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A federal appeals court has been asked to overturn a judge's determination that a school can order students to remove U.S. flag-themed articles of clothing because other students celebrating Mexico's Cinco de Mayo could be upset by Old Glory.
The appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was filed today by several legal teams who are working on behalf of three students attending Live Oak High School in San Francisco's Morgan Hill Unified School District.
"It is a sad day in our nation's history when government officials ban the American flag on a public high school campus for any reason," said Robert Muise, founder and senior counsel for the American Freedom Law Center, one of the groups working on the case.
"Here, school officials feared that our clients would offend 'Mexican' students if they wore their flag shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo, so they ordered the students to either remove their shirts or leave school in direction violation of their First Amendment rights," he said.
The AFLC is working with the Becker Law Firm of Los Angeles as well as the Rutherford Institute on the case.
"The American flag is not a symbol of racism or race hatemongering. It should never be ordered into a student's locker just so it won't offend people because of their pride in another nation's culture," said William J Becker Jr. of the Becker Law Firm. "The American flag symbolizes unity and promotes a public school's goal of providing students with opportunities to celebrate their cultural heritage. The First Amendment guarantees students the right to express their patriotism every day of the year regardless of whose cultural heritage is being celebrated."
He also ruled that the censorship was "equal" with permission by the school for other students to wear the Mexican flag because there was no one who was threatening violence over that.
In a report about the flag case, the AFLC said, "School officials intentionally restricted the students' speech on May 5, 2010, because they believed that the message conveyed by their patriotic clothing would offend some Mexican students since it was Cinco de Mayo (i.e., 'their day'). School officials enforced the clothing restriction even though they had no objective evidence that the students were causing any disruption - let alone a material and substantial one - to the operation of the school."
The report said the school had approved the day to be recognized by the MEChA student group.
"M.E.Ch.A. is an acronym that stands for 'movimiento' [movement] 'estudiantil' [student] 'Chicano' [an ethnic identity] and 'Aztlan' [referring to the mythical homeland of the Aztecs]. 'Chicanismo' is a term that includes as part of its definition 'a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of [the Chicano] cultural heritage.' In other words, M.E.Ch.A, by its very name, is a student movement that rejects the assimilation of Chicanos into American culture. According to the M.E.Ch.A. club's 'Charter/Constitution' that was filed with school officials at Live Oak High School, the purpose of the club is, in part, to 'support students who have a desire to keep up their own culture & customs,'" the AFLC said.
Live Oak High School students (from left): Daniel Galli, Austin Carvalho, Matt Dariano and Dominic Maciel (photo: Gilroy Dispatch )
The confrontation developed when, as instructed by Principal Nick Boden, Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez "approached the students and directed them to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out."
School officials were responding to complaints from some students described by Rodriguez as "Mexican American or Mexican students."
"When the students refused to disrespect the American flag, Rodriguez directed them to go with him to his office. The students complied. After receiving a call from her son, Ms. Diana Dariano, the mother of one of the student plaintiffs, arrived at the school and addressed the matter with Rodriguez. Other parents soon arrived, and a meeting was held with Principal Boden. During this meeting, Boden and Rodriguez made it clear that they objected to the students' American flag clothing because they believed that its message would offend Mexican students on campus since it was Cinco De Mayo," the report said.
"Prior to restricting the students' patriotic message, school officials had no information that the students' passive speech had caused any disruption whatsoever at the school, even though students had been on campus for over three hours and attended at least two classroom periods as well as homeroom," the AFLC reported.
After the fact, the school took no action to "deter a school official" from repeating the violation, the AFLC said.
It reported, "Despite banning the American flag, school officials permitted the Mexican students participating in the Cinco de Mayo celebration to wear clothing that had the colors of the Mexican flag."
AFLC Senior Counsel David Yerushalmi commented: "These students and their parents should be commended for standing up and exercising their rights under the First Amendment. Our rights will only have meaning if we are willing to fight for them. That is what the American Freedom Law Center is doing every day, but it also takes courageous citizens, such as our clients in this case, to join us in the fight."
During the district court stage of the dispute, evidence revealed that, "One Mexican student shouted, 'F-- them white boys, f-- them white boys.'"
When Rodriguez told him to stop using such language, the Mexican student said, "But Rodriguez, they are racist. They are being racist. F-- them white boys. Let's f-- them up.'"
The judge noted in another situation that a "male student" approached one of the plaintiffs and "shoved a Mexican flag at him."
A female student also "approached plaintiff M.D., motioned to his shirt, and said, 'why are you wearing that, do you not like Mexicans?'" the judge wrote.
Because of such behavior, the school officials were correct to blame those wearing the attire and take action, the judge said.
"The court finds that they did not violate the First Amendment by asking plaintiffs to turn their shirts inside out," Ware wrote.
The plaintiffs are John and Dianna Dariano, Kurt and Julie Ann Fagerstrom and Kendall and Joy Jones, on behalf of their children. |
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"No one thought this would end in such a violent way."
"...Our only experience was the Orange Revolution in 2004, which happened without a single drop of blood. Nobody was expecting this. People went on the street expecting changes to be made in our country, in our foreign policy. But on the 29th of November, students on the Maidan were beaten by the riot police. And so the Maidan Revolution, as we saw it, started on the 30th of November after students were beaten. But even on the last day of Maidan, when a sniper killed 100 people on Instytutska Street, nobody thought that Ukraine would be in a situation like the one we're in today."
January 25, 2014
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Poroshenko Meets With Putin In Milan
"Of course there is tension in the air. The press is there, so there are certain things they can't say. [Putin] is president of a country that's making a war with our country. It's difficult. But he has a lot of bodyguards, so you can't do anything. [Laughs.] "
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Poroshenko Visits the U.S. |
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Country ratings Income distribution Life expectancy Position of women Freedom Literacy Sexual minorities NI Assessment (Politics)
Only 15 years ago, Indonesia was ruled by Soeharto, whose 32-year regime began with the orchestrated massacre of up to a million actual and suspected members of the Communist Party and ended following massive street demonstrations amid economic collapse. The Soeharto regime did reduce the poverty rate and roll out near-universal primary education. But there was tight censorship, suppression of dissent and a rigid, top-down system of administration.
Since then, Indonesia's path has been not so much 'two steps forward, one step back', but rather resembles a drunk staggering irresolutely home. The current president, Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono, widely known as SBY, was a serving military officer in occupied East Timor under Soeharto, but he has been a strong advocate of the army staying out of politics.
A seller in a traditional market on the island of Sumba prepares oil lamps at her stall as night falls. On the outer islands, electrical power is often unreliable or non-existent.
Josh Estey
He was initially perceived as a competent manager of the economy committed to reforms, including extending access to health and education and strengthening local government and community institutions. He has strongly supported PNPM, the national poverty-reduction and community-empowerment programme, which offers microcredit to poor people and block grants to local communities for developing village infrastructure.
Josh Estey
Despite these successes, his government has become increasingly unpopular, being widely perceived as weak, indecisive and lacking the will to implement the full range of promised reforms. This is partly a product of its devolution of power, which has involved unfortunate compromises and has undermined attempts to implement meaningful reform in, for example, environmental management, minority rights and eradicating corruption.
No-one ever thought the last of these would be easy: in 2012, 170 of Indonesia's 550 district heads were facing criminal investigations into corruption involving sums of more than $100,000 in each case. The President's Democratic Party has itself been racked by numerous corruption and bribery scandals, with SBY often seeming to drag his feet in cases involving party members and senior military figures.
An aerial shot of one of the few crowded kampungs left in central Jakarta; poor residents are increasingly being pushed to shanty towns on the perimeter.
Josh Estey
This perceived weakness has left the electorate increasingly disillusioned with political and economic reforms, and disturbingly nostalgic for the 'good old days' of the Soeharto regime. With presidential elections scheduled for 2014, one of the most popular emerging candidates is General Prabowo Subianto, Soeharto's stridently anti-Chinese former son-in-law, who has been trying, with some success, to sweep under the carpet memories of his involvement in the kidnapping, imprisonment and torture of democracy activists.
Indonesia remains a troubled country. Almost half the country's population still lives on less than two dollars per day. In rural areas, particularly in the eastern provinces, there are high rates of malnutrition and child and maternal mortality. By contrast, the major cities have seen rampant, barely controlled private-sector development, with building glittering shopping malls and ritzy apartment blocks taking precedence over flood controls, roads, and public parks. Jakarta's clogged canals and dysfunctional dykes mean that, in the rainy season, the city experiences serious floods and electricity blackouts that bring it to a virtual standstill for days at a time. Despite such conditions, rural migrants continue to pour into the city in search of work and better living conditions, with many living in illegal settlements on the fringes or by the canals.
A goat on the wall of the main cemetery in central Jakarta
Josh Estey
Indonesia's economic fundamentals remain strong. It has a smart, engaged middle class and its poorer citizens are becoming increasingly empowered to demand basic services. The big question is: will its progress be undermined by vested interests? The story is still being written, with the country passing through yet another 'decade of living dangerously'.
Fact file
Leader President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono Economy GNI per capita $2,940 (Malaysia $8,770, Australia $49,130). Since 2004, the economy has expanded by more than 6% per year and Indonesia is now classified as a 'middle-income country'. But around half the people live on under two dollars a day, with many unemployed or underemployed. Monetary unit Indonesian rupiah Main exports Gas, plywood, textiles and rubber. Indonesia is the world's largest tin producer People 239.9 million - the world's fourth most populous country. Some 58% live on the island of Java. With an effective family planning programme, the rate of growth is fairly low (and declining), at 1.04%. Health Infant mortality rate 27 per 1,000 live births (Malaysia 5, Australia 4). Lifetime risk of maternal death 1 in 190 (Australia 1 in 7,400). The HIV prevalence rate in Papua and West Papua is around 2.4%, more than 10 times the national average and over the WHO threshold defining an epidemic. Indonesia is introducing a universal social health insurance system. Environment Large areas of forest are being cleared by transnational pulp and palm-oil companies, to be replaced by plantations. As a result, huge areas of Kalimantan have been hit by bush fires, causing massive smogs over the entire region. Regional autonomy has made it harder for central government to protect the environment. Culture Highly diverse, with hundreds of different ethnic groups in the different islands. Religion 87% Muslim, 7% Protestant, 3% Catholic, 2% Hindu, and 1% Buddhist (2010 census). The syncretic form of Islam practised by many Javanese has Hindu and animist elements. Language Bahasa Indonesia (official) is spoken to some degree by almost all citizens. But there are around 500 local languages spoken throughout the archipelago. Human Development Index 0.629 - 121st of 187 countries (Malaysia 0.769, Australia 0.938)
Country ratings in detail
Income distribution Large and growing gaps between rural and urban areas and between the poor eastern provinces and the richer western provinces. The Gini index has risen from 0.31 in 1999 to 0.41 in 2011 (0.4 is a danger point for social instability/unrest) Literacy 92%. Rates are lowest in the eastern provinces, although still fair. Life expectancy 69 years (Malaysia 74, Australia 82) Freedom The rights to free expression, worship, and assembly are generally upheld, though vigilantes have attacked religious minorities and threatened journalists. The record is worse the further away one travels from Jakarta and is close to appalling in West Papua, where there are frequent allegations of torture of activists. Position of women Women earn less than men, face discrimination in law, and often marry very young, particularly in rural areas. But women traders often control their own businesses, as many girls as boys attend school and there is a strong women's movement. Sexual minorities The national criminal code does not prohibit homosexuality. There is a large gay scene in Jakarta and the big cities, with numerous support/advocacy groups. But some regions have a modified sharia law that punishes homosexual acts with fines or imprisonment. New Internationalist assessment Indonesia has made a partially successful transition from an authoritarian dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy, with the devolution of authority for many basic services to elected district governments. National, regional and district elections are more or less free, fair and democratic. But corruption at high levels is still rife and there are some disturbing signs of regression to authoritarianism, particularly among the emerging presidential contenders for the 2014 election. Indonesians are increasingly disenchanted with the process of reform.
This article is from the May 2013 issue of New Internationalist . You can access the entire archive of over 500 issues with a digital subscription. Subscribe today >> |
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Top row: LaDavia Drane; Osi Imeokparia; Clay Middleton; Jalisa Washington; Maya Harris; Ida Woldemichael. Center row: Marcus Ferrell; Electra Skrzydlewski; Danny D. Glover; Symone Sanders; LaDawn Blackett Jones; Roy Tatum. Bottom row: Deana Bass; Katrina Pierson; Armstrong Williams; Elroy Sailor; Kay Cole James; Shermichael Singleton. LinkedIn
If you want the black vote, it helps if you hire individuals in key positions who reflect the community.
That was the advice given to Democratic campaigns by Quentin James, co-founder of Inclusv, a hiring-initiative project created by Power PAC+, which released a report on staff diversity focused on hiring for each Democratic campaign.
"If staffers of color are not at the forefront in every department of your campaign, it's inauthentic to say you are ready to lead our nation on issues like immigration or criminal-justice reform. ... If candidates want our support, people of color have to play prominent and vital roles within their campaigns," said James as the report was released.
In the months after Inclusv's report, more African Americans became players in the race for the White House. The first two contests of the 2016 campaign are the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary Feb. 9. Below is a look at African Americans who are staffers on presidential campaigns now.
Hillary Clinton's African-American Staff
There are over 20 African Americans in top positions on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. LaDavia Drane, who was the executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus under Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), is Clinton's African-American outreach director.
Maya Harris holds the title of Senior Policy Advisor on the campaign. Marlon Marshall, who campaigned for Clinton in 2008 and then became a member of the Obama administration, is Clinton's director of state campaigns and political engagement.
Tyrone Gayle, a veteran of the 2012 campaign of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and of Capitol Hill, handles regional communications for the campaign. Hans Goff is Clinton's regional political states director; Charles Olivier is the deputy chief financial officer and controller; and Elizabeth Gramling is the campaign's operations director.
Brynne Craig is Clinton's deputy director of state campaigns; Tracey Lewis is primary states director; and Richard McDaniel is Southern regional primary states director.
Former staffer to Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Citadel graduate Clay Middleton is Clinton's South Carolina state director. Jalisa Washington is the South Carolina political director, and Erin Stevens is the New York state director for the campaign.
Others include Bernard Coleman, chief diversity and human resources officer; De'Ara Balenger, Director of Engagement; Marcus Switzer, deputy national finance director; Angelique Cannon, deputy national finance director for the mid-Atlantic region; and Joslyn Massengale, corporate counsel.
The Clinton campaign also has black staffers running important aspects of its tech operations: Ida Woldemichael, who previously worked at the Clinton Foundation, is a senior designer; Osi Imeokparia, a Google and eBay alum and Stanford graduate, is the Clinton campaign's chief product officer; and Sharif Corinaldi is a senior software engineer.
Karen Finney is senior adviser for communications and political outreach for the Clinton presidential campaign. In late 2015, Clinton hired veteran black pollster Ron Lester and enlisted the help of an African-American-owned advertising firm, Burrell Communications, which is headed by two black women.
Sen. Bernie Sanders' African-American Staff
Sen. Bernie Sanders also has many African Americans on his staff.
Christopher Smith is Sanders' deputy national field director, and Nick Carter is his national deputy political outreach director. Symone Sanders is the face of the campaign as Sanders' national press secretary. Marcus Ferrell is Sanders' director, African-American outreach; his deputy is Roy Tatem. Sanders also has a senior adviser for African-American outreach: Donni Turner.
Aneesa McMillan is the communications director, South Carolina.
Sanders has four African-American state directors. His Alabama state director is Kelvin Datcher; his Georgia state director is LaDawn Blackett Jones. The Kansas state director is Brooklynne Mosley, and Sanders' North Carolina state director is Aisha Dew.
Sanders has a national HBCU outreach director, Danny D. Glover (not the actor). Christale Spain is Sanders' state primary director for South Carolina.
Sanders also has several key African Americans assigned in key primary states. Alex Askew is Sanders' political director in South Carolina; Paul Stovall is the national advance lead for the Sanders campaign; Michele Gilliam is a constituency director for New Hampshire; Electra Skrzydlewski is the deputy outreach director for Nevada; and Angie Nixon is the director of community organizing, South Carolina.
African Americans on Republican Campaigns
Even though most African Americans who are players in the 2016 race for the White House are working for Democrats, there are several power players in key positions on GOP campaigns.
Katrina Pierson is in a prominent role as national spokesperson for billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump. (In 2014, Pierson challenged Rep. Pete Sessions [R-Texas] for Congress but was unsuccessful.) Earl Phillip is Trump's state chair in North Carolina.
Retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson has well-known political operative and TV personality Armstrong Williams on his campaign staff as an adviser and business manager. Even though Carson has experienced a recent staff shakeup, Deana Bass remains his national press secretary. Shermichael Singleton started as the Carson campaign's coalitions adviser in November.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has political veteran Kay Cole James as his campaign co-chair for Virginia and Charles Badger as his director of coalitions.
Sen. Rand Paul, who is known for being ahead of most Democrats on justice-reform issues, has political veteran Elroy Sailor as a senior adviser and C.J. Sailor as a political operative in Iowa.
As the 2016 campaign finally reaches the point when voters will make their decisions for the first time in the 2016 cycle, it will be interesting to see who among the power players above will be using their power in the White House a year from now.
Editor's Note: The Root reached out to Martin O'Malley's campaign for their list of African American staffers, but the campaign failed to respond by the time of this article's posting.
Lauren Victoria Burke is a Washington, D.C.-based political reporter who writes the Crew of 42 blog. She appears regularly on NewsOne Now with Roland Martin on TV One. Follow her on Twitter . |
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (photo: AFP/Getty Images). King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Islamic State (Isis), now being described in some quarters as "the most capable military power in the Middle East outside Israel", is at the top of the global agenda. Naturally, there is discussion of its origins and backers.
It is notable that, in particular, the Saudi government has scrambled to deny any links to the group. In the past two weeks, the usually low-profile Saudi ambassador in the UK sent a strongly worded letter to the Guardian. The embassy issued a press release to the same effect, and last week the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia himself made a statement condemning Isis. This follows a $100m contribution to a UN anti-terror programme.
Saudi Arabia is increasingly feeling the heat of the Sunni hardline blowback. While the Saudi government technically doesn't sponsor Isis, it has promoted a fundamentalist Salafi interpretation of Islam that has encroached into the mainstream Sunni space. This has created the conditions, inside and outside the country, for extremism to breed.
The clergy is a powerful force in Saudi Arabia. Its influence derives from the fact that the royal family has entered into a formal pact with the sheikhs, under which the understanding is that the House of Saud can hold on to political power, while the religious establishment gets to dictate the national character of Saudi Arabia, one that has remained doggedly extreme. This vision has also been exported abroad by both state and non-state actors, the former as a clumsy substitute for a coherent foreign policy, by which the Saudi government contributes funds for mosques and charitable organisations in Muslim countries as a way of purchasing influence; the latter via personal wealth and the zeal of private citizens.
Osama bin Laden was a perfect combination of the two, a personally motivated non-state actor, radicalised in the schools and mosques of Jeddah, who managed to also rope in the Saudi establishment by selling a religious mission to them -- pushing back the Soviet invasion -- in the guise of a political project.
But it seems even Saudis are beginning to see the foolhardiness of this arrangement. In a searing essay in the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh last week, Hissa bint Ahmed bin Al al-Sheikh, a member of one of the most influential religious families in Saudi Arabia and a relative of the grand mufti, rails against the "farce of fatwas" in the kingdom, and records a litany of extremist measures introduced since the 1980s that have stifled public life and glorified a culture of "hatred and death" that she recognises in Isis. This is a culture disseminated via state media, the national curriculum and public order laws -- legislation that many Saudi intellectuals warned against.
The Saudi establishment has sacrificed its people, and the wider Muslim world that lies within its influence, in return for immunity from religious revolt of the type that threatened Mecca in the 1970s. While the immediate focus vis-a-vis Isis needs to be on practical counter-extremism measures, the west can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to Saudi's internal contradictions. These have spawned a decadent and west-friendly royal family that preside over a society where clerics run amok, where imams rant against infidels, religious minorities are oppressed, education is heavily slanted towards religion and where people are beheaded for sorcery. As far as containing the radical Islamic threat, the status quo is increasingly no longer working -- neither for the Saudis, nor the western governments who support them.
Saudi salafism is not the wellspring of hardline Islamic groups worldwide, but it is part of something that might be -- a tendency for Arab and Muslim governments to pay lip service to Islam to bolster their religious credentials through politically expedient means. These leaders simultaneously instrumentalise religion while oppressing any form of religious opposition. The combination of serious cash and the religious weight that comes from being the birthplace of Islam renders Saudi Arabia the most dangerous member of this club.
The long-term solution to the constant reincarnation of radical Islamic political movements doesn't lie in grand public gestures like anti-terrorism funding, strong statements of condemnation, or "rehabilitation clinics" for radicals, but in dismantling state-sponsored religious indoctrination. As the Isis threats march on, the old calculations no longer work in Arab governments' favour. |
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president |
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By NBP Staff | July 4, 2018, 13:42 EDT
Printed from: http://newbostonpost.com/2018/07/04/kingston-slams-warren-over-call-to-abolish-ice/
U.S. Senate candidate John Kingston, Republican from Winchester
Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Kingston is criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren's call to get rid of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, accusing her of pandering "to the far left."
Warren called for eliminating the federal agency that enforces immigration law during a rally at Boston City Hall Plaza this past Saturday.
"Sen. Warren proposes to do away with law enforcement agents who protect our communities night and day. She panders to the far left by calling for the elimination of ICE, just months after calling our police forces 'occupying armies'," Kingston said in a written statement. "Elizabeth Warren values the rights of illegal aliens and criminals over the safety of the people of Massachusetts, and it's time to tune her out and turn her out."
Warren on Saturday told a rally that the Trump administration's detention of illegal immigrants and children at the Mexico border is "a moral crisis for our country."
"The president's deeply immoral actions have made it obvious we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and values," Warren said .
In response, Kingston accused Warren of denigrating federal law enforcement officers for doing their jobs, and he suggested Warren is at least partly to blame for problems with U.S. immigration policy.
"ICE agents put their lives on the line to uphold the rule of law and protect our communities from criminal illegal aliens. They deserve our respect and admiration, not leftist disdain, for the critical duty they perform for our nation," Kingston said in the statement. "Any failure of immigration policy is the fault of a broken culture in Washington and politicians like Sen. Warren who put divisive politics ahead of results. To vilify and blame law enforcement agents is reckless and irresponsible."
A spokesman for Warren could not immediately be reached for comment.
Kingston is one of three candidates running for the Republican nomination in the September primary to take on Warren in November. The other two are state Representative Geoff Diehl (R-Whitman) and Beth Lindstrom, a former political consultant and aide to Mitt Romney. A not-for-profit organization affiliated with Mr. Kingston owns a modest number of shares in Boston Media Networks, the company that operates New Boston Post. |
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U.S. Senate candidate John Kingston, Republican from Winchester
Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Kingston is criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren's call |
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With Wednesday's vote, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat fulfils campaign promise to make this the first law brought before parliament during his second term. The law replaces gendered terms with spouse, birth parent and parent who did not give birth. People celebrate in front of the rainbow-colour lit Auberge de Castille, the office of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, after the parliament voted to legalise same-sex marriage on the Roman Catholic Mediterranean island, in Valletta, Malta. July 12, 2017. ( TRT World and Agencies )
Maltese lawmakers voted on Wednesday to legalise same-sex marriage on the Roman Catholic Mediterranean island, fulfilling Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's campaign promise to make this the first law brought before parliament in his new term.
The law, which drew cross-party support, removes words including as "husband", "wife", "mother" and "father" from the Marriage Act and replaces them with the gender-neutral "spouse", "parent who gave birth" and "parent who did not give birth".
Muscat said such wording was needed to avoid categorising any member of society.
He rejected accusations that this could spell the end to "Mother's Day" or "Father's Day", saying such suggestions were "laughable".
"I think this is an historic vote. It shows that our democracy and our society are maturing ... It is a society where we can all say we are equal," the prime minister told reporters.
Muscat won a second term in office on June 3 and had vowed to reinforce his call for equality in society.
Progressive legislation
Once a staunchly conservative nation, Malta has been steadily adopting more progressive legislation in recent years.
In 2011, the country voted in a referendum to allow divorce, and in 2014 it approved civil partnerships.
Malta was the 24th country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage with the vote coming just two weeks after German lawmakers approved a similar measure in June.
The opposition Nationalist Party backed the introduction of same-sex marriage, despite fierce criticism from some conservatives, who said it marked a damaging departure from the party's Christian-Democratic principles.
"You have pushed the party into a lose-lose situation and it seems many of you cannot even see it," former finance minister Tonio Fenech said, who is no longer a member of parliament.
In the end, only one opposition lawmaker voted against the bill, while 66 parliamentarians supported it. There were no abstentions.
Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said his party backed the law because society was changing and because it did not alter anything from the civil partnerships law which gave civil partners the same rights as married couples.
The Malta Gay Rights Movement celebrated the new law with a party attended by hundreds in a square outside the prime minister's office in the capital, Valletta. |
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The law replaces gendered terms with spouse, birth parent and parent who did not give birth. |
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Periscope is a live-streaming video app available for both Android and iOS devices. Twitter acquired the app in 2015, but it was developed earlier (before being launched) by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein. In 2013, Beykpour witnessed political protests in Istanbul but could only read about them on Twitter, not see them. This experience motivated the development of the app, which was originally called Bounty. In June 2016, Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives staged a sit-in on the floor of the capital to protest the House's decision not to vote on a gun control bill, and members used Periscope to live stream the protest. Visiting the Periscope site, pspc.tv, shows a broad range of live-streamed videos from accounts varying from local news stations to the personal accounts of exercise personalities and mental health therapists. The number of viewers watching is displayed on the bottom of each streamed video. |
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Today, there are over 12 million undocumented workers in the United States. This is more undocumented workers than any other nation on Earth. The extent of people coming from Latin America to the US has reached unprecedented levels. Though undocumented workers have been coming to the US for decades, never have the levels reached this high.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which was signed into law by then President Ronald Reagan was supposed to alleviate, once and for all, the entry into the US of undocumented persons from other countries. Right off the bat, this law strictly prohibits employers from hiring, as they put it, "unauthorized aliens." They specifically require that all new hires anywhere in the US MUST provide proof of citizenship or residency, and proof of ability to work, usually in the form of what we call a Social Security Number or appropriate green card. This number is unique to each person and in the case of the green card, it identifies the person as being a foreigner with the authorization to work.
The provisions within this law demanded fines into the thousands of dollars for every undocumented worker hired by a given firm. Even mere paperwork violations were subject to incredible fines. It strictly prohibited businesses from recruiting foreigners to work in the US. This law specifically demanded that the Comptroller General give an annual report to Congress on the progress of the enactment of this law. But it also negated prosecution of anyone hired before the date this law became effective. In other words, all those who were undocumented before the date in 1986 that this law came into effect, were exempt from prosecution. Effectively, in 1986, the President Reagan cleaned the slate of all undocumented workers and gave everyone a fresh start.
This law was to put at zero the number of undocumented workers inside the US. It was to clear out the messy problem of those with no papers, and allow a fresh look at undocumented workers in the US. We were to start anew, with no undocumented workers to speak of, and with control of our borders. This was the chance for the US to start fresh with no "unauthorized aliens." But something strange happened after that.
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According to Wikipedia, as of January, 2006, there were 6.8 million undocumented Mexicans residing in the US. The rest of Latin America accounted for another three million. Asia accounted for over one million more, while the other nations of the world accounted for the rest. It also goes on to state that since 1992, undocumented workers have entered the US between 400,000 and 700,000 per year. Since 1986, more than 12 million undocumented workers have entered the US, despite the severe sanctions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Instead of eliminating undocumented workers entering the US, it appears that Reagan's bill actually increased the process.
While nearly every American has an opinion about the influx of foreigners without proper documentation, few understand why.
Here is but an excerpt from one of the thousands of extremist websites that proclaim that Mexico is intent on conquering the United States:
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"Our southern neighbor is not shy about expressing its intention to conquer the American Southwest, which Mexico regards as territory lost in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo in 1846. Mexican children are taught in school that the United States stole that land, which they call "Aztlan." Absurd rantings of political extremists? Consider...
* In 1997, then-President Zedillo proclaimed that "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders."
* Mexico's President Fox has been unrelenting in his brazen demands on the United States, starting with open borders even before he was elected. He has called for the border to be "a joining line." His visits to the U.S. have been filled with endless requirements for Mexican citizens illegally in this country -- free healthcare, taxpayer-subsidized in-state tuition for illegals at state colleges and universities, guestworker programs and amnesty for all."
These sites exist for the sole purpose of enflaming the hatred of Americans who do not know better. They inflame the American ignorant public into thinking that a bunch of peasants with no arms to speak of will suddenly rise up and overtake a section of the US with the rest of the US standing idly by and watching. Let's consider the following:
300 million Americans live in the United States. The entire Mexican undocumented population is less than seven million. The United States possesses the most potent and lethal armed military in the world. They have thousands more nuclear warheads than any other nation on Earth. They have the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard stationed in every state in the US and by the thousands. The US possesses the highest level of technology to inflict the greatest amount of damage on anyone anywhere. Yet these yo-yos think that a few Mexicans without arms are somehow going to seize control of one third of US territory. This would be one of the greatest satires known to mankind, if it were not for the fact that millions of Americans believe it is true. The blind hatred displayed and copied by the millions of Americans who believe this crap is the fuel that Congress and the president feed on and promote to enact even more draconian measures against the immigrant.
But wait, there's another side to this tale.
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Let's put all of this in the eyes of the immigrant. It is clear that millions of Americans are duped into believing that the undocumented worker poses a dire threat to the sanctity of the US. What does the immigrant think??
For the undocumented worker living in the US, the story is remarkably different. I have lived four years in Mexico, and I have interviewed countless Mexicans on the reasons for their exodus to the US. Here is what I've found. First I will start with the emigrant in the US and later, returning to Mexico. Primarily, only Mexicans from Northern Mexico migrate to the US. The rest of Mexico tends to migrate to Mexico City. The people that migrate to Mexico City are called "Paracaidistas" or "parachutists", because if they land on your property and manage to build a dwelling there before you can get rid of them, they can claim permanent residence even though they don't own the land beneath them. The swelling slums outside of Mexico City is testimony to this huge, unplanned migration that sorely lacks necessary infrastructure. The reason for their migration, either to Mexico City or to the US, is universally for the betterment of one's own life, and the possibility of helping out the rest of one's family. This fact alone is hardly ever touched on in the main stream media in the US. Mexicans, or better said almost any migrant person, move to the US in order to make more money, and using this new found wealth to help their family back home. Western Union has made a fortune by offering money transfer services of this kind. Nearly every Mexican I met either here or in Mexico has told me that their first love is the country they were born and raised in, Mexico. They see their stay in the US as merely transitory until they get enough money to retire at home in their native country. Believe it or not, the Mexicans living in Mexico actually resent those who have traveled to the US to live. The reason is actually quite simple. Those who move to the US are usually in their teens or early twenties. Their knowledge of the intricacies of the work place is quite limited. When these people return to Mexico, they use the same vocabulary they acquired in the US. Since these words are from the English language, Mexicans who have never visited the US assume that their brethren are deliberately using words unknown to them. There is a lot of friction in Mexico between those who have lived in the US, and those who have never seen it. In the US, Mexicans have a huge chip on their shoulder. Any act by any American is looked upon with the criteria that, "The gringos hate me and exploit me. If this gringo asks me to do something, he will no doubt pay me below regular wages. I am being exploited by the powers that be here."
Clearly, the Mexican immigrant to the US feels a constant threat from the government, society and life in general. They know that the "migra," or ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, could deport them at any moment. They realize that their lack of knowledge of the English language is a great impairment for future growth and success. Their ignorance of Americans mores and customs is another great hindrance to their advancement in society. I remember in 1984, having just arrived back here from Mexico, I sent my Chilanga wife, or Mexico City-born wife, to the store to by a can of coke. She came back with a can of diet, decaffeinated coke. I immediately realized that there was much she needed to learn about the differences between Mexican life and American life. |
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The International Organization for Migration reported on Monday that an airstrike on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in Yemen's Hajjah Province killed at least forty people and injured two hundred others. The attack occurred on the fifth consecutive day of airstrikes carried out by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by intelligence and logistical support from the United States
The Imploding Middle East, Saudi Kingdom And Pakistan By Haris Khurshid
In latest turn of the events in Middle East now Pakistan is at crossroads to get embroiled in a distant conflict involving its Muslim benefactor Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or extricate itself from an avoidable war looming on the horizon of Yemen. The region is experiencing new wave of violence and disintegration in less stable parts mainly drawn by Shia Sunni sectarian and ethnic prejudice
Even America's 'Media Watchdogs' Hide U.S.'s Ukrainian Nazification & Ethnic Cleansing By Eric Zuesse
The U.S.'news' media are so censored and controlled, so that even America's 'media watchdog' organizations -- mediamatters.org and fair.org on the left; and aim.org and mrc.org on the right -- have hidden from the American public President Barack Obama's Ukrainian coup in February 2014 that violently overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President and replaced him with a Ukrainian nazi (racist-fascist) rabidly eliminationist anti-Russian, police-state regime in Kiev
Accountability Must Be At The Heart Of The Paris Climate Pact By Harro van Asselt, Hakon Saelen and Pieter Pauw
Slowly but surely, the first climate pledges for the 2015 agreement - or, in UN-speak, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) - have started to trickle in. Mexico and Norway were the latest countries to formally announce their pledges, with the United States and Russia also expected to submit their offers this week. Under the 2015 agreement, the hope is that INDCs will prove to be crucial instruments in preventing dangerous climate change. Yet a key element is still missing
Pakistan has halted work on six coal-fired power projects of some 14,000 megawatts due to environmental concerns, lack of needed infrastructure and foreign investment
Surviving Climate Disaster In Africa's Sahel By Thomas C. Mountain
After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government of Eritrea initiated a major water conservation plan that along with reforestation and soil conservation is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted
We Are Losing The Oceans By Paul Craig Roberts
From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored
Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country's major patron of the last 13 years -- and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces
Two Muslims Lynched In Two Different Cities Of The World Incited Two Different Reactions By Abdul Rashid Agwan
The gory events of Kabul and Dimapur expose modern hypocrisy where both civilizational zeal and barbaric spree are going hand in hand, where religions fail to stimulate respect for human dignity in their followers and where the rule of law is yet not honored by those who are supposed to be its vouched guardians
Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers By Matt Peppe
In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out. Last week, in an act of mass murder with more than 12 times the number of victims, 27-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided the plane he was flying straight into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board. Yet it is only the former murderous act that has been described by politicians and portrayed in the media as an existential threat and an example of terrorism
Television Commercial In California Asks Drone Pilots To Stop Killing By David Swanson
This may be a first: a television ad campaign in a U.S. state capitol appealing to someone to stop murdering human beings who have, in most cases, already been born. A new 15-second television ad, a variation on one that's aired in Las Vegas near Creech Air Force Base, is debuting this week in Sacramento, Calif.
BOOKS: Occupy These Photos By Mickey Z.
Now, I'm asking you to be part of that mission. Occupy These Photos is a book born on the streets and we're seeking funding in the same DIY manner: from the ground up. Please click here to find out how you can get involved! Thanks in advance for your support. Without you, this book would not have happened.
Indian Parliamentarian Doubts If Tobacco Kills! Do Not Reinvent The Wheel By Bobby Ramakant
Indian parliamentarian who is chairing the committee which told the government not to implement stronger pictorial graphic health warnings on tobacco packs (and raise the warning size from 40% to 85%) from 1st April 2015, casted doubts whether tobacco causes cancer. India is at risk of reversing the gains made in saving lives from tobacco! He is the same parliamentarian who had raised similar questions in the parliament in 2011 and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India had given him detailed response underlining the alarming magnitude of the tobacco pandemic in the country
30 March, 2015
Yemen: Saudi-Led Airstrikes Take Civilian Toll By Human Rights Watch
The Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab countries that conducted airstrikes in Yemen on March 26 and 27, 2015, killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 34 civilians during the first day of bombings in Sanaa, the capital, Human Rights Watch said today. The 11 dead included 2 children and 2 women. Saudi and other warplanes also carried out strikes on apparent targets in the cities of Saada, Hodaida, Taiz, and Aden
Yemen: No Military Solution By Chandra Muzaffar
To bring order and stability to a nation which is in such a terrible mess, one has to persuade all the relevant players to talk to one another, to negotiate, to compromise. The peaceful, non-violent approach to conflict resolution has not been given enough space and scope to succeed in Yemen. The UN has been trying to play a role in a very difficult situation. The UN should be given full support by all the contending forces
A Middle East Holocaust By Paul Craig Roberts
How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression? Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the bombers. Iran is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and China can destroy the US and all of Washington's vassal states. The intensity of Washington's propaganda war is driving the world to destruction
A Pakistani Woman named Aafia Siddiqui was abducted from a taxi in Karachi, Pakistan along with her 3 children 12 years ago on March 30, 2003. At the time she was vulnerable, recently divorced from an abusive husband; living with her mother; her father had just died of a heart attack. The youngest child was an infant. Following her abduction, Aafia Siddiqui and her children disappeared from view for 5 years. She spent those years in US Black Site prisons in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One can only imagine the torment she suffered there, in a system created to enable the torture and abuse of terrorism suspects. She was a woman alone. They took her children, and threatened them when personal torture was not enough to gain her acquiescence
A study published in the journal Science found government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. Now, the question is: Whether to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions?
Does Civilisation Mean Insanity And Violence? By Sukumaran C. V.
Biodiversity is the prime necessity for the continuance of Life on Earth, and the humans destroy the very thing which helps them survive on earth
Postcard From The End Of America: Carlisle, PA By Linh Dinh
Black, white, brown or yellow, anyone who's dwelling within these Disunited States will be thoroughly nicked up, if not buried alive, from the coming collapse and turmoil, and it's telling that our final chapter started with a double castrations that was broadcast, live, to the entire world, and that one of our bravest dissidents, Bradley Manning, also wishes to have nothing between his legs, and that our present day Jim Thorpe, one Bruce Jenner, also dreams of the day he will finally be emasculated. Don't worry, it's coming
Gendered Dis-preference In Indian Society By Roli Misra
In present context with the advent of new technology the practice of female infanticide has been replaced by genocide of millions of women known as female foeticide - denying the girl its very right to take birth. The rapid spread of the use of ultrasounds and amniocentesis for sex determination followed by sex selective induced abortions has created a situation of daughter drought with tragic consequences
Lambs To The Slaughter: The Dying Future Of Higher Education By P K Vijayan
For the sake of our professional integrity, then, for the sake of our students, for the sake of the institutions that we have studied and worked in, for the sake of the society to which we belong and to which we are accountable - for everyone's sake, and not just our own, it is time for the teachers' movement to come together once again, and give an exemplary response to the forces that seek to grind us down
Attacking The Cross: Rise In Anti Christian Violence By Ram Puniyani
Julio Ribeiro is one of the best known police officers in India. Recently (March 16, 2015) he wrote in his article that he is feeling like a stranger in this country. 'I feel threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in my own country'. This pain and anguish of a distinguished citizen, an outstanding police officer has to be seen against the backdrop of the rising attacks on Churches and rape of the 71 year old nun in Kolkata. All over the country the rage amongst the Christian community is there to be seen in the form of silent marches, candle light vigils and peaceful protests
Islam, Peace, Justice & Dialogue By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's Interaction Interaction with a group of Catholic priests and nuns, New Delhi
The Healing Power Of Meditation By William T. Hathaway
TM produces mental and physical rest that is twice as deep as in sleep, although we're fully awake. This rejuvenating state enables the body's self-healing mechanism to repair the damage from traumatic events and illnesses. With these blockages gone we are more able to develop our full capabilities
29 March, 2015
Arab leaders have agreed to form a joint military force at a Sharm el-Sheikh summit, hosting Egyptian President Abdel Sisi has announced. The meeting was dominated by the situation in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia leads a bombing campaign against rebels
The US is now openly coordinating another act of naked aggression committed by a tandem force of two US-collaborator countries competing for the title of world's worst domestic dictatorship: Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Shell's Climate Change Strategy: Narcissistic, Paranoid, And Psychopathic By John Ashton
In an open letter to Shell's Ben Van Beurden, the UK's former top climate envoy says now is the time for him to show leadership
A week with Wyden shows a secret fundraiser for a secretly negotiated corporate agreement
Stop Smoking The Democrack By Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
The U.S. government is toying with a war with nuclear Russia while already waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having done severe damage to Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Military spending is climbing ever higher. Presidential war powers are ever more extreme. The proliferation of nuclear technology is combining with the ease and secrecy of drone wars to raise the risk of a Dr. Strangelove finish to the human species. And, let's face it, you had more time to give a damn when the president was a Republican
Scientists and scientific organisations around the world call on Government of India to withdraw a flawed study on chrysotile asbestos and stop blocking UN Convention
Re-Probe Hashimpura Killing Case By Syed Ali Mujtaba
It's bolt on India's democracy that the murders of Hashimpura are let out for want of evidence. There is hardly any hue and cry, local and international pressure being built for re-probe. The evidences are abundant, it needs to pieced together and bring it for the judicial scrutiny. Re-probe of Hashimpura carnage alone can instill confidence among the minority community in the country
Tobacco or Health! U Turn On Pictorial Warning On Tobacco Products By Subhash Gatade
Government is set to defer indefinitely the implementation of notification for increasing the size of pictorial warning on tobacco products beyond April one, when it was to come into force. ..The notification regarding amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules, 2008 sought increase in the size of specified health warning from the current 40 per cent to 85 per cent of the principal display area of the package of tobacco products
28 March, 2015
Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched airstrikes in Yemen against rebel Shiite Houthi forces gaining more ground. The mainly Gulf coalition, which also includes the US, is trying to help embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Twenty-four people were killed and 43 injured as a result of Saudi-led airstrikes over the last 24 hours, Yemen's Saba state news agency reported the Interior Ministry saying in a statement
Nuclear Threat Escalating Beyond Political Rhetoric By Thalif Deen
As a new cold war between the United States and Russia picks up steam, the nuclear threat is in danger of escalating - perhaps far beyond political rhetoric
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth's Ability To Support Life By Paul Craig Roberts
David Ray Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin's book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? The book is a carefully researched document
No Ban On Coal Finance As Green Climate Fund Eyes First Projects By Megan Darby
The Green Climate Fund has not ruled out backing coal plants after a protracted three-day board meeting in Songdo, South Korea. Tense negotiations ended at 04 20 on Thursday with agreement on seven intermediaries to disburse funds for low carbon development and climate adaptation in poor countries
Two Degree Celsius Climate Change Target 'Utterly Inadequate By Countercurrents.org
The official global target of a 2degC temperature rise is 'utterly inadequate' for protecting those at most risk from climate change, says a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), writing a commentary in the open access journal Climate Change Responses. The commentary presents a rare inside-view of a two-day discussion at the Lima Conference of the Parties (COP) on the likely consequences of accepting an average global warming target of 2degC versus 1.5degC
The Czech Republic And The Fine Art Of Collaboration By Andre Vltchek
The US military convoy will soon be passing through the Czech territory, from the Baltics and Poland, to its permanent base in Bavaria, Germany. That is bad enough. The Czechs should not have allowed the convoy to pass. Provoking Russia and moving closer and closer to the fascist Empire is a shameless and cowardly act
Coming Home By William T. Hathaway
From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War. RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from antiwar activists, the true stories of their efforts to change our warrior culture. In this chapter a mother tells of her son's return from combat. She wishes to remain anonymous
Cultural Hegemony And Social Change: 2015 By Jon Kofas
There are conservative analysts who assume that more than anything people crave safety and security. Cultural hegemony rests on the fears of the people who have been conditioned to accept the status quo and avert risk when it comes to securing a new social contract that would represent all people. Some advocates of democracy argue that actualizing their potential is just as important for human beings, but this entails having an institutional structure that permits and promotes those possibilities. I have argued in the past that uprisings are very possible in the 21st century, especially after the next inevitable deep recession, but systemic change is highly unlikely
It's been a bad couple of weeks for Monsanto. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines for not reporting hundreds of uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals at its eastern Idaho phosphate plant. It also paid out a string of lawsuit settlements totaling $350,000 as a result of its GMOs tainting wheat in seven US states. Such amounts represent little more than a tap on the wrist for a company that rakes in sales of almost $16 billion dollars annually
Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict By William James Martin
The Palestinians have little to offer Obama. Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term. If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice
Brutal Lathi Charge On Workers Outside Delhi Secretariat By Abhinav Sinha
Complete account of the brutal lathi charge on workers outside Delhi Secretariat on the orders of Kejriwal Government on March 25, 2015
Human Rights Violations by the Punjab Government and Punjab Police regarding the Surat Singh Khalsa fast unto death
27 March, 2015
Airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by other members of Gulf Cooperating Council and the U.S. government, continued to hit Yemen on Thursday as the situation in one of the world's most impoverished, yet strategically important countries continues to unravel amid what can only be described now as all-out war. Reports indicate that a first wave of bombings overnight which resulted in a number of civilian deaths--including entire families trapped in flattened houses--have spurred widespread anger in Sanaa and other targeted cities, even among members of the population opposed to the Houthi rebels
Saudi Arabia, Egypt Prepare US-Backed Invasion Of Yemen By Niles Williamson
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are preparing a US-backed military invasion of Yemen aimed at pushing back the Houthi militia that has taken over much of the country and reasserting the control of besieged President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that the three-pronged assault would come from Saudi Arabia in the north and from the Red Sea in the west and the Arabian Sea in the south. As many as five Egyptian troop ships have been stationed off the coast of Yemen. The officials said that the assault would begin after airstrikes had sufficiently weakened the Houthi rebels
5 Facts You Need To Know About Yemen And Its Conflicts By Russia Today
One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players - and some of the world's most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation's conflicts
US Warplanes Attack Targets In Center Of Tikrit By Patrick Martin
US warplanes began air strikes on Islamic State positions in the center of Tikrit Wednesday night, the first involvement of US forces in the bloody fighting in that Iraqi city, the hometown of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Military sources said at least 180 targets were struck in one of the most ferocious bombardments since the US resumed military operations in Iraq last August
Far from being a "Sunni jihadist group", ISIS is yet another creation of botched up U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World. Attributing anything Islamic to the group is as ridiculous as attributing American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and illegal detention of "illegal combatants" at Guantanamo Bay to Christianity. Nevertheless, ISIS is an enigma, a by-product of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war, and last but not least, an integral part of Washington's false flag operation in the Muslim World
Europe Must Not Be Forced Into A Nuclear War With Russia By John Scales Avery
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it. Europe must not be the close ally (or vassal) of the world's greatest purveyor of violence and war
The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU's Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013 By Eric Zuesse
So: now you know why Yanukovych, the very next day after his learning about the $160B price tag of the EU's offer, turned it down, and also why this revelation is still news, more than a year later -- just as it was news to me until I happened upon it only today
Amnesty: Gaza Firing Of Indiscriminate Rockets Is War Crime By Robert Barsocchini
Amnesty notes in a new report that attacks by Gazans resisting Israeli occupation, invasion, and terrorist attacks amount to war crimes, due to the uncontrollable nature of the rudimentary projectiles Gazans are forced to use because of the Israeli occupation and siege keeping Gaza isolated from the rest of the world. "According to UN data, more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel during the conflict." But the western media is silent on the number of casualty caused by these projectiles compared to the overwhelming death and destruction caused by Israel's assualt on Gaza
New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During And After WWII By Robert Barsocchini
Germany's The Local reports: Professor Miriam Gebhardt's book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin
A Different Form Of Holocaust Denial By Mickey Z.
The use of the word "holocaust" in relation to factory farming is semantically accurate but horribly insensitive and demonstrably ineffectiv
Volume Loss From Antarctic Ice Shelves Is Accelerating, Finds Study By Countercurrents.org
Scientists have warned: The ice around the edge of Antarctica is melting faster than previously thought, potentially unlocking meters of sea-level rise in the long-term
Vast Majority Of Americans Believe That The Climate Is Changing By Ian James
Stanford University professor Jon Krosnick has been studying Americans' attitudes about global warming for nearly two decades and has found in repeated polls that a large majority see climate change as a threat to future generations that should be addressed
In tracing the rapid deterioration of the legal intellect in Sri Lanka, the extrajudicial killings committed by the State should be scrutinised as one of the most significant factors for such deterioration
The Supreme Court's scrapping of Section 66 A of the Information Technology Act for being "unconstitutional in entirety" is indeed a great moment in the life of the democracy. The Act did, in fact, invade citizenry's right of free speech "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately". However, is this really a moment to celebrate in the life of a republic whose criminal justice system is rotten to the core? Will it really lead to any exercise of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, in a land where ordinary citizens fear the police more than the criminals?
Revisiting The Caste Question By Priyanka Dass Saharia
How is modern form of caste in contemporary times? Nicholas Dirks had argued on colonial power knowledge complexes instrumental in reifying it within bureaucratic structures and discourses. The various institutions of caste were used as tools to manage the divide and rule policies perpetuated by the British. The question then becomes as to what form did these changes take? In what ways did the imported modernity of colonialism changed the 'registers' of belief and social reality in India?
Examinations And Professional Competence By S.G.Vombatkere
The recent news reports of wholesale cheating in matriculation examinations in Bihar, with pictures of accomplices dangerously climbing the walls of buildings in which examinations were being held, to hand over cheating-aids to candidates, are horrifying. The physical risk taken by the accomplices shows that the cash paid to them - by parents who are okay with cheating, and making arrangements to "help" their wards - is adequate
26 March, 2015
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared "to protect and defend the legitimate government" of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi
US Airstrikes, Coupled With Iran-Backed Militias And Iraqi Forces, Target ISIS In Tikrit By Jon Queally
As Middle East historian Juan Cole points out, the U.S. military on Wednesday into Thursday was assisting the Saudi bombing of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, while simultaneously collaborating (at least indirectly) with Iranian military advisors from the Iranian Republican Guard Corp in the operation against ISIS in Tikrit. "The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region," he writes. "But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran."
Washington's Two Air Wars: With Iran In Iraq, With Saudis (Against Iran) In Yemen By Juan Cole
The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region. But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran
"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
Obama Now Sides w. Poroshenko & EU To End Ukraine's War By Eric Zuesse
Obama has other fish to fry with them -- such as his proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), to grant international corporations effective control over the environmental, labor, and product-safety regulations of participating countries. He seems to have decided (at least for the time being) to pursue -- via other routes than Ukraine -- his war against Russia
Agent Orange Funding Opens Door To US Militarism And Covert Action In Vietnam By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Is the United States finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country's affairs as part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" strategy?
Globalization and cheater economics have been destroying the world's great rivers and their fisheries. Most people know about the devastation of rivers from water pollution, but not as many are aware of the significant impacts of big dams, river engineering, and real estate development in and on top of rivers. These activities can seriously damage fisheries and impair the natural functions of riverine ecosystems. A true-cost, steady state economy would, for the most part, avoid the continuing tragic dismantlement of rivers and fisheries
Imagine if an American presidential candidate made a plea to his supporters on election day with the following statement: "The Republican administration is in danger. Black voters are going en masse to the polls. Liberal NGOs are bringing them on buses." Even in a country where Chris Matthews is a media celebrity and Pamela Geller is an intellectual, the statement would be scandalous, a political death wish even. In Israel, however, the opposite is true. In a message delivered in a video on Facebook, incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a sinister call appealing to ingrained racism in Israeli society: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses."
Despite Protests, Japan Diverts Funds Earmarked To Fight Climate Change To Finance Coal Plants In India, Bangladesh By Countercurrents.org
Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, reported the Associated Press
Premises On The Question Of Political Crisis In Bangladesh By Farooque Chowdhury
Today's Bangladesh faces political crisis as scores of news-reports and views claim [an end-note to this article cites headings/excerpts of a few of those], and today's Bangladesh doesn't face political crisis as one can claim periods of turmoil are not crisis, can cite a few data from economy, and can also refer to a lull within a long period of crisis. Both the statements, one can claim, are correct in relative terms. On the other hand, any of the two cancels the other. Only a scientific approach to the question - crisis - can provide a reliable answer. The approach should look into all related aspects instead of making sweeping remarks based on superficial observations and shallow search that ignores basic elements of crisis
Pads Against Sexism Campaign - Some Issues By Parvin Sultana
Elone Kastratia started a unique street art protest using Sanitary napkins with messages against sexual violence in her hometown Krlsruhe, Germany which went viral in social media. With rapidly spreading across to other countries, it was picked up by students of universities like Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They put up sanitary napkins in various spots in the universities. The idea behind using sanitary napkins to start such awareness campaign was to use blunt hard hitting methods in starting a dialogue around sexual harassment of women. The means used raised many eyebrows in a society where sexism continues to be rampant
A Deeper Look At Vedic History Suggests A Tribal Melting Pot That May Surprise The Hindu Nationalist By Amritanshu Pandey
While the nationalists speak of a golden past the truth is that ancient India may very well have been the equivalent of a medieval Arabia! Realisation of this could help us better accept India's vast cultural diversity, and prevent us from engaging in acts such as the ban on beef-production simply because it offends the culture of a select group. The truth is that there could have been several ancient Indian tribes that relished beef, while others abstained from its consumption. Which of them represent the real India, and who are we truly descended from?
The Fear Factor In Indian Republic By Parvez Alam
I am tempted to write because I am feeling insecure. May be I shouldn't write because it becomes easy for them to identify me and kill me. They can kill me any time anywhere, in day light, at mid night, in Hashimpura or in Sopore or in Batla House. What is the purpose of these institutions, only killing and intimidating or something else? Why have we made our society in such a way that police and army symbolize only fear? Why we train security personnel in the fashion which create them spineless robots who just do not feel any acquiescence with thinking and judging? Why are we not agitating against the acts of violence, denial of justice, inhumanity and banality of evil? Why are we so silent when we are feeling so disturbed inside?
A Guide To Understanding Our Times - Review of Recollection of Things Learned By Gaither Stewart By William T. Hathaway
G aither Stewart is a man of passions. In The Europe Trilogy he shared with us his passion for international espionage and intrigue. In Voices from Pisalocca he shared his passion for village life in his adoptive country, Italy. In The Fifth Sun he shared his passion for Native-American mythology. Now in Recollection of Things Learned he shares his passion for socialism, both the complexity of its theory and the clash of its praxis.
25March, 2015
The issue of rising food Prices across the globe is a matter of great concern, and is being discussed on many international forums. Studies show that, since households in developing countries spend most of their income on food items, rising food prices affect them significantly more than households in developed countries
Hold The Rich Accountable In New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs By Thalif Deen
The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments - this time particularly by the rich - if the UN's 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed
Two Towns Face The Fallout As Himalayan Glaciers Melt By Daniel Grossman
For two towns in northern India, melting glaciers have had very different impacts -- one town has benefited from flowing streams and bountiful harvests; but the other has seen its water supplies dry up and now is being forced to relocate
U.S.-v.-Russia: Even Stephen Cohen Is Starting To Speak The Truth By Eric Zuesse
An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) "for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real," and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this "possibly a fateful turning-point in history." He also says "it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance."
How The US Government And US Military Became Murder, Inc. By Paul Craig Roberts
The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war. If the crazed Russophobic US generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will be destroyed. The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war nuclear
Resisting Israeli Politics By Brenda Heard
Six months prior to the upcoming UK general election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published its "2015 General Election Jewish Manifesto." This forty-page document urges both existing and prospective members of the UK Parliament to support various "policy asks" and to "champion these causes." The Manifesto was styled after a very similar one created for the 2014 EU elections. Indeed their goals appear the same: to ensure a pro-Israeli agenda in the House of Commons and beyond
Supreme Court Decision On Section 66A Lays The Basis Of Fifth Pillar Of Democracy By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
India has now unrestricted freedom to speak and express on social sites, albeit qualified by the reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Art. 19 of the constitution. This development makes India one of the most advanced countries in the world where people can release their grievances against the system, and against the leaders who for no attainments still glorify themselves. It gives Indian people a tool to create public opinion on any issue. Internet is now a force with a capacity to channelize the people's anger, desires, and expectations in unified manner towards its destination
Our educational system needs a radical change
24 March, 2015
As U.S. military convoy pushes through countries in eastern Europe while cash contribution to Clinton Foundation gets exposed. Activists are protesting the U.S. military march. An AP report said: A U.S. army infantry convoy is driving through eastern Europe seeking to provide reassurance to a region concerned that the Ukraine conflict threatens its securit
IMF: Ukraine Must Now Steal $1.5 Billion+ From Russia To Buy Arms By German Economic News
The IMF has developed a program for Ukraine, under which the current financial hole is to be filled in the amount $40 billion. The due debts [the senior debt] are part of the plan, and will be restructured, according to the IMF. Exactly how it is to happen, the IMF does not explain. Experts say that the IMF believes that Russia should participate in a haircut
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record - while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years
World's Richest One Percent Undermine Fight Against Economic Inequalities By Thalif Deen
The growing economic inequalities between rich and poor - and the lopsided concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the world's one percent - are undermining international efforts to fight global poverty, environmental degradation and social injustice, according to a civil society alliance
Empire And Colonialism: Rich Men In London Still Deciding Africa's Future By Colin Todhunter
Some PS600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce
Herbicide US Sprays Over Millions Of Acres In Columbia "Drug War" Linked To Cancer By Robert Barsocchini
The Associated Press reports that "the world's most-popular weed killer" has been discovered to be "a likely cause of cancer": The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a French-based research arm of the World Health Organization, has reclassified the herbicide glyphosate as a result of what it said is convincing evidence the chemical produces cancer in lab animals and more limited findings it causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in humans. ...the glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup [made by Monsanto] is a mainstay of industrial agriculture
To coincide with the IARC's findings, public promoter of GM golden rice Patrick Moore recently said during an interview on French TV that: "I do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing cancer. You can drink a whole quart and it won't hurt you." On being repeatedly asked to back up his statement Moore walked out of the interview
Sixty Percent Of Global Drone Exports Come From Israel -- New Data By Rania Khalek
Israel has supplied 60.7 percent of the world's drones since 1985, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. As a result, Israel is the single greatest source of drone proliferation in the world
Secrecy And Democracy Are Incompatible By John Scales Avery
It is obvious, almost by definition, that excessive governmental secrecy and true democracy are incompatible. If the people of a country have no idea what their government is doing, they cannot possibly have the influence on decisions that the word "democracy" implies
A Liberal Lawyer Gives Up On Preventing Murder By David Swanson
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called "There is no such thing as peacetime." Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder
Wait For Justice To Victims Of Hashimpura Has Become Much Longer By Subash Gatade
After around 28 years of the gruesome massacre allegedly by the personnel of the much feared PAC ( Provincial Armed Constabulary) for its biased approach , the Delhi court acquitted all 16 accused on 'benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused'. There have been very few massacres in post-independent India which have shaken the civil society to the core and have propelled it to come forward and raise its voice. And the Hashimpura killings happen to be one such episode
America's Global Dominance (Since WW II) Has Just Ended By Eric Zuesse
Obama's arrogance is what's driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase "the ugly American." In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America's problem, but perhaps they won't become the world's, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won't. And that's today's big news-story
Barbarians Are Coming - Western or Arabs? By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The US and the Europeans see war as an instrument of political hegemony and control over the precious natural resources of the Arab-Muslim world. The super-ego American and the allied Europeans are missing sense of guilt for the vice and ruins of decade long occupation and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan
Vietnam's Major Regional Thrust For A Malaria-Free Asia Pacific By 2030 By Citizen News Service (CNS)
Vietnam signals greater regional leadership in malaria elimination by hosting health officials and experts to discuss challenges to achieving a malaria-free Asia Pacific by 2030. This week, Vietnam will host Ministry of Health officials from the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN); a group of 17 countries in Asia Pacific who each share the ultimate goal to become malaria-free
23 March, 2015
Houthi militia members seized the military airport in Taiz on Saturday without any resistance from Yemeni military forces. The capture of Taiz brings the Houthi forces within 180 kilometers of the southern port city of Aden, the hometown and stronghold of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.Fighters from the Special Security Forces reportedly fired their automatic weapons and volleys of tear gas to disperse large crowds of protesters who turned out to oppose the Houthis' presence in the country's third largest city. Amid the country's descent into sectarian conflict, the United States announced that it was evacuating approximately 100 US Special Operations soldiers who had been stationed at the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province. They cited security threats after Al Qaeda militants briefly seized control of the nearby city of Al Houta on Friday
12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion - 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation By Dr Gideon Polya
Those with consciences recently marked the 12th anniversary on 19 March 2015 of the illegal and war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on false assertions of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was conducted in the absence of UN sanction or Iraqi threat to the invading nations, and led to 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million). The West has now commenced its Seventh Iraq War since 1914 in over a century of Western violence in which Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation have totalled 9 million. However Western Mainstream media have resolutely ignored the carnage, this tragically illustrating the adage "History ignored yields history repeated
The crisis that struck Ukraine last year-- the overthrow of the elected president, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in the Russian speaking eastern provinces-- was the result of problems that had been festering, not only in Ukraine but all along the former frontiers of the USSR since the end of the cold war and the collapse of eastern European socialism over twenty some years previously
For Hamza: Arms Sanctions Against Israel's Everyday Terrorism By Vacy Vlazna
Meet little Hamza Mus'ab Almadani of Khan Younis, Gaza. Look carefully, look tenderly, don't turn away. Please don't turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, turned away from Palestine. Hamza is Palestine. Look carefully at Israel's savage violation to his once perfect little body when on the 25th July 2014, Israel's soldiers loaded and fired pale blue artillery shells that discharged white incendiary rain on Gaza in hundreds of phosphorous-impregnated felt wedges as Hamza and his family slept. Imagine the agony Hamza suffered from the moment the white phosphorous struck and burrowed through his soft three year old skin. Phosphorous burns are only contained by blocking off oxygen but the extreme pain and, as you can see, the horrific tissue damage endures
Middle Income Nations Home To Half The World's Hungry By Thalif Deen
Nearly half of the world's hungry, about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Senator Cotton, Hitler, And 'Appeasement' By Mickey Z.
There are many issues swirling about the current situation in Iran but invoking Churchill, Hitler, and the A Word activates the following historical facade: by whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the United States and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being questioned... especially when every enemy of the United States is likened to Hitler
Jump Out Of The Pot! By William T. Hathaway
Like the frogs in a simmering water pot, we are provided with pictures, music, and other pleasures to distract us from the worsening conditions of our lives and render us incapable of changing them. These entertainments lull us with subjective emotions that offer solace and escape from our objective reality. They range from the crude to the refined, but all are characterized by glorifying the inner life of the supposedly sovereign individual
Declaring Dr. Chia Thye Poh As A Singaporean Hero Is A Better Way To Commemorate The Death Of Lee Kuan Yew A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
Many, including President Barack Obama, have been paying glowing tributes to Lee Kuan Yew since the announcement of his death this morning, 23rd March 2015. However, recalling what Lee Kuan Yew did to Dr. Chia Thye Poh and many other persons who aspired for multi-party democracy and respect for the freedom of expression in Singapore is a better way to remember Lee Kuan Yew. It is the least that can be done to fight back against the terrible legacy he has bequeathed
What Happened In Hashimpura 28 Years Ago? By Vibhuti Narain Rai
There are some experiences that stick with you throughout your life. They always stay with you like a nightmare and sometimes are like debts on your shoulders. The experience at Hashimpura Massacre was such an experience for me, says Vibhuti Narayan Rai, then Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, UP. On 22 May 1987, in Hashimpura, a locality in the Meerut City, 42 innocent Muslims were killed in cold blood by the personnel of Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC)
Police Firing On Women On International Women's Day In Odisha By Ganatantrik Adhikar Surakhya Sangathan
On 8th March 2015, when the world was observing International Women's Day, Odisha police fired upon women agitators at Namatara village of Rajakanika block of Kendrapada district and injured 16 villagers, mostly women. Out of those injured people, 9 villagers (five women, two girl children and 2 men) got admitted in Cuttak Medical College because of serious bullet injury. Now the police have already arrested 6 people for attacking the police and have filed cases against 60 people also. Namatara village having 200 houses are mostly of dalit communities
The Need For A New Approach To Adivasi Development By Gladson Dungdung
It is quite clear that the Tribal Sub-Plan has failed to achieve its objectives due to lack of community participation, transparency and accountability since it was implemented in 1974-75. This is why the Government of India should replace it with a Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP), which would ensure respect, preserve and protect their identity, autonomy, culture and traditional system of governance. Tribals should be given the right to choose their own path of development. The new Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP) would ensure full and effective participation of Adivasis in their own development
Ambedkar: Reimagining The Image By B.Prabakaran
Some years back Gopal Guru wrote an article on how Dalits especially lower middleclass and middle class Dalits have understood Ambedkar and in what form have they established him. With this background of spate of recent attacks, equally important and pertinent question to ask now would be how Ambedkar has been understood in the larger social arena and what he really means to them?
Winemaker Paul Hobbs, Repeat Offender, Violates Agreements Again By Shepherd Bliss
San Francisco's North Bay large winemakers routinely violate the weak rules regarding their practices and are seldom fined, according to the daily Press Democrat, March 11, 2015. Those rules need to be enforced and strengthened, especially as we enter an even more-dry drought
22 March, 2015
Why are so few talking about coal's impact on already scarce water resources? Despite the global water crisis being identified as the top risk to people across the globe, very few are taking a stand to protect dwindling water resources from the huge planned global growth of coal-fired power stations
The "Naturalness" Of The Commons By David de Ugarte
Agricultural and hunting commons are the original form of ownership and work, long prior to State property and private property... and for the time being, the most persistent: commons institutions remained vigorous throughout the world up through the Middle Ages and resisted Modernity with relative strength until the "amortization" of nineteenth-century liberalism forced them to evolve into modern cooperativism. But don't be fooled: even today, there are large European regions, like Galicia, where more of the 25% of the territory is made up of common lands. We have always been surrounded by the commons and by community values. Our culture kept more than just the formula for us
Food Democracy South And North: From Food Sovereignty To Transition Initiatives By Olivier De Schutter
People seek to co-design food systems, to participate in shaping them, to recapture them. We were familiar with the slogan of workplace democracy; we must now open up our eyes to food democracy
Only Less Will Do By Richard Heinberg
As we collide with Earth's limits, many people's first reflex response will be to try to find someone to blame. The result could be wars and witch-hunts. But social and international conflict will only deepen our misery. One thing that could help would be the widely disseminated knowledge that our predicament is mostly the result of increasing human numbers and increasing appetites confronting disappearing resources, and that only cooperative self-limitation will avert a fight to the bitter end. We can learn; history shows that. But in this instance we need to learn fast
Why The Western Alliance Is Ending By Eric Zuesse
It's well-known that only aristocrats profit from wars. And O'Bomba represents them just as much as his Republican 'opposition' do. But, now, even the aristocrats in other nations are increasingly abandoning him. All he evidently still has going for him is liberal and Democratic fools in the United States, who haven't yet figured out that he's a Manchurian candidate, Trojan horse, 'Democrat,' who (like the Clintons) would have FDR twisting in his grave if only he saw this. Fortunately, Roosevelt isn't around to see it
Netanyahu Victory, Saudi Arabia And Iran By G. Asgar Mitha
The failure of the N-talks and Iran not getting the concessions - economic, easing sanctions and political - it is seeking on its terms is that the US, Israel and EU3 may well start a catastrophic war in the Middle East, likely between Iran and ISIS. If it wins, then certainly Iran will be recognized as the balancing force in the Middle East - a defeat for both Israel and Saudi Arabia
What Do The Opponents Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran Really Want? By Dr. John Duke Anthony
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is once again in Switzerland with his British, Chinese, French, German, and Russian counterparts to continue negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Whether the respective diplomatic and national security negotiators will succeed remains to be seen. To be sure, a mutually acceptable agreement with Iran by six among the world's most powerful and influential nations, on one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other, is no small matter. In substance as well as in procedure and desired outcome, the goals - ensuring that Iran does not produce a nuclear bomb and, to that end, agreeing on as intrusive a nature and range of inspections as any in history - are as laudable as they are in many ways timely, urgent, and necessary
Babloo Loitongbam: Three Decades Of Building Human Rights Solidarity An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam By Abhay Kumar
An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam, pre-eminent human rights activist, who for the past three decades is striving hard to bring justice for those in North East India whose rights are being violated on a daily basis especially under the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
On Tuesday 17th March, Violent clashes erupted between Iranian security forces and Ahwazi Arab civilians after the end of the football match between Foulad Al-Ahwaz FC and Al-Hilal Saudi FC. One young fan has allegedly been shot dead by the Iranian anti-riot forces who used live ammunition targeting Ahwazi fans
Condemn Acquittal Of 16 PAC Personnel Accused In The Hashimpura Massacre By People's Union for Democratic Rights
On 22 May 1987, PAC personnel of UP reached Hashimpura, Meerut, took away about 50 Muslim men from a crowd outside a mosque, shot dead at least 42 of the men, and threw their bodies into a canal. On 21 March 2015, a Delhi Sessions Court accepted that the PAC personnel had committed these murders, but acquitted the policemen charged on account of insufficient evidence. Twenty eight years after the brutal massacre of Muslims by state forces, the guilty in uniform have not been identified and are roaming free
21 March, 2015
Ban Ki-moon's special envoy on climate change voiced support for the fossil fuel divestment movement at an event in London on Friday. Mary Robinson, leading climate justice campaigner and former president of Ireland, said it was "very interesting" to see the movement grow in impact. For any fund, "it is almost a due diligence requirement" to consider ending investment in dirty energy companies, she said
Geoengineering May Backfire, Find Scientists By Countercurrents.org
To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are proposals involving using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. But a new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters
The Messages From Israel's Election By Ilan Pappe
The conclusion for the international community should be clear now. Only decolonization of the settler state can lead to reconciliation. And the only way to kick off this decolonization is by employing the same means exercised against the other long-standing settler state of the twentieth century: apartheid South Africa
Russia Under Attack By Paul Craig Roberts
While Washington works assiduously to undermine the Minsk agreement that German chancellor Merkel and French president Hollande achieved in order to halt the military conflict in Ukraine, Washington has sent Victoria Nuland to Armenia to organize a "color revolution" or coup there, has sent Richard Miles as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to do the same there, and has sent Pamela Spratlen as ambassador to Uzbekistan to purchase that government's allegiance away from Russia. The result would be to break up the Collective Security Treaty Organization and present Russia and China with destabilization where they can least afford it
Europe: Old Friendships, Hesitant Alliances By Gaither Stewart
You can't ignore the reality that perhaps never before has a fine knowledge of geography been more important than today. It is a geographical fact that Eurasia exists. However any gung ho American neocon policy that aims at American control over that vast area rings like an Earth power claiming control, or aspiring to the control of, say, the planet Uranus. Fortunately, Europe understands the idiocy of neocon belief in America's invincibility and Exceptionalism ... or perhaps Europe is finally beginning to understand
Opposing War With A Smile By David Swanson
Big changes will be needed in our politics, our economy, our energy use, our culture, and in the stories we tell each other about the world. But these changes can come step-by-step and advance self-aware toward complete replacement of the war system with a peace system. Attempting such a change, which is in some ways well underway already, can hardly be less sensible than the knowing failure of war
The Collapse Of French Intellectual Diversity By Andre Vltchek
If you think that France is not as much a police state, as the UK or the US, think twice. Heavily armed military and police are visible at all train stations and many intersections, even at some narrow alleys. Internet providers are openly spying on their costumers. Mass media is self-censoring its reports. The regime's propaganda is in "top gear". But the people of France, at least the great majority of them, believe that they live in an 'open and democratic society.' If asked, they cannot prove it; they have no arguments. They are simply told that they are free, and so they believe it
The Great GMO Legitimation Crisis By Colin Todhunter
Author of 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' Steven Druker recently talked of how back in the seventies a group of molecular biologists formed part of a scientific elite that sought to allay fears about genetic engineering by putting a positive spin on it. At the same time, critics of this emerging technology were increasingly depicted as being little more than non-scientists who expressed ignorant but well-meaning concerns about science and genetic engineering. This continues today, but the attacks on critics are becoming more vicious
From Basic Income To Social Dividends: Sharing The Value Of Common Resources By Rajesh Makwana
It's time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part IV By Jon V Kofas
The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan's Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate
Public Hero: Paying For Honesty By S.G.Vombatkere
One hopes that Ravi's death will trigger a wave of honest officials and public-spirited citizens who will support each other in the best interest of the people of our sovereign socialist secular democratic Republic
The Maharashra Beef Ban Is Unconstitutional By Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights
The CPDR holds that the Maharashtra Animal Protection (Amendment) Act, 1995 is not in consonance with Article 48 when this is viewed in conjunction with the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. This Act is not even based on Hindu religious faith. Contrary to Hinduism, which is a conglomerate of beliefs and faiths aimed at achieving spiritual salvation, the ideology of the majority in the Maharashtra Assembly that enacted this law in 1995 is that of Hindutva, which is aimed at attaining political power, and is the Indian variant of Nazism. The Act is aimed at depriving the Other of her livelihood and way of life, which must be condemned by all those who stand for pluralism, secularism and democratic rights
The Dimapur Lynch Mob And Violence Of Hurt Sentiments By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
While community politics creates unbridgeable walls between citizens, the fluidity of opportunities under modernity generates another world outside communities. The man killed by the Naga mob in Dimapur was actually married to a Naga woman. Their girl child, half Naga-half Cachharree Muslim, and hence neither Naga, nor Cachharee Muslim, faces an uncertain future. It depends crucially on the future of democracy in the country whether she spends her life in trauma in the barrenness of no-man's land between communities, or she grows up to live full life of a citizen without fear, hatred and suspicion
Documenting Hate And Communal Violence Under The Modi Regime By John Dayal
The 300 days have also seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rightsorganizations and Rights Defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and the systems if the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act and the Passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, Fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. This report is focused on issues of communally targeted violence and the politics of hate and divisiveness that emanates from a thesis of religious nationalism
Progress Made But Work Remains On Firewalling Health Policy From Tobacco Industry By Shobha Shukla
Considerable progress has been made in different countries globally in protecting public health policy from tobacco industry interference, but certainly lot more work needs to be done. 2012 World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) Declaration called on all governments to establish a national coordinating mechanism of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which is fully firewalled from the tobacco industry
South Asian region has very high levels of tobacco use, and thus not surprisingly, rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other tobacco related illnesses rage high. Nepal is in spotlight in South Asian region by demonstrating high commitment to tobacco control and also acting on the ground! Recognizing Nepal's leadership, the country was awarded the prestigious 'Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control' at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH 2015)
20 March, 2015
Crosscurrents By Kathy Kelly
By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee
To Survive, We Must Act Now On Global Warming By Lionel Anet
To ensure that our offspring can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that's to have a worldwide united action to stop that dangerous warming. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth;we must showthe unavoidable disaster they will face in pursuing this ridicules goal. They must see their wealth will be useless in the future on our lifeless planet
Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe By The Danish Pugwash Group
The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe
19 March, 2015
Unless Obama can summon up the will and the courage to publicly tell Israel that enough is enough and then back his words with actions, the answer to Lerman's question is that nobody can stop Netanyahu advancing the doomsday clock. My guess is that Obama will wash his hands of the conflict and walk away from it. In that event he'll deserve a place in history as the American president who gave Zionism the green light to take the region and possibly the whole world to hell. I hope, Mr. President, that I am wrong about you and your intentions
Israel Votes Apartheid By Neve Gordon
Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu's secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier's votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center). The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid
Israelis Vote To Abandon All Pretence Of Seeking Peace By Dan Glazebrook
Israelis went to the polls the other day in an election which, defying all predictions, saw the 'left-wing' of Zionism - genocide with a human face - soundly beaten by its more honest 'right wing', whose commitment to the total eradication of the Palestinians as any kind of political entity is openly stated
Netanyahu Victory Opens Door For One-State Solution By Francis Boyle
Before the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988, the position of the Palestine National Council and the Palestine Liberation Organization was that there should be only one, democratic and secular state for the entire mandate for Palestine, which would include Israel within it. It was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat himself who encouraged the Palestine National Council to accept the two-state solution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988. After 27 years of fruitlessly trying to pursue a two-state solution, it is now time for the Palestine National Council and the PLO to reconsider their options
On Wednesday, March 18th, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of Ukraine -- who was selected for that post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the U.S. coup that installed him into this office -- told his cabinet meeting, "Our goal is to regain control of Donetsk and Lugansk." Those are the two districts comprising Donbass, the self-proclaimed independent region of Ukraine, which now calls itself "The People's Republic" and sometimes "Novorossiya," and which rejects the coup and its coup-imposed Government
Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator's forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin's defense of Crimeans' democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal
Countries Agree On UN Plan In Sendai To Save Lives From Disasters By Megan Darby
Twelve hours behind schedule, 187 countries agreed a deal in Sendai on Wednesday to reduce death and economic damage from natural disasters.The Sendai Framework set seven targets and four priorities for the next fifteen years. These include plans to "substantially reduce" loss of life from 2005-15 levels in 2020-30 and to reduce economic losses as a proportion of global GDP by 2030
The time has come for the Indian Railways to seize the day, and scale up its investment in solar power
1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of "We the People"
'Islamic State' As A Western Phenomenon? Reimagining The IS Debate By Ramzy Baroud
No matter how one attempts to wrangle with the so-called 'Islamic State' (IS) rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up
The Veggie Pride Talk I Didn't Give By Mickey Z.
For the first time in many years, I've declined an offer to be the lead speaker at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC's Union Square Park. I learned the hard way that although the cheers have been loud, the local vegan/animal rights scene wasn't actually hearing me. Since I've opted to no longer howl into an echo chamber, I'll share my thoughts here instead
Ahwazis Call The Amnesty International To Urge Iran To Stop Persecution By Amir Saedi
Ahwazi Community in the UK demonstrated in front of the Amnesty International on Tuesday 17 March 2015 against the persecution of the Arabs by the Iranian regime. Following the protest a group of Ahwazi activists met with Mrs Hassiba Hadh Sahraoui, the Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa Programme
Condemn The Gang-Rape In Nadia And Continuing Attacks On Christians By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR expresses outrage at the gang-rape of a 71 year old nun by a gang of "dacoits" inside a convent in Gangnapur village, Nadia district, West Bengal on 14th March 2015. The men reportedly raided and desecrated the convent before taking away 12 lakhs.Clearly, the motive was not merely to rob and decamp but to punish the school and the community through this horrendous gang-rape. In this connection, PUDR wishes to draw attention to the disturbing trend of attacks on Christians, including their institutions and places of worship, in recent times
The Hindutva Algebra Of Nation-Making By Braj Ranjan Mani
Remembering Martin Niemoller's famous poem, I am tempted to think that if Martin had been an Indian--alive today--he would certainly have scribbled something like the following
Hold Tobacco Industry Liable: Turn The Cost-Benefit Ratio Upside Down By Shobha Shukla
WHO FCTC Article 19 envisions a world where governments hold the power to protect people from harmful products like tobacco, can recover the costs of treating tobacco-related disease from the tobacco industry, and can use their legal systems to ensure their right to do so
18 March, 2015
Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed victory after a closely contested national election in Israel. According to unofficial figures released by the Israeli election committee, Netanyahu's Likud Party has won at least 29 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, putting it in a strong position to form a ruling coalition. Likud's main challenger, the Zionist Union, won 24 seats. Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog has called Netanyahu to concede defeat. President Reuven Rivlin, a longtime Likud loyalist, will designate Netanyahu to form the next government once the distribution of seats is finalized among the ten parties that reached the threshold of 3.25 percent of the vote
Why I'm Relieved Netanyahu Won By Ali Abunimah
The Israeli Jewish public's choice to re-elect Netanyahu should make it clear to people around the world that Israel does not seek peace and does not seek justice. It will continue to oppress and ethnically cleanse Palestinians until it is stopped. Negotiating with such a regime is pointless when its power over its victims remains vast and unchecked. The message we should take away is simple: the proper treatment for a polity committed to occupation, apartheid and ethno-racial supremacy is to isolate it until it recognizes that it must abandon those commitments. Palestinians have asked the world to do that through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Netanyahu makes the case a little easier, so it's time to step it up
Thousands March In Caracas Protesting US Interference,Solidarity Concert In Havana By Countercurrents.org
In the face of imperialist intervention Venezuelan people are mobilizing themselves. Thousands of citizens in capital Caracas have joined in marches protesting US interference in Venezuela. Venezuelan social movements took to the streets to oppose US aggression. Over 100,000 Venezuelans were mobilized throughout the country for a series of national military exercises in defense of their national sovereignty. A contingent of Russian soldiers and naval craft participated in the exercise. And, thousands of Cubans gathered at the University of Havana's Grand Stairway to express their unconditional solidarity with Venezuela and opposition to US aggression
Latin America again sets example of solidarity and unity against imperialist intervention as the Empire threatens Venezuela with sanctions. In this moment of anti-imperialist struggle, Fidel Castro expresses solidarity to Venezuela
Writer and researcher Colin Todhunter takes apart the arguments of pro-GMO lobbyist Anthony Trewavas
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part III By Jon V Kofas
Can Democracy Be Viable with a Wide Gap between Rich and Poor?
Marijuana: Legalize--Don't Advertise By William John Cox
The War on Drugs has proven to be a monstrous mistake resulting in the waste of a trillion dollars and the shameful criminal conviction and incarceration of thousands of Americans. While the end to drug prohibition may not be entirely possible, the more limited movement to decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana is gaining momentum. Those who support ending drug prohibition, but continue to believe drug use is harmful, have the responsibility to find ways to avoid the advertising and promotion of legalized marijuana
Two distinguished Ahwazi former prisoners named "Ramadan Nasseri" and "Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari" in their interviews with human rights organizations and Arab Media agencies revealed flagrant human rights violations that the Iranian occupying government has exercised against Ahwazi Arab prisoners in Al-Ahwaz
Doms In Varanasi Seek Justice Through Honorable Rehabilitation By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Domraj often come in mythologies and they continue to do the task of burning dead bodies at the Ghats and cleaning human excreta in the city. Most of the land meant for them is already occupied and big ghats have erupted on the bank. Nothing has changed for them. In fact, they reflect the criminal civilization which kept them subjugated for thousands of years and the independence that we got in 1947 has no meaning for them as the community remains untouchables among untouchables absolutely ostracized and thoroughly disenfranchised in the holy city
Where There Is A Will There Is A Way: Teeja Devi By Shobha Shukla
According to Teeja, "There has been a lot of change in my life since the time I came to this village as a child bride. Women are in a better position today to improve their lives and also to fight for their rights, although I have been doing that from the very beginning. From personal experiences I can say that women have the capacity to fight for their rights. But unless they come out of their houses, meet other people, and voice their opinions, they will not be able to progress. I am just literate enough to sign my name but I am very much aware of my and other people's rights and am ready to fight for them
No Country For Art? By Arshie Qureshi
Call it official High headedness or the apathy of the people, anyone who watched the vandalism at art gallery in Kashmir last month will point to you the underlying reality about art ignorance in the valley. It almost seems ironical that on one hand we dwell in a part of the world which is historically a crucible of rich cultural heritage, merging a strong sense of mysticism with the delicacies of nature. A place where everything manifests the divinity. And on the other hand, a man with a clueless look on his face frantically drags the delicate figurine out of the gallery and smashes it without a pang of remorse
17 March, 2015
Nearly a quarter of damages wrought by natural disasters on the developing world are borne by the agricultural sector, finds a new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) study released in Sendai, Japan on March 17, 2015 at the UN World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction. $70 billion in damages to crops and livestock over a 10 year period
While the whole country was celebrating Holi, a joyous festival of colours, three farmers that were contemplating suicide in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh went ahead and took their own lives. One of them, wearing the same colour soaked dress he had celebrated the festival in, hung himself to a tree
Agricultural Crisis And Remedial Pathways For India By Dr Sunny Sandhu
NaMo model of development has already spelt doom for the farmers , its clear that its pro corporate and anti farmer government , like the previous government as well . Changing of Land laws in favor of corporates is the start . GM crops are being cleared at an alarming rate . Lip service is being done to promote organic and natural farming . We the youth of india has to rise to this toxic challenge and ensure to safeguard our ecosystems , biodiversity , bhoomi , river goddesses and beej (seeds)
Nandigram today is a sad picture of rejection. Women, who were the integral part of the movement and were at the forefront of the anti-acquistion stir that eventually catapulted the Trinamool Congress into power in West Bengal are now confined to their homes and are subjected to all kind of oppression
Cropping Africa's Wet Savannas Would Bring High Environmental Costs By Countercurrents.org
Converting Africa's wet savannas into farmland would come at a high environmental cost and, in some cases, fail to meet existing standards for renewable fuels, finds a new report published in the journal Nature Climate Change. With the global population rising, Africa's vast wet savannas have been targeted as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at low environmental costs
An Open Letter To Subramanian Swamy By Shehzad Poonawalla
Mr.Swamy, you continue to remain an accused out on bail and the law will catch up with you eventually, notwithstanding the Delhi Police dragging its feet. The kind of politics you subscribe to is also subject to the law of diminishing returns in the long run. Even Mr. Modi has begun to realize that and every now and then, he and his good friend "Barack" throw in a word of caution, for your ilk, even if it is only for symbolism. Frankly, Harvard can and did prevent you from wearing its name. I only wish secular, tolerant Hindus and Indians could have had that authority and choice too
Book Review: The Dispensable Nation - American Foreign Policy in Retreat By Vali Nasr Reviewed By Jim Miles
U.S. foreign policy is not in retreat, perhaps in tatters and rags, wrapped in a flag stained in the blood of far too many millions of people around the world. Works such as "The Dispensable Nation" simply highlight the arrogance and hubris of an empire in decline
Obama And The 'News' Media Continue To Falsify About Obamacare By Eric Zuesse
This "universal healthcare" thing is an ongoing lie from Obama, because there is no way that the plan that he proposed, nor the one that he selected Senator Max Baucus to design to meet his intentions and ram through Congress, could even possibly produce a 100% insureds-rate, or "universal coverage." The rest of the industrialized world has it (and has better healthcare at lower prices), but we still don't
Stratfor: "US Aims To Prevent A German-Russian Alliance" By German Economic News
The head of the private intelligence agency Stratfor has for the first time publicly said that the US government considers to be its overriding strategic objective the prevention of a German-Russian alliance. Blocking that alliance is the only way to prevent an alternative world power capable of challenging extension of the American position of being the world's lone superpower
In the end, maybe the Big Dick School of Patriotism comes down to this: we embrace the idea of an all-powerful military because at a time when the world seems such a fragile and hostile place, if even our military won't keep us safe, who will? Unless there just might be a better way to go through the world than by carrying a big dick?
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy : PART II By Jon V Kofas
Attitudes of the Rich toward the Poor and Working Poor
Each understands according To things misunderstood: A shadow-world in dumb-show Where "evil" contends with "good."
Crisis In The AAP Casts Shadows On Civil-Society Meet On Alternative Politics By Abhay Kumar
Linking the current contestation in the AAP to its inability to take a firm stance on secularism, senior advocate and president of PUCL (Delhi), N. D. Pancholi pulled up AAP for raising the "divisive" slogan of Vandre Matram, which, in his view, had a major contribution to the partition of the country. 'Vande Matram creates suspicion among Muslims,' Pancholi contended
Is it time to have few more paid/payable (read credible) news channels in various regional languages, which can survive with contributions from the subscribers?
16 March, 2015
Poor countries should receive between US$400 billion and US$2 trillion per year from rich countries by 2050 to help them cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fight climate crisis, finds a new paper published on March 16, 2015 by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science
The American Government's Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
The American Government's biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine -- and it's even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that's totally unnecessary for America's national-security, and that actually places all of our nation's security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats ("oligarchs") in both the U.S. and Ukraine -- not for any real reasons of the American people, at all
The Misrepresentation Of Israeli Aggression As Self-Defense By Matt Peppe
The media and the public will uncritically support the position of American and Israeli power. Thousands of Palestinians will be indiscriminately killed, but not because Israel is defending itself. Palestinians will be killed because the U.S. government refuses to protect them from a belligerent and aggressive regime, and refuses even to recognize their right to protect themselves
The Realpolitik Of Revolution By William T. Hathaway
What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution
Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman In America By Chris Hedges
Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bete noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party
Truth Is Our Country By Paul Craig Roberts
Press Club Of Mexico Awards Paul Craig Roberts International Medal For Journalism Excellence
An Ahwazi Arab street vendor by the name of Younes Asakere from Mohammareh city has set himself on fire in protest against the action of the Occupying municipal officials who confiscated his small grocer's stall
Religion, Politics And Society: A Birds Eye View By Ram Puniyani
What has religion to do with politics? What has violence to do with religion? And how does the expression of major political agenda shape itself in contemporary times? Roughly speaking it seems that the religion is being used as a cover for many a political phenomenon. This seems to be the observation more so from South Asian-West Asian perspective
Veloor Swaminathan is no more. He left Plachimada forever on March 14, 2015. Swaminathan along with Mylamma were the initial foundations of the historic struggle of Plachimada in Kerala. The struggle initiated by a small group of these Adivasis with Dalits and farmers forced one of the largest corporate powers in the world, Coca Cola to bend down and quit Plachimada. If anybody asks, how did such a small force of marginalised people achieve such a herculean task, I would say, study Mylamma and Swaminathan, for any strategy for any people's movement raising issues of marginalisation
Another Church Attacked In Haryana: Holy Cross Replaced With A Hanuman Idol By Shehzad Poonawalla
Petition registered with NCM (National Commission for Minorities) To draw attention to and direct action on the constant spree of attacks and vandalism on churches (7th in 4 months) including the latest one in Kaimri village near Hisar, Haryana where the Holy Cross was replaced with a Hanuman Idol
Rapist Mukesh Singh Is Not Alone In Denigrating Women By Shamsul Islam
It is true that Mukesh made reprehensible statements about women in general and rape victim in particular. It is debatable whether banning a film containing such statements is the solution but fact is that rapist Mukesh is not alone in holding male chauvinistic views denigrating women.India is flooded with popular religious literature denigrating women. Geeta Press based in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, is the largest supplier of this kind of literature. It publishes literature espousing the 'Hindu' way of life for women on a very large scale. The low-priced publications are available throughout the country, especially the Hindi belt, and are even sold through Government allotted stalls at railway stations and government roadways stands
On The Interrelationship Between Bovine And Human Beings By Subhash Gatade
As things stand today it appears that the people in power seem to be more concerned with making the desi-videsi moneybags happy to maintain a conducive atmosphere for bringing in new investments and also catering to 'sentiments' of a dominant section of people around cow. It is just another way to say that while human beings will have to wait but the bovine cannot
Surveillance Cameras In Classrooms: Trust V/S Security By Ms.Swaleha Sindhi
Each student brings knowledge to the school and the schools must validate their ideas, this will encourage students of different levels of ability to keep sharing their knowledge. Students must be provided a safe space in which they can grow, thrive, question, analyse, think critically, and take risks. Schools can have their own ways of monitoring discipline by making the discipline incharges or the school Principals do patrolling in the corridor while the classes are going on. Camera is just another thing for students (especially adolescents) to play with
15 March, 2015
During the past few days, German Economic News has specifically identified the following EU nations that are strongly opposed to this supplying of weapons to Ukraine: Spain, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, France, and Slovakia. Furthermore, Italy is increasing its cooperation with Russia
If I had to express my hope in one sentence it would be this. A fourth term as prime minister for Netanyahu would see Israel becoming more and more isolated and could improve the chances of Western governments being moved to use the leverage they have to cause the Zionist (not Jewish) state to end its defiance of international law and denial of the Palestinian claim for justice. Another way to put it would be to say Netanyahu is a disaster for Zionism so let's have more of him
International Court, Hague, Rules in Favor of Ecuador in its Case Against U.S. Oil Giant, Chevron By Robert Barsocchini
The International Court of Justice (CIJ) ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-based oil company Chevron US $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld. The money will benefit about 30,000 Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous
China's Dirty Coal Plants Face Climate Risk, Investors Warned By Megan Darby
Many of China's dirtiest coal plants could be forced to close early as regulations to curb greenhouse gases, air pollution and water stress tighten. That is the outlook described in the most comprehensive assessment to date of the risk of "stranded assets" to investors in coal power worldwide. Seven of the 10 companies with the biggest portfolios of "subcritical" coal plants - the least efficient kind - are Chinese, according to research from Oxford University. The US is next, taking six of the top 20 slots
47 Years Ago In My Lai: 'We Were There To Kill Ideology' By Mickey Z.
Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children. Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in. With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23. Never forget, comrades: This is how we can choose to be
A Blueprint For Ending War By World Beyond War
It is no longer sufficient to end a particular war or particular weapons system if we want peace. The entire cultural complex of the War System must be replaced with a different system for managing conflict. Fortunately, as we shall see, such a system is already developing in the real world. The War System is a choice. The gate to the iron cage is, in fact, open and we can walk out whenever we choose
With the 51 day Israeli attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014 that killed over 2,200, wounded 11,000, destroyed 20,000 homes and displaced 500,000, the closing to humanitarian organizations of the border with Gaza by the Egyptian government, continuing Israeli attacks on fishermen and others, and the lack of international aid through UNWRA for the rebuilding of Gaza, the international Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition has decided to again challenge Israel's naval blockade of Gaza in an effort to gain publicity for the critical necessity of ending the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the isolation of the people of Gaza
The Politics of Extinction By William deBuys
Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy By Jon V Kofas
The great challenge of our time is social and geographic inequality that threatens not only the system of capitalism creating inequality, but the democratic political regime under which capitalism has thrived in the last one hundred years
Review: "Genocide In Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration Of AModern State" By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani By Dr Gideon Polya
Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani have published "Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State" , a carefully documented, must-read account of the Zionist-backed US Alliance destruction of Iraq and the killing of millions of Iraqis over the last quarter century for oil, US hegemony and for military dominance of the Middle East by a nuclear-armed, genocidally racist Apartheid Israel. This is a damning case that everyone should read to prevent recurrence (history ignored yields history repeated) and for ultimate legal recourse and Nuremberg-style justice for the Iraqi people
Afzal Guru's Mortal Remains Must Reach His Family By Dr. Paramjit Singh Sahni & Shobha Aggarwal
In all situations the body of the deceased must reach the family. This alone would satisfy and soothe the collective conscience of the society
Release Of Political Detenues By Abdul Majid Zargar
If India hopes to achieve an acceptable political solution to the long festering problem then it is imperative that all political prisoners are set free and a congenial & conducive atmosphere prepared for holding talks with all the stake-holders. That was also stated by the group of interlocutors appointed by Govt. Of India in 2010 to explore a political solution to the issue
The Two Conferences Of Jammu And Kashmir By Yasir Altaf Zargar
In Jammu and Kashmir both the conference's had different aspiration for J&K'S status. The Muslim conference was favouring joining Pakistan while national conference was opposing it
AAP's Divide And Rule By Satya Sagar
Whatever potential AAP has, for genuine countrywide transformation, on the class or caste front, cannot be achieved by mechanically expanding the Delhi model across the national landscape like a rubber mask. That will only result in the hasty induction of a lot of people wearing the mask of Kejriwal, without possessing any of his talents while retaining at least a few of his vices! Rather, the process will have to be an organic one, with dozens and scores of local Kejriwals springing up from the grassroots, taking up the issues that AAP has raised in Delhi but with both the causes and methods tailored to context - what I would call the 'Apne AAP' movement. Every anonymous volunteer who is part of AAP, and indeed its core strength, has the potential to be a Kejriwal, YY or PB
Why Science Is Closer To Morality Than Religion By Amritanshu Pandey
India's fundamentalist moral brigade has shifted gears since the advent of Acche Din, and we are subject to daily reports of the moral police's enthusiasm, derived largely from our substantial pool of religion and culture. In this regard India is no different to religious societies around the world, where faith and its institutions provide the basis for our moral compass. If your dominant religion disavows of homosexuality, for example, then it can be guaranteed that your society's outlook will be that homosexuality is immoral
Kanshiram Declassed Ambedkarite Politics By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Understand Kanshiram's mantra that key to power come from the poor and they are vast and we need to change our perceptions and strengthen their struggle and leadership. We can not ask people to sacrifice their lives for 'leaders'. Those time have gone. Give space as you want elsewhere and provide a healing touch to people where community leaders have not yet reached
14 March, 2015
Having reached a tenuous peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia (without the US), Germany is realizing and announcing that, indeed, the US does not seem intent on peace. McClatchy reports that German government officials have "recently referred to U.S. statements of Russian involvement in the Ukraine fighting as 'dangerous propaganda'". In light of US propaganda and military support for Kiev, Germany even asked outright whether "the Americans want to sabotage the European mediation attempts in Ukraine led by Chancellor Merkel?"
On this video from Fox 'News': At 3:30, Lou Dobbs asks the Fox Noise military analyst: "What do you expect" in Ukraine? At 3:35 he answers: "In the Ukraine, the only way that the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians ... killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags."
Fishermen, Are They Criminals? An Open Letter To Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka And India By Ravi Nitesh
I demand Sri Lankan PM to express his apology over the statement to shoot Indian fishermen because it was against humanitarian approach, against UN sea laws and most importantly against the unity of fishermen. He must apologise that he see fishermen not as 'criminals'. He must also apologise to people of Sri Lanka that he doesn't believe what he said is a common belief of Sri Lanka's people and fishermen. We know that even fishermen of Sri Lanka will never support his statement
Feeding A Warmer, Riskier World By Jose Graziano da Silva
Artificial meat. Indoor aquaculture. Vertical farms. Irrigation drones. Once in the realm of science fiction, these are now fact. Food production is going high-tech, at least in some places. But the vast majority of the world's farmers still face that old, fundamental fact: Their crops, their very livelihoods, depend on how Mother Nature treats them. Over 80 percent of world agriculture today remains dependent on the rains, just as it did 10,000 years ago
Showing Chicago a whole different concept of governing, and an appreciation for the people of our city, Chuy Garcia came to Logan Square on March 12th and received a enthusiastic welcome from the several hundred people who turned out to greet him and support his campaign for Mayor
With Enemies Like This, Imperialism Doesn't Need Friends By Dan Glazebrook
'Can non-Europeans Think?' by Hamid Dabashi declares the end of the colonial domination of knowledge, but the author effectively aligns himself with the West's very real war against the developing world
Venezuela - A Threat? By Chandra Muzaffar
So far the US has not provided any tangible evidence of how Venezuelan officials have violated human rights or indulged in public corruption. Its reckless allegations have been effectively refuted by the Caracas government. Even leaders from other Latin American countries have condemned the statements emanating from Washington DC
There were astronomers like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, mathematicians like Bhaskara I and Baudhayana, physicians like Charaka and surgeons like Sushrutha in ancient India, but the work of these men of science has nothing to do with Hinduism or Hindutva. It is absurd, therefore, of Hindutva politicians to associate the work of these scientists with "Hinduism" or "Hindutva" and quite disgraceful of them to claim credit for the ingenuity, hard work and courageous assertions of ancient Indian scientists, many of whom, like the astronomer Aryabhata, had to face the ire of Brahminical orthodoxy to make these assertions
Frontier, probably, the thinnest and the most-plain appearing English weekly from Kolkata, a city with protest and politics, resistance and revolution faces an imminent threat of eviction
13 March, 2015
Danger Of War With Russia Grows As US Sends Military Equipement To Ukraine By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier
Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO's ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power. The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry
Ukraine's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Declares War On Russia By Eric Zuesse
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, "Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation. Hostile countries over the past decade have spent billions of dollars rearming it."
Oil Demand Could Fall Without Climate Solution, Warns Shell By Ed King
Demand for oil and gas could fall if major producers fail to find economically viable and publicly acceptable ways of cutting their climate-warming gas emissions, Shell has warned. The oil giant revealed its fears in its Strategic Report, released on March 12, 2015, telling investors that new climate change regulations "may result in project delays and higher costs."
Bangladesh To Use SERVIR Satellite-Based Flood Forecasting, Warning System By Janet Anderson
Bangladesh officials have announced plans to expand a satellite-based flood forecasting and warning system developed by SERVIR to aid an area where floodwaters inundate from 1/3 to 2/3 of the country annually, killing hundreds of people and affecting millions. The system, which relies on river level data provided by the Jason-2 satellite, last year provided the longest lead time for flood warnings ever produced in Bangladesh
Dissatisfaction With U.S. Government Soars By Eric Zuesse
The latest Gallup poll shows that even as Americans are more satisfied with the American economy, they are more dissatisfied with the government; and that this government-dissatisfaction is so high that for the first time while Gallup has been following this matter, the ratio of dissatisfaction with government is swamping the ratio of dissatisfaction with both of the other two matters that Americans are dissatisfied with: the economy, and unemployment
The CIA And America's Presidents: Some Rarely Discussed Truths Shaping Contemporary American Democracy By John Chuckman
When people write of America's secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone's being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President's case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end
The Growth Schism: Greater Israel At Odds With U.S Decline In The Middle East By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner
In an attempt to put Netanyahu's Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline
Secret History Of My Geography Teacher, Also Cofounder Of Hamas By Ramzy Baroud
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle
Ending sanctions on Cuba in the name of a new foreign policy while at the same time imposing sanctions on Venezuela because of supposed government repression is indeed laughable. It makes absolutely no sense if we take seriously the narrative on human rights and democracy peddled by the White House and echoed in the media. But it makes perfect sense if we view it as a cynical, realpolitik attempt to undermine the threat of a good example and a way of reestablishing American influence in the Caribbean through an increased presence in Cuba. Taking into account these factors, we can see there is no new, enlightened dawn in US policy, rather a switching of targets. It is, lamentably, business as usual
Unite! Let's Make Sure That Kandhamals Are Not Repeated By Medha Patkar
My friends, let me stop my speech by saying that it is time that the displaced people and the marginalized people come together as a strong force, so that these forms of injustice can be effectively dealt with in a united manner
In a shocking incident, over 30 Dalit and Adivasi students and activists were arrested this afternoon from Shastri Bhavan in New Delhi when they demanded to meet the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, over unfair budgetary allocations in education of Dalit and Adivasi students. At the time of the arrest, the delegation, including N Paul Diwakar, well-known Dalit activist and general secretary of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), were about to submit a Memorandum of Demands to the Minister asking for reallocation of funds. The activists were taken to Parliament Police station where another Dalit activist Beena Pallical was forcefully dragged taken inside the police station
Essential Elements That Can Give Rise To A New Kind Of Politics By Dr. Satinath Choudhary
It would have been ideal for all of legislators to continue to have equal power with no chief minister, ministers or deputy-ministers. Various legislators could join collectives interested in guiding various departments of the government. For different decisions different small collectives could be formed even in the same department. However, the decisions of the collectives would have to be approved by the whole legislature. In case there more than one collective dealing with the same issue, they can meet with each other to iron out their differences before or/and after they present their proposals to the full legislative body. Full legislature would be the supreme body to put final seal of approval on any issue or legislation
12 March, 2015
Over the past two months, Geneva offered two opportunities for governments to deepen their understanding of the interplay between human rights and climate action. The coming months will now be critical to determine whether, through the UN climate body and the Human Rights Council, states are willing to commit to take steps towards ensuring that climate policies address climate change in a way that promotes human rights at the same time
The Real Story Behind The Oil Price Collapse By Michael T. Klare
Those of you currently staying strong and paying close attention are probably already astonished that we're on the brink of social, economic, and environmental collapse. Hopefully, you're also telling everyone you know. But then what?
Stop The Fast Track To A Future Of Global Corporate Rule By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers
Several major international agreements are under negotiation which would greatly empower multinational corporations and the World Economic Forum is promoting a new model of global governance that creates a hybrid government-corporate structure. Humankind is proceeding on a path to global corporate rule where transnational corporations would not just influence public policy, they would write the policies and vote on them. The power of nation-states and people to determine their futures would be weakened in a system of corporate rule
Vietnam: Some History By Andy Piascik
Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with death so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the role we play in the world will have to come from us
Understanding Nelson Mandela's Complex Legacy Honors Him The Most By Doug Allen
It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed "the struggle is my life." In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses
Avigdor Lieberman, ISIS, And The Saudi Regime By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
A country pretending to share the same "values" as the U. S. and the other Western democracies allows itself a Foreign Minister who calls for the beheading of its own Palestinian citizens! In 2014, the Saudi Arabian regime beheaded 83 people. The beheadings of ISIS exceeds 100, while the dark figure may be much higher. Will the Israel government follow the advice of its foreign minister, and who will do the job?
Roots Of Modern Terrorism And Religious Fundamentalism By G. Asgar Mitha
Saudi Arabia and other Monarchist Arab Wahhabist countries have been natural economic allies of America and its European vassals as they are weak and in need of protection. America continues to support the Saudis in exporting their perverted religious dogma across the Muslim countries in order to breed religious intolerance, cruelty and terrorism. Some of the countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine have been war victims, others like Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt have survived upon American and Saudi aids. Iran is the only Muslim country where America and the Saudi monarchy have failed for exporting terrorism and religious extremism and both fear it as a regional power
If you see Iran through that left-Democratic lens, that is if you are opposed to Republican efforts to start yet another unnecessary catastrophic war, this one with Iran, I have a few ideas I'd like to run by you
Arab World: Political Disintegration And Search For Reason By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The Arab masses long for political change and a promising future based on peaceful co-existence with others. In view of the unstoppable cycle of sectarian killings and daily bloodbaths in so many Arab states - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and spill-over to other oil producing Arab nations - and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures - is the Arab world coming to its own end? The Arab rulers and the masses live and breathe in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented governance - the essence of Islamic system of governance. The worst is yet to come as the wars continue, surrender to foreign forces as there are no leaders to think of the future, no Arab armies to defend the people and no sustainable socio-economic infrastructures intact to support the masses
Sleepwalking Into World War Three? Why The Independent Media Is Vital By Colin Todhunter
The corporate media have a narrative and the truth does not fit into it. If this tells us anything it is that sites like the one you are reading this particular article on are essential for informing the public about the reality of the aggression that could be sleepwalking the world towards humanity's final war. And while the mainstream media might still be 'main', in as much as that is where most people still turn to for information, there is nothing to keep the alternative web-based media from becoming 'mainstream'
Understanding Women's Labour Book Review By Suparna Banerjee
This book is an analysis of the dialectic of women's labour and the processes of capital accumulation in Asian economies -- an analysis that blends empirical research with theoretical reflections. Indeed, one of the book's stated aims is to examine the relationship between Marxist political and economic theories with feminism, and the author offers theoretical corrections -- based on empirical data -- to Marx's and Proudhon's theories on women's labour and on women's roles in society
Kashmir's Polite, Mad Revolutionary, India's Bogeyman By Radha Surya
Two cheers for Indian democracy. For now the dust has settled. The Kashmir issue has dropped from the headlines of the Indian news media. The politicians and the deshbakts can return to the self-serving pretence about the decline of pro-azaadi sentiment in Kashmir. It's now back to believing that Kashmir is identical to every other Indian state and that its problems have to do with governance and development. No need to confront the troublesome fact that divided Kashmir lies at the heart of an international dispute
Of Masrat Alam Drama And Beyond By Dr. Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
Masrat Alam's row just seems a drama scripted by some hidden and veiled writers with Modi, (Prime Minister of India) Rajnath, (Home Minister) and Mufti Syed,(Chief Minister) as important characters. The drama has been played with Mufti's role as survivor, Avatar, and Messiah for the people of Kashmir and sensational with PM Modi's remarks "I share the opposition's aakrosh (anger)". While as Rajnath Singh, has attempted a new twist to the drama by asking a written report from the state government. The beginning of the drama is so sensational and twisting; God knows what would be the end
In response to beef ban law thousands of workers of Devnar abattoir (Mumbai), who will be losing their jobs came on the streets to protest against this move of the government (March 11). Many traders, from different religion also came to Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest this communal act of the Maharashtra Government. In a PIL filed in the Bombay High Court the petitioner argues that this ban on beef infringes on the fundamental right of citizens to choose meat of their choice is fundamental. The hope is that the society overcomes such abuse of 'identity issues' for political goals and lets the people have their own choices in matters of food habits, and let those who are making their living from this trade do so peacefully
The 'President' Of Egalitarian India By Aishik Chanda
Dressed in blue full-sleeve shirt and grey trousers, Sachin Prabhakar Sawant, excitedly explains his roadmap for an egalitarian India. An engineer by education, the Mira Road resident who is sitting on a dharna for over a year at Azad Maidan in south Bombay, declared himself the President of India on March 23, 2014. Since then, he has made a corner at Azad Maidan his home, demanding implementation of the constitution 'religiously'. Sawant, the President of Independent Candidates' Party (ICP), says he wants to establish Buddhist system in the country and destroy all forms of casteism, sectarianism and communalism from their roots
11 March, 2015
Just ahead of the four-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, five organizations have issued a message that the only way to avert climate disaster is by embracing a clean energy future. It was March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan earthquake caused a massive tsunami which triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and destroyed thousands of lives and livelihoods
Carbon Emissions Could Dramatically Increase Risk Of U.S. Megadroughts By Steve Cole & Leslie McCarthy
Droughts in the US Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. The study, published [in February] in the journal Science Advances, is based on projections from several climate models, including one sponsored by NASA. The research found continued increases in human-produced greenhouse gas emissions drives up the risk of severe droughts in these regions
New Carbon Accounting Method Proposed By Countercurrents.org
Consumption-based accounting, also known as carbon footprints, has been suggested as an alternative to today's production-based accounting. With carbon footprints, each country must account for all emissions that are caused by its final consumption -- regardless of where the goods were produced. This has been called a fairer way of measuring emissions, potentially avoiding so-called carbon leakage, where rich, developed countries can reduce their domestic emissions by shifting carbon-intensive production abroad
The political and military maneuvers now going on in the Ukraine have the potential of escalating out of control. If we don't understand the actual reality that has brought about this crisis there is no hope of being able to prevent this escalation. In order to understand this reality we must refrain from simple minded finger pointing at one side or the other and assigning complete responsibility for the crisis to one of the parties in the dispute, although one side may be disproportionately responsible
What we have is an extensive set of lies of omission: the Tribune and Sun-Times have not investigated the story, obviously hoping it would go away. Because of their inaction, it appears that there were hopes that it would not become an issue in the mayoral run-off. The mainstream media "dam" seems to be giving away, though, as activists and the alternative media in Chicago, including Substancenews.net, keep this issue alive. Whether it gets more fully into the mayoral campaign or not, police maleficence in Chicago--as well as across the United States--is going to continue to be challenged
Getting Serious About Terrorism By Andy Piascik
Last month, President Obama convened a summit at the White House to discuss terrorism. As could easily have been predicted, the focus was entirely on those the United States deems official enemies. Conversely and equally predictably, the two best and most obvious ways the United States can combat terrorism - stop doing it and stop giving arms, money and diplomatic cover to others who do - were not on the agenda
This past week, Laura Poitras's documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His "sole motive", he wrote, was "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes - the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge."
All capitals strive to be showcases, sure, but very few, or perhaps none, is as successful at blocking out its nation's true ugliness and failures. This sleight of hand, though, also works on many of the residents of this near perfect square inside a near perfect circle. The hell they've created keeps seeping in, however, and soon enough, it will overwhelm, if not explode, this Potemkin village of a city. This smug bubble will burst
Violence Against Women: Why We Keep Getting It Wrong By Robert J. Burrowes
With the passing of another International Women's Day, during which much attention around the world has again been focused on tackling violence against women, I would like to explain why none of the initiatives currently being proposed will achieve anything unless we acknowledge, and act on, the cause of this violence
Top 'News' Executives Suppress Key Facts; The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture. Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail
Feeding The Vultures, While Starving Agriculture: Capitalism's Great Indian Con-Trick By Colin Todhunter
India's development is being hijacked by the country's wealthy ruling class and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are now swooping. Meanwhile, the genuine wealth creators, the entrepreneurs who work the fields and have been custodians of the land and seeds for centuries, are being sold out to corporate interests whose only concern is to how best loot the economy
The influence in the news coverage at different times in the Middle East, illustrates that new media helped the people of Middle-East in getting their voices heard, and did help in advocacy efforts at times when state tried to block the access but at the same time everyone had eye on the developments taking place in that part of the world
Deprecate Lynching Of A Muslim Youth At Dimapur Of Nagaland By Lateef Mohammed Khan
It is Crime against Humanity based upon political motivation - Judiciary, State and Central Government are culpable
10 March, 2015
We humans are amazingly creative and resourceful and have emerged successfully from many dire situations. We can easily create this on the ground, while we work on the big problem of transferring from the negative emotional condition of the death culture- civilization- to the positive emotional condition of a life nurturing survival
Venezuela, A Security Threat, Declares US By Countercurrents.org
The US has declared Venezuela is a national security threat. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order on March 9, 2015 slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security". President Nicolas Maduro a few days ago revealed new evidence on the coup plot against his administration revealing that much of it was planned in the US
President Obama Picks Another Fight, This Time Venezuela By Eric Zuesse
The Obama Administration, which in 2009 provided the crucial assistance that enabled the progressive democratic President of Honduras to be overthrown and a junta of oligarchs to replace him; and which in 2014 perpetrated a bloody coup that replaced the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian equally corrupt Government, and thus sparked Ukraine's civil war against the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for Yanukovych; is now again trying to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro
Possibility Of Escape By Kathy Kelly
I'm here among women, some of whom, I've been told, are supposed to be "hardened criminals." Fellow activists incarcerated in men's prisons likewise concur that the system is futile, merciless and wrongheaded. Our jailers, I'm convinced, can see this. Men like Governor Rauner, it seems, can see it, or his advisers can. Where are the inflexible ones keeping women like Marlo isolated from and lost to the world, trembling for their future for the next five years? I would like to make an appeal to you, and to myself two months from now when I've left here and once more rejoined the polite society of these women's "inflexible jailers." I choose to believe that we can be moved and these women can escape. I am writing this, as many have written and will write, to see if we're easier to move than iron and stone
Far from the east coast metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, in the western region of Xinjiang (referred to as East Turkestan by Uyghurs), the Muslim Uyghur minority has long been struggling under the repressive rule of the Communist Party (CCP). The Uyghurs - who speak a Turkic language and have much more culturally in common with their Central Asian neighbours - want independence from China. For the CCP, who see itself as the guardian of the civilisation-state, this kind of 'separatism' is unacceptable: It poses an existential threat to China because its borders pre-date the modern nation-state system and any challenge to that could precipitate other territorial disputes that could make her like any other country - that's to say, arbitrary lines on a map
An Interview with Mona Oudeh an Ahwazi Arab activist
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, on average, US police piled up the bodies of 928 US citizens per year between 2003-2009 and 2011
So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It's been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue
If the United States is ever to become a democratic society, and if we are ever to enter the international community as a responsible party willing to wage peace instead of war, to foster cooperation and mutual aid rather than domination, we will have to account for the crimes of those who claim to act in our names like Kissinger. Our outrage at the crimes of murderous thugs who are official enemies like Pol Pot is not enough. A cabal of American mis-leaders from Kennedy on caused for far more Indochinese deaths than the Khmer Rouge, after all, and those responsible should be judged and treated accordingly
Australia's Sovereignty Severely Compromised For US-Israeli Designs By Dr. Daud Batchelor
As Australia's international standing has risen, the country's sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites:the disproportionately influential military-industrial complex and Zionist lobbies.Australia's sovereignty is being compromised by the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former PM Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we "have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war"
Transformation By Gaither Stewart
I return again and again to the Russian example because just as the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia set its stamp on the development of the idea of Socialism there (in the end making the greatest revolution of modern times), when the propitious moment arrives, when what was inexpressible becomes expressible, when events have created a universal mood of revolutionary discontent with the existing system, when tensions reach the boiling point, the American intelligentsia, together with the American wage earners and the growing, multiplying, ever angrier and, one hopes, awakening middle class, will rise against the capitalist system, salvage the positive parts of America and bring about that transformation I am speaking of
Fact Finding Report On Communal Violence in Bharuch District, Gujarat By PUCL
Today PUCL, Gujarat Submitted a fact finding Report to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), National Commission for Minorities, Chief Minister and Minister of Home and Revenue (Gujarat), Director General of Police (Gujarat) demanding urgent action in cases of Violation of Right to Life and Liberties, Right to livelihood of the affected people in the villages of Hansot Block, District Bharuch, Gujarat due to communal violence and ineffective/biased state action from December 2014 onwards
Women's emancipation entails changing the mindset, initiating revolution and bringing radical transformation in the ways contemporary capitalist patriarchal society operates. It demands meaningful understanding and interventions in day to day to struggles of women situated in different contextual background. Focusing on prejudices, stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes that have denied women of their constitutional or human rights is essential. The women's liberation movement in the modern Indian society needs to focus on the issues relating to struggle for substantive equality, freedom from violence and survival issues. Commercialization is not a solution; the answer lies in political and social mobilization around everyday issues relating to women lives on daily basis. The need is to strive for dignity and respect at the work place, within homes and public spaces and reimagining the new world order based on social justice
This film, 'India's Daughter', except for Mukesh Singh has nothing. Only Nirbhaya's mother is sole person who is countering the criminal and the lawyers. The criminals are in jail and the lawyer, specifically Mohan Sharma, is sitting in chair, very calmly, with the uniform, inside his own chamber, is spreading nothing but 'hatred' towards Nirbhaya! As a human being I can't accept this
Nation's Honour, 'IBIs' And The Dimapur Lynching By Bonojit Hussain
While there is little doubt that the mob lynching would not have been possible without complicity of the police force at various levels, Nagaland Chief Minister TR Zeliang in a kneejerk reaction has blamed social media users for the flare-up and the subsequent lynching. It would do well to both CM TR Zeliang and Naga society at large if he musters the courage to condemn and initiate action against the leaders of those civil society organizations that made libelous and false statements and calling for mob (in) justice
Hacking Consciousness: The Stanford University Video Series Reviewed by William T. Hathaway
This new Stanford video series investigates consciousness as the source of not only the human mind but also of all energy and matter. Consciousness is seen as the essence of the universe, a unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena. Five scientists from different disciplines describe how we can contact this field and use it to improve our lives. The series, designed by Michael Heinrich, is now available free on YouTube
09 March, 2015
With Saturday's execution of an Islamist defendant, the first state killing of the hundreds of people sentenced to death in mass show trials following the July 2013 military coup, the US-backed Egyptian junta is stepping up its campaign of police-state terror against the people
ISIS Destroys Ancient Sites Near Mosul By Sandy English
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC
The 'new Cold War,' against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it's already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government's chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it's a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it's 'the Western Alliance,' after all
Putin Wants To Eat Your Children By David Swanson
It's Vladimir Putin's turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer
A Global Security System: An Alternative To War By David Swanson
World Beyond War, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending all war, published this week a guide toward that end, a short book titled A Global Security System: An Alternative to War
Right To Insult or The Responsibility Principle? -- Thoughts On The Charlie-Hebdo-Massacre By Saral Sarkar
One thing can probably be regarded as indisputable: One cannot get any positive results through insults and provocations. On the contrary, they only stir up hatred and violence. We have observed that in the last 25 years. With this method one can only start a new conflict again and again
How I Saw The Light With Daylight Saving Time! By Gary Corseri
I thought that it had all been like that: that we had all lost our minds in a "wild romance" of life on a whirling, little, momentary planet of might-have-beens and should-have-beens. And I wept. And understood
The forthcoming state visit of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sri Lanka and the red carpet welcome accorded to him, including the ceremonial speech to the Sri Lanka's parliament are indeed a bad omen for all the democratic, left and progressive forces of this country. The March 13-14 visit is the first standalone trip by an Indian PM to Sri Lanka in 28 years
Greece: Limited Options, Limited Prospects By Jon V Kofas
The day after the Greek left-center party SYRIZA won the election of January 2015, optimism ran across Europe's progressive quarters, while the conservatives and neoliberals acr4oss the world insisted the new regime was extreme left and it would invite disaster. Just a few short weeks after that election, the world knows that SYRIZA was indeed a center-left regime, one trying to introduce some modest reforms in a bankrupt nation whose future is really the past of even greater dependence instead of the future of greater national sovereignty in all domains from economy to defense
Preeti has conquered many male dominated bastions and treaded upon paths, which others would normally fear to step upon. She is at the forefront of spearheading demonstrations to fight for not only the rights of women farmers but of all the villagers--forcing authorities to get the drains cleaned, voters' list corrected, water-logging removed; ration cards anomalies rectified; freeing land from encroachers--the list can go on and on. No wonder that even people of her native town of Gorakhpur marvel at her achievements and look upon her with reverence
Forest Peoples Programme Complaint Against Golden Agri Resources Upheld By Forestpeoples.org
Palm oil conglomerate criticised for multiple violation of RSPO's requirements that lands only be acquired from indigenous peoples and local communities with their free, prior and informed consent
08 March, 2015
Mob (in)justice In Dimapur By Parvin Sultana
Dimapur is regarded as the business capital of Nagaland, a state in the Northeastern region of India. This small town was jolted by a series of horrific incidents that took place on 5th March, 2015. A man accused of raping a college student was murdered by a mob. Videos of the 35 year old Syed Farid Khan being paraded naked and beaten to death became viral. His lifeless blood drenched body was then hanged
Analysing The Dimapur Lynching By Sazzad Hussain
This modern day lynching was photographed by mobile wielding youth as souvenirs. The entire act was committed in broad day light where the police and the civil administration choose to remain nonchalant. The punch line of the narrative was that the "rapist", who was also an "illegal Bangladeshi immigrant", got his punishment in a country where the justice delivery system is very slow
EU Increasingly Abandons Obama On Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
As reported on Saturday March 7th by both German Economic News, and Spiegel magazine, the ongoing lies and arrogance from U.S. President Barack Obama's Administration regarding Ukraine and Russia have finally raised to the surface a long-mounting anger of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Government
Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food. As a result, India is facing a nutritional crisis: every fourth Indian goes hungry, and in 2011 alone, diabetes took the lives of 1 million Indians
Meet The Planet's Most Dangerous Nuclear Rogue State By Mickey Z.
We're told we can't allow just anyone (except allies like Israel, of course) to acquire such lethal technology -- and we can't let anyone help arm men so evil they might, well, use nuclear weapons on civilians. We hear this while pretending that our tax dollars aren't funding the forces that regularly use nuclear weapons on civilians
Palestinian Memory And Hope By Dan Lieberman
They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam's Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C
Ahab's Speech Before His Crew: The Face Of Falsehood By William A.Cook
A Reflection on the Congress of the United States
Sexual violence in the conflict zones are not an aberration. They are widespread. Yet, they do not evoke the same outrage that this particular incident in a non-conflict zone has received. The Government, the judiciary and even those people who are aware of this reality remain silent. Aren't these the daughters of India too? Aren't they women as well? This hypocrisy needs to be addressed. Respect and rights cannot be exclusive or the entitlement of only a particular section of women
Ahwazi Mass Demonstration In Front Of The European Parliament In Brussels By Rahim Hamid
The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz has organized a mass demonstration, under the title "We will never forget our Ahwazi people" in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, the Belgian Capital. The Demonstration took place on Friday 6th of March to condemn the policies of Iranian occupation and the ongoing anti-human atrocities against the Arab people of Ahwaz
07 March, 2015
Europe depends on Russia for gas. It is supplied by Gazprom, a state monopoly. It was delivered for some years through Ukraine, but not without difficulties even before the civil war. Russia decided to join a dozen other European countries in building South Stream, under the Black Sea, into Bulgaria. The European Union attempted to impose its antitrust policy on Russia. On 1 December 2014 Russia abandoned South Stream and announced an agreement with Turkey to supply Europe at the Turkish-Greek border, through the New Black Sea Pipeline, leaving the necessary infrastructure from there to the care of the Union.
The 'Democrat' Brzezinski Says Russia's Putin Wants To Invade NATO By Eric Zuesse
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama's friend and advisor on Russia, has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "seized" Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine
Europe Blocks U.S. From Racing To War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
According to German Economic News, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande are balking at the speed of Obama's rush to war against Russia. Earlier, some of the smaller national economies in the European Union -- the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece -- dissented from America's effort to increase economic sanctions and military measures against Russia. But there is now increasing pressure upon the leaders in Germany, France, and Italy, also to separate the EU from the American rush to war against Russia
Germany's Balancing Act By William T. Hathaway
Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population
The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism
While stone statues of the female form (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga/Kali) are worshipped in temples and religious rituals, a large number of those made of flesh and blood face violence on the streets and in homes, and encounter discrimination throughout their lives that begins at (or even before) birth, and continues during childhood, adolescence and adulthood
Women's Empowerment: Not A Copy Paste Model By Dr.Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
There is no denying that the condition of women in West is relatively better than India but not so excellent that we will blindly follow it and become one dimensional. Before following or adopting any model of women empowerment we must understand its positives and negatives as well. The only model of women empowerment which seems suitable to any context is sociological model of development. Which aims inclusive empowerment, in social sphere, economic sphere, and political sphere, moreover empowerment associated with critical thinking and consciousness raising
ISIS And Its Faulty Logic (PDF) By Mirza Yawar Baig
Peace is the effect of justice. Those who like to talk about peace must ensure that justice is established. Until that is done, any apparent peace is only a recess between wars. We. All of us. White or black. Christian, Jew, Hindu or Muslim or of any faith. We who believe in goodness and are against exploitation of all kinds. We the people of the world. We need to take it back from the hands of those who want to exploit it and us for their own ends. We have to stand together
AAP As A Start-up And The New 'App' By Anand Teltumbde
The biggest challenge before a start-up is to scale up or be gobbled up by the big fish. Remember what Microsoft did to Netscape. In the absence of practical ideas about how to scale up, start-ups only end up swelling the coffers of venture capitalists and promoters
A Short Note On 'India's Daughter' By V. Arun Kumar
I recently watched the BCC's documentary 'India's Daughter' made by LesleeUdwin. The document is strong one exposing the misogynist and male chauvinism mind-set existing in our society. Banning of this documentary is idiotic, but I have certain reservations
Coalition And Controversies By Abdul Majid Zargar
So the BJP-PDP coalition is a fait-accompli now In Jammu & Kashmir. Mufti Mohammad Syed has assumed the reins of coalition Govt. on the assurance of a full six year term as Chief Minster. The oath of office was administered by Governor Vohra on 1st March 2015. A galaxy of leaders from BJP were present on the dias. Congress & NC boycotted the function
06 March, 2015
Press Release
"Indian courts have stated on multiple occasions that mere possession of certain literature cannot be considered a crime. The National Human Rights Commission has asked for a report from the Kerala police on the arrests. Authorities must ensure that the two men are protected from torture and other ill-treatment," said Shemeer Babu, Programmes Director, Amnesty International India
The documentary `India's Daughter' made by Leslee Udwin about the rape that shook Delhi in December 2012 raised a lot of debate, outrage and furor in Parliament, in media and in general. The police filed a FIR and the broadcast of this documentary is banned in India. Statements were issued by groups in favour and against such ban. However, what is being overlooked amidst this debate is the reality of women's lives in India. A woman in India faces this patriarchal misogynist attitude every day - at home and at public spaces, through her entire life in different ways. The documentary pointed to this regressive attitude and subjugating culture that needs to be addressed. Prohibiting the documentary is futile as shying away from such questions that pertains to reality of women's live or living in denial that misogyny exists or closing eyes to realities is hardly helpful to bring about social transformation. The need is to strike at the roots and confront the sexist and patriarchal violent culture in a mature manner
Is 'India's Daughter' A Victim Of Corporate Media War ? By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
BBC's film failed to expose India's caste impunity, which rapes women at their whims and fancies to assert its supremacy in India's villages. It is sad that our activists and human rights 'champion' did not have time to narrate things when they critique the film, instead the farce of nationalism and technicalities of the matter are being raised and that shows the hollowness of the protests and the human rights movement itself which keep quiet on the violence against Dalit women and make it just a plain gender issue. India will never answer that. BBC documentary failed us in that but nevertheless it is a milestone as it still exposes Indian society and its hypocrisy in dealing with the issue
Muzzling India's Daughters By Farzana Versey
Soon after December 16, 2012, India became international news for a rape. Intellectuals and the political class had at the time lapped up the attention, to the extent of participating in the globalisation of Delhi as the rape capital. The shame they felt came with the caveat of their moral superiority. Today, when it comes back full circle to mock them they stand more exposed than what they are exposing. They had called her India's daughter, and now they object to the title of a documentary using it. India has banned the film
Why The Rise Of Fascism Is Again The Issue By John Pilger
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons
Let's End The New Cold War Before It Heats Up By Ernest Partridge
The United States and Russia are rushing, relentlessly, toward war, unless cooler voices are heard and heeded. Those voices are not being heard in our mass media or heeded by our politicians. The familiar historical indicators of a march to war are apparent to all with eyes to see: arms buildup, depersonalization of the "enemy," demonization of its leaders, marginalizing of moderate voices, suppression of dissent, refusal to negotiate and compromise in good faith, deliberate failure to recognize the concerns and interests of "the other."
Wars may be how Americans learn geography, but do they always learn the history of how the geography was shaped by wars? I've just read Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years by John McHugo. It's very heavy on the wars, which is always a problem with how we tell history, since it convinces people that war is normal. But it also makes clear that war wasn't always normal in Syria
All Buildings In Debaltseve Ukraine Were Destroyed Or Damaged By The Occupying Ukrainian Army By Eric Zuesse
According to the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Ukraine, no usable buildings survive in the town of Debaltseve, the crucial railroad junction that was long fought over between the occupying Ukrainian army and the town's residents. The OSCE official, Michael Bociurkiw, said on Wednesday March 4th, "The violence must be stopped, as it is developing into a real disaster in some areas. As for Debaltseve, for example, our representatives have said that there was no house left that was not destroyed or damaged by shelling."
Greece Injured By EU By Andre Vltchek
Greece is in a cage; it is a hostage. The door is actually open. But the country is scared to walk out and face the world. It still prefers to suffer from familiar tyrants, than to encounter the unknown
An open letter and a challenge to the Royal Society
Justice: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Different nations and systems that exist in today's world are based on some sort of principle or framework, but the underlying fact is that if any such nation or system is based on justice, then only one expects good results out of it, otherwise it is not going to last for long, and history is witness, how such nations and systems collapse as, Malcolm-X, once said, "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." Excerpts of a short conversation with my friend over a cup of tea, here is what he thinks
05 March, 2015
New documents from the cache of files leaked by Edward Snowden show that New Zealand's intelligence agency has been collecting in bulk the cell phone, email, and internet files of people across the Pacific Island nations and handing that data over to the U.S. National Security Agency in an operation one angered lawmaker now describes as a "giant vaccum cleaner of information
This communication, we are sending after viewing the documentary film, which ironically, you had proposed to telecast on 8th March 2015, on the occasion of InternationalWomen's Day. We are writing to you to express our serious concerns about some aspects of this film which, as a responsible channel, we fully expect that you will take on board and postpone the broadcast of this film, till all legal processes and proceedings pertaining to the 16 December 2012 case have concluded
"India's Daughter" : A Ban Is Not The Solution By National Federation Of Indian Women
National Federation Of Indian Women (NFIW) strongly opposes the banning of the documentary India's Daughter. The 'objectionable' portions of the documentary not only expose the mentality of the rapist, they are also a reflection of the mentality and attitude of the Indian patriarchal society towards women
"India's Daughter": Blanket Ban An Attack On The Freedom Of Expression By All India Democratic Women's Association
All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled "India's Daughter" made by BBC 4. This is a knee jerk reaction that constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression
Netanyahu's Farcical Fear Mongering By Alan Hart
Netanyahu's portrayal of an Iran on course to possess nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel, plus the standing ovations and the applause his performance received, might well have pleased enough brainwashed Israeli Jews to vote in ways that guarantee he will emerge from Israel's upcoming elections in a position to cobble together the next coalition government and serve a fourth term as prime minister
Compete To Possess And Die Out, or Be Fair To Survive By Lionel Anet
Atmospheric scientists have estimated that, with the carbon we have emitted, we can expect a 3 metre ocean rise by the end of this century. We are in big trouble and continual reliance on growth will end up killing everyone. The task ahead of us is the most difficult ever and to deal with it will take a united effort. So the ball is in their court, the 1%,has to decide to live as one of us or die.Nevertheless they can't see the choice they have on their own; we must show them the choices they have, to save ourselves
US Considering Openly Arming Syrian al-Qaeda Faction, al-Nusra By Robert Barsocchini
As reported at Antiwar.com, the US and some of its regional client dictatorships are prodding the major al-Qaeda faction operating in Syria, a brutal terrorist group called al-Nusra, to "re-brand" so the US can openly arm it
A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
Not Science, Just Lies And Propaganda: The Massive Fraud Behind GMOs Exposed By Colin Todhunter
'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' is a new book by the US public interest lawyer Steve Druker. The book is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who initiated a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing
Fast Food Nations: Selling Out To Junk Food, Illness And Food Insecurity By Colin Todhunter
Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture and food sectors, including the subsequent impact on the livelihoods of hundreds of millions
The claim of the Hindutva gang that Dr BR Ambedkar endorsed the Hindutva project and opposed beef-eating as cow was sacred to Hinduism is a terrible travesty of facts. Dr Ambedkar, a great researcher, produced a brilliant essay on the subject titled 'Did The Hindus Never Eat Beef?' All those who are really interested in understanding the Indian past and wish to challenge the supremacist myth making for cleansing and marginalizing minorities must read the above-mentioned work which is being reproduced here
An Underground Radioactive Waste Laboratory Coming Up In Gogi Village In Yadgir District Of Karnataka By VT Padmanabhan & Joseph Makkolil
In March last year, we reported a secret move by the DAE to set up a repository (DGR) for storing high level radioactive waste (HLW) under the hills of Idukki-Theni districts in Kerala-Tamil Nadu. TIFR published a blanket denial saying that INO has nothing to do with radioactive waste. Our contention was that radioactive waste repository was a separate project, co-located at the same site. Now we report a similar effort to build an underground research laboratory (URL) in Gogi village of Yadgir district in Karnataka
Noted social activist Medha Patkar joined hands with MDMK leader Vaiko to oppose the proposed neutrino observatory project in Theni district, saying that it would cause large-scale environmental damages. "Nature will suffer major damages if India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is set up. Radiation from it will affect people in the area. The central government does not seem to care about the people's livelihood. The INO project will not benefit India either," Patkar said
Sour Grapes In 'Wine Country'-- Intense Challenges To Wineries Erupt By Shepherd Bliss
A movement against the expansion of rural wineries grows throughout the North Bay. Residents demand that applications should include an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and conform to the rules of CEQA (California Environment Quality Act). Demands grow for moratoriums on all new wineries in Sonoma and Napa Counties, especially those seeking to be industrial, commercial event centers, located away from urban centers, compromising the quality of rural life and nature
04 March, 2015
Netanyahu Delivers Anti-Iran Tirade To US Congress By Bill Van Auken
The speech delivered Tuesday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress consisted of a hysterical anti-Iran tirade and an implicit denunciation of the Obama administration for what was portrayed as an outright betrayal of the security interests of both Israel and the US
Benjamin Netanyahu's Fantasy World By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Netanyahu's speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years
Netanyahu Invokes Biblical Myths And Islamophobia To Derail US Diplomacy On Iran By Ali Abunimah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his much trailed and politically divisive speech to the US Congress today, forcefully denouncing a possible international agreement that would place Iran's civilian nuclear energy program under strict supervision. Immediately afterwards, I spoke to The Real News Network's Paul Jay to analyze the speech, including Netanyahu's appeal to Biblical myths and Islamophobia in his attempt to derail US diplomacy
Netanyahu Addresses "His" Congress By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
By sabotaging of the agreement between the US and Iran, Israel intends to maintain its nuclear hegemony in the region and impose its will upon his neighbors. It can massacre the people in the Gaza Strip with impunity because the US holds its protective hand over Israel and prevents any resolution critical of Israel in the UN Security Council. How long will Americans let Israel humiliate them and their President? Do Obama and his staff have no self-esteem? And why are the richest Americans keeping quiet?
Gitmo In Chicago By Stephen Lendman
On February 24, The Guardian headlined "The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site.' " It's an "off-the-books (Homan Square) interrogation compound," said the Guardian - some miles west from where this writer lives. A "nondescript warehouse (is) the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." People are lawlessly arrested, detained, denied access to lawyers up to 24 hours, and tortured during secret interrogations
"Collective Psychopathology" And US Police State Methods By Jon V Kofas
In February 2015, The Guardian published a couple of new stories about the connection between the Chicago police department "black site" at Homan Square and the Guantanamo prison where terror suspects have been kept as political prisoners without ever been charged. Neither the national media in the US nor the Chicago media organizations, including African-American, have pursued this story. Even after the British paper brought these issues to the attention of the public, the mainstream media in Chicago and across the US are ignoring the revelations, a subject in itself revealing about the role of the US media in a democratic society where human rights and civil rights violations occur
History without the moral leadership of intellectuals is devoid of meaning, chaotic and unpredictable. But this is a period of seismic historical transition, and it must eventually yield the kind of intellectual who will break free from the confines of the ego, regimes, self-serving politics, sects, ideologies and geography
The West had their chance to show what their democracy looks like when they applied it to Russia in the 1990's. Their methods have not changed since then. There is nothing new that could be offered, and the Russian people have declared that they do not want another round of the old. The best thing to do is to let them be. Only when the external pressure subsides will they be able to address their own problems without being accused, sometimes rightfully and sometimes inaccurately, of working for or being exploited by foreign governments
Wealth Of World's Billionaires Surges Past $7 Trillion By Joseph Kishore
The combined net worth of the world's billionaires has reached a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion, according to the latest compilation published by Forbes magazine on Monday. There are a record 1,826 billionaires, each with an average wealth of $3.8 billion. Relative to last year, the world's billionaires have increased their combined wealth by more than 10 percent, from $6.4 trillion in 2014, while the total number of billionaires has grown by 11 percent
Greatest Generation? What Happened 70 Years Ago Will Change Your Mind! By Mickey Z.
By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Cheered on by the likes of Time magazine -- which explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves" -- the U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians. Read that again: The U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians
"Tears in Paradise. Suffering and struggle of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004" by Rajendra Prasad tells the story of Indian indentured labour ("5 year slaves") taken to Fiji from British-occupied India in the period 1879-1916 and brutally exploited on British- and Australian-run sugar cane plantations. The last "5 year slaves" were finally released from bondage in 1920, 87 years after slavery was supposedly banned in the British Empire. Today effective Third World slavery is rampant through globalization
We Are All Mukto-Mona ! The Challenge Of Unreason In South Asia By Subhash Gatade
Humayun Azad, Salman Tasser, Ahmad Rajib Haider, Dr Dabholkar, Com Pansare and now Avijit Roy. Thanks to religious fervour and growth of extremism of every kind in this part of South Asia, where forces of darkness seem to be on the ascendance, it may just create a feeling that we have reached a dead end as we are losing people one by one who were 'a beacon of hope and light in these dreadful times'. Should we then say that whatever 'little hope we saw in the horizon will it wither away?' We have no other option than to remain eternal optimist with a sincere hope that their 'mettle will be passed onto new generation.'
A Bear Hug! By Mohammad Ashraf
Modi-Mufti hug reminded one of the famous Kashmiri proverbs about bear hugs and friendships. One hopes it turns out to be positive and does not end in the proverbial endings!
03 March, 2015
The National Human Rights Commission of India has taken suo motu cognizance of a media report that the Kerala Government was targeting human rights defenders and rights activists by labeling them as 'Maoists sympathizers'. Human rights defenders and advocates Tushar Nirmal Sarathy and Jaison C. Cooper had been arrested under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in Kerala and were in jail since the 30th January, 2015
China Warns U.S. To Stop Its Ukrainian Proxy War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
A much-ignored huge news report from Reuters on Friday, February 27th, was headlined "Chinese diplomat tells West to consider Russia's security concerns over Ukraine." China's Ambassador to Belgium (which has the capital of the EU) said that the "nature and root cause" of the Ukrainian conflict is "the West," and that "The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration."
Two Different Approaches, Two Different Results In Fighting Ebola By Matt Peppe
In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident. These countries are the mighty USA and little Cuba
The Obama Administration, Shell, and the Fate of the Arctic Ocean
"Before Our Eyes": The Future Of The Middle East By Thierry Meyssan
For several months, Barack Obama has been trying to change US policy in the Middle East in order to eliminate the Islamic Emirate with the help of Syria. But he cannot do this, partly because he has been saying for years that President Assad must go, and secondly because his regional allies support the Islamic Emirate against Syria. However, things are slowly evolving so he should be able to do so soon. Thus, it appears that all States that supported the Islamic Emirate have ceased to do so, opening the way for a redistribution of the cards
Do Not Give The Thieves The Key To Your Home: Stop The TTIP By Colin Todhunter
Some 375 civil society organisations from across Europe have today called on EU decision-makers to protect citizens, workers, and the environment from threats the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) it poses
Gandhi As An Economist By John Scales Avery
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are
The Politics of Food: Palestinians Exhibit Culture, Identity At JNU Food Festival By Abhay Kumar
As the dusk of Republic Day fell and dazzling lights began to flood the Jhelum Lawn of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), hundreds of students thronged International Food Festival. I, too, joined the crowd and walked along one stall after another, looking at mouthwatering cuisines. But later the evening, before I came out of the festival's marquee, I had felt that the venue displayed not only foods but also aspiration, identity, struggle and culture of a subjugated people. One of the participants in the annual festival was Palestine. As the illegal Israeli occupation continues, the festival served as an important space for Palestinians to assert their identity
Occupation: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Some call it, occupation, others invasion, conquest, or control of a nation or territory by foreigners. Whatever you call it, it doesn't sound comfortable at all. Have you ever felt, or tried to feel how it is like, to be living in occupation. How is it to be occupied? Ask someone who has experienced occupation. I had a chance to sit with a friend of mine, David (name changed) for a cup of tea, which he has lived most of his life under occupation. He answered me some unanswered questions, and explained the real meaning of occupation. Here are some excerpts of our conversation
Time For Teachers To Let Go Classroom Management And Focus On Classroom Interactions By Ms. Swaleha Sindhi
Most of teachers plan to create calm and productive classrooms. But such sight is not seen in all the classes. Things don't always go as planned with teachers. Teachers might be using great selection of classroom management tools to get students attention. But sometimes when teachers are so focused on classroom management, entire period is spent trying to get students on task. This proves to be exhausting for both teachers and students, so in cases where teachers are teaching some heavy subjects when they need to put their energies towards content then they can give classroom management a back seat. If most of the class is ready to learn and there are minimal distractions, then teachers can give themselves permission to focus on the content. Thus, a teacher is expected to use different strategies and bring a balance in classrooms
With its wealth of detail, its fascinating insights, its bold critique of radical Islamist discourse and politics, its helpful and much-needed articulation of an Islamic understanding of peace and inter-community harmony and dialogue, and the hope that it offers us, this book is definitely a must-read for anyone concerned with what is admittedly one of the most widely-discussed and hotly-debated subjects across the world today
02 March, 2015
The assassination, latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years, occurred in the backdrop of on-going political disturbance carried by the opponents of Sheikh Hasina government as her government publicly announced its policy of zero-tolerance to religious extremism, and is strong handedly trying to weed out the religious extremists. There have been a series of similar attacks in recent years blamed on the Islamic militants
The Saudi Hypocrisy By Mazin Qumsiyeh
The kingdom of "Saudi Arabia" is going to behead a man for "apostacy" (renouncing his belief in Islam and the Quran) while welcoming Egyptian Al-Sisi whose security forces are torturing people to death in Egypt for being supportive of an Islamic political system more moderate than that of that Kingdom!
Almost all Republicans, plus the top level of the Democratic Party such as Obama, hate Russia, even after communism ended and the Soviet Union broke up. They are simply obsessed with destroying Russia. So: although Bush was weak against Al Qaeda, he was strong against Russia: he brought into NATO, the military club against Russia, the following seven nations: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia -- six of which seven nations had formerly been members of the Warsaw Pact along with the U.S.S.R., against the U.S. The reality is: Obama, like Republicans generally, hates Russia
The Ten Commandments for a Better American World
ISIS 101: What's Really Terrifying About This Threat By John Chuckman
The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths
Review of 'Confessions Of A Terrorist - A Novel' By Anita McKone
If you have ever asked 'Why?... How could they do this?' in response to the latest report of terrorism, then 'Confessions of a Terrorist' is the novel for you. But only if you genuinely want to find out the answers
How To Stop Bogus Wars And Articulate Global Peacemaking? By Mahboob A. Khawaja
Islamophobia is on the rise. Few reactionary instances of individual madness are used by the Western strategists to blame Muslims and Islam as the focal point of their perpetuated belligerency
Quotas Aren't Negating Merit And Efficiency By V.M.Yazhmozhi
Though caste based reservation is an affirmative action to uplift the socially and educationally oppressed classes and to bring forth social justice, critics often argue that "Quotas are a negation of merit and efficiency". A paper published by Ashwini Deshpande, Professor at the Delhi School of Economics and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan has defeated this ideology
01 March, 2015
Rapid melting of Antarctic ice could push sea levels up 10 feet worldwide within two centuries, "recurving" heavily populated coastlines and essentially reshaping the world, the Associated Press reported. Parts of Antarctica are thawing so quickly, the continent has become "ground zero of global climate change without a doubt," Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica told AP
Killing Of Boris Nemtso Has Relevance For World Politics By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
Killing of Boris Nemtso, a strong critic of Putin in Moscow is shocking, sad and highly difficult to figure out, who killed? Why was he killed? And what will be its political fallout for Putin and for Russia as a whole?
Is he a smooth-talking, disingenuous, cunning salesman who knows that everything he asserts about Israel being in danger of annihilation and not having a Palestinian partner for peace is propaganda nonsense, or, does he really believe what he says?
What appears to be happening is that Obama is easing off the US aggression throttle towards Iran, while Israel is simultaneously on the precipice of teaming up with Saudi Arabia (another close US client/ally) to aggressively bomb Iran - the top international crime
Skipping Netanyahu's Speech For All The Wrong Reasons By David Swanson
Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said
The post-coup leaders of Ukraine have routinely said that Ukraine should destroy Russia; and, now, starting on February 24th, they are placing into position the key prerequisite for doing so, which is the advanced Anti-Ballistic-Missile, or ABM, system, S-300
On February 22nd, NBC's "Meet the Press" presented reporter Richard Engel in a terrific four-minute documentary on Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's catastrophic policy-results in Libya. (You can watch it by clicking on that link.) The segment concluded that Obama and his Administration (including Hillary Clinton) didn't know where they were going in this operation
The Entire Case For Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies By Eric Zuesse
U.S. President Barack Obama has stated many times his case against Russia -- the reason for the economic sanctions. In his National Security Strategy 2015, he uses the term "aggression" 18 times, and 17 of them are referring specifically to only one country as "aggressive": Russia. However, not once does he say there what the "aggression" consisted of: what its target was, or what it itself was. He's vague there on everything except his own target: Russia
When Growth Trumps Freedom: The Chill In Canada Comes From Our Government, Not The Weather By James Magnus-Johnston
With the introduction of Canada's so-called "secret police" bill, there is increasing concern the rights of the oil patch will trump the rights of ordinary citizens in a new and chilling way-through the kinds of fear tactics you'd sooner expect in Soviet Russia than a western liberal democracy
The 'Star-Spangled Banner' Lyrics That Get Swept Under The Rug By Robert Barsocchini
The US national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner", has four verses, though only one is commonly sung or discussed. The reason for this becomes apparent when the lyrics are read and the history behind them known
Bitter Lakes - "McJihad" By US And Saudi Arabia By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
Adam Curties' documentary "Bitter Lake" documents brilliantly the total failure of the US intervention and the arrogance of its Western stooges in Afghanistan
Did you know that the American Dream now comes in the form of a miracle pill? A recent marketing and advertising trend is peddling what they call the "smart pill", presumably a brain pill that not only makes you smart, it can also make you rich because you optimize your brain capacity! This is essentially a vitamin supplement that claims to boost memory, energy, and creativity, but it can also make you rich, very rich because it allows you to use your head more effectively when making those difficult career and investment decisions. You too can realize the "American Dream" just by taking this pill, without going to college, without working hard, without any effort on your part
GMOs And Green Blob Hallucinations: The Twisted World Of Mr Paterson By Colin Todhunter
Speaking last week in Pretoria, former UK Environment Minister Owen Paterson described critics of GMOs as comprising part of a privileged class that increasingly fetishizes food and seeks to turn their personal preferences into policy proscriptions for the rest of us. He called them backward-looking and regressive. He claimed their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment because of their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques
Postcard From The End Of America: Center City, Philadelphia By Linh Dinh
Though the most visible homeless are still the old and middle-aged, they are becoming younger and younger, and the other day, I met 30-year-old Stephanie sitting behind a plastic cup with a sign, "HOMELESS AND HUNGRY / ANYTHING HELPS / THANK YOU."
Check Your Privilege, Become An Ally By Mickey Z.
In a society built upon a foundation of hierarchy, declaring "we're all one" -- regardless of our intentions -- is yet another example of privilege run amok. If we wish to profoundly connect with our fellow humans, we must become allies... not "one."It takes no extra time to choose solidarity instead of privilege. The payoff for this transition is not only a richer, more compassionate life for yourself but also, a deeper commitment to collective liberation
We are once again reminded of the goondaism that prevails in regions like these, where communities face threats of abuse, intimidation and forced eviction due to mining and other so called development projects; where human right defenders and activists who believe in and abide by the law are made to feel like criminals and where the rich corporates who violate the law, rule the land
Budget 2015 : A Step Towards Inequality By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
The abolition of Wealth Tax, with a reduction in rate of corporate tax to 25% over next four years may have its own spiraling effects. There is always talks to reduce subsidy in the agricultural sector but benefits to corporate groups may outnumber the subsidy benefits to rural people
From Barpeta To Lucknow: Journey Of Waste-Pickers By Dr. Roli Misra & Parvin Sultana
Internal migration from Assam to other parts of India for a better livelihood is very common. But the condition of these waste pickers worsen once they move from Barpeta to Lucknow. Poverty, issues of identity circumscribed by larger question of illegal immigration makes it harder for them to work and sustain themselves. What is required is a move from rhetorical politics and a humanitarian take on the issue of these people who are stuck in the lowest rung of social ladder. Only then policies will be successful in true sense and people can break free from stigmas and move ahead
In Jammu and Kashmir, everything has significance and worth of something even the foot-ware that one purchases from the market but 'Human Lives' remain valueless. So outlandish that we didn't ascertain the connotation of famous maxim 'health is wealth.'
Condemn The Brutal Murder Of Avijit Roy By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism strongly condemns the brutal murder of Mr Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi secular blogger and author on 26th February in Dhaka. His wife Ms Rafida Anwar Banna has suffered grievous injuries in the attack. Mr Roy was a popular blogger and author who wrote a number of books against religious extremism and the threat to human dignity and democracy from it. He had been on the hit list of Islamic fundamentalists for a number of years
Release 145 Undertrial Maruti Workers On Bail By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR welcomes the bail granted by the Supreme Court to Sunil s/o Satpal and Kanwaljeet Singh, two of the Maruti workers on February 23, 2015. Sunil and Kanwaljeet are among the 147 workers who were arrested in the aftermath of the violence on July 18, 2012, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana which led to the death of the factory's HR manager Awaneesh Kumar Deb. However it is hardly a cause for celebration given that the bail was long overdue, and the other 145 workers still continue to languish in jail
Narmada Jeevanshala's Balmela: From The (Play) Ground By National Alliance of People's Movements
The Narmada Jeevanshalas (Schools of Life) celebrated its 16th annual Balmela (Children's fair), from 12th February to 15thFebruary at a resettlement site of the Project Affected Families (PAFs) of the Narmada - Sardar Sarovar Dam |
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Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson Photo Credit: Wikimedia
Recently, speaking about the creation of the Constitution to a room filled with teachers of history, I mentioned that the drafters struggled over how best to choose the president. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention initially agreed that Congress should make the choice, but then grew concerned that foreign powers would bribe congressmen to favor their preferred candidates.
A wave of snickers swept the room.
"Wait," I said, realizing the connection the teachers had made between current events and my comment. "I'm not making that point."
But when you talk about the Constitution, it always connects to current events. Since I share the national puzzlement over the president's unaccountable bromance with the leader of an unfriendly nation that evidently interfered with the 2016 elections, I looked back at the debates over the Constitution during that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787.
The risk of foreign influence over how to choose the chief executive came up in late July, when the delegates confronted fundamental disagreements on that subject. "There are objections," observed James Madison of Virginia, "against every mode that has been, or perhaps can be proposed."
On that day, Madison's target was the convention's initial preference for having Congress select the president. He warned that it would give foreign powers "the opportunity to mix their intrigues and influence with the election."
Choosing the American leader, he continued, "will be an object of great moment with the great rival powers of Europe," who will want "to have at the head of our government a man attached to their respective politics and interests. No pains, nor perhaps expense, will be spared."
The studious Madison did not rest his criticism on pure reason, but drew support from history. Both Germany and Poland, he noted, "are witnesses of this danger." When Germany was mostly part of the Holy Roman Empire, choice of its leader "was much influenced by foreign interference," while elections of the Polish kings "has at all times produced the most eager interference of foreign princes, and has in fact at length slid entirely into foreign hands."
Madison's concerns - and history lesson - resonated with his colleagues. Pierce Butler of South Carolina stressed that the selection of the president must avoid "two great evils": "cabal at home and influence from abroad." Hugh Williamson of North Carolina also was dissatisfied with Congress choosing the president, insisting that "it opened a door for foreign influence."
For weeks more, the delegates wrestled with the problem of how to pick a chief executive. They finally agreed on a complicated elector system so flawed that it required the Twelfth Amendment to allow it to function at all (even badly, as it now does).
That system's principal virtue, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 68, was that it shielded the presidential choice from "the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils," by "raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union."
For two hundred thirty years, the need to exclude foreign influence over our elections was never controversial. The Framers shielded the presidential selection process against the risks familiar to them: principally, in Hamilton's phrase, bribery of those who might "prostitute their votes."
Although Madison and Hamilton and their colleagues did not anticipate cyber-hacking of election systems or warfare through false social media campaigns, we need not wonder what they would have thought of them. Anything that impairs the integrity of elections, that allows a foreign power to raise a creature of its own to the presidency, defeats our sovereignty as a nation.
The Framers understood that. So did the history teachers to whom I spoke. It's long since time for the president, Congress, and our government to take the steps necessary to preserve elections free of foreign interference.
Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day. |
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Reuters: Obama backers show signs of disappointment . "Gay rights supporters, abortion rights activists, environmentalists and backers of immigration reform all have seen their agendas stalled, with watered-down healthcare the main accomplishment of Obama's once-ambitious agenda."
New mini-episodes of True Blood to begin airing .
Leaping whale blamed for drowning death off Provincetown.
FOX News' Greg Gutfeld: Gay Obama hecklers did it because they are racist . "But I wonder, couldn't this heckling be a precursor to violent extremism? And could this agitation toward our president, said to be based on policy, really be thinly veiled racism? I mean, the president did say he agreed with this gay group and yet they still heckled."
Bobby Trendy pumps gas .
Annie Lennox: HIV-positive for Idol Gives Back. Video .
Walter "Bud" Pidgeon, president of the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, demands Bluewater Productions withdraw the new comic book featuring Ellen Degeneres because she is gay and supports animal rights : "As emails flooded Bluewater's server from USSA's members castigating him for 'elevating' gays, supporting 'less than acceptable lifestyles', and for honoring Ellen's request that issue proceeds go the to U.S. Humane Society he quickly discovered Pidgeon was a real person and had in fact called upon his 3 million members to take action against Bluewater."
Congress to hold hearing on gay aging .
China to drop ban on HIV-positive tourists: "'The ban was imposed in the 1980s because of a lack of knowledge and is now obsolete and discriminatory,' said He Xiong, deputy head of the Beijing centre for disease prevention and control. 'HIV/Aids cases have been seen in all of China's provinces and a travel ban on foreigners will not help improve local public health,' he said. China has 740,000 people who are HIV-positive and is one of 60 countries that denies entry to sufferers of the disease."
This was my favorite magazine too.
Boy George on prison fashion : "You have to wear these really horrible denim trousers and a stripy shirt tucked in. I looked like a lesbian. You wear your own clothes in the daytime - nothing too fancy - you're not allowed hoods. Hoodies are banned. It wasn't anything like the new Lady Gaga video: it was not like that at all."
UK travel show reality stars gay bashed even though they're not gay : "The two men, Romane Hole and Nathan Evans, are both straight and are just friends, but they jokingly held hands when they boarded the bus at the start of the journey, which commenced in Athens.
'We had no idea how gay we were going to look by holding hands,' said Evans. 'Then all the way through the series, the [episodes] seem to have been edited to make us look as if we are a homosexual couple, rather than a pair of straight friends.'
... Some viewers not only have gotten the wrong idea about the men, but have allegedly acted in violently homophobic ways based on that impression. |
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
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The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
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The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.
About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
Ethics Policy
The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity. |
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By Sharon Rondeau on Monday, January 30, 2017 Editorials
"IMMENSE HYPOCRISY" by Joan Swirsky, (c)2017 (Jan. 30, 2017) -- A day or two before the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump on January 20th, 2017, I watched a reporter interviewing five attractive, intelligent, articulate women from California, who were all making the long cross-country trip to the Women's March on Washington on January 21st. [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 Editorials
"SAY WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID" by RoseAnn Salanitri, TPATH, (c)2016 (Nov. 2, 2016) -- Since the most important election in decades is days away, at the risk of sounding radical, it is more than appropriate to put political correctness aside to say what needs to be said. It is amazing when people are amazed [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Monday, August 1, 2016 Editorials
"EXTERMINATION VIA GOVERNMENT-FUNDED ABORTIONS" by JB Williams, (c)2016 (Aug. 1, 2016) -- As has been the case in American politics of divide and conquer for far too long, race relations are once again center stage in the 2016 Democratic Party campaign for power, this time under the Black Lives Matter banner. Once again, a political [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Friday, July 1, 2016 Editorials
WHO WILL SPUR JOB-CREATION AND INDEPENDENCE? by Jeff Crouere, (c)2016, writing and broadcasting at Ringside Politics (Jul. 1, 2016) -- Once again, BET (Black Entertainment Television) hosted their annual awards ceremony Sunday night, and, once again it turned political. During the show, various speakers, award winners and hosts used their platforms to encourage support for [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Monday, April 18, 2016 Editorials
"ISN'T IT ALWAYS ABOUT THE MONEY" by Joan Swirsky, (c)2016 (Apr. 18, 2016) -- At the beginning of January 2016, an organization called NORPAC--a lobby whose mission is to support candidates and sitting members of Congress "who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel"--invited its members to "an exclusive and intimate" cocktail [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Thursday, March 17, 2016 Editorials
"PULPITS AFLAME WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS" by RoseAnn Salanitri, Senior TPATH Contributor, (c)2016 (Mar. 17, 2016) -- Clever political slogans have a way of resonating within us. They can result in votes for the candidate that is talented enough to wordsmith the catchiest phrase. Two of the best slogans of our time were crafted by the Obama [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Wednesday, March 16, 2016 Editorials
"GREEN" EVANGELICALS DISGUISE ANTI-LIFE POLICIES AS PRO-LIFE, PERPETUATING SUFFERING AND DEATH by E. Calvin Beisner, Janice Shaw Crouse and Austin Ruse, (c)2016 (Mar. 16, 2016) -- The evangelical "creation care" movement professes to be pro-life and, for the most part, rightly so. But some creation care advocates give reason to wonder. Case in point: the [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Thursday, February 18, 2016 National
DOCUMENTS OBSCURED; FOREIGN-CITIZEN FATHERS; REPORTED DUAL CITIZENSHIP by Sharon Rondeau (Feb. 18, 2016) -- On March 23, 2015, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz declared his candidacy for the presidency on Twitter and later, at Liberty University, a well-known Christian college in Lynchburg, VA. During his announcement speech, Cruz invoked his "personal history," which includes travel among [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Wednesday, November 25, 2015 Editorials
"UPSIDE DOWN" by Rich Mastrisciano, TPATH Contributor, (c)2015 (Nov. 25, 2015) -- President Obama assured us his goal was to Fundamentally Transform the United States of America. One of those transformations has been to regain America's moral compass. He is not afraid to explain to the world we are not the great compassionate people we [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Monday, November 9, 2015 Editorials
"THROWING A POLITICAL TANTRUM" by RoseAnn Salanitri, (c)2015, TPATH Contributor (Nov. 9, 2015) -- The title of this piece probably communicates that I am angry. Anyone coming to that conclusion would be right. I am angry. My Christian worldview requires that I wrestle with whether or not this anger is righteous. You be the judge. [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Wednesday, September 30, 2015 Editorials
IS ABORTION NOT INFANTICIDE? by RoseAnn Salanitri, TPATH Contributor, (c)2015 (Sep. 30, 2015) -- If you find it hard to watch the news without yelling that things don't make sense anymore, your sensibilities of fairness and common sense have an ample supply of fuel these days. Amidst the burgeoning realm of campaign rhetoric, the recent [...] |
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Looking back on the outrage over the release of Netflix's Dear White People is pretty amusing.
So many were quick to judge a show they were completely unfamiliar with. Little did these people know that not only would the series call out issues of racism in the hands of white people, but addresses conflicts amongst black liberals as well.
From hilarious parodies of Scandal and Iyanla Vanzant that mock our love/hate relationship with exploitative television, to confronting police brutality, Dear White People addressed many issues within and forced upon the black community.
Followed by every laughably relatable scenario was an "aha" moment that many of us could learn from.
Here's our top 18.
1. "When you mock or belittle us, you enforce an existing system. Cops everywhere staring down a barrel of a gun at a black man don't see a human being."
Stop dehumanizing us.
2. "If you were a cat owner and only all cats were dying in America, if someone said to you, 'All Lives Matter,' you'd be upset, too."
The irony here is that Troy said this only to get votes for president, as he made dozens of promises geared toward whatever was necessary to attract certain groups of students. Yet, as ridiculous as this statement may be, sadly, it's quite true.
In order to gain empathy for black lives, sometimes you have to use analogies centered around things that should be of lesser importance, like animals, for people to understand.
3. "You get away with murder because you look more like them than I do. That's your light skinned privilege."
Light skinned privilege is real and should be addressed more.
While it is much different than white privilege, it still remains an issue in the black community that shouldn't be swept under the rug.
4. "Dear White People, dating a black guy to piss off your parents doesn't make you down -- it makes you an asshole."
If some of you could stop using black men to rebel against your racist parents that would be great. Thanks.
5. "And therefore he deserved to die."
The media often paints a picture of black victims as criminals as a justification for their murder. Whether you're a straight A student or a drug addict, you have every right to a life that shouldn't be taken away over fear of the color of your skin.
6. "Dear White People, you made me hate myself as a kid, so now I hate you, and that's my secret shame."
Our inner struggle with trying to connect with those who have made us feel less than is all too real.
7. "Dear White People, if you wanted to demoralize us with your European beauty standard, mission accomplished."
Black women fight against this standard every day.
8. "Steve Jobs was a monster who used Chinese slave labor to make his products ... Those kids make a fantastic phone."
Too many of us claim to be "woke" until it costs us something near and dear, like our iPhones. Capitalism wins every time, doesn't it?
9. "Racism, here?" ... "I thought President Obama Fixed all that."
Remember when people thought Barack Obama's presidency would resolve race relations ? Good times.
10. "How many times have we had the narrative that black men aren't good enough and that we need a white savior?"
The "black men ain't shit" narrative followed by "get you a white man" is demeaning.
The same can be said for the dehumanizing of black women for the attention of white women. The sick idea that white people are better than us is constantly reinforced when belittle each other in comparison.
11. "But it's not like I'm a racist."
Lol. We've heard that one too many times. Usually if you have to say you're not a racist (especially when no one has actually called you a racist), you're probably a racist.
12. "Our skin color is not a weapon."
This unfortunately has to be a daily reminder until our lives are no longer unjustly taken from us.
13. "Some of y'all in here with your liberal purity, wasting time deciding who's black enough. Who cares if you're woke or not if you're dead?"
Being woke is great and all, but now it's starting to become more of a self serving contest than a mission for truth and justice.
14. "Troy would never find himself in this situation ... Because I raised him."
This is a prime example of many people's failed understanding of how police brutality works.
Police brutality is stemmed from racism and fear of black people for simply being black, it has nothing to do with whether you are well spoken or not.
Just ask Jordan Edwards .
15. "...All men are created equal ... unless you're loud and black and possess an opinion, then all you get is a bullet."
All men were never treated as equal. Slavery is the strongest evidence of this case. Black men being three times more likely than white man to die in the hands of police prove this as well.
16. "Just because I happen to be a white male does not automatically mean I'm some asshole!"
Accompanied by ...
To the white men, especially the liberal white men who defend black rights, there is a stark difference between calling out white privilege and insulting you.
And that feeling you get when you're the only white face in a room and want to scream? That is our lives every day.
17. "Pause ... What's the opposite of pause?" "Not silencing millions with your hetero-supremacy."
A "pause" joke is warranted when somebody makes an innocent comment that can be interpreted as gay. A lot of us, myself included, never realized how insensitive and offensive this could be.
18. "The minute black kids sit together in a cafeteria, white folks cry self-segregation. Never mind that white people have always sat together and always will."
White people are usually only aware of segregation when they happen to be the ones who that aren't invited to the table.
The lack of understanding of the black experience and how to cope adds to the struggle. Dear White People forces us to look in the mirror and question what faults we may have had in it.
It also serves as reminder to those of us who've been fed up that we are not alone in this. |
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Bob Feldman The Electronic Intifada 28 March 2005
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website at www.israelsoldiers.org . With annual revenues of $15,112,321 and assets of $10,936,961 in 2002, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces group assists members of the North American public in providing financial support for certain designated programs of the Association for Welfare of Soldiers in Israel.
At its $1,000-a-plate 2005 New York Gala Dinner on March 15, for instance, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces New York chapter "will once again honor the soldiers" in "the largest single fundraising event" for the U.S.-based IDF support group, according to its website at www.israelsoldiers.org . The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website also notes that "we plan to once again send our message of support to the soldiers of the IDF , and let them know that we appreciate all that they do."
Benny Shabtai The chairman of the 2005 dinner, a member of the national board of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces named Benny Shabtai, is a former bodyguard at the Israeli embassy in Paris and former member of the Israeli army. After immigrating to the United States, Shabtai became the exclusive distributor of Raymond Weil watches from Switzerland. In its March 12, 2004 issue, Forbes magazine made the following reference to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces Dinner Chairman Shabtai:
"Benny Shabtai, the Israeli businessman who is president of Raymond Weil USA , is selling his Upper East Side townhouse for $23 million, according to The New York Observer... Shabtai bought it in 2000 for $8.2 million... Shabtai, who was born in Tel Aviv, keeps a fairly low profile, but he is rumored to have dabbled in or funded a wide variety of businesses. According to one report, he controls Aryt Industries, an Israeli holding company of various high-tech industrial and defense businesses... A few years ago, he entertained Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Michael Jackson at a reception at his home in New York..."
Part of the $15 million that chapters of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces raise in the U.S. each year goes to fund "capital campaign projects," such as a planned $1 million project in Jerusalem to build "The Cultural Well-being and Sports Center" in the Israeli Army's Border Control Base. Among the completed "capital campaign projects" funded in the past was a $250,000 project "located near the Lebanese border and serving combat soldiers in the Northern Command" to refurbish the Israeli soldiers' homes in Kyriat Shmoneh.
According to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website, "last summer, Israel's Defense Minister, Lieutenant General L. Shaul Mofaz, spent 15 days on a whirlwind coast-to-coast tour with Friends of the IDF ," "tirelessly campaigned to raise money and awareness of the plight of IDF Soldiers" and raised over $4,000,000 at the annual dinner of the group's Cleveland chapter.
The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces also conducts 9-Day "Mission To Israel" guided tours for U.S. citizens that feature "visits to strategic IDF command posts." Day 4 of its "Mission To Israel" tour, for instance, includes a "briefing at Central Command Headquarters," a visit to " IDF units around Ramallah" and a "tour at the Ammunition Hill." On Day 5, the "Mission To Israel" tour, entitled "Visit the Northern Command," consists of a visit to Chaunt Hashomer "to meet soldiers," a visit to "Division #36 at the Golan Heights," a "lookout from an IDF post onto the Golan Heights," a "briefing on daily life close to the Lebanese border" and a "night tour to the `Secret Tunnel.'" Day 6 of the Friends of the IDF tour includes a visit at Ramat David Air Force Base and a visit to "the Navy base in Haifa;" and Day 7 includes a visit to the "Engineering training school including display of land mine exercises," according to the FIDC website.
Besides Raymond Weil USA President Shabtai, the national board of the Friends of the IDF also includes NYU School of Law Board of Trustees Chairman and Centre Partners Management Managing Director Lester Pollack--a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations' pro-Israeli Establishment pressure group. In addition, FIDF board member Pollack also sits on the corporate board of Bank Leumi USA . The $3 billion portfolio of Pollack's Centre Partners Management firm includes investments in stock of the Firearms Training Systems Inc., a leading provider of small arms training systems to the military, and in stock of Maverick Media, a U.S. media firm that owns radio stations.
Unlike the U.S. citizens who are involved in the Manhattan-based Friends of the Israel Defense Forces group, most U.S. anti-war activists have been morally opposed to the actions in recent years of the IDF in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In his 2003 Verso book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against The Palestinians, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor of Sociology Baruch Kimmerling described some of these morally objectionable actions:
"Waves of tank and infantry units, supported by Apache helicopters, rolled into the PNA -controlled West Bank and later Gaza Strip territories, cities, refugee camps, and even villages [on March 29, 2002]... They captured and imprisoned thousands of suspects in detention camps... This operation not only destroyed political organizations and their facilities, but civilian institutions like universities, schools, clinics, churches, and mosques...
"...On December 17, 2000, Israel initiated a policy of extra-judicial executions (called targeted killings)... The operations... killed... innocent individuals... Some members of the Israeli public openly labeled such actions war crimes..."
After some Israeli draftees began refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, most U.S. anti-war activists began to express political support for the Refuser Solidarity Network, whose website is www.refusersolidarity.net .
According to the www.guidestar.org website, the Manhattan office of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces has been located on the 5th floor of 298 Fifth Avenue in recent years.
Bob Feldman is an anti-war Movement writer and activist who contributed "Inspecting Nuclear Israel" and "The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934" to Counterpunch magazine. He is an occasional contributor to EI . Facebook Google+ Twitter |
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So, it happened. I was pregnant. It was a boy from Tinder who worked in finance. He was an Ivy League graduate that was fairly dimwitted, but he had a sweet face, and I was taking a vacation from my psychiatric medicine. I couldn't believe it. Was the stress of the situation worth it? Was sex with the man who ignored me when I told him about my pregnancy worth it? Would the pain of having to heal my insides be worth it? No, but it happened. I knew there was only one solution: abortion.
I found out early on because I had decided to get my six-month check up with my gynecologist. After a spat of spring fever and the slip up with said tinder bro, it was time. I was off my birth control for a month, so I planned on retrieving a new pill prescription, getting my pap smear, and heading out on my merry way to celebrate Memorial Day. I entered the office like a bull in a china shop carrying three tote bags and my cell phone. I felt like I was PMSing too the fullest. After my examination, my doctor said in her thick Russian accent, "Okay, you want pregnancy test?" I agreed, just for good measure.
"You are pregnant." The words sounded so heavy and intense with her accent.
I waited for a minute for the nurse to come out. She nodded her head at me and said, "You are pregnant." The words sounded so heavy and intense with her accent. I was ready to run to Planned Parenthood but it was a holiday weekend so this was impossible. I had to wait until Tuesday. When I finally contacted the facility, I made an appointment for that Friday. I was going to be examined, retrieve the abortion pills, and induce a miscarriage the next day. I'd have Sunday to recover. A seamless plan except I had to go through the week until Friday still pregnant, still cramping, and still angry with myself.
I was surprisingly blase and dismissive of sympathy. I didn't need it. I needed to not be pregnant. I was told over the phone that my insurance would cover the cost of the pills. This was a plus side, as I didn't want to inform my one-night-stand that I was in fact carrying. I wouldn't have had to tell him either way because my mother would have helped me. I told him anyway. I felt nervous. Very amicably, I asked for half of the cost if I had to pay for it myself. I was ignored after texting and calling him. How convenient.
I had been told that it is difficult to have a surgical abortion being only 4 weeks pregnant therefore I chose to take the pills. On the day of my appointment, I met with the midwife where I took one pill in her presence, an antibiotic later on, and would take four the next day. She gave me prescriptions for painkillers and anti-nausea pills then told me to treat myself well. Her thorough explanation of the procedure made me confident in my choice.
I took the remainder of the pills at my best friend's apartment. Her place looks a harem's den for Victorian witches, and she is a comforting soul. It was 8 p.m. I put on a maxi pad, my pink negligee, took my pain meds, then let the four pills dissolve on each side of my cheeks as instructed. We each read the packet over and over again. Two full maxi pads in two hours-call a doctor. Blood clots the size of lemons for two hours-call a doctor. We had this down, now I just waited for the storm to begin.
By putting this into words and speaking up about my abortion, I realized that I am not ashamed and I don't want anyone else to be.
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When it started I sat on the toilet and had gone into a meditative state, but the pain would persist. I coughed at one point and felt a few large clots. This went on for an hour. After that, I had one consecutive cramp. I had a feeling this was right before the eye of the hurricane and I was right. Suddenly it started again, this time, worse. I went back to the toilet and sat to perform my ritualistic meditation. At one point my friend came into the bathroom and said I looked like I was in a voodoo trance. Is this was giving birth felt like? I almost passed out. Then at 3am, it was over. No pain, no clots, just some minor bleeding. I couldn't believe it.
The following week before my follow up, I thought about how great everyone at the facility was. This prompted me to read up on any opposition the organization faced. I wanted to vomit a few sentences into the articles, and not from any side effects of the abortion. Texas cutting their HIV program and hosting facilities where it is near impossible to perform an abortion. Michigan GOP State Rep. Lee Chatfield, is cosponsoring a state anti-abortion bill. The shooting last year, the bomb threats, the shaming, it was sensory overload, and there I was: complaining that I had too much sympathy for my insurance covered procedure. New York really has a way of placing people in a bubble until the reality of the world sets in.
After going through the physical pain, and bleeding for a week afterward, I couldn't believe there was still a government trying to take away my agency as a human. The thought of a woman with no support having to do this is awful. I couldn't believe that while I sat in pain, I was ignored by some dismissive guy who seemingly fetishized me as a fat, party-girl. By putting this into words and speaking up about my abortion, I realized that I am not ashamed and I don't want anyone else to be. No one should feel wrong for doing the right thing. Us lucky ones need to be the voice for the voiceless and never feel devalued for sticking to our choices and embracing our liberties as women and Americans. I feel unstoppable and in touch with the world, and I hope every woman can feel this power at some point in her life.
More from BUST
Kat Lloyd is a writer living in Brooklyn where she hosts her podcast, Beat Face Radio. Her work deals with aesthetics, culture, and politics through a campy, feminist lens. Follow her at beatfaceradio.com and on Instagram @beatfaceradio . |
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This and the next will be the last songbook posts on pop-music movies for a while. Despite my doing five(!) posts on ALMOST FAMOUS , two on the SCHOOL OF ROCK, and an epic one on THE DOORS, I do think that among my list of pop-music films , THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is the standout in terms of sheer cinematic achievement, with only AMERICAN GRAFFITI giving it a run for the money. And in terms of the more literary sort of cinematic achievement, no film on the list can touch it. That perhaps points to why Stillman wound up also producing a quirky novelization of it , and why Peter Lawlers essay on the film(available here ) is IMO his very best film-analysis.
(Stillmans latest film, DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, is now out on video. I propose we all try to view it by mid-November, and then share our thoughts here. Its the strangest bird of the Stillman films, and if any readers have a grand theory of how to interpret that will exceed the capacity of our comments section, email Peter at Berry College, and hell fwd your stuff to me.)
Lawlers essay shows how a consideration of religion, nature, and grace lies at the heart of LAST DAYS. What Im going to concentrate on here are simply two of its music-scene aspects:
1) Classic 70s Disco as a Movement. (this post)
2) The Aristocratic Nature of the Club. (this and the next one)
When the Josh character declares his allegiance to the disco movement, his friend Tom says in disbelief, its a movement ? Stillman acknowledges that it seems odd to consider it this way. Folk, hippie rock, punk rock--these really were considered movements by many of their participants, whereas 70s disco was considered by most to simply be a fad. But even fads can have way of life ideas behind them--and some participants will be able, like Stillman, to articulate these. Stillman after all was there he frequented the famous NYC disco clubs like Studio 54. Through certain statements, especially those made by the earnest Josh character, and the bitchy Charlotte character, we are given his take on how disco could be regarded as a movement.
Just as Jimmy Steinway is getting attracted to Charlotte, and thus gratuitously agreeing with whatever she says, we get her pronouncement that
. . . before Disco, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, this country was a dancing WASTELAND. You know the Woodstock Generation of the 1960s, who were so full of themselves and conceited? None of those people could dance.
The context, and the fact that we already know that Charlotte is given to making hurtful and outrageous statements with absolute confidence, indicate that Stillman does not entirely agree. He surely has some awareness that the hippies hoped that their psychedelic ballrooms and free-form music would unleash the dance as never before. He surely knows that only a few years before that, the craze for the twist had broke the previous lock couple-centered dances had had on social dancing, unleashing a whole slew of stand-alone steps . (Note--that twist documentary I link to is well worth whatever trouble it might be to see.) There is plenty to say about how that break heralded sexual and expressive individualism, but in light of the LAST DAYS interest in the tensions between group social life and ferocious pairing off, we should also compare the dominance of couple-centered dances from the waltz(?) up until the twist, to the earlier more community-oriented line-type dances of Jane Austens novels or of the contra and square dancing traditions.
My own sense is that the early-to-mid 60s embrace of R+B dance got overdone --as best exemplified by the way Englands mods turned to amphetamines to keep them engaged in the non-stop-dancin their scene championed--and thus eventually provoked a reactive turn to heaviness(hard-rock, art rock), relaxed rural-ness(country-rock), and even outright mellowness (James Taylor and co.). If Stillman would agree with this, Im sure he would add that the mid-60s problem was not simply too much dance, but especially, an attitude that increasingly sought to push things into Dionysian dance. The Morrison-esque collective frenzies of the late 60s required more than acid and amplification. Dance-wise they were built upon the likes of the twist and the mashed potato--steps like Jims Shaman-ic moves were simply added on top. Everyone got groovin in the streets, the parks, and the love-ins, and yet this late 60s crescendo of dance somehow nearly . . . killed it, with an ugly aftermath of Iron Man on one hand, Youve Got A Friend on the other, and way too many people either too conceited or wasted to cha cha cha.
I mention the Cha-Cha to point to the fact that LAST DAYS is not the only Stillman film to point to this late-60s to mid-70s dance-floor wasteland . Because Audrey Rouget, the darling and heroine of METROPOLITAN, is noticed attending the LAST DAYS Club when she is in her late 20s or early 30s, we can date METROPOLITAN pretty precisely to about 10-12 years before 1980(the novelization makes this even clearer). So the attractions of its debutante balls become all the more apparent: in a desert of stoned sloppiness and Revolution-ary seriousness, those balls provided an oasis of dance, class, and intelligent frivolity. To embrace the likes of the Cha-Cha was to defend civilization, and fun.
Stillmans films typically feature a young group gathering around, and courting via, unassuming and often form-dominated dance music. In BARCELONA he is for the low limbo (and 70s disco) as opposed to the modern jazz embraced by the Barcelona hipster set(Fred says, My jazz rule is, if you cant dance to it, you dont want to know about it!), in METROPOLITAN he is for the ridiculous Cha-Cha and most especially the highly-organized dances and rituals of the debutante ball scene, and in his latest, DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, he is for the collegiate damsels prescribing tap and Astaire for depression, and trying to start their own Latin dance craze. All this is linked at the hip with the fact that his films are consistently for the couple and group social life.
So despite Charlotte's ignorance of dance history and her general trait of being too harsh, Stillman thinks that her reaction to the early 70s situation is a basically correct. We know this because we also hear this line of thinking from Josh. He says to Tom that what is great about the disco club is that its a place where, when ones life situation makes one ready for it (in male terms particularly, economically established enough to court), there is a place to go for dancing, cocktails, and conversation. He adds that only a few years before, and for some time, there was a shocking lack of this, a social lack. Toms reaction indicates his complete agreement, his sharing the feeling that something about that time was grievously impoverished and well, lonely.
Songbook readers know I have a lot of sympathy with this. While I do get interested in Dylan, hippies, Bowie, baroque-rock, and even some art rock, I am overall not a fan of the turn to seriousness in our pop music, whose first big wave came in 1966-1975, especially insofar as it snuffed out what was best in the Afro-American tradition. Disco taken as a movement was the way Stillman and his peers reacted to this in the 70s, whereas pro-hop new wave and the more underground retro rock n roll movement was the way I and some of my peers reacted to it in the 80s.
But Stillmans movement was far more interesting socially . The garage and rockabilly scenes of the 80s were tiny underground affairs. The ska revival of the same time was only slightly more successful. More promisingly, there was a moment with the mid-to-late 90s swing revival where it was plausible to speak of hopes for a rebirth of grown-up culture , as Mark Gauvreau Judge did with this book in 2000, but it passed.
The swing revival did have the potential to make a widespread impact, as its lasting legacy in giving ball-room dancing a boost attests, but it was a far more ambitious idea than those other revivals, since for it to really work you needed a) jazz-musician participation, b) bigger bands, and perhaps even c) supper-club like venues. Alas, the jazz musicians balked (with one notable exception ) at the most golden opportunity to reconnect with popular audiences ever handed them, and so they left the music to cliche-mongers like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Alas, as has been the case from the late 40s on, the economics of sustaining large dance orchestras are usually no longer workable. And alas, the social patterns that made the classy supper-club work from 1910-1970 no longer have much strength.
The disco movement, however, really achieved a rebirth of grown-up dance-centered culture on a widespread and economically viable level. Something somewhat like the old supper clubs, or Ricks Cafe Americana, was recreated with The Club, which yes, was perhaps only perfected in Manhattan, but which was imitated world-wide. It is telling that one criticism Stillmans film received with respect to historical accuracy was there being places in his films Club for conversation, when the actual disco was generally too loud for this; Stillman does not agree with this point entirelyin his recollection the best NYC Clubs did provide corners for conversation--but he does admit that his Club pushes things more in this direction, the healthy direction.
Josh also says that whats great about the club is that everyone is there: everyone you know, and everyone you dont but want to. So thats an aristocratic sense of everyoneit is a select crowd, a crowd not too massive or general to keep you from meeting the interesting people youd like to, and, a crowd that contains your crowd.
This set of interesting people includes more gays and blacks than the typical crowd, reflecting the origins of the disco music and scene, but as Stillman emphasizes, it also includes a wider spectrum of ages than you associate with rock. Disco is classy enough, or smoothly bland enough(if you want to be critical), that it makes sense for the ( gasp ) over-thirty crowd to be there dancing to it. It is not a youth-movement thing, a generational identity thing. So the Club is a place where you might make interesting and useful connections with the sorts of older folks who want to remain hip to the scene. You might get to talk with Audrey Rouget, who has become a key figure in publishing. You might meet, on a less heady but probably more useful level, the businessman Ted from BARCELONA. This, Stillman correctly thinks, is far more natural than the way rocks social pattern tends to draw sharp generational boundaries. The conversational and multi-generational Club is more natural to us, being the political animals we are with all that implies, than the hippie frenzy or the rock mosh-pit, or the typical overwhelm-the-senses dance club of today. Stillman is alive to the orgiastic possibilities of the discoin one scene that your body, my body, everybody song is playing, and its clear that not a few of the Clubs patrons gay and straight would regard the more intense dance clubs of today as an improvement, but his own Club makes the more social pleasures available alongside the more primal ones.
So one way the Club is aristocratic in that you might socialize with superior and better-connected people. But there is another aspect of the disco movement that was more brashly and theatrically aristocratic: the emphasis on all things chic . This began, I suspect, as a counter-reaction among blacks to certain earthy stylistic imperatives associated with the idea of funk. Blacks have typically always had, as Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray emphasize, a greater interest in steppin out Saturday Night in a puttin-on-the-Ritz way than most whites. Dressin' to the nines and drivin' a Cadillac. I dont know the ps and qs of how this played out in the development of the disco sound, but it seems fairly plain that putting string sections on top of funk bass lines was a way some blacks had of reasserting this old pattern of classiness and aspiration against the 70s-emphasis on Black Power solidarity with the ghetto masses and George Clinton-esque funk-freakiness. They wanted to insist that one could be funky and classy, Afro and affluent, rooted in the Harlem uptown but movin and shakin things downtown, etc. But as with most reactions, things went further than restoring balance. Sister Sledge praises The Greatest Dancer with a listing of the designer brands he is wearing: He wears the finest clothes, the best designers heaven knows, from his head down to his toes . . . Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci . . . The bridge to an 80s embrace of fashionista materialism a la Madonna and co., is plain to see. This is the side of the aristocratic that we abhorthe emphasis that both the nouveau riche and the old-line families might put upon surface indications of aristocratic quality, and the idea that one might be excluded simply because one is not wearing the right clothes.
But one must not let ones correct hatred of all forms of surface determination of the aristocratic, which all result in an aristocratic class with many undeserving members, delude one about the initially natural origins of those determinations. There are sound reasons for thinking the children of two remarkably excellent humans will have greater genetic and educational chances than most to become remarkably excellent themselves. Associating aristocratic status with those who have good bloodlines is not per se irrational. Nor is, Im afraid to say, doing so on the basis of how a person dresses and presents herself. Now political situations in which it is more manageable to skip the association and investigation, and simply outright award that status to those with noble blood, have obviously been the more typical ones in human history. Similarly, it might be that the Club has no better way to award entry into its little aristocracy-for-a-night than to make snap intuition-al judgments that inevitably, are heavily based on appearances.
So before we praise the Disco Movements archetypal Club any more, we need to grapple with the fact that we dont know for certain whether we would be impressive enough to get in the door. |
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February 5, 2016 2:29 pm
Young women campaigning for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) on Tinder were reportedly banned from the dating app after sending messages supporting his candidacy to possible matches.
Colorado veterans seeking health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs faced excessive wait times and, in some instances, denied care, according to a new watchdog report.
Iowa's largest newspaper is demanding a "complete audit" into the results of the Iowa Democratic caucus that saw Hillary Clinton narrowly edge out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) by 0.2 percentage points. |
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A migrant caravan coming to the U.S. border from Central America has gotten a great deal of attention this spring, but Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Thursday their arrival is nothing unusual, as hundred of thousands have entered the United States in recent years.
"Since 2013, over 200,000 unaccompanied children from Central America have come into this country," Johnson told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "We're looking at 750,000 children and family units that have exploited our very loose immigration laws by and large in this country."
The United States has gotten good at apprehending and getting people in court, but the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has sent a strong signal to people "that if you get into America, you can stay, and they have stayed," Johnson said. "It creates a greater incentive for more unaccompanied children and more family units coming to this country because of the legal loopholes."
Homeland Security has been watching the caravan's approach, but Johnson said he wants to know why Mexido has not enforced its own strict immigration laws, which are more strict than the ones in the United States.
"Why isn't Mexico helping us?" he said. "They're part of the problem. They're complicit in this wave of undocumented children from Central America."
But the United States does need to fix its own laws, and ask Mexico, through diplomatic channels, to enforce theirs, Johnson said.
"We first need to get our own house in order," Johnson said. "We need to expose what again too many members of Congress don't realize all the loopholes and legal precedents laws that created this flow. Our primary objective should be to stop or reduce the flow and that's working with Mexico and fixing our legal immigration system, our broken system." |
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...though she forgot the razor for the pits last time.
Wake up right! Receive our free morning news blast HERE Posted in News
Last month, Michigan State Police director Colonel Kriste Kibbey Etue shared a Facebook post displaying the sentiments of literally the majority of America, but one that has gotten her into hot water with liberals in the peanut gallery.
The September 24 post, which has since been removed, decries NFL players 'taking-a-knee' during the national anthem as "millionaire ingrates who hate America."
Etue was forced to "apologize" for the post three days later.
"It was a mistake to share this message on Facebook and I sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended," Kriste Kibbey Etue said in a statement posted on the Michigan State Police Facebook page. "I will continue my focus on the unity at the Michigan State Police and in communities across Michigan."
But as is always the case with Social Justice Warrior sharks who smell blood in the water, an apology is never enough.
On Friday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder issued a statement announcing that Etue will lose five days of pay as punishment for her egregious sin.
"Colonel Etue posted something on social media that was inappropriate. ... The colonel has served honorably as an enlisted trooper for 30 years, and I hope we can come together as Michiganders to move forward and find common ground, rather than rehash past mistakes," said the Republican governor.
Etue will still be expected to work during those five days, according to Fox59.
Even as the Michigan State Police end non-serious-crime high-speed pursuits in Detroit, Snyder announced that he and his administration are also developing "cultural awareness and sensitivity training guidelines" for all government departments as well as policies for state employees on the private use of social media.
"We are the best Michigan when we are a diverse Michigan, and I will continue taking actions to ensure all state departments are working to effectively serve all residents in an impartial and inclusive manner," said Snyder.
We're not supposed to ask it, of course, but all of this does beg the question - does the NFL have a higher percentage of "ingrates" than the rest of the population?
According to Forbes , perhaps so:
Are these incidents isolated to a few players, or does the NFL have a more pervasive violent crime problem?
Arrests for violence, drugs and DUI are fairly common even for elite NFL players who have the most to lose from an arrest and possible suspension from the league without pay. Unfortunately, young men are often arrested for violent acts and NFL players are no exception. First round NFL draft selections are actually 37% less likely to be arrested for assault/domestic violence than men of similar age in the general population. Nonetheless, more first round draft selections will be arrested while playing for the NFL than will ever be named first team All-Pro.[1] The risk that a top draft selection gets in trouble with the law is a genuine concern for NFL teams.
About 1.1% of NFL first round draft selections are arrested for assault (including domestic violence) per season, based on data since the 2000 draft. It is therefore to be expected that one of the 32 first round selections in this week's NFL draft will be arrested for assault or domestic violence every three years. The arrest rate for DUI and drug offenses is approximately twice as high as the rate for assaults, so two DUI or drug possession arrests are expected every three years for the new crop of first round selections.
Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.
Wake up right! Receive our free morning news blast HERE Posted in News
Environmentalist Tom Steyer is spending the money on a national TV campaign to "demand that elected officials take a stand" on ousting the Republican president. Steyer was one of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's chief financial backer during her presidential campaign.
"He has threatened to reduce aid for millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico who are struggling to survive without drinkable water or electricity -- a move that would be a total dereliction of his duty," Steyer writes, adding that Trump's Twitter activity is making people anxious about what the president could have in store for the country.
By Amber Randall and Grace Carr, DCNF
Eight of the nine "Spotlight" crew members who loudly condemned the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal have remained quiet about the rampant sexual assault allegations levied against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The "Spotlight" crew were quick to condemn the systemic sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priests, but the actors, director and producers, many of whom have close ties to Weinstein, have not spoken out against the decades of Weinstein's alleged harassment and assault on young women in Hollywood. The Oscar-winning movie is based on the true story of Boston Globe journalists who investigated allegations of sexual abuse of young boys in the Catholic church.
Of the six actors on the film, so far only Mark Ruffalo has spoken about the Weinstein allegations. The rest, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, Billy Crudup and Rachel McAdams have been silent on the matter, despite repeated phone calls and emails from The Daily Caller News Foundation requesting comment on the matter.
Ruffalo gave a somewhat tepid response to the slew of allegations against Weinstein, referring to the alleged rapes and harassment as a "sickness" before calling on other men in power to "do better."
"I hope Harvey gets the help that he needs. This is -- it's a sickness," he said on the red carpet.
"Spotlight" director Tom McCarthy and producers Michael Sugar and Peter Lawson have yet to comment publicly on the Weinstein scandal. It's an odd move from the crew as most of them have ties to Weinstein and have worked with him over the years.
Lawson served as the vice president of acquisitions and co-productions at The Weinstein Company, the film studio founded by Weinstein and his brothers. The actors themselves have also starred in numerous high profile Weinstein films, ranging from "Southpaw" "Begin Again," "The Butler," "Scream" and "Dedication." Slattery is currently producing a film with the Weinstein Company.
Despite their lukewarm handling of the Weinstein allegations, the actors had no problem forcefully condemning the abuse done by the Catholic Church. Ruffalo participated in a "Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests" (SNAP) protests outside a Los Angeles church to demand the names of the priests who assaulted young boys.
The producer of the film, Sugar, also took a moment to lecture Pope Francis on how he should be handling the church during an Oscar acceptance speech. Slattery also routinely talked about how important it was to expose the Church's wrongdoings.
H/T The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
Follow Grace on Twitter .
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] . Posted in News |
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The International Organization for Migration reported on Monday that an airstrike on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in Yemen's Hajjah Province killed at least forty people and injured two hundred others. The attack occurred on the fifth consecutive day of airstrikes carried out by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by intelligence and logistical support from the United States
The Imploding Middle East, Saudi Kingdom And Pakistan By Haris Khurshid
In latest turn of the events in Middle East now Pakistan is at crossroads to get embroiled in a distant conflict involving its Muslim benefactor Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or extricate itself from an avoidable war looming on the horizon of Yemen. The region is experiencing new wave of violence and disintegration in less stable parts mainly drawn by Shia Sunni sectarian and ethnic prejudice
Even America's 'Media Watchdogs' Hide U.S.'s Ukrainian Nazification & Ethnic Cleansing By Eric Zuesse
The U.S.'news' media are so censored and controlled, so that even America's 'media watchdog' organizations -- mediamatters.org and fair.org on the left; and aim.org and mrc.org on the right -- have hidden from the American public President Barack Obama's Ukrainian coup in February 2014 that violently overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President and replaced him with a Ukrainian nazi (racist-fascist) rabidly eliminationist anti-Russian, police-state regime in Kiev
Accountability Must Be At The Heart Of The Paris Climate Pact By Harro van Asselt, Hakon Saelen and Pieter Pauw
Slowly but surely, the first climate pledges for the 2015 agreement - or, in UN-speak, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) - have started to trickle in. Mexico and Norway were the latest countries to formally announce their pledges, with the United States and Russia also expected to submit their offers this week. Under the 2015 agreement, the hope is that INDCs will prove to be crucial instruments in preventing dangerous climate change. Yet a key element is still missing
Pakistan has halted work on six coal-fired power projects of some 14,000 megawatts due to environmental concerns, lack of needed infrastructure and foreign investment
Surviving Climate Disaster In Africa's Sahel By Thomas C. Mountain
After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government of Eritrea initiated a major water conservation plan that along with reforestation and soil conservation is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted
We Are Losing The Oceans By Paul Craig Roberts
From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored
Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country's major patron of the last 13 years -- and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces
Two Muslims Lynched In Two Different Cities Of The World Incited Two Different Reactions By Abdul Rashid Agwan
The gory events of Kabul and Dimapur expose modern hypocrisy where both civilizational zeal and barbaric spree are going hand in hand, where religions fail to stimulate respect for human dignity in their followers and where the rule of law is yet not honored by those who are supposed to be its vouched guardians
Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers By Matt Peppe
In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out. Last week, in an act of mass murder with more than 12 times the number of victims, 27-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided the plane he was flying straight into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board. Yet it is only the former murderous act that has been described by politicians and portrayed in the media as an existential threat and an example of terrorism
Television Commercial In California Asks Drone Pilots To Stop Killing By David Swanson
This may be a first: a television ad campaign in a U.S. state capitol appealing to someone to stop murdering human beings who have, in most cases, already been born. A new 15-second television ad, a variation on one that's aired in Las Vegas near Creech Air Force Base, is debuting this week in Sacramento, Calif.
BOOKS: Occupy These Photos By Mickey Z.
Now, I'm asking you to be part of that mission. Occupy These Photos is a book born on the streets and we're seeking funding in the same DIY manner: from the ground up. Please click here to find out how you can get involved! Thanks in advance for your support. Without you, this book would not have happened.
Indian Parliamentarian Doubts If Tobacco Kills! Do Not Reinvent The Wheel By Bobby Ramakant
Indian parliamentarian who is chairing the committee which told the government not to implement stronger pictorial graphic health warnings on tobacco packs (and raise the warning size from 40% to 85%) from 1st April 2015, casted doubts whether tobacco causes cancer. India is at risk of reversing the gains made in saving lives from tobacco! He is the same parliamentarian who had raised similar questions in the parliament in 2011 and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India had given him detailed response underlining the alarming magnitude of the tobacco pandemic in the country
30 March, 2015
Yemen: Saudi-Led Airstrikes Take Civilian Toll By Human Rights Watch
The Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab countries that conducted airstrikes in Yemen on March 26 and 27, 2015, killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 34 civilians during the first day of bombings in Sanaa, the capital, Human Rights Watch said today. The 11 dead included 2 children and 2 women. Saudi and other warplanes also carried out strikes on apparent targets in the cities of Saada, Hodaida, Taiz, and Aden
Yemen: No Military Solution By Chandra Muzaffar
To bring order and stability to a nation which is in such a terrible mess, one has to persuade all the relevant players to talk to one another, to negotiate, to compromise. The peaceful, non-violent approach to conflict resolution has not been given enough space and scope to succeed in Yemen. The UN has been trying to play a role in a very difficult situation. The UN should be given full support by all the contending forces
A Middle East Holocaust By Paul Craig Roberts
How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression? Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the bombers. Iran is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and China can destroy the US and all of Washington's vassal states. The intensity of Washington's propaganda war is driving the world to destruction
A Pakistani Woman named Aafia Siddiqui was abducted from a taxi in Karachi, Pakistan along with her 3 children 12 years ago on March 30, 2003. At the time she was vulnerable, recently divorced from an abusive husband; living with her mother; her father had just died of a heart attack. The youngest child was an infant. Following her abduction, Aafia Siddiqui and her children disappeared from view for 5 years. She spent those years in US Black Site prisons in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One can only imagine the torment she suffered there, in a system created to enable the torture and abuse of terrorism suspects. She was a woman alone. They took her children, and threatened them when personal torture was not enough to gain her acquiescence
A study published in the journal Science found government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. Now, the question is: Whether to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions?
Does Civilisation Mean Insanity And Violence? By Sukumaran C. V.
Biodiversity is the prime necessity for the continuance of Life on Earth, and the humans destroy the very thing which helps them survive on earth
Postcard From The End Of America: Carlisle, PA By Linh Dinh
Black, white, brown or yellow, anyone who's dwelling within these Disunited States will be thoroughly nicked up, if not buried alive, from the coming collapse and turmoil, and it's telling that our final chapter started with a double castrations that was broadcast, live, to the entire world, and that one of our bravest dissidents, Bradley Manning, also wishes to have nothing between his legs, and that our present day Jim Thorpe, one Bruce Jenner, also dreams of the day he will finally be emasculated. Don't worry, it's coming
Gendered Dis-preference In Indian Society By Roli Misra
In present context with the advent of new technology the practice of female infanticide has been replaced by genocide of millions of women known as female foeticide - denying the girl its very right to take birth. The rapid spread of the use of ultrasounds and amniocentesis for sex determination followed by sex selective induced abortions has created a situation of daughter drought with tragic consequences
Lambs To The Slaughter: The Dying Future Of Higher Education By P K Vijayan
For the sake of our professional integrity, then, for the sake of our students, for the sake of the institutions that we have studied and worked in, for the sake of the society to which we belong and to which we are accountable - for everyone's sake, and not just our own, it is time for the teachers' movement to come together once again, and give an exemplary response to the forces that seek to grind us down
Attacking The Cross: Rise In Anti Christian Violence By Ram Puniyani
Julio Ribeiro is one of the best known police officers in India. Recently (March 16, 2015) he wrote in his article that he is feeling like a stranger in this country. 'I feel threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in my own country'. This pain and anguish of a distinguished citizen, an outstanding police officer has to be seen against the backdrop of the rising attacks on Churches and rape of the 71 year old nun in Kolkata. All over the country the rage amongst the Christian community is there to be seen in the form of silent marches, candle light vigils and peaceful protests
Islam, Peace, Justice & Dialogue By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's Interaction Interaction with a group of Catholic priests and nuns, New Delhi
The Healing Power Of Meditation By William T. Hathaway
TM produces mental and physical rest that is twice as deep as in sleep, although we're fully awake. This rejuvenating state enables the body's self-healing mechanism to repair the damage from traumatic events and illnesses. With these blockages gone we are more able to develop our full capabilities
29 March, 2015
Arab leaders have agreed to form a joint military force at a Sharm el-Sheikh summit, hosting Egyptian President Abdel Sisi has announced. The meeting was dominated by the situation in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia leads a bombing campaign against rebels
The US is now openly coordinating another act of naked aggression committed by a tandem force of two US-collaborator countries competing for the title of world's worst domestic dictatorship: Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Shell's Climate Change Strategy: Narcissistic, Paranoid, And Psychopathic By John Ashton
In an open letter to Shell's Ben Van Beurden, the UK's former top climate envoy says now is the time for him to show leadership
A week with Wyden shows a secret fundraiser for a secretly negotiated corporate agreement
Stop Smoking The Democrack By Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
The U.S. government is toying with a war with nuclear Russia while already waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having done severe damage to Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Military spending is climbing ever higher. Presidential war powers are ever more extreme. The proliferation of nuclear technology is combining with the ease and secrecy of drone wars to raise the risk of a Dr. Strangelove finish to the human species. And, let's face it, you had more time to give a damn when the president was a Republican
Scientists and scientific organisations around the world call on Government of India to withdraw a flawed study on chrysotile asbestos and stop blocking UN Convention
Re-Probe Hashimpura Killing Case By Syed Ali Mujtaba
It's bolt on India's democracy that the murders of Hashimpura are let out for want of evidence. There is hardly any hue and cry, local and international pressure being built for re-probe. The evidences are abundant, it needs to pieced together and bring it for the judicial scrutiny. Re-probe of Hashimpura carnage alone can instill confidence among the minority community in the country
Tobacco or Health! U Turn On Pictorial Warning On Tobacco Products By Subhash Gatade
Government is set to defer indefinitely the implementation of notification for increasing the size of pictorial warning on tobacco products beyond April one, when it was to come into force. ..The notification regarding amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules, 2008 sought increase in the size of specified health warning from the current 40 per cent to 85 per cent of the principal display area of the package of tobacco products
28 March, 2015
Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched airstrikes in Yemen against rebel Shiite Houthi forces gaining more ground. The mainly Gulf coalition, which also includes the US, is trying to help embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Twenty-four people were killed and 43 injured as a result of Saudi-led airstrikes over the last 24 hours, Yemen's Saba state news agency reported the Interior Ministry saying in a statement
Nuclear Threat Escalating Beyond Political Rhetoric By Thalif Deen
As a new cold war between the United States and Russia picks up steam, the nuclear threat is in danger of escalating - perhaps far beyond political rhetoric
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth's Ability To Support Life By Paul Craig Roberts
David Ray Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin's book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? The book is a carefully researched document
No Ban On Coal Finance As Green Climate Fund Eyes First Projects By Megan Darby
The Green Climate Fund has not ruled out backing coal plants after a protracted three-day board meeting in Songdo, South Korea. Tense negotiations ended at 04 20 on Thursday with agreement on seven intermediaries to disburse funds for low carbon development and climate adaptation in poor countries
Two Degree Celsius Climate Change Target 'Utterly Inadequate By Countercurrents.org
The official global target of a 2degC temperature rise is 'utterly inadequate' for protecting those at most risk from climate change, says a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), writing a commentary in the open access journal Climate Change Responses. The commentary presents a rare inside-view of a two-day discussion at the Lima Conference of the Parties (COP) on the likely consequences of accepting an average global warming target of 2degC versus 1.5degC
The Czech Republic And The Fine Art Of Collaboration By Andre Vltchek
The US military convoy will soon be passing through the Czech territory, from the Baltics and Poland, to its permanent base in Bavaria, Germany. That is bad enough. The Czechs should not have allowed the convoy to pass. Provoking Russia and moving closer and closer to the fascist Empire is a shameless and cowardly act
Coming Home By William T. Hathaway
From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War. RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from antiwar activists, the true stories of their efforts to change our warrior culture. In this chapter a mother tells of her son's return from combat. She wishes to remain anonymous
Cultural Hegemony And Social Change: 2015 By Jon Kofas
There are conservative analysts who assume that more than anything people crave safety and security. Cultural hegemony rests on the fears of the people who have been conditioned to accept the status quo and avert risk when it comes to securing a new social contract that would represent all people. Some advocates of democracy argue that actualizing their potential is just as important for human beings, but this entails having an institutional structure that permits and promotes those possibilities. I have argued in the past that uprisings are very possible in the 21st century, especially after the next inevitable deep recession, but systemic change is highly unlikely
It's been a bad couple of weeks for Monsanto. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines for not reporting hundreds of uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals at its eastern Idaho phosphate plant. It also paid out a string of lawsuit settlements totaling $350,000 as a result of its GMOs tainting wheat in seven US states. Such amounts represent little more than a tap on the wrist for a company that rakes in sales of almost $16 billion dollars annually
Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict By William James Martin
The Palestinians have little to offer Obama. Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term. If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice
Brutal Lathi Charge On Workers Outside Delhi Secretariat By Abhinav Sinha
Complete account of the brutal lathi charge on workers outside Delhi Secretariat on the orders of Kejriwal Government on March 25, 2015
Human Rights Violations by the Punjab Government and Punjab Police regarding the Surat Singh Khalsa fast unto death
27 March, 2015
Airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by other members of Gulf Cooperating Council and the U.S. government, continued to hit Yemen on Thursday as the situation in one of the world's most impoverished, yet strategically important countries continues to unravel amid what can only be described now as all-out war. Reports indicate that a first wave of bombings overnight which resulted in a number of civilian deaths--including entire families trapped in flattened houses--have spurred widespread anger in Sanaa and other targeted cities, even among members of the population opposed to the Houthi rebels
Saudi Arabia, Egypt Prepare US-Backed Invasion Of Yemen By Niles Williamson
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are preparing a US-backed military invasion of Yemen aimed at pushing back the Houthi militia that has taken over much of the country and reasserting the control of besieged President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that the three-pronged assault would come from Saudi Arabia in the north and from the Red Sea in the west and the Arabian Sea in the south. As many as five Egyptian troop ships have been stationed off the coast of Yemen. The officials said that the assault would begin after airstrikes had sufficiently weakened the Houthi rebels
5 Facts You Need To Know About Yemen And Its Conflicts By Russia Today
One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players - and some of the world's most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation's conflicts
US Warplanes Attack Targets In Center Of Tikrit By Patrick Martin
US warplanes began air strikes on Islamic State positions in the center of Tikrit Wednesday night, the first involvement of US forces in the bloody fighting in that Iraqi city, the hometown of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Military sources said at least 180 targets were struck in one of the most ferocious bombardments since the US resumed military operations in Iraq last August
Far from being a "Sunni jihadist group", ISIS is yet another creation of botched up U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World. Attributing anything Islamic to the group is as ridiculous as attributing American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and illegal detention of "illegal combatants" at Guantanamo Bay to Christianity. Nevertheless, ISIS is an enigma, a by-product of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war, and last but not least, an integral part of Washington's false flag operation in the Muslim World
Europe Must Not Be Forced Into A Nuclear War With Russia By John Scales Avery
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it. Europe must not be the close ally (or vassal) of the world's greatest purveyor of violence and war
The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU's Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013 By Eric Zuesse
So: now you know why Yanukovych, the very next day after his learning about the $160B price tag of the EU's offer, turned it down, and also why this revelation is still news, more than a year later -- just as it was news to me until I happened upon it only today
Amnesty: Gaza Firing Of Indiscriminate Rockets Is War Crime By Robert Barsocchini
Amnesty notes in a new report that attacks by Gazans resisting Israeli occupation, invasion, and terrorist attacks amount to war crimes, due to the uncontrollable nature of the rudimentary projectiles Gazans are forced to use because of the Israeli occupation and siege keeping Gaza isolated from the rest of the world. "According to UN data, more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel during the conflict." But the western media is silent on the number of casualty caused by these projectiles compared to the overwhelming death and destruction caused by Israel's assualt on Gaza
New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During And After WWII By Robert Barsocchini
Germany's The Local reports: Professor Miriam Gebhardt's book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin
A Different Form Of Holocaust Denial By Mickey Z.
The use of the word "holocaust" in relation to factory farming is semantically accurate but horribly insensitive and demonstrably ineffectiv
Volume Loss From Antarctic Ice Shelves Is Accelerating, Finds Study By Countercurrents.org
Scientists have warned: The ice around the edge of Antarctica is melting faster than previously thought, potentially unlocking meters of sea-level rise in the long-term
Vast Majority Of Americans Believe That The Climate Is Changing By Ian James
Stanford University professor Jon Krosnick has been studying Americans' attitudes about global warming for nearly two decades and has found in repeated polls that a large majority see climate change as a threat to future generations that should be addressed
In tracing the rapid deterioration of the legal intellect in Sri Lanka, the extrajudicial killings committed by the State should be scrutinised as one of the most significant factors for such deterioration
The Supreme Court's scrapping of Section 66 A of the Information Technology Act for being "unconstitutional in entirety" is indeed a great moment in the life of the democracy. The Act did, in fact, invade citizenry's right of free speech "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately". However, is this really a moment to celebrate in the life of a republic whose criminal justice system is rotten to the core? Will it really lead to any exercise of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, in a land where ordinary citizens fear the police more than the criminals?
Revisiting The Caste Question By Priyanka Dass Saharia
How is modern form of caste in contemporary times? Nicholas Dirks had argued on colonial power knowledge complexes instrumental in reifying it within bureaucratic structures and discourses. The various institutions of caste were used as tools to manage the divide and rule policies perpetuated by the British. The question then becomes as to what form did these changes take? In what ways did the imported modernity of colonialism changed the 'registers' of belief and social reality in India?
Examinations And Professional Competence By S.G.Vombatkere
The recent news reports of wholesale cheating in matriculation examinations in Bihar, with pictures of accomplices dangerously climbing the walls of buildings in which examinations were being held, to hand over cheating-aids to candidates, are horrifying. The physical risk taken by the accomplices shows that the cash paid to them - by parents who are okay with cheating, and making arrangements to "help" their wards - is adequate
26 March, 2015
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared "to protect and defend the legitimate government" of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi
US Airstrikes, Coupled With Iran-Backed Militias And Iraqi Forces, Target ISIS In Tikrit By Jon Queally
As Middle East historian Juan Cole points out, the U.S. military on Wednesday into Thursday was assisting the Saudi bombing of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, while simultaneously collaborating (at least indirectly) with Iranian military advisors from the Iranian Republican Guard Corp in the operation against ISIS in Tikrit. "The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region," he writes. "But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran."
Washington's Two Air Wars: With Iran In Iraq, With Saudis (Against Iran) In Yemen By Juan Cole
The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region. But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran
"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
Obama Now Sides w. Poroshenko & EU To End Ukraine's War By Eric Zuesse
Obama has other fish to fry with them -- such as his proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), to grant international corporations effective control over the environmental, labor, and product-safety regulations of participating countries. He seems to have decided (at least for the time being) to pursue -- via other routes than Ukraine -- his war against Russia
Agent Orange Funding Opens Door To US Militarism And Covert Action In Vietnam By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Is the United States finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country's affairs as part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" strategy?
Globalization and cheater economics have been destroying the world's great rivers and their fisheries. Most people know about the devastation of rivers from water pollution, but not as many are aware of the significant impacts of big dams, river engineering, and real estate development in and on top of rivers. These activities can seriously damage fisheries and impair the natural functions of riverine ecosystems. A true-cost, steady state economy would, for the most part, avoid the continuing tragic dismantlement of rivers and fisheries
Imagine if an American presidential candidate made a plea to his supporters on election day with the following statement: "The Republican administration is in danger. Black voters are going en masse to the polls. Liberal NGOs are bringing them on buses." Even in a country where Chris Matthews is a media celebrity and Pamela Geller is an intellectual, the statement would be scandalous, a political death wish even. In Israel, however, the opposite is true. In a message delivered in a video on Facebook, incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a sinister call appealing to ingrained racism in Israeli society: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses."
Despite Protests, Japan Diverts Funds Earmarked To Fight Climate Change To Finance Coal Plants In India, Bangladesh By Countercurrents.org
Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, reported the Associated Press
Premises On The Question Of Political Crisis In Bangladesh By Farooque Chowdhury
Today's Bangladesh faces political crisis as scores of news-reports and views claim [an end-note to this article cites headings/excerpts of a few of those], and today's Bangladesh doesn't face political crisis as one can claim periods of turmoil are not crisis, can cite a few data from economy, and can also refer to a lull within a long period of crisis. Both the statements, one can claim, are correct in relative terms. On the other hand, any of the two cancels the other. Only a scientific approach to the question - crisis - can provide a reliable answer. The approach should look into all related aspects instead of making sweeping remarks based on superficial observations and shallow search that ignores basic elements of crisis
Pads Against Sexism Campaign - Some Issues By Parvin Sultana
Elone Kastratia started a unique street art protest using Sanitary napkins with messages against sexual violence in her hometown Krlsruhe, Germany which went viral in social media. With rapidly spreading across to other countries, it was picked up by students of universities like Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They put up sanitary napkins in various spots in the universities. The idea behind using sanitary napkins to start such awareness campaign was to use blunt hard hitting methods in starting a dialogue around sexual harassment of women. The means used raised many eyebrows in a society where sexism continues to be rampant
A Deeper Look At Vedic History Suggests A Tribal Melting Pot That May Surprise The Hindu Nationalist By Amritanshu Pandey
While the nationalists speak of a golden past the truth is that ancient India may very well have been the equivalent of a medieval Arabia! Realisation of this could help us better accept India's vast cultural diversity, and prevent us from engaging in acts such as the ban on beef-production simply because it offends the culture of a select group. The truth is that there could have been several ancient Indian tribes that relished beef, while others abstained from its consumption. Which of them represent the real India, and who are we truly descended from?
The Fear Factor In Indian Republic By Parvez Alam
I am tempted to write because I am feeling insecure. May be I shouldn't write because it becomes easy for them to identify me and kill me. They can kill me any time anywhere, in day light, at mid night, in Hashimpura or in Sopore or in Batla House. What is the purpose of these institutions, only killing and intimidating or something else? Why have we made our society in such a way that police and army symbolize only fear? Why we train security personnel in the fashion which create them spineless robots who just do not feel any acquiescence with thinking and judging? Why are we not agitating against the acts of violence, denial of justice, inhumanity and banality of evil? Why are we so silent when we are feeling so disturbed inside?
A Guide To Understanding Our Times - Review of Recollection of Things Learned By Gaither Stewart By William T. Hathaway
G aither Stewart is a man of passions. In The Europe Trilogy he shared with us his passion for international espionage and intrigue. In Voices from Pisalocca he shared his passion for village life in his adoptive country, Italy. In The Fifth Sun he shared his passion for Native-American mythology. Now in Recollection of Things Learned he shares his passion for socialism, both the complexity of its theory and the clash of its praxis.
25March, 2015
The issue of rising food Prices across the globe is a matter of great concern, and is being discussed on many international forums. Studies show that, since households in developing countries spend most of their income on food items, rising food prices affect them significantly more than households in developed countries
Hold The Rich Accountable In New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs By Thalif Deen
The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments - this time particularly by the rich - if the UN's 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed
Two Towns Face The Fallout As Himalayan Glaciers Melt By Daniel Grossman
For two towns in northern India, melting glaciers have had very different impacts -- one town has benefited from flowing streams and bountiful harvests; but the other has seen its water supplies dry up and now is being forced to relocate
U.S.-v.-Russia: Even Stephen Cohen Is Starting To Speak The Truth By Eric Zuesse
An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) "for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real," and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this "possibly a fateful turning-point in history." He also says "it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance."
How The US Government And US Military Became Murder, Inc. By Paul Craig Roberts
The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war. If the crazed Russophobic US generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will be destroyed. The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war nuclear
Resisting Israeli Politics By Brenda Heard
Six months prior to the upcoming UK general election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published its "2015 General Election Jewish Manifesto." This forty-page document urges both existing and prospective members of the UK Parliament to support various "policy asks" and to "champion these causes." The Manifesto was styled after a very similar one created for the 2014 EU elections. Indeed their goals appear the same: to ensure a pro-Israeli agenda in the House of Commons and beyond
Supreme Court Decision On Section 66A Lays The Basis Of Fifth Pillar Of Democracy By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
India has now unrestricted freedom to speak and express on social sites, albeit qualified by the reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Art. 19 of the constitution. This development makes India one of the most advanced countries in the world where people can release their grievances against the system, and against the leaders who for no attainments still glorify themselves. It gives Indian people a tool to create public opinion on any issue. Internet is now a force with a capacity to channelize the people's anger, desires, and expectations in unified manner towards its destination
Our educational system needs a radical change
24 March, 2015
As U.S. military convoy pushes through countries in eastern Europe while cash contribution to Clinton Foundation gets exposed. Activists are protesting the U.S. military march. An AP report said: A U.S. army infantry convoy is driving through eastern Europe seeking to provide reassurance to a region concerned that the Ukraine conflict threatens its securit
IMF: Ukraine Must Now Steal $1.5 Billion+ From Russia To Buy Arms By German Economic News
The IMF has developed a program for Ukraine, under which the current financial hole is to be filled in the amount $40 billion. The due debts [the senior debt] are part of the plan, and will be restructured, according to the IMF. Exactly how it is to happen, the IMF does not explain. Experts say that the IMF believes that Russia should participate in a haircut
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record - while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years
World's Richest One Percent Undermine Fight Against Economic Inequalities By Thalif Deen
The growing economic inequalities between rich and poor - and the lopsided concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the world's one percent - are undermining international efforts to fight global poverty, environmental degradation and social injustice, according to a civil society alliance
Empire And Colonialism: Rich Men In London Still Deciding Africa's Future By Colin Todhunter
Some PS600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce
Herbicide US Sprays Over Millions Of Acres In Columbia "Drug War" Linked To Cancer By Robert Barsocchini
The Associated Press reports that "the world's most-popular weed killer" has been discovered to be "a likely cause of cancer": The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a French-based research arm of the World Health Organization, has reclassified the herbicide glyphosate as a result of what it said is convincing evidence the chemical produces cancer in lab animals and more limited findings it causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in humans. ...the glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup [made by Monsanto] is a mainstay of industrial agriculture
To coincide with the IARC's findings, public promoter of GM golden rice Patrick Moore recently said during an interview on French TV that: "I do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing cancer. You can drink a whole quart and it won't hurt you." On being repeatedly asked to back up his statement Moore walked out of the interview
Sixty Percent Of Global Drone Exports Come From Israel -- New Data By Rania Khalek
Israel has supplied 60.7 percent of the world's drones since 1985, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. As a result, Israel is the single greatest source of drone proliferation in the world
Secrecy And Democracy Are Incompatible By John Scales Avery
It is obvious, almost by definition, that excessive governmental secrecy and true democracy are incompatible. If the people of a country have no idea what their government is doing, they cannot possibly have the influence on decisions that the word "democracy" implies
A Liberal Lawyer Gives Up On Preventing Murder By David Swanson
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called "There is no such thing as peacetime." Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder
Wait For Justice To Victims Of Hashimpura Has Become Much Longer By Subash Gatade
After around 28 years of the gruesome massacre allegedly by the personnel of the much feared PAC ( Provincial Armed Constabulary) for its biased approach , the Delhi court acquitted all 16 accused on 'benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused'. There have been very few massacres in post-independent India which have shaken the civil society to the core and have propelled it to come forward and raise its voice. And the Hashimpura killings happen to be one such episode
America's Global Dominance (Since WW II) Has Just Ended By Eric Zuesse
Obama's arrogance is what's driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase "the ugly American." In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America's problem, but perhaps they won't become the world's, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won't. And that's today's big news-story
Barbarians Are Coming - Western or Arabs? By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The US and the Europeans see war as an instrument of political hegemony and control over the precious natural resources of the Arab-Muslim world. The super-ego American and the allied Europeans are missing sense of guilt for the vice and ruins of decade long occupation and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan
Vietnam's Major Regional Thrust For A Malaria-Free Asia Pacific By 2030 By Citizen News Service (CNS)
Vietnam signals greater regional leadership in malaria elimination by hosting health officials and experts to discuss challenges to achieving a malaria-free Asia Pacific by 2030. This week, Vietnam will host Ministry of Health officials from the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN); a group of 17 countries in Asia Pacific who each share the ultimate goal to become malaria-free
23 March, 2015
Houthi militia members seized the military airport in Taiz on Saturday without any resistance from Yemeni military forces. The capture of Taiz brings the Houthi forces within 180 kilometers of the southern port city of Aden, the hometown and stronghold of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.Fighters from the Special Security Forces reportedly fired their automatic weapons and volleys of tear gas to disperse large crowds of protesters who turned out to oppose the Houthis' presence in the country's third largest city. Amid the country's descent into sectarian conflict, the United States announced that it was evacuating approximately 100 US Special Operations soldiers who had been stationed at the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province. They cited security threats after Al Qaeda militants briefly seized control of the nearby city of Al Houta on Friday
12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion - 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation By Dr Gideon Polya
Those with consciences recently marked the 12th anniversary on 19 March 2015 of the illegal and war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on false assertions of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was conducted in the absence of UN sanction or Iraqi threat to the invading nations, and led to 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million). The West has now commenced its Seventh Iraq War since 1914 in over a century of Western violence in which Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation have totalled 9 million. However Western Mainstream media have resolutely ignored the carnage, this tragically illustrating the adage "History ignored yields history repeated
The crisis that struck Ukraine last year-- the overthrow of the elected president, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in the Russian speaking eastern provinces-- was the result of problems that had been festering, not only in Ukraine but all along the former frontiers of the USSR since the end of the cold war and the collapse of eastern European socialism over twenty some years previously
For Hamza: Arms Sanctions Against Israel's Everyday Terrorism By Vacy Vlazna
Meet little Hamza Mus'ab Almadani of Khan Younis, Gaza. Look carefully, look tenderly, don't turn away. Please don't turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, turned away from Palestine. Hamza is Palestine. Look carefully at Israel's savage violation to his once perfect little body when on the 25th July 2014, Israel's soldiers loaded and fired pale blue artillery shells that discharged white incendiary rain on Gaza in hundreds of phosphorous-impregnated felt wedges as Hamza and his family slept. Imagine the agony Hamza suffered from the moment the white phosphorous struck and burrowed through his soft three year old skin. Phosphorous burns are only contained by blocking off oxygen but the extreme pain and, as you can see, the horrific tissue damage endures
Middle Income Nations Home To Half The World's Hungry By Thalif Deen
Nearly half of the world's hungry, about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Senator Cotton, Hitler, And 'Appeasement' By Mickey Z.
There are many issues swirling about the current situation in Iran but invoking Churchill, Hitler, and the A Word activates the following historical facade: by whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the United States and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being questioned... especially when every enemy of the United States is likened to Hitler
Jump Out Of The Pot! By William T. Hathaway
Like the frogs in a simmering water pot, we are provided with pictures, music, and other pleasures to distract us from the worsening conditions of our lives and render us incapable of changing them. These entertainments lull us with subjective emotions that offer solace and escape from our objective reality. They range from the crude to the refined, but all are characterized by glorifying the inner life of the supposedly sovereign individual
Declaring Dr. Chia Thye Poh As A Singaporean Hero Is A Better Way To Commemorate The Death Of Lee Kuan Yew A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
Many, including President Barack Obama, have been paying glowing tributes to Lee Kuan Yew since the announcement of his death this morning, 23rd March 2015. However, recalling what Lee Kuan Yew did to Dr. Chia Thye Poh and many other persons who aspired for multi-party democracy and respect for the freedom of expression in Singapore is a better way to remember Lee Kuan Yew. It is the least that can be done to fight back against the terrible legacy he has bequeathed
What Happened In Hashimpura 28 Years Ago? By Vibhuti Narain Rai
There are some experiences that stick with you throughout your life. They always stay with you like a nightmare and sometimes are like debts on your shoulders. The experience at Hashimpura Massacre was such an experience for me, says Vibhuti Narayan Rai, then Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, UP. On 22 May 1987, in Hashimpura, a locality in the Meerut City, 42 innocent Muslims were killed in cold blood by the personnel of Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC)
Police Firing On Women On International Women's Day In Odisha By Ganatantrik Adhikar Surakhya Sangathan
On 8th March 2015, when the world was observing International Women's Day, Odisha police fired upon women agitators at Namatara village of Rajakanika block of Kendrapada district and injured 16 villagers, mostly women. Out of those injured people, 9 villagers (five women, two girl children and 2 men) got admitted in Cuttak Medical College because of serious bullet injury. Now the police have already arrested 6 people for attacking the police and have filed cases against 60 people also. Namatara village having 200 houses are mostly of dalit communities
The Need For A New Approach To Adivasi Development By Gladson Dungdung
It is quite clear that the Tribal Sub-Plan has failed to achieve its objectives due to lack of community participation, transparency and accountability since it was implemented in 1974-75. This is why the Government of India should replace it with a Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP), which would ensure respect, preserve and protect their identity, autonomy, culture and traditional system of governance. Tribals should be given the right to choose their own path of development. The new Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP) would ensure full and effective participation of Adivasis in their own development
Ambedkar: Reimagining The Image By B.Prabakaran
Some years back Gopal Guru wrote an article on how Dalits especially lower middleclass and middle class Dalits have understood Ambedkar and in what form have they established him. With this background of spate of recent attacks, equally important and pertinent question to ask now would be how Ambedkar has been understood in the larger social arena and what he really means to them?
Winemaker Paul Hobbs, Repeat Offender, Violates Agreements Again By Shepherd Bliss
San Francisco's North Bay large winemakers routinely violate the weak rules regarding their practices and are seldom fined, according to the daily Press Democrat, March 11, 2015. Those rules need to be enforced and strengthened, especially as we enter an even more-dry drought
22 March, 2015
Why are so few talking about coal's impact on already scarce water resources? Despite the global water crisis being identified as the top risk to people across the globe, very few are taking a stand to protect dwindling water resources from the huge planned global growth of coal-fired power stations
The "Naturalness" Of The Commons By David de Ugarte
Agricultural and hunting commons are the original form of ownership and work, long prior to State property and private property... and for the time being, the most persistent: commons institutions remained vigorous throughout the world up through the Middle Ages and resisted Modernity with relative strength until the "amortization" of nineteenth-century liberalism forced them to evolve into modern cooperativism. But don't be fooled: even today, there are large European regions, like Galicia, where more of the 25% of the territory is made up of common lands. We have always been surrounded by the commons and by community values. Our culture kept more than just the formula for us
Food Democracy South And North: From Food Sovereignty To Transition Initiatives By Olivier De Schutter
People seek to co-design food systems, to participate in shaping them, to recapture them. We were familiar with the slogan of workplace democracy; we must now open up our eyes to food democracy
Only Less Will Do By Richard Heinberg
As we collide with Earth's limits, many people's first reflex response will be to try to find someone to blame. The result could be wars and witch-hunts. But social and international conflict will only deepen our misery. One thing that could help would be the widely disseminated knowledge that our predicament is mostly the result of increasing human numbers and increasing appetites confronting disappearing resources, and that only cooperative self-limitation will avert a fight to the bitter end. We can learn; history shows that. But in this instance we need to learn fast
Why The Western Alliance Is Ending By Eric Zuesse
It's well-known that only aristocrats profit from wars. And O'Bomba represents them just as much as his Republican 'opposition' do. But, now, even the aristocrats in other nations are increasingly abandoning him. All he evidently still has going for him is liberal and Democratic fools in the United States, who haven't yet figured out that he's a Manchurian candidate, Trojan horse, 'Democrat,' who (like the Clintons) would have FDR twisting in his grave if only he saw this. Fortunately, Roosevelt isn't around to see it
Netanyahu Victory, Saudi Arabia And Iran By G. Asgar Mitha
The failure of the N-talks and Iran not getting the concessions - economic, easing sanctions and political - it is seeking on its terms is that the US, Israel and EU3 may well start a catastrophic war in the Middle East, likely between Iran and ISIS. If it wins, then certainly Iran will be recognized as the balancing force in the Middle East - a defeat for both Israel and Saudi Arabia
What Do The Opponents Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran Really Want? By Dr. John Duke Anthony
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is once again in Switzerland with his British, Chinese, French, German, and Russian counterparts to continue negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Whether the respective diplomatic and national security negotiators will succeed remains to be seen. To be sure, a mutually acceptable agreement with Iran by six among the world's most powerful and influential nations, on one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other, is no small matter. In substance as well as in procedure and desired outcome, the goals - ensuring that Iran does not produce a nuclear bomb and, to that end, agreeing on as intrusive a nature and range of inspections as any in history - are as laudable as they are in many ways timely, urgent, and necessary
Babloo Loitongbam: Three Decades Of Building Human Rights Solidarity An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam By Abhay Kumar
An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam, pre-eminent human rights activist, who for the past three decades is striving hard to bring justice for those in North East India whose rights are being violated on a daily basis especially under the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
On Tuesday 17th March, Violent clashes erupted between Iranian security forces and Ahwazi Arab civilians after the end of the football match between Foulad Al-Ahwaz FC and Al-Hilal Saudi FC. One young fan has allegedly been shot dead by the Iranian anti-riot forces who used live ammunition targeting Ahwazi fans
Condemn Acquittal Of 16 PAC Personnel Accused In The Hashimpura Massacre By People's Union for Democratic Rights
On 22 May 1987, PAC personnel of UP reached Hashimpura, Meerut, took away about 50 Muslim men from a crowd outside a mosque, shot dead at least 42 of the men, and threw their bodies into a canal. On 21 March 2015, a Delhi Sessions Court accepted that the PAC personnel had committed these murders, but acquitted the policemen charged on account of insufficient evidence. Twenty eight years after the brutal massacre of Muslims by state forces, the guilty in uniform have not been identified and are roaming free
21 March, 2015
Ban Ki-moon's special envoy on climate change voiced support for the fossil fuel divestment movement at an event in London on Friday. Mary Robinson, leading climate justice campaigner and former president of Ireland, said it was "very interesting" to see the movement grow in impact. For any fund, "it is almost a due diligence requirement" to consider ending investment in dirty energy companies, she said
Geoengineering May Backfire, Find Scientists By Countercurrents.org
To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are proposals involving using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. But a new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters
The Messages From Israel's Election By Ilan Pappe
The conclusion for the international community should be clear now. Only decolonization of the settler state can lead to reconciliation. And the only way to kick off this decolonization is by employing the same means exercised against the other long-standing settler state of the twentieth century: apartheid South Africa
Russia Under Attack By Paul Craig Roberts
While Washington works assiduously to undermine the Minsk agreement that German chancellor Merkel and French president Hollande achieved in order to halt the military conflict in Ukraine, Washington has sent Victoria Nuland to Armenia to organize a "color revolution" or coup there, has sent Richard Miles as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to do the same there, and has sent Pamela Spratlen as ambassador to Uzbekistan to purchase that government's allegiance away from Russia. The result would be to break up the Collective Security Treaty Organization and present Russia and China with destabilization where they can least afford it
Europe: Old Friendships, Hesitant Alliances By Gaither Stewart
You can't ignore the reality that perhaps never before has a fine knowledge of geography been more important than today. It is a geographical fact that Eurasia exists. However any gung ho American neocon policy that aims at American control over that vast area rings like an Earth power claiming control, or aspiring to the control of, say, the planet Uranus. Fortunately, Europe understands the idiocy of neocon belief in America's invincibility and Exceptionalism ... or perhaps Europe is finally beginning to understand
Opposing War With A Smile By David Swanson
Big changes will be needed in our politics, our economy, our energy use, our culture, and in the stories we tell each other about the world. But these changes can come step-by-step and advance self-aware toward complete replacement of the war system with a peace system. Attempting such a change, which is in some ways well underway already, can hardly be less sensible than the knowing failure of war
The Collapse Of French Intellectual Diversity By Andre Vltchek
If you think that France is not as much a police state, as the UK or the US, think twice. Heavily armed military and police are visible at all train stations and many intersections, even at some narrow alleys. Internet providers are openly spying on their costumers. Mass media is self-censoring its reports. The regime's propaganda is in "top gear". But the people of France, at least the great majority of them, believe that they live in an 'open and democratic society.' If asked, they cannot prove it; they have no arguments. They are simply told that they are free, and so they believe it
The Great GMO Legitimation Crisis By Colin Todhunter
Author of 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' Steven Druker recently talked of how back in the seventies a group of molecular biologists formed part of a scientific elite that sought to allay fears about genetic engineering by putting a positive spin on it. At the same time, critics of this emerging technology were increasingly depicted as being little more than non-scientists who expressed ignorant but well-meaning concerns about science and genetic engineering. This continues today, but the attacks on critics are becoming more vicious
From Basic Income To Social Dividends: Sharing The Value Of Common Resources By Rajesh Makwana
It's time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part IV By Jon V Kofas
The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan's Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate
Public Hero: Paying For Honesty By S.G.Vombatkere
One hopes that Ravi's death will trigger a wave of honest officials and public-spirited citizens who will support each other in the best interest of the people of our sovereign socialist secular democratic Republic
The Maharashra Beef Ban Is Unconstitutional By Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights
The CPDR holds that the Maharashtra Animal Protection (Amendment) Act, 1995 is not in consonance with Article 48 when this is viewed in conjunction with the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. This Act is not even based on Hindu religious faith. Contrary to Hinduism, which is a conglomerate of beliefs and faiths aimed at achieving spiritual salvation, the ideology of the majority in the Maharashtra Assembly that enacted this law in 1995 is that of Hindutva, which is aimed at attaining political power, and is the Indian variant of Nazism. The Act is aimed at depriving the Other of her livelihood and way of life, which must be condemned by all those who stand for pluralism, secularism and democratic rights
The Dimapur Lynch Mob And Violence Of Hurt Sentiments By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
While community politics creates unbridgeable walls between citizens, the fluidity of opportunities under modernity generates another world outside communities. The man killed by the Naga mob in Dimapur was actually married to a Naga woman. Their girl child, half Naga-half Cachharree Muslim, and hence neither Naga, nor Cachharee Muslim, faces an uncertain future. It depends crucially on the future of democracy in the country whether she spends her life in trauma in the barrenness of no-man's land between communities, or she grows up to live full life of a citizen without fear, hatred and suspicion
Documenting Hate And Communal Violence Under The Modi Regime By John Dayal
The 300 days have also seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rightsorganizations and Rights Defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and the systems if the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act and the Passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, Fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. This report is focused on issues of communally targeted violence and the politics of hate and divisiveness that emanates from a thesis of religious nationalism
Progress Made But Work Remains On Firewalling Health Policy From Tobacco Industry By Shobha Shukla
Considerable progress has been made in different countries globally in protecting public health policy from tobacco industry interference, but certainly lot more work needs to be done. 2012 World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) Declaration called on all governments to establish a national coordinating mechanism of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which is fully firewalled from the tobacco industry
South Asian region has very high levels of tobacco use, and thus not surprisingly, rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other tobacco related illnesses rage high. Nepal is in spotlight in South Asian region by demonstrating high commitment to tobacco control and also acting on the ground! Recognizing Nepal's leadership, the country was awarded the prestigious 'Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control' at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH 2015)
20 March, 2015
Crosscurrents By Kathy Kelly
By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee
To Survive, We Must Act Now On Global Warming By Lionel Anet
To ensure that our offspring can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that's to have a worldwide united action to stop that dangerous warming. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth;we must showthe unavoidable disaster they will face in pursuing this ridicules goal. They must see their wealth will be useless in the future on our lifeless planet
Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe By The Danish Pugwash Group
The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe
19 March, 2015
Unless Obama can summon up the will and the courage to publicly tell Israel that enough is enough and then back his words with actions, the answer to Lerman's question is that nobody can stop Netanyahu advancing the doomsday clock. My guess is that Obama will wash his hands of the conflict and walk away from it. In that event he'll deserve a place in history as the American president who gave Zionism the green light to take the region and possibly the whole world to hell. I hope, Mr. President, that I am wrong about you and your intentions
Israel Votes Apartheid By Neve Gordon
Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu's secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier's votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center). The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid
Israelis Vote To Abandon All Pretence Of Seeking Peace By Dan Glazebrook
Israelis went to the polls the other day in an election which, defying all predictions, saw the 'left-wing' of Zionism - genocide with a human face - soundly beaten by its more honest 'right wing', whose commitment to the total eradication of the Palestinians as any kind of political entity is openly stated
Netanyahu Victory Opens Door For One-State Solution By Francis Boyle
Before the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988, the position of the Palestine National Council and the Palestine Liberation Organization was that there should be only one, democratic and secular state for the entire mandate for Palestine, which would include Israel within it. It was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat himself who encouraged the Palestine National Council to accept the two-state solution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988. After 27 years of fruitlessly trying to pursue a two-state solution, it is now time for the Palestine National Council and the PLO to reconsider their options
On Wednesday, March 18th, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of Ukraine -- who was selected for that post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the U.S. coup that installed him into this office -- told his cabinet meeting, "Our goal is to regain control of Donetsk and Lugansk." Those are the two districts comprising Donbass, the self-proclaimed independent region of Ukraine, which now calls itself "The People's Republic" and sometimes "Novorossiya," and which rejects the coup and its coup-imposed Government
Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator's forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin's defense of Crimeans' democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal
Countries Agree On UN Plan In Sendai To Save Lives From Disasters By Megan Darby
Twelve hours behind schedule, 187 countries agreed a deal in Sendai on Wednesday to reduce death and economic damage from natural disasters.The Sendai Framework set seven targets and four priorities for the next fifteen years. These include plans to "substantially reduce" loss of life from 2005-15 levels in 2020-30 and to reduce economic losses as a proportion of global GDP by 2030
The time has come for the Indian Railways to seize the day, and scale up its investment in solar power
1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of "We the People"
'Islamic State' As A Western Phenomenon? Reimagining The IS Debate By Ramzy Baroud
No matter how one attempts to wrangle with the so-called 'Islamic State' (IS) rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up
The Veggie Pride Talk I Didn't Give By Mickey Z.
For the first time in many years, I've declined an offer to be the lead speaker at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC's Union Square Park. I learned the hard way that although the cheers have been loud, the local vegan/animal rights scene wasn't actually hearing me. Since I've opted to no longer howl into an echo chamber, I'll share my thoughts here instead
Ahwazis Call The Amnesty International To Urge Iran To Stop Persecution By Amir Saedi
Ahwazi Community in the UK demonstrated in front of the Amnesty International on Tuesday 17 March 2015 against the persecution of the Arabs by the Iranian regime. Following the protest a group of Ahwazi activists met with Mrs Hassiba Hadh Sahraoui, the Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa Programme
Condemn The Gang-Rape In Nadia And Continuing Attacks On Christians By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR expresses outrage at the gang-rape of a 71 year old nun by a gang of "dacoits" inside a convent in Gangnapur village, Nadia district, West Bengal on 14th March 2015. The men reportedly raided and desecrated the convent before taking away 12 lakhs.Clearly, the motive was not merely to rob and decamp but to punish the school and the community through this horrendous gang-rape. In this connection, PUDR wishes to draw attention to the disturbing trend of attacks on Christians, including their institutions and places of worship, in recent times
The Hindutva Algebra Of Nation-Making By Braj Ranjan Mani
Remembering Martin Niemoller's famous poem, I am tempted to think that if Martin had been an Indian--alive today--he would certainly have scribbled something like the following
Hold Tobacco Industry Liable: Turn The Cost-Benefit Ratio Upside Down By Shobha Shukla
WHO FCTC Article 19 envisions a world where governments hold the power to protect people from harmful products like tobacco, can recover the costs of treating tobacco-related disease from the tobacco industry, and can use their legal systems to ensure their right to do so
18 March, 2015
Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed victory after a closely contested national election in Israel. According to unofficial figures released by the Israeli election committee, Netanyahu's Likud Party has won at least 29 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, putting it in a strong position to form a ruling coalition. Likud's main challenger, the Zionist Union, won 24 seats. Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog has called Netanyahu to concede defeat. President Reuven Rivlin, a longtime Likud loyalist, will designate Netanyahu to form the next government once the distribution of seats is finalized among the ten parties that reached the threshold of 3.25 percent of the vote
Why I'm Relieved Netanyahu Won By Ali Abunimah
The Israeli Jewish public's choice to re-elect Netanyahu should make it clear to people around the world that Israel does not seek peace and does not seek justice. It will continue to oppress and ethnically cleanse Palestinians until it is stopped. Negotiating with such a regime is pointless when its power over its victims remains vast and unchecked. The message we should take away is simple: the proper treatment for a polity committed to occupation, apartheid and ethno-racial supremacy is to isolate it until it recognizes that it must abandon those commitments. Palestinians have asked the world to do that through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Netanyahu makes the case a little easier, so it's time to step it up
Thousands March In Caracas Protesting US Interference,Solidarity Concert In Havana By Countercurrents.org
In the face of imperialist intervention Venezuelan people are mobilizing themselves. Thousands of citizens in capital Caracas have joined in marches protesting US interference in Venezuela. Venezuelan social movements took to the streets to oppose US aggression. Over 100,000 Venezuelans were mobilized throughout the country for a series of national military exercises in defense of their national sovereignty. A contingent of Russian soldiers and naval craft participated in the exercise. And, thousands of Cubans gathered at the University of Havana's Grand Stairway to express their unconditional solidarity with Venezuela and opposition to US aggression
Latin America again sets example of solidarity and unity against imperialist intervention as the Empire threatens Venezuela with sanctions. In this moment of anti-imperialist struggle, Fidel Castro expresses solidarity to Venezuela
Writer and researcher Colin Todhunter takes apart the arguments of pro-GMO lobbyist Anthony Trewavas
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part III By Jon V Kofas
Can Democracy Be Viable with a Wide Gap between Rich and Poor?
Marijuana: Legalize--Don't Advertise By William John Cox
The War on Drugs has proven to be a monstrous mistake resulting in the waste of a trillion dollars and the shameful criminal conviction and incarceration of thousands of Americans. While the end to drug prohibition may not be entirely possible, the more limited movement to decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana is gaining momentum. Those who support ending drug prohibition, but continue to believe drug use is harmful, have the responsibility to find ways to avoid the advertising and promotion of legalized marijuana
Two distinguished Ahwazi former prisoners named "Ramadan Nasseri" and "Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari" in their interviews with human rights organizations and Arab Media agencies revealed flagrant human rights violations that the Iranian occupying government has exercised against Ahwazi Arab prisoners in Al-Ahwaz
Doms In Varanasi Seek Justice Through Honorable Rehabilitation By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Domraj often come in mythologies and they continue to do the task of burning dead bodies at the Ghats and cleaning human excreta in the city. Most of the land meant for them is already occupied and big ghats have erupted on the bank. Nothing has changed for them. In fact, they reflect the criminal civilization which kept them subjugated for thousands of years and the independence that we got in 1947 has no meaning for them as the community remains untouchables among untouchables absolutely ostracized and thoroughly disenfranchised in the holy city
Where There Is A Will There Is A Way: Teeja Devi By Shobha Shukla
According to Teeja, "There has been a lot of change in my life since the time I came to this village as a child bride. Women are in a better position today to improve their lives and also to fight for their rights, although I have been doing that from the very beginning. From personal experiences I can say that women have the capacity to fight for their rights. But unless they come out of their houses, meet other people, and voice their opinions, they will not be able to progress. I am just literate enough to sign my name but I am very much aware of my and other people's rights and am ready to fight for them
No Country For Art? By Arshie Qureshi
Call it official High headedness or the apathy of the people, anyone who watched the vandalism at art gallery in Kashmir last month will point to you the underlying reality about art ignorance in the valley. It almost seems ironical that on one hand we dwell in a part of the world which is historically a crucible of rich cultural heritage, merging a strong sense of mysticism with the delicacies of nature. A place where everything manifests the divinity. And on the other hand, a man with a clueless look on his face frantically drags the delicate figurine out of the gallery and smashes it without a pang of remorse
17 March, 2015
Nearly a quarter of damages wrought by natural disasters on the developing world are borne by the agricultural sector, finds a new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) study released in Sendai, Japan on March 17, 2015 at the UN World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction. $70 billion in damages to crops and livestock over a 10 year period
While the whole country was celebrating Holi, a joyous festival of colours, three farmers that were contemplating suicide in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh went ahead and took their own lives. One of them, wearing the same colour soaked dress he had celebrated the festival in, hung himself to a tree
Agricultural Crisis And Remedial Pathways For India By Dr Sunny Sandhu
NaMo model of development has already spelt doom for the farmers , its clear that its pro corporate and anti farmer government , like the previous government as well . Changing of Land laws in favor of corporates is the start . GM crops are being cleared at an alarming rate . Lip service is being done to promote organic and natural farming . We the youth of india has to rise to this toxic challenge and ensure to safeguard our ecosystems , biodiversity , bhoomi , river goddesses and beej (seeds)
Nandigram today is a sad picture of rejection. Women, who were the integral part of the movement and were at the forefront of the anti-acquistion stir that eventually catapulted the Trinamool Congress into power in West Bengal are now confined to their homes and are subjected to all kind of oppression
Cropping Africa's Wet Savannas Would Bring High Environmental Costs By Countercurrents.org
Converting Africa's wet savannas into farmland would come at a high environmental cost and, in some cases, fail to meet existing standards for renewable fuels, finds a new report published in the journal Nature Climate Change. With the global population rising, Africa's vast wet savannas have been targeted as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at low environmental costs
An Open Letter To Subramanian Swamy By Shehzad Poonawalla
Mr.Swamy, you continue to remain an accused out on bail and the law will catch up with you eventually, notwithstanding the Delhi Police dragging its feet. The kind of politics you subscribe to is also subject to the law of diminishing returns in the long run. Even Mr. Modi has begun to realize that and every now and then, he and his good friend "Barack" throw in a word of caution, for your ilk, even if it is only for symbolism. Frankly, Harvard can and did prevent you from wearing its name. I only wish secular, tolerant Hindus and Indians could have had that authority and choice too
Book Review: The Dispensable Nation - American Foreign Policy in Retreat By Vali Nasr Reviewed By Jim Miles
U.S. foreign policy is not in retreat, perhaps in tatters and rags, wrapped in a flag stained in the blood of far too many millions of people around the world. Works such as "The Dispensable Nation" simply highlight the arrogance and hubris of an empire in decline
Obama And The 'News' Media Continue To Falsify About Obamacare By Eric Zuesse
This "universal healthcare" thing is an ongoing lie from Obama, because there is no way that the plan that he proposed, nor the one that he selected Senator Max Baucus to design to meet his intentions and ram through Congress, could even possibly produce a 100% insureds-rate, or "universal coverage." The rest of the industrialized world has it (and has better healthcare at lower prices), but we still don't
Stratfor: "US Aims To Prevent A German-Russian Alliance" By German Economic News
The head of the private intelligence agency Stratfor has for the first time publicly said that the US government considers to be its overriding strategic objective the prevention of a German-Russian alliance. Blocking that alliance is the only way to prevent an alternative world power capable of challenging extension of the American position of being the world's lone superpower
In the end, maybe the Big Dick School of Patriotism comes down to this: we embrace the idea of an all-powerful military because at a time when the world seems such a fragile and hostile place, if even our military won't keep us safe, who will? Unless there just might be a better way to go through the world than by carrying a big dick?
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy : PART II By Jon V Kofas
Attitudes of the Rich toward the Poor and Working Poor
Each understands according To things misunderstood: A shadow-world in dumb-show Where "evil" contends with "good."
Crisis In The AAP Casts Shadows On Civil-Society Meet On Alternative Politics By Abhay Kumar
Linking the current contestation in the AAP to its inability to take a firm stance on secularism, senior advocate and president of PUCL (Delhi), N. D. Pancholi pulled up AAP for raising the "divisive" slogan of Vandre Matram, which, in his view, had a major contribution to the partition of the country. 'Vande Matram creates suspicion among Muslims,' Pancholi contended
Is it time to have few more paid/payable (read credible) news channels in various regional languages, which can survive with contributions from the subscribers?
16 March, 2015
Poor countries should receive between US$400 billion and US$2 trillion per year from rich countries by 2050 to help them cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fight climate crisis, finds a new paper published on March 16, 2015 by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science
The American Government's Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
The American Government's biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine -- and it's even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that's totally unnecessary for America's national-security, and that actually places all of our nation's security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats ("oligarchs") in both the U.S. and Ukraine -- not for any real reasons of the American people, at all
The Misrepresentation Of Israeli Aggression As Self-Defense By Matt Peppe
The media and the public will uncritically support the position of American and Israeli power. Thousands of Palestinians will be indiscriminately killed, but not because Israel is defending itself. Palestinians will be killed because the U.S. government refuses to protect them from a belligerent and aggressive regime, and refuses even to recognize their right to protect themselves
The Realpolitik Of Revolution By William T. Hathaway
What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution
Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman In America By Chris Hedges
Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bete noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party
Truth Is Our Country By Paul Craig Roberts
Press Club Of Mexico Awards Paul Craig Roberts International Medal For Journalism Excellence
An Ahwazi Arab street vendor by the name of Younes Asakere from Mohammareh city has set himself on fire in protest against the action of the Occupying municipal officials who confiscated his small grocer's stall
Religion, Politics And Society: A Birds Eye View By Ram Puniyani
What has religion to do with politics? What has violence to do with religion? And how does the expression of major political agenda shape itself in contemporary times? Roughly speaking it seems that the religion is being used as a cover for many a political phenomenon. This seems to be the observation more so from South Asian-West Asian perspective
Veloor Swaminathan is no more. He left Plachimada forever on March 14, 2015. Swaminathan along with Mylamma were the initial foundations of the historic struggle of Plachimada in Kerala. The struggle initiated by a small group of these Adivasis with Dalits and farmers forced one of the largest corporate powers in the world, Coca Cola to bend down and quit Plachimada. If anybody asks, how did such a small force of marginalised people achieve such a herculean task, I would say, study Mylamma and Swaminathan, for any strategy for any people's movement raising issues of marginalisation
Another Church Attacked In Haryana: Holy Cross Replaced With A Hanuman Idol By Shehzad Poonawalla
Petition registered with NCM (National Commission for Minorities) To draw attention to and direct action on the constant spree of attacks and vandalism on churches (7th in 4 months) including the latest one in Kaimri village near Hisar, Haryana where the Holy Cross was replaced with a Hanuman Idol
Rapist Mukesh Singh Is Not Alone In Denigrating Women By Shamsul Islam
It is true that Mukesh made reprehensible statements about women in general and rape victim in particular. It is debatable whether banning a film containing such statements is the solution but fact is that rapist Mukesh is not alone in holding male chauvinistic views denigrating women.India is flooded with popular religious literature denigrating women. Geeta Press based in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, is the largest supplier of this kind of literature. It publishes literature espousing the 'Hindu' way of life for women on a very large scale. The low-priced publications are available throughout the country, especially the Hindi belt, and are even sold through Government allotted stalls at railway stations and government roadways stands
On The Interrelationship Between Bovine And Human Beings By Subhash Gatade
As things stand today it appears that the people in power seem to be more concerned with making the desi-videsi moneybags happy to maintain a conducive atmosphere for bringing in new investments and also catering to 'sentiments' of a dominant section of people around cow. It is just another way to say that while human beings will have to wait but the bovine cannot
Surveillance Cameras In Classrooms: Trust V/S Security By Ms.Swaleha Sindhi
Each student brings knowledge to the school and the schools must validate their ideas, this will encourage students of different levels of ability to keep sharing their knowledge. Students must be provided a safe space in which they can grow, thrive, question, analyse, think critically, and take risks. Schools can have their own ways of monitoring discipline by making the discipline incharges or the school Principals do patrolling in the corridor while the classes are going on. Camera is just another thing for students (especially adolescents) to play with
15 March, 2015
During the past few days, German Economic News has specifically identified the following EU nations that are strongly opposed to this supplying of weapons to Ukraine: Spain, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, France, and Slovakia. Furthermore, Italy is increasing its cooperation with Russia
If I had to express my hope in one sentence it would be this. A fourth term as prime minister for Netanyahu would see Israel becoming more and more isolated and could improve the chances of Western governments being moved to use the leverage they have to cause the Zionist (not Jewish) state to end its defiance of international law and denial of the Palestinian claim for justice. Another way to put it would be to say Netanyahu is a disaster for Zionism so let's have more of him
International Court, Hague, Rules in Favor of Ecuador in its Case Against U.S. Oil Giant, Chevron By Robert Barsocchini
The International Court of Justice (CIJ) ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-based oil company Chevron US $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld. The money will benefit about 30,000 Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous
China's Dirty Coal Plants Face Climate Risk, Investors Warned By Megan Darby
Many of China's dirtiest coal plants could be forced to close early as regulations to curb greenhouse gases, air pollution and water stress tighten. That is the outlook described in the most comprehensive assessment to date of the risk of "stranded assets" to investors in coal power worldwide. Seven of the 10 companies with the biggest portfolios of "subcritical" coal plants - the least efficient kind - are Chinese, according to research from Oxford University. The US is next, taking six of the top 20 slots
47 Years Ago In My Lai: 'We Were There To Kill Ideology' By Mickey Z.
Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children. Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in. With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23. Never forget, comrades: This is how we can choose to be
A Blueprint For Ending War By World Beyond War
It is no longer sufficient to end a particular war or particular weapons system if we want peace. The entire cultural complex of the War System must be replaced with a different system for managing conflict. Fortunately, as we shall see, such a system is already developing in the real world. The War System is a choice. The gate to the iron cage is, in fact, open and we can walk out whenever we choose
With the 51 day Israeli attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014 that killed over 2,200, wounded 11,000, destroyed 20,000 homes and displaced 500,000, the closing to humanitarian organizations of the border with Gaza by the Egyptian government, continuing Israeli attacks on fishermen and others, and the lack of international aid through UNWRA for the rebuilding of Gaza, the international Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition has decided to again challenge Israel's naval blockade of Gaza in an effort to gain publicity for the critical necessity of ending the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the isolation of the people of Gaza
The Politics of Extinction By William deBuys
Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy By Jon V Kofas
The great challenge of our time is social and geographic inequality that threatens not only the system of capitalism creating inequality, but the democratic political regime under which capitalism has thrived in the last one hundred years
Review: "Genocide In Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration Of AModern State" By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani By Dr Gideon Polya
Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani have published "Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State" , a carefully documented, must-read account of the Zionist-backed US Alliance destruction of Iraq and the killing of millions of Iraqis over the last quarter century for oil, US hegemony and for military dominance of the Middle East by a nuclear-armed, genocidally racist Apartheid Israel. This is a damning case that everyone should read to prevent recurrence (history ignored yields history repeated) and for ultimate legal recourse and Nuremberg-style justice for the Iraqi people
Afzal Guru's Mortal Remains Must Reach His Family By Dr. Paramjit Singh Sahni & Shobha Aggarwal
In all situations the body of the deceased must reach the family. This alone would satisfy and soothe the collective conscience of the society
Release Of Political Detenues By Abdul Majid Zargar
If India hopes to achieve an acceptable political solution to the long festering problem then it is imperative that all political prisoners are set free and a congenial & conducive atmosphere prepared for holding talks with all the stake-holders. That was also stated by the group of interlocutors appointed by Govt. Of India in 2010 to explore a political solution to the issue
The Two Conferences Of Jammu And Kashmir By Yasir Altaf Zargar
In Jammu and Kashmir both the conference's had different aspiration for J&K'S status. The Muslim conference was favouring joining Pakistan while national conference was opposing it
AAP's Divide And Rule By Satya Sagar
Whatever potential AAP has, for genuine countrywide transformation, on the class or caste front, cannot be achieved by mechanically expanding the Delhi model across the national landscape like a rubber mask. That will only result in the hasty induction of a lot of people wearing the mask of Kejriwal, without possessing any of his talents while retaining at least a few of his vices! Rather, the process will have to be an organic one, with dozens and scores of local Kejriwals springing up from the grassroots, taking up the issues that AAP has raised in Delhi but with both the causes and methods tailored to context - what I would call the 'Apne AAP' movement. Every anonymous volunteer who is part of AAP, and indeed its core strength, has the potential to be a Kejriwal, YY or PB
Why Science Is Closer To Morality Than Religion By Amritanshu Pandey
India's fundamentalist moral brigade has shifted gears since the advent of Acche Din, and we are subject to daily reports of the moral police's enthusiasm, derived largely from our substantial pool of religion and culture. In this regard India is no different to religious societies around the world, where faith and its institutions provide the basis for our moral compass. If your dominant religion disavows of homosexuality, for example, then it can be guaranteed that your society's outlook will be that homosexuality is immoral
Kanshiram Declassed Ambedkarite Politics By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Understand Kanshiram's mantra that key to power come from the poor and they are vast and we need to change our perceptions and strengthen their struggle and leadership. We can not ask people to sacrifice their lives for 'leaders'. Those time have gone. Give space as you want elsewhere and provide a healing touch to people where community leaders have not yet reached
14 March, 2015
Having reached a tenuous peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia (without the US), Germany is realizing and announcing that, indeed, the US does not seem intent on peace. McClatchy reports that German government officials have "recently referred to U.S. statements of Russian involvement in the Ukraine fighting as 'dangerous propaganda'". In light of US propaganda and military support for Kiev, Germany even asked outright whether "the Americans want to sabotage the European mediation attempts in Ukraine led by Chancellor Merkel?"
On this video from Fox 'News': At 3:30, Lou Dobbs asks the Fox Noise military analyst: "What do you expect" in Ukraine? At 3:35 he answers: "In the Ukraine, the only way that the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians ... killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags."
Fishermen, Are They Criminals? An Open Letter To Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka And India By Ravi Nitesh
I demand Sri Lankan PM to express his apology over the statement to shoot Indian fishermen because it was against humanitarian approach, against UN sea laws and most importantly against the unity of fishermen. He must apologise that he see fishermen not as 'criminals'. He must also apologise to people of Sri Lanka that he doesn't believe what he said is a common belief of Sri Lanka's people and fishermen. We know that even fishermen of Sri Lanka will never support his statement
Feeding A Warmer, Riskier World By Jose Graziano da Silva
Artificial meat. Indoor aquaculture. Vertical farms. Irrigation drones. Once in the realm of science fiction, these are now fact. Food production is going high-tech, at least in some places. But the vast majority of the world's farmers still face that old, fundamental fact: Their crops, their very livelihoods, depend on how Mother Nature treats them. Over 80 percent of world agriculture today remains dependent on the rains, just as it did 10,000 years ago
Showing Chicago a whole different concept of governing, and an appreciation for the people of our city, Chuy Garcia came to Logan Square on March 12th and received a enthusiastic welcome from the several hundred people who turned out to greet him and support his campaign for Mayor
With Enemies Like This, Imperialism Doesn't Need Friends By Dan Glazebrook
'Can non-Europeans Think?' by Hamid Dabashi declares the end of the colonial domination of knowledge, but the author effectively aligns himself with the West's very real war against the developing world
Venezuela - A Threat? By Chandra Muzaffar
So far the US has not provided any tangible evidence of how Venezuelan officials have violated human rights or indulged in public corruption. Its reckless allegations have been effectively refuted by the Caracas government. Even leaders from other Latin American countries have condemned the statements emanating from Washington DC
There were astronomers like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, mathematicians like Bhaskara I and Baudhayana, physicians like Charaka and surgeons like Sushrutha in ancient India, but the work of these men of science has nothing to do with Hinduism or Hindutva. It is absurd, therefore, of Hindutva politicians to associate the work of these scientists with "Hinduism" or "Hindutva" and quite disgraceful of them to claim credit for the ingenuity, hard work and courageous assertions of ancient Indian scientists, many of whom, like the astronomer Aryabhata, had to face the ire of Brahminical orthodoxy to make these assertions
Frontier, probably, the thinnest and the most-plain appearing English weekly from Kolkata, a city with protest and politics, resistance and revolution faces an imminent threat of eviction
13 March, 2015
Danger Of War With Russia Grows As US Sends Military Equipement To Ukraine By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier
Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO's ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power. The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry
Ukraine's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Declares War On Russia By Eric Zuesse
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, "Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation. Hostile countries over the past decade have spent billions of dollars rearming it."
Oil Demand Could Fall Without Climate Solution, Warns Shell By Ed King
Demand for oil and gas could fall if major producers fail to find economically viable and publicly acceptable ways of cutting their climate-warming gas emissions, Shell has warned. The oil giant revealed its fears in its Strategic Report, released on March 12, 2015, telling investors that new climate change regulations "may result in project delays and higher costs."
Bangladesh To Use SERVIR Satellite-Based Flood Forecasting, Warning System By Janet Anderson
Bangladesh officials have announced plans to expand a satellite-based flood forecasting and warning system developed by SERVIR to aid an area where floodwaters inundate from 1/3 to 2/3 of the country annually, killing hundreds of people and affecting millions. The system, which relies on river level data provided by the Jason-2 satellite, last year provided the longest lead time for flood warnings ever produced in Bangladesh
Dissatisfaction With U.S. Government Soars By Eric Zuesse
The latest Gallup poll shows that even as Americans are more satisfied with the American economy, they are more dissatisfied with the government; and that this government-dissatisfaction is so high that for the first time while Gallup has been following this matter, the ratio of dissatisfaction with government is swamping the ratio of dissatisfaction with both of the other two matters that Americans are dissatisfied with: the economy, and unemployment
The CIA And America's Presidents: Some Rarely Discussed Truths Shaping Contemporary American Democracy By John Chuckman
When people write of America's secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone's being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President's case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end
The Growth Schism: Greater Israel At Odds With U.S Decline In The Middle East By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner
In an attempt to put Netanyahu's Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline
Secret History Of My Geography Teacher, Also Cofounder Of Hamas By Ramzy Baroud
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle
Ending sanctions on Cuba in the name of a new foreign policy while at the same time imposing sanctions on Venezuela because of supposed government repression is indeed laughable. It makes absolutely no sense if we take seriously the narrative on human rights and democracy peddled by the White House and echoed in the media. But it makes perfect sense if we view it as a cynical, realpolitik attempt to undermine the threat of a good example and a way of reestablishing American influence in the Caribbean through an increased presence in Cuba. Taking into account these factors, we can see there is no new, enlightened dawn in US policy, rather a switching of targets. It is, lamentably, business as usual
Unite! Let's Make Sure That Kandhamals Are Not Repeated By Medha Patkar
My friends, let me stop my speech by saying that it is time that the displaced people and the marginalized people come together as a strong force, so that these forms of injustice can be effectively dealt with in a united manner
In a shocking incident, over 30 Dalit and Adivasi students and activists were arrested this afternoon from Shastri Bhavan in New Delhi when they demanded to meet the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, over unfair budgetary allocations in education of Dalit and Adivasi students. At the time of the arrest, the delegation, including N Paul Diwakar, well-known Dalit activist and general secretary of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), were about to submit a Memorandum of Demands to the Minister asking for reallocation of funds. The activists were taken to Parliament Police station where another Dalit activist Beena Pallical was forcefully dragged taken inside the police station
Essential Elements That Can Give Rise To A New Kind Of Politics By Dr. Satinath Choudhary
It would have been ideal for all of legislators to continue to have equal power with no chief minister, ministers or deputy-ministers. Various legislators could join collectives interested in guiding various departments of the government. For different decisions different small collectives could be formed even in the same department. However, the decisions of the collectives would have to be approved by the whole legislature. In case there more than one collective dealing with the same issue, they can meet with each other to iron out their differences before or/and after they present their proposals to the full legislative body. Full legislature would be the supreme body to put final seal of approval on any issue or legislation
12 March, 2015
Over the past two months, Geneva offered two opportunities for governments to deepen their understanding of the interplay between human rights and climate action. The coming months will now be critical to determine whether, through the UN climate body and the Human Rights Council, states are willing to commit to take steps towards ensuring that climate policies address climate change in a way that promotes human rights at the same time
The Real Story Behind The Oil Price Collapse By Michael T. Klare
Those of you currently staying strong and paying close attention are probably already astonished that we're on the brink of social, economic, and environmental collapse. Hopefully, you're also telling everyone you know. But then what?
Stop The Fast Track To A Future Of Global Corporate Rule By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers
Several major international agreements are under negotiation which would greatly empower multinational corporations and the World Economic Forum is promoting a new model of global governance that creates a hybrid government-corporate structure. Humankind is proceeding on a path to global corporate rule where transnational corporations would not just influence public policy, they would write the policies and vote on them. The power of nation-states and people to determine their futures would be weakened in a system of corporate rule
Vietnam: Some History By Andy Piascik
Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with death so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the role we play in the world will have to come from us
Understanding Nelson Mandela's Complex Legacy Honors Him The Most By Doug Allen
It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed "the struggle is my life." In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses
Avigdor Lieberman, ISIS, And The Saudi Regime By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
A country pretending to share the same "values" as the U. S. and the other Western democracies allows itself a Foreign Minister who calls for the beheading of its own Palestinian citizens! In 2014, the Saudi Arabian regime beheaded 83 people. The beheadings of ISIS exceeds 100, while the dark figure may be much higher. Will the Israel government follow the advice of its foreign minister, and who will do the job?
Roots Of Modern Terrorism And Religious Fundamentalism By G. Asgar Mitha
Saudi Arabia and other Monarchist Arab Wahhabist countries have been natural economic allies of America and its European vassals as they are weak and in need of protection. America continues to support the Saudis in exporting their perverted religious dogma across the Muslim countries in order to breed religious intolerance, cruelty and terrorism. Some of the countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine have been war victims, others like Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt have survived upon American and Saudi aids. Iran is the only Muslim country where America and the Saudi monarchy have failed for exporting terrorism and religious extremism and both fear it as a regional power
If you see Iran through that left-Democratic lens, that is if you are opposed to Republican efforts to start yet another unnecessary catastrophic war, this one with Iran, I have a few ideas I'd like to run by you
Arab World: Political Disintegration And Search For Reason By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The Arab masses long for political change and a promising future based on peaceful co-existence with others. In view of the unstoppable cycle of sectarian killings and daily bloodbaths in so many Arab states - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and spill-over to other oil producing Arab nations - and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures - is the Arab world coming to its own end? The Arab rulers and the masses live and breathe in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented governance - the essence of Islamic system of governance. The worst is yet to come as the wars continue, surrender to foreign forces as there are no leaders to think of the future, no Arab armies to defend the people and no sustainable socio-economic infrastructures intact to support the masses
Sleepwalking Into World War Three? Why The Independent Media Is Vital By Colin Todhunter
The corporate media have a narrative and the truth does not fit into it. If this tells us anything it is that sites like the one you are reading this particular article on are essential for informing the public about the reality of the aggression that could be sleepwalking the world towards humanity's final war. And while the mainstream media might still be 'main', in as much as that is where most people still turn to for information, there is nothing to keep the alternative web-based media from becoming 'mainstream'
Understanding Women's Labour Book Review By Suparna Banerjee
This book is an analysis of the dialectic of women's labour and the processes of capital accumulation in Asian economies -- an analysis that blends empirical research with theoretical reflections. Indeed, one of the book's stated aims is to examine the relationship between Marxist political and economic theories with feminism, and the author offers theoretical corrections -- based on empirical data -- to Marx's and Proudhon's theories on women's labour and on women's roles in society
Kashmir's Polite, Mad Revolutionary, India's Bogeyman By Radha Surya
Two cheers for Indian democracy. For now the dust has settled. The Kashmir issue has dropped from the headlines of the Indian news media. The politicians and the deshbakts can return to the self-serving pretence about the decline of pro-azaadi sentiment in Kashmir. It's now back to believing that Kashmir is identical to every other Indian state and that its problems have to do with governance and development. No need to confront the troublesome fact that divided Kashmir lies at the heart of an international dispute
Of Masrat Alam Drama And Beyond By Dr. Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
Masrat Alam's row just seems a drama scripted by some hidden and veiled writers with Modi, (Prime Minister of India) Rajnath, (Home Minister) and Mufti Syed,(Chief Minister) as important characters. The drama has been played with Mufti's role as survivor, Avatar, and Messiah for the people of Kashmir and sensational with PM Modi's remarks "I share the opposition's aakrosh (anger)". While as Rajnath Singh, has attempted a new twist to the drama by asking a written report from the state government. The beginning of the drama is so sensational and twisting; God knows what would be the end
In response to beef ban law thousands of workers of Devnar abattoir (Mumbai), who will be losing their jobs came on the streets to protest against this move of the government (March 11). Many traders, from different religion also came to Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest this communal act of the Maharashtra Government. In a PIL filed in the Bombay High Court the petitioner argues that this ban on beef infringes on the fundamental right of citizens to choose meat of their choice is fundamental. The hope is that the society overcomes such abuse of 'identity issues' for political goals and lets the people have their own choices in matters of food habits, and let those who are making their living from this trade do so peacefully
The 'President' Of Egalitarian India By Aishik Chanda
Dressed in blue full-sleeve shirt and grey trousers, Sachin Prabhakar Sawant, excitedly explains his roadmap for an egalitarian India. An engineer by education, the Mira Road resident who is sitting on a dharna for over a year at Azad Maidan in south Bombay, declared himself the President of India on March 23, 2014. Since then, he has made a corner at Azad Maidan his home, demanding implementation of the constitution 'religiously'. Sawant, the President of Independent Candidates' Party (ICP), says he wants to establish Buddhist system in the country and destroy all forms of casteism, sectarianism and communalism from their roots
11 March, 2015
Just ahead of the four-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, five organizations have issued a message that the only way to avert climate disaster is by embracing a clean energy future. It was March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan earthquake caused a massive tsunami which triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and destroyed thousands of lives and livelihoods
Carbon Emissions Could Dramatically Increase Risk Of U.S. Megadroughts By Steve Cole & Leslie McCarthy
Droughts in the US Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. The study, published [in February] in the journal Science Advances, is based on projections from several climate models, including one sponsored by NASA. The research found continued increases in human-produced greenhouse gas emissions drives up the risk of severe droughts in these regions
New Carbon Accounting Method Proposed By Countercurrents.org
Consumption-based accounting, also known as carbon footprints, has been suggested as an alternative to today's production-based accounting. With carbon footprints, each country must account for all emissions that are caused by its final consumption -- regardless of where the goods were produced. This has been called a fairer way of measuring emissions, potentially avoiding so-called carbon leakage, where rich, developed countries can reduce their domestic emissions by shifting carbon-intensive production abroad
The political and military maneuvers now going on in the Ukraine have the potential of escalating out of control. If we don't understand the actual reality that has brought about this crisis there is no hope of being able to prevent this escalation. In order to understand this reality we must refrain from simple minded finger pointing at one side or the other and assigning complete responsibility for the crisis to one of the parties in the dispute, although one side may be disproportionately responsible
What we have is an extensive set of lies of omission: the Tribune and Sun-Times have not investigated the story, obviously hoping it would go away. Because of their inaction, it appears that there were hopes that it would not become an issue in the mayoral run-off. The mainstream media "dam" seems to be giving away, though, as activists and the alternative media in Chicago, including Substancenews.net, keep this issue alive. Whether it gets more fully into the mayoral campaign or not, police maleficence in Chicago--as well as across the United States--is going to continue to be challenged
Getting Serious About Terrorism By Andy Piascik
Last month, President Obama convened a summit at the White House to discuss terrorism. As could easily have been predicted, the focus was entirely on those the United States deems official enemies. Conversely and equally predictably, the two best and most obvious ways the United States can combat terrorism - stop doing it and stop giving arms, money and diplomatic cover to others who do - were not on the agenda
This past week, Laura Poitras's documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His "sole motive", he wrote, was "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes - the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge."
All capitals strive to be showcases, sure, but very few, or perhaps none, is as successful at blocking out its nation's true ugliness and failures. This sleight of hand, though, also works on many of the residents of this near perfect square inside a near perfect circle. The hell they've created keeps seeping in, however, and soon enough, it will overwhelm, if not explode, this Potemkin village of a city. This smug bubble will burst
Violence Against Women: Why We Keep Getting It Wrong By Robert J. Burrowes
With the passing of another International Women's Day, during which much attention around the world has again been focused on tackling violence against women, I would like to explain why none of the initiatives currently being proposed will achieve anything unless we acknowledge, and act on, the cause of this violence
Top 'News' Executives Suppress Key Facts; The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture. Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail
Feeding The Vultures, While Starving Agriculture: Capitalism's Great Indian Con-Trick By Colin Todhunter
India's development is being hijacked by the country's wealthy ruling class and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are now swooping. Meanwhile, the genuine wealth creators, the entrepreneurs who work the fields and have been custodians of the land and seeds for centuries, are being sold out to corporate interests whose only concern is to how best loot the economy
The influence in the news coverage at different times in the Middle East, illustrates that new media helped the people of Middle-East in getting their voices heard, and did help in advocacy efforts at times when state tried to block the access but at the same time everyone had eye on the developments taking place in that part of the world
Deprecate Lynching Of A Muslim Youth At Dimapur Of Nagaland By Lateef Mohammed Khan
It is Crime against Humanity based upon political motivation - Judiciary, State and Central Government are culpable
10 March, 2015
We humans are amazingly creative and resourceful and have emerged successfully from many dire situations. We can easily create this on the ground, while we work on the big problem of transferring from the negative emotional condition of the death culture- civilization- to the positive emotional condition of a life nurturing survival
Venezuela, A Security Threat, Declares US By Countercurrents.org
The US has declared Venezuela is a national security threat. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order on March 9, 2015 slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security". President Nicolas Maduro a few days ago revealed new evidence on the coup plot against his administration revealing that much of it was planned in the US
President Obama Picks Another Fight, This Time Venezuela By Eric Zuesse
The Obama Administration, which in 2009 provided the crucial assistance that enabled the progressive democratic President of Honduras to be overthrown and a junta of oligarchs to replace him; and which in 2014 perpetrated a bloody coup that replaced the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian equally corrupt Government, and thus sparked Ukraine's civil war against the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for Yanukovych; is now again trying to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro
Possibility Of Escape By Kathy Kelly
I'm here among women, some of whom, I've been told, are supposed to be "hardened criminals." Fellow activists incarcerated in men's prisons likewise concur that the system is futile, merciless and wrongheaded. Our jailers, I'm convinced, can see this. Men like Governor Rauner, it seems, can see it, or his advisers can. Where are the inflexible ones keeping women like Marlo isolated from and lost to the world, trembling for their future for the next five years? I would like to make an appeal to you, and to myself two months from now when I've left here and once more rejoined the polite society of these women's "inflexible jailers." I choose to believe that we can be moved and these women can escape. I am writing this, as many have written and will write, to see if we're easier to move than iron and stone
Far from the east coast metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, in the western region of Xinjiang (referred to as East Turkestan by Uyghurs), the Muslim Uyghur minority has long been struggling under the repressive rule of the Communist Party (CCP). The Uyghurs - who speak a Turkic language and have much more culturally in common with their Central Asian neighbours - want independence from China. For the CCP, who see itself as the guardian of the civilisation-state, this kind of 'separatism' is unacceptable: It poses an existential threat to China because its borders pre-date the modern nation-state system and any challenge to that could precipitate other territorial disputes that could make her like any other country - that's to say, arbitrary lines on a map
An Interview with Mona Oudeh an Ahwazi Arab activist
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, on average, US police piled up the bodies of 928 US citizens per year between 2003-2009 and 2011
So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It's been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue
If the United States is ever to become a democratic society, and if we are ever to enter the international community as a responsible party willing to wage peace instead of war, to foster cooperation and mutual aid rather than domination, we will have to account for the crimes of those who claim to act in our names like Kissinger. Our outrage at the crimes of murderous thugs who are official enemies like Pol Pot is not enough. A cabal of American mis-leaders from Kennedy on caused for far more Indochinese deaths than the Khmer Rouge, after all, and those responsible should be judged and treated accordingly
Australia's Sovereignty Severely Compromised For US-Israeli Designs By Dr. Daud Batchelor
As Australia's international standing has risen, the country's sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites:the disproportionately influential military-industrial complex and Zionist lobbies.Australia's sovereignty is being compromised by the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former PM Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we "have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war"
Transformation By Gaither Stewart
I return again and again to the Russian example because just as the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia set its stamp on the development of the idea of Socialism there (in the end making the greatest revolution of modern times), when the propitious moment arrives, when what was inexpressible becomes expressible, when events have created a universal mood of revolutionary discontent with the existing system, when tensions reach the boiling point, the American intelligentsia, together with the American wage earners and the growing, multiplying, ever angrier and, one hopes, awakening middle class, will rise against the capitalist system, salvage the positive parts of America and bring about that transformation I am speaking of
Fact Finding Report On Communal Violence in Bharuch District, Gujarat By PUCL
Today PUCL, Gujarat Submitted a fact finding Report to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), National Commission for Minorities, Chief Minister and Minister of Home and Revenue (Gujarat), Director General of Police (Gujarat) demanding urgent action in cases of Violation of Right to Life and Liberties, Right to livelihood of the affected people in the villages of Hansot Block, District Bharuch, Gujarat due to communal violence and ineffective/biased state action from December 2014 onwards
Women's emancipation entails changing the mindset, initiating revolution and bringing radical transformation in the ways contemporary capitalist patriarchal society operates. It demands meaningful understanding and interventions in day to day to struggles of women situated in different contextual background. Focusing on prejudices, stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes that have denied women of their constitutional or human rights is essential. The women's liberation movement in the modern Indian society needs to focus on the issues relating to struggle for substantive equality, freedom from violence and survival issues. Commercialization is not a solution; the answer lies in political and social mobilization around everyday issues relating to women lives on daily basis. The need is to strive for dignity and respect at the work place, within homes and public spaces and reimagining the new world order based on social justice
This film, 'India's Daughter', except for Mukesh Singh has nothing. Only Nirbhaya's mother is sole person who is countering the criminal and the lawyers. The criminals are in jail and the lawyer, specifically Mohan Sharma, is sitting in chair, very calmly, with the uniform, inside his own chamber, is spreading nothing but 'hatred' towards Nirbhaya! As a human being I can't accept this
Nation's Honour, 'IBIs' And The Dimapur Lynching By Bonojit Hussain
While there is little doubt that the mob lynching would not have been possible without complicity of the police force at various levels, Nagaland Chief Minister TR Zeliang in a kneejerk reaction has blamed social media users for the flare-up and the subsequent lynching. It would do well to both CM TR Zeliang and Naga society at large if he musters the courage to condemn and initiate action against the leaders of those civil society organizations that made libelous and false statements and calling for mob (in) justice
Hacking Consciousness: The Stanford University Video Series Reviewed by William T. Hathaway
This new Stanford video series investigates consciousness as the source of not only the human mind but also of all energy and matter. Consciousness is seen as the essence of the universe, a unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena. Five scientists from different disciplines describe how we can contact this field and use it to improve our lives. The series, designed by Michael Heinrich, is now available free on YouTube
09 March, 2015
With Saturday's execution of an Islamist defendant, the first state killing of the hundreds of people sentenced to death in mass show trials following the July 2013 military coup, the US-backed Egyptian junta is stepping up its campaign of police-state terror against the people
ISIS Destroys Ancient Sites Near Mosul By Sandy English
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC
The 'new Cold War,' against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it's already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government's chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it's a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it's 'the Western Alliance,' after all
Putin Wants To Eat Your Children By David Swanson
It's Vladimir Putin's turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer
A Global Security System: An Alternative To War By David Swanson
World Beyond War, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending all war, published this week a guide toward that end, a short book titled A Global Security System: An Alternative to War
Right To Insult or The Responsibility Principle? -- Thoughts On The Charlie-Hebdo-Massacre By Saral Sarkar
One thing can probably be regarded as indisputable: One cannot get any positive results through insults and provocations. On the contrary, they only stir up hatred and violence. We have observed that in the last 25 years. With this method one can only start a new conflict again and again
How I Saw The Light With Daylight Saving Time! By Gary Corseri
I thought that it had all been like that: that we had all lost our minds in a "wild romance" of life on a whirling, little, momentary planet of might-have-beens and should-have-beens. And I wept. And understood
The forthcoming state visit of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sri Lanka and the red carpet welcome accorded to him, including the ceremonial speech to the Sri Lanka's parliament are indeed a bad omen for all the democratic, left and progressive forces of this country. The March 13-14 visit is the first standalone trip by an Indian PM to Sri Lanka in 28 years
Greece: Limited Options, Limited Prospects By Jon V Kofas
The day after the Greek left-center party SYRIZA won the election of January 2015, optimism ran across Europe's progressive quarters, while the conservatives and neoliberals acr4oss the world insisted the new regime was extreme left and it would invite disaster. Just a few short weeks after that election, the world knows that SYRIZA was indeed a center-left regime, one trying to introduce some modest reforms in a bankrupt nation whose future is really the past of even greater dependence instead of the future of greater national sovereignty in all domains from economy to defense
Preeti has conquered many male dominated bastions and treaded upon paths, which others would normally fear to step upon. She is at the forefront of spearheading demonstrations to fight for not only the rights of women farmers but of all the villagers--forcing authorities to get the drains cleaned, voters' list corrected, water-logging removed; ration cards anomalies rectified; freeing land from encroachers--the list can go on and on. No wonder that even people of her native town of Gorakhpur marvel at her achievements and look upon her with reverence
Forest Peoples Programme Complaint Against Golden Agri Resources Upheld By Forestpeoples.org
Palm oil conglomerate criticised for multiple violation of RSPO's requirements that lands only be acquired from indigenous peoples and local communities with their free, prior and informed consent
08 March, 2015
Mob (in)justice In Dimapur By Parvin Sultana
Dimapur is regarded as the business capital of Nagaland, a state in the Northeastern region of India. This small town was jolted by a series of horrific incidents that took place on 5th March, 2015. A man accused of raping a college student was murdered by a mob. Videos of the 35 year old Syed Farid Khan being paraded naked and beaten to death became viral. His lifeless blood drenched body was then hanged
Analysing The Dimapur Lynching By Sazzad Hussain
This modern day lynching was photographed by mobile wielding youth as souvenirs. The entire act was committed in broad day light where the police and the civil administration choose to remain nonchalant. The punch line of the narrative was that the "rapist", who was also an "illegal Bangladeshi immigrant", got his punishment in a country where the justice delivery system is very slow
EU Increasingly Abandons Obama On Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
As reported on Saturday March 7th by both German Economic News, and Spiegel magazine, the ongoing lies and arrogance from U.S. President Barack Obama's Administration regarding Ukraine and Russia have finally raised to the surface a long-mounting anger of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Government
Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food. As a result, India is facing a nutritional crisis: every fourth Indian goes hungry, and in 2011 alone, diabetes took the lives of 1 million Indians
Meet The Planet's Most Dangerous Nuclear Rogue State By Mickey Z.
We're told we can't allow just anyone (except allies like Israel, of course) to acquire such lethal technology -- and we can't let anyone help arm men so evil they might, well, use nuclear weapons on civilians. We hear this while pretending that our tax dollars aren't funding the forces that regularly use nuclear weapons on civilians
Palestinian Memory And Hope By Dan Lieberman
They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam's Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C
Ahab's Speech Before His Crew: The Face Of Falsehood By William A.Cook
A Reflection on the Congress of the United States
Sexual violence in the conflict zones are not an aberration. They are widespread. Yet, they do not evoke the same outrage that this particular incident in a non-conflict zone has received. The Government, the judiciary and even those people who are aware of this reality remain silent. Aren't these the daughters of India too? Aren't they women as well? This hypocrisy needs to be addressed. Respect and rights cannot be exclusive or the entitlement of only a particular section of women
Ahwazi Mass Demonstration In Front Of The European Parliament In Brussels By Rahim Hamid
The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz has organized a mass demonstration, under the title "We will never forget our Ahwazi people" in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, the Belgian Capital. The Demonstration took place on Friday 6th of March to condemn the policies of Iranian occupation and the ongoing anti-human atrocities against the Arab people of Ahwaz
07 March, 2015
Europe depends on Russia for gas. It is supplied by Gazprom, a state monopoly. It was delivered for some years through Ukraine, but not without difficulties even before the civil war. Russia decided to join a dozen other European countries in building South Stream, under the Black Sea, into Bulgaria. The European Union attempted to impose its antitrust policy on Russia. On 1 December 2014 Russia abandoned South Stream and announced an agreement with Turkey to supply Europe at the Turkish-Greek border, through the New Black Sea Pipeline, leaving the necessary infrastructure from there to the care of the Union.
The 'Democrat' Brzezinski Says Russia's Putin Wants To Invade NATO By Eric Zuesse
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama's friend and advisor on Russia, has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "seized" Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine
Europe Blocks U.S. From Racing To War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
According to German Economic News, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande are balking at the speed of Obama's rush to war against Russia. Earlier, some of the smaller national economies in the European Union -- the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece -- dissented from America's effort to increase economic sanctions and military measures against Russia. But there is now increasing pressure upon the leaders in Germany, France, and Italy, also to separate the EU from the American rush to war against Russia
Germany's Balancing Act By William T. Hathaway
Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population
The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism
While stone statues of the female form (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga/Kali) are worshipped in temples and religious rituals, a large number of those made of flesh and blood face violence on the streets and in homes, and encounter discrimination throughout their lives that begins at (or even before) birth, and continues during childhood, adolescence and adulthood
Women's Empowerment: Not A Copy Paste Model By Dr.Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
There is no denying that the condition of women in West is relatively better than India but not so excellent that we will blindly follow it and become one dimensional. Before following or adopting any model of women empowerment we must understand its positives and negatives as well. The only model of women empowerment which seems suitable to any context is sociological model of development. Which aims inclusive empowerment, in social sphere, economic sphere, and political sphere, moreover empowerment associated with critical thinking and consciousness raising
ISIS And Its Faulty Logic (PDF) By Mirza Yawar Baig
Peace is the effect of justice. Those who like to talk about peace must ensure that justice is established. Until that is done, any apparent peace is only a recess between wars. We. All of us. White or black. Christian, Jew, Hindu or Muslim or of any faith. We who believe in goodness and are against exploitation of all kinds. We the people of the world. We need to take it back from the hands of those who want to exploit it and us for their own ends. We have to stand together
AAP As A Start-up And The New 'App' By Anand Teltumbde
The biggest challenge before a start-up is to scale up or be gobbled up by the big fish. Remember what Microsoft did to Netscape. In the absence of practical ideas about how to scale up, start-ups only end up swelling the coffers of venture capitalists and promoters
A Short Note On 'India's Daughter' By V. Arun Kumar
I recently watched the BCC's documentary 'India's Daughter' made by LesleeUdwin. The document is strong one exposing the misogynist and male chauvinism mind-set existing in our society. Banning of this documentary is idiotic, but I have certain reservations
Coalition And Controversies By Abdul Majid Zargar
So the BJP-PDP coalition is a fait-accompli now In Jammu & Kashmir. Mufti Mohammad Syed has assumed the reins of coalition Govt. on the assurance of a full six year term as Chief Minster. The oath of office was administered by Governor Vohra on 1st March 2015. A galaxy of leaders from BJP were present on the dias. Congress & NC boycotted the function
06 March, 2015
Press Release
"Indian courts have stated on multiple occasions that mere possession of certain literature cannot be considered a crime. The National Human Rights Commission has asked for a report from the Kerala police on the arrests. Authorities must ensure that the two men are protected from torture and other ill-treatment," said Shemeer Babu, Programmes Director, Amnesty International India
The documentary `India's Daughter' made by Leslee Udwin about the rape that shook Delhi in December 2012 raised a lot of debate, outrage and furor in Parliament, in media and in general. The police filed a FIR and the broadcast of this documentary is banned in India. Statements were issued by groups in favour and against such ban. However, what is being overlooked amidst this debate is the reality of women's lives in India. A woman in India faces this patriarchal misogynist attitude every day - at home and at public spaces, through her entire life in different ways. The documentary pointed to this regressive attitude and subjugating culture that needs to be addressed. Prohibiting the documentary is futile as shying away from such questions that pertains to reality of women's live or living in denial that misogyny exists or closing eyes to realities is hardly helpful to bring about social transformation. The need is to strike at the roots and confront the sexist and patriarchal violent culture in a mature manner
Is 'India's Daughter' A Victim Of Corporate Media War ? By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
BBC's film failed to expose India's caste impunity, which rapes women at their whims and fancies to assert its supremacy in India's villages. It is sad that our activists and human rights 'champion' did not have time to narrate things when they critique the film, instead the farce of nationalism and technicalities of the matter are being raised and that shows the hollowness of the protests and the human rights movement itself which keep quiet on the violence against Dalit women and make it just a plain gender issue. India will never answer that. BBC documentary failed us in that but nevertheless it is a milestone as it still exposes Indian society and its hypocrisy in dealing with the issue
Muzzling India's Daughters By Farzana Versey
Soon after December 16, 2012, India became international news for a rape. Intellectuals and the political class had at the time lapped up the attention, to the extent of participating in the globalisation of Delhi as the rape capital. The shame they felt came with the caveat of their moral superiority. Today, when it comes back full circle to mock them they stand more exposed than what they are exposing. They had called her India's daughter, and now they object to the title of a documentary using it. India has banned the film
Why The Rise Of Fascism Is Again The Issue By John Pilger
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons
Let's End The New Cold War Before It Heats Up By Ernest Partridge
The United States and Russia are rushing, relentlessly, toward war, unless cooler voices are heard and heeded. Those voices are not being heard in our mass media or heeded by our politicians. The familiar historical indicators of a march to war are apparent to all with eyes to see: arms buildup, depersonalization of the "enemy," demonization of its leaders, marginalizing of moderate voices, suppression of dissent, refusal to negotiate and compromise in good faith, deliberate failure to recognize the concerns and interests of "the other."
Wars may be how Americans learn geography, but do they always learn the history of how the geography was shaped by wars? I've just read Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years by John McHugo. It's very heavy on the wars, which is always a problem with how we tell history, since it convinces people that war is normal. But it also makes clear that war wasn't always normal in Syria
All Buildings In Debaltseve Ukraine Were Destroyed Or Damaged By The Occupying Ukrainian Army By Eric Zuesse
According to the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Ukraine, no usable buildings survive in the town of Debaltseve, the crucial railroad junction that was long fought over between the occupying Ukrainian army and the town's residents. The OSCE official, Michael Bociurkiw, said on Wednesday March 4th, "The violence must be stopped, as it is developing into a real disaster in some areas. As for Debaltseve, for example, our representatives have said that there was no house left that was not destroyed or damaged by shelling."
Greece Injured By EU By Andre Vltchek
Greece is in a cage; it is a hostage. The door is actually open. But the country is scared to walk out and face the world. It still prefers to suffer from familiar tyrants, than to encounter the unknown
An open letter and a challenge to the Royal Society
Justice: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Different nations and systems that exist in today's world are based on some sort of principle or framework, but the underlying fact is that if any such nation or system is based on justice, then only one expects good results out of it, otherwise it is not going to last for long, and history is witness, how such nations and systems collapse as, Malcolm-X, once said, "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." Excerpts of a short conversation with my friend over a cup of tea, here is what he thinks
05 March, 2015
New documents from the cache of files leaked by Edward Snowden show that New Zealand's intelligence agency has been collecting in bulk the cell phone, email, and internet files of people across the Pacific Island nations and handing that data over to the U.S. National Security Agency in an operation one angered lawmaker now describes as a "giant vaccum cleaner of information
This communication, we are sending after viewing the documentary film, which ironically, you had proposed to telecast on 8th March 2015, on the occasion of InternationalWomen's Day. We are writing to you to express our serious concerns about some aspects of this film which, as a responsible channel, we fully expect that you will take on board and postpone the broadcast of this film, till all legal processes and proceedings pertaining to the 16 December 2012 case have concluded
"India's Daughter" : A Ban Is Not The Solution By National Federation Of Indian Women
National Federation Of Indian Women (NFIW) strongly opposes the banning of the documentary India's Daughter. The 'objectionable' portions of the documentary not only expose the mentality of the rapist, they are also a reflection of the mentality and attitude of the Indian patriarchal society towards women
"India's Daughter": Blanket Ban An Attack On The Freedom Of Expression By All India Democratic Women's Association
All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled "India's Daughter" made by BBC 4. This is a knee jerk reaction that constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression
Netanyahu's Farcical Fear Mongering By Alan Hart
Netanyahu's portrayal of an Iran on course to possess nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel, plus the standing ovations and the applause his performance received, might well have pleased enough brainwashed Israeli Jews to vote in ways that guarantee he will emerge from Israel's upcoming elections in a position to cobble together the next coalition government and serve a fourth term as prime minister
Compete To Possess And Die Out, or Be Fair To Survive By Lionel Anet
Atmospheric scientists have estimated that, with the carbon we have emitted, we can expect a 3 metre ocean rise by the end of this century. We are in big trouble and continual reliance on growth will end up killing everyone. The task ahead of us is the most difficult ever and to deal with it will take a united effort. So the ball is in their court, the 1%,has to decide to live as one of us or die.Nevertheless they can't see the choice they have on their own; we must show them the choices they have, to save ourselves
US Considering Openly Arming Syrian al-Qaeda Faction, al-Nusra By Robert Barsocchini
As reported at Antiwar.com, the US and some of its regional client dictatorships are prodding the major al-Qaeda faction operating in Syria, a brutal terrorist group called al-Nusra, to "re-brand" so the US can openly arm it
A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
Not Science, Just Lies And Propaganda: The Massive Fraud Behind GMOs Exposed By Colin Todhunter
'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' is a new book by the US public interest lawyer Steve Druker. The book is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who initiated a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing
Fast Food Nations: Selling Out To Junk Food, Illness And Food Insecurity By Colin Todhunter
Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture and food sectors, including the subsequent impact on the livelihoods of hundreds of millions
The claim of the Hindutva gang that Dr BR Ambedkar endorsed the Hindutva project and opposed beef-eating as cow was sacred to Hinduism is a terrible travesty of facts. Dr Ambedkar, a great researcher, produced a brilliant essay on the subject titled 'Did The Hindus Never Eat Beef?' All those who are really interested in understanding the Indian past and wish to challenge the supremacist myth making for cleansing and marginalizing minorities must read the above-mentioned work which is being reproduced here
An Underground Radioactive Waste Laboratory Coming Up In Gogi Village In Yadgir District Of Karnataka By VT Padmanabhan & Joseph Makkolil
In March last year, we reported a secret move by the DAE to set up a repository (DGR) for storing high level radioactive waste (HLW) under the hills of Idukki-Theni districts in Kerala-Tamil Nadu. TIFR published a blanket denial saying that INO has nothing to do with radioactive waste. Our contention was that radioactive waste repository was a separate project, co-located at the same site. Now we report a similar effort to build an underground research laboratory (URL) in Gogi village of Yadgir district in Karnataka
Noted social activist Medha Patkar joined hands with MDMK leader Vaiko to oppose the proposed neutrino observatory project in Theni district, saying that it would cause large-scale environmental damages. "Nature will suffer major damages if India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is set up. Radiation from it will affect people in the area. The central government does not seem to care about the people's livelihood. The INO project will not benefit India either," Patkar said
Sour Grapes In 'Wine Country'-- Intense Challenges To Wineries Erupt By Shepherd Bliss
A movement against the expansion of rural wineries grows throughout the North Bay. Residents demand that applications should include an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and conform to the rules of CEQA (California Environment Quality Act). Demands grow for moratoriums on all new wineries in Sonoma and Napa Counties, especially those seeking to be industrial, commercial event centers, located away from urban centers, compromising the quality of rural life and nature
04 March, 2015
Netanyahu Delivers Anti-Iran Tirade To US Congress By Bill Van Auken
The speech delivered Tuesday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress consisted of a hysterical anti-Iran tirade and an implicit denunciation of the Obama administration for what was portrayed as an outright betrayal of the security interests of both Israel and the US
Benjamin Netanyahu's Fantasy World By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Netanyahu's speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years
Netanyahu Invokes Biblical Myths And Islamophobia To Derail US Diplomacy On Iran By Ali Abunimah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his much trailed and politically divisive speech to the US Congress today, forcefully denouncing a possible international agreement that would place Iran's civilian nuclear energy program under strict supervision. Immediately afterwards, I spoke to The Real News Network's Paul Jay to analyze the speech, including Netanyahu's appeal to Biblical myths and Islamophobia in his attempt to derail US diplomacy
Netanyahu Addresses "His" Congress By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
By sabotaging of the agreement between the US and Iran, Israel intends to maintain its nuclear hegemony in the region and impose its will upon his neighbors. It can massacre the people in the Gaza Strip with impunity because the US holds its protective hand over Israel and prevents any resolution critical of Israel in the UN Security Council. How long will Americans let Israel humiliate them and their President? Do Obama and his staff have no self-esteem? And why are the richest Americans keeping quiet?
Gitmo In Chicago By Stephen Lendman
On February 24, The Guardian headlined "The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site.' " It's an "off-the-books (Homan Square) interrogation compound," said the Guardian - some miles west from where this writer lives. A "nondescript warehouse (is) the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." People are lawlessly arrested, detained, denied access to lawyers up to 24 hours, and tortured during secret interrogations
"Collective Psychopathology" And US Police State Methods By Jon V Kofas
In February 2015, The Guardian published a couple of new stories about the connection between the Chicago police department "black site" at Homan Square and the Guantanamo prison where terror suspects have been kept as political prisoners without ever been charged. Neither the national media in the US nor the Chicago media organizations, including African-American, have pursued this story. Even after the British paper brought these issues to the attention of the public, the mainstream media in Chicago and across the US are ignoring the revelations, a subject in itself revealing about the role of the US media in a democratic society where human rights and civil rights violations occur
History without the moral leadership of intellectuals is devoid of meaning, chaotic and unpredictable. But this is a period of seismic historical transition, and it must eventually yield the kind of intellectual who will break free from the confines of the ego, regimes, self-serving politics, sects, ideologies and geography
The West had their chance to show what their democracy looks like when they applied it to Russia in the 1990's. Their methods have not changed since then. There is nothing new that could be offered, and the Russian people have declared that they do not want another round of the old. The best thing to do is to let them be. Only when the external pressure subsides will they be able to address their own problems without being accused, sometimes rightfully and sometimes inaccurately, of working for or being exploited by foreign governments
Wealth Of World's Billionaires Surges Past $7 Trillion By Joseph Kishore
The combined net worth of the world's billionaires has reached a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion, according to the latest compilation published by Forbes magazine on Monday. There are a record 1,826 billionaires, each with an average wealth of $3.8 billion. Relative to last year, the world's billionaires have increased their combined wealth by more than 10 percent, from $6.4 trillion in 2014, while the total number of billionaires has grown by 11 percent
Greatest Generation? What Happened 70 Years Ago Will Change Your Mind! By Mickey Z.
By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Cheered on by the likes of Time magazine -- which explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves" -- the U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians. Read that again: The U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians
"Tears in Paradise. Suffering and struggle of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004" by Rajendra Prasad tells the story of Indian indentured labour ("5 year slaves") taken to Fiji from British-occupied India in the period 1879-1916 and brutally exploited on British- and Australian-run sugar cane plantations. The last "5 year slaves" were finally released from bondage in 1920, 87 years after slavery was supposedly banned in the British Empire. Today effective Third World slavery is rampant through globalization
We Are All Mukto-Mona ! The Challenge Of Unreason In South Asia By Subhash Gatade
Humayun Azad, Salman Tasser, Ahmad Rajib Haider, Dr Dabholkar, Com Pansare and now Avijit Roy. Thanks to religious fervour and growth of extremism of every kind in this part of South Asia, where forces of darkness seem to be on the ascendance, it may just create a feeling that we have reached a dead end as we are losing people one by one who were 'a beacon of hope and light in these dreadful times'. Should we then say that whatever 'little hope we saw in the horizon will it wither away?' We have no other option than to remain eternal optimist with a sincere hope that their 'mettle will be passed onto new generation.'
A Bear Hug! By Mohammad Ashraf
Modi-Mufti hug reminded one of the famous Kashmiri proverbs about bear hugs and friendships. One hopes it turns out to be positive and does not end in the proverbial endings!
03 March, 2015
The National Human Rights Commission of India has taken suo motu cognizance of a media report that the Kerala Government was targeting human rights defenders and rights activists by labeling them as 'Maoists sympathizers'. Human rights defenders and advocates Tushar Nirmal Sarathy and Jaison C. Cooper had been arrested under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in Kerala and were in jail since the 30th January, 2015
China Warns U.S. To Stop Its Ukrainian Proxy War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
A much-ignored huge news report from Reuters on Friday, February 27th, was headlined "Chinese diplomat tells West to consider Russia's security concerns over Ukraine." China's Ambassador to Belgium (which has the capital of the EU) said that the "nature and root cause" of the Ukrainian conflict is "the West," and that "The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration."
Two Different Approaches, Two Different Results In Fighting Ebola By Matt Peppe
In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident. These countries are the mighty USA and little Cuba
The Obama Administration, Shell, and the Fate of the Arctic Ocean
"Before Our Eyes": The Future Of The Middle East By Thierry Meyssan
For several months, Barack Obama has been trying to change US policy in the Middle East in order to eliminate the Islamic Emirate with the help of Syria. But he cannot do this, partly because he has been saying for years that President Assad must go, and secondly because his regional allies support the Islamic Emirate against Syria. However, things are slowly evolving so he should be able to do so soon. Thus, it appears that all States that supported the Islamic Emirate have ceased to do so, opening the way for a redistribution of the cards
Do Not Give The Thieves The Key To Your Home: Stop The TTIP By Colin Todhunter
Some 375 civil society organisations from across Europe have today called on EU decision-makers to protect citizens, workers, and the environment from threats the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) it poses
Gandhi As An Economist By John Scales Avery
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are
The Politics of Food: Palestinians Exhibit Culture, Identity At JNU Food Festival By Abhay Kumar
As the dusk of Republic Day fell and dazzling lights began to flood the Jhelum Lawn of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), hundreds of students thronged International Food Festival. I, too, joined the crowd and walked along one stall after another, looking at mouthwatering cuisines. But later the evening, before I came out of the festival's marquee, I had felt that the venue displayed not only foods but also aspiration, identity, struggle and culture of a subjugated people. One of the participants in the annual festival was Palestine. As the illegal Israeli occupation continues, the festival served as an important space for Palestinians to assert their identity
Occupation: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Some call it, occupation, others invasion, conquest, or control of a nation or territory by foreigners. Whatever you call it, it doesn't sound comfortable at all. Have you ever felt, or tried to feel how it is like, to be living in occupation. How is it to be occupied? Ask someone who has experienced occupation. I had a chance to sit with a friend of mine, David (name changed) for a cup of tea, which he has lived most of his life under occupation. He answered me some unanswered questions, and explained the real meaning of occupation. Here are some excerpts of our conversation
Time For Teachers To Let Go Classroom Management And Focus On Classroom Interactions By Ms. Swaleha Sindhi
Most of teachers plan to create calm and productive classrooms. But such sight is not seen in all the classes. Things don't always go as planned with teachers. Teachers might be using great selection of classroom management tools to get students attention. But sometimes when teachers are so focused on classroom management, entire period is spent trying to get students on task. This proves to be exhausting for both teachers and students, so in cases where teachers are teaching some heavy subjects when they need to put their energies towards content then they can give classroom management a back seat. If most of the class is ready to learn and there are minimal distractions, then teachers can give themselves permission to focus on the content. Thus, a teacher is expected to use different strategies and bring a balance in classrooms
With its wealth of detail, its fascinating insights, its bold critique of radical Islamist discourse and politics, its helpful and much-needed articulation of an Islamic understanding of peace and inter-community harmony and dialogue, and the hope that it offers us, this book is definitely a must-read for anyone concerned with what is admittedly one of the most widely-discussed and hotly-debated subjects across the world today
02 March, 2015
The assassination, latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years, occurred in the backdrop of on-going political disturbance carried by the opponents of Sheikh Hasina government as her government publicly announced its policy of zero-tolerance to religious extremism, and is strong handedly trying to weed out the religious extremists. There have been a series of similar attacks in recent years blamed on the Islamic militants
The Saudi Hypocrisy By Mazin Qumsiyeh
The kingdom of "Saudi Arabia" is going to behead a man for "apostacy" (renouncing his belief in Islam and the Quran) while welcoming Egyptian Al-Sisi whose security forces are torturing people to death in Egypt for being supportive of an Islamic political system more moderate than that of that Kingdom!
Almost all Republicans, plus the top level of the Democratic Party such as Obama, hate Russia, even after communism ended and the Soviet Union broke up. They are simply obsessed with destroying Russia. So: although Bush was weak against Al Qaeda, he was strong against Russia: he brought into NATO, the military club against Russia, the following seven nations: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia -- six of which seven nations had formerly been members of the Warsaw Pact along with the U.S.S.R., against the U.S. The reality is: Obama, like Republicans generally, hates Russia
The Ten Commandments for a Better American World
ISIS 101: What's Really Terrifying About This Threat By John Chuckman
The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths
Review of 'Confessions Of A Terrorist - A Novel' By Anita McKone
If you have ever asked 'Why?... How could they do this?' in response to the latest report of terrorism, then 'Confessions of a Terrorist' is the novel for you. But only if you genuinely want to find out the answers
How To Stop Bogus Wars And Articulate Global Peacemaking? By Mahboob A. Khawaja
Islamophobia is on the rise. Few reactionary instances of individual madness are used by the Western strategists to blame Muslims and Islam as the focal point of their perpetuated belligerency
Quotas Aren't Negating Merit And Efficiency By V.M.Yazhmozhi
Though caste based reservation is an affirmative action to uplift the socially and educationally oppressed classes and to bring forth social justice, critics often argue that "Quotas are a negation of merit and efficiency". A paper published by Ashwini Deshpande, Professor at the Delhi School of Economics and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan has defeated this ideology
01 March, 2015
Rapid melting of Antarctic ice could push sea levels up 10 feet worldwide within two centuries, "recurving" heavily populated coastlines and essentially reshaping the world, the Associated Press reported. Parts of Antarctica are thawing so quickly, the continent has become "ground zero of global climate change without a doubt," Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica told AP
Killing Of Boris Nemtso Has Relevance For World Politics By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
Killing of Boris Nemtso, a strong critic of Putin in Moscow is shocking, sad and highly difficult to figure out, who killed? Why was he killed? And what will be its political fallout for Putin and for Russia as a whole?
Is he a smooth-talking, disingenuous, cunning salesman who knows that everything he asserts about Israel being in danger of annihilation and not having a Palestinian partner for peace is propaganda nonsense, or, does he really believe what he says?
What appears to be happening is that Obama is easing off the US aggression throttle towards Iran, while Israel is simultaneously on the precipice of teaming up with Saudi Arabia (another close US client/ally) to aggressively bomb Iran - the top international crime
Skipping Netanyahu's Speech For All The Wrong Reasons By David Swanson
Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said
The post-coup leaders of Ukraine have routinely said that Ukraine should destroy Russia; and, now, starting on February 24th, they are placing into position the key prerequisite for doing so, which is the advanced Anti-Ballistic-Missile, or ABM, system, S-300
On February 22nd, NBC's "Meet the Press" presented reporter Richard Engel in a terrific four-minute documentary on Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's catastrophic policy-results in Libya. (You can watch it by clicking on that link.) The segment concluded that Obama and his Administration (including Hillary Clinton) didn't know where they were going in this operation
The Entire Case For Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies By Eric Zuesse
U.S. President Barack Obama has stated many times his case against Russia -- the reason for the economic sanctions. In his National Security Strategy 2015, he uses the term "aggression" 18 times, and 17 of them are referring specifically to only one country as "aggressive": Russia. However, not once does he say there what the "aggression" consisted of: what its target was, or what it itself was. He's vague there on everything except his own target: Russia
When Growth Trumps Freedom: The Chill In Canada Comes From Our Government, Not The Weather By James Magnus-Johnston
With the introduction of Canada's so-called "secret police" bill, there is increasing concern the rights of the oil patch will trump the rights of ordinary citizens in a new and chilling way-through the kinds of fear tactics you'd sooner expect in Soviet Russia than a western liberal democracy
The 'Star-Spangled Banner' Lyrics That Get Swept Under The Rug By Robert Barsocchini
The US national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner", has four verses, though only one is commonly sung or discussed. The reason for this becomes apparent when the lyrics are read and the history behind them known
Bitter Lakes - "McJihad" By US And Saudi Arabia By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
Adam Curties' documentary "Bitter Lake" documents brilliantly the total failure of the US intervention and the arrogance of its Western stooges in Afghanistan
Did you know that the American Dream now comes in the form of a miracle pill? A recent marketing and advertising trend is peddling what they call the "smart pill", presumably a brain pill that not only makes you smart, it can also make you rich because you optimize your brain capacity! This is essentially a vitamin supplement that claims to boost memory, energy, and creativity, but it can also make you rich, very rich because it allows you to use your head more effectively when making those difficult career and investment decisions. You too can realize the "American Dream" just by taking this pill, without going to college, without working hard, without any effort on your part
GMOs And Green Blob Hallucinations: The Twisted World Of Mr Paterson By Colin Todhunter
Speaking last week in Pretoria, former UK Environment Minister Owen Paterson described critics of GMOs as comprising part of a privileged class that increasingly fetishizes food and seeks to turn their personal preferences into policy proscriptions for the rest of us. He called them backward-looking and regressive. He claimed their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment because of their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques
Postcard From The End Of America: Center City, Philadelphia By Linh Dinh
Though the most visible homeless are still the old and middle-aged, they are becoming younger and younger, and the other day, I met 30-year-old Stephanie sitting behind a plastic cup with a sign, "HOMELESS AND HUNGRY / ANYTHING HELPS / THANK YOU."
Check Your Privilege, Become An Ally By Mickey Z.
In a society built upon a foundation of hierarchy, declaring "we're all one" -- regardless of our intentions -- is yet another example of privilege run amok. If we wish to profoundly connect with our fellow humans, we must become allies... not "one."It takes no extra time to choose solidarity instead of privilege. The payoff for this transition is not only a richer, more compassionate life for yourself but also, a deeper commitment to collective liberation
We are once again reminded of the goondaism that prevails in regions like these, where communities face threats of abuse, intimidation and forced eviction due to mining and other so called development projects; where human right defenders and activists who believe in and abide by the law are made to feel like criminals and where the rich corporates who violate the law, rule the land
Budget 2015 : A Step Towards Inequality By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
The abolition of Wealth Tax, with a reduction in rate of corporate tax to 25% over next four years may have its own spiraling effects. There is always talks to reduce subsidy in the agricultural sector but benefits to corporate groups may outnumber the subsidy benefits to rural people
From Barpeta To Lucknow: Journey Of Waste-Pickers By Dr. Roli Misra & Parvin Sultana
Internal migration from Assam to other parts of India for a better livelihood is very common. But the condition of these waste pickers worsen once they move from Barpeta to Lucknow. Poverty, issues of identity circumscribed by larger question of illegal immigration makes it harder for them to work and sustain themselves. What is required is a move from rhetorical politics and a humanitarian take on the issue of these people who are stuck in the lowest rung of social ladder. Only then policies will be successful in true sense and people can break free from stigmas and move ahead
In Jammu and Kashmir, everything has significance and worth of something even the foot-ware that one purchases from the market but 'Human Lives' remain valueless. So outlandish that we didn't ascertain the connotation of famous maxim 'health is wealth.'
Condemn The Brutal Murder Of Avijit Roy By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism strongly condemns the brutal murder of Mr Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi secular blogger and author on 26th February in Dhaka. His wife Ms Rafida Anwar Banna has suffered grievous injuries in the attack. Mr Roy was a popular blogger and author who wrote a number of books against religious extremism and the threat to human dignity and democracy from it. He had been on the hit list of Islamic fundamentalists for a number of years
Release 145 Undertrial Maruti Workers On Bail By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR welcomes the bail granted by the Supreme Court to Sunil s/o Satpal and Kanwaljeet Singh, two of the Maruti workers on February 23, 2015. Sunil and Kanwaljeet are among the 147 workers who were arrested in the aftermath of the violence on July 18, 2012, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana which led to the death of the factory's HR manager Awaneesh Kumar Deb. However it is hardly a cause for celebration given that the bail was long overdue, and the other 145 workers still continue to languish in jail
Narmada Jeevanshala's Balmela: From The (Play) Ground By National Alliance of People's Movements
The Narmada Jeevanshalas (Schools of Life) celebrated its 16th annual Balmela (Children's fair), from 12th February to 15thFebruary at a resettlement site of the Project Affected Families (PAFs) of the Narmada - Sardar Sarovar Dam |
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Brenner Vs Loesch: New Scandal Prompts Sara Marie Brenner To Leave Politics
Top: Sara Marie & Andrew Brenner; Bottom: Chris & Dana Loesch
Another day, another instance of conservative infighting over petty, childish issues: After engaging in a heated discussion with Chris Loesch on Twitter about the Central American child refugee border crisis, Ohio State Representative Andrew Brenner decided to give Chris and his wife Dana Loesch a call to discuss things further. The only problem? He wasn't supposed to have their number. Worse, the couple were actually on vacation at the time Brenner called them - prompting national attention for both couples. As a result, Andrew Brenner's wife Sara Marie - who we've covered here frequently - wrote a lengthy column lashing out at the Loeschs and the Tea Party in general as she proclaimed she was leaving politics (for now at least). It's worth noting that Andrew Brenner obtained the Loeschs' phone number from his wife - something neither Loesch appreciated .
The incident has not only received attention in local Ohio media but also national news mentions.
The entire debacle began when Andrew Brenner took issue with Chris Loesch's take on Glenn Beck's position on the refugee children flooding across our borders. Beck recently announced he would deliver trucks of supplies and toys to the refugees to which Loesch agreed since it's a private charitable effort (and humanitarian aid). Brenner took issue with this arguing that offering food, water and aid to those children encourages additional people to cross the border (basically equating offering humanitarian aid with amnesty).
"No but he is helping the illegals out, how is that different than giving their parents jobs here?" Brenner asked referring to Beck's aid. "Why not pass out the food and water in northern Mexico?" he suggested . Finally, after becoming exasperated by people wanting to help refugee children, Brenner commented , "U dont c the correlation, more illegals will now see they will get help so more will come." Brenner's entire argument against providing private humanitarian aid to refugee children hinged on the fact that providing basic necessities is no different than giving jobs to undocumented immigrants.
From there he obtained the Loeschs' private number from his wife Sara Marie, called the couple, and all hell broke loose .
This follows Sara Marie's business registration debacle earlier this year in which she failed to register and/or license her online news site ( Brenner Brief ) despite it being a profit-generating business with employees. That mini-scandal resulted in the Ohio Attorney General's Office receiving information to begin an investigation.
It came as no surprise then, given the culmination of these two events, that Sara Marie announced today on her Brenner Brief site that she's leaving politics and pursuing a new career selling jewelry online. "I have decided as a result that, over the next few months at least, I will not have a radio show nor will I personally be writing about politics. I am turning over the reigns of Brenner Brief News and Brenner Brief Radio Network - more on that in the days to come," Brenner stated midway through her lengthy screed spent mostly bashing the current incarnation of the Tea Party.
That Sara Marie calls out "phonies" only looking to capitalize on friendships and conservative partnerships is perhaps the most amusing - and most ironic - part of her essay. She said:
"There are also some who have become quite popular among conservatives who are complete phonies, and have even attacked me. I have been told by close friends that the exposure of these individuals for who they really are comes out of their own jealousy. I have found that people in our movement are not supportive of one another. There are no partnerships that exists because you support one-another's work. Either one person or group is getting something out of it, or there is something to be cashed in in the near future. And, rumors flies quickly, especially ones that are false, and your supposed friends turns on you very quickly without so much as a moment to hear your side of the story. I'll not stoop to their level by stating the names of those I'm referencing, but if you have watched my social media over the last year you have seen these examples play out in real time. If I could offer one piece of advice to those who have not been aged and cured yet among the amateur and semi-professional punditry world: be careful, very careful - as many of your "friends" are attached to you only for what you can potentially bring to them."
Anyone who's read our previous articles on Brenner knows her M.O. when dealing with other conservative individuals and organizations. That is to say, Brenner has a treasure trove of broken professional and personal relationships in which she committed the very crime she's now accusing the Loeschs of committing.
For instance, Brenner once started another business called the 'PolitiGal Network' she based almost identically on a non-profit she was terminated from. She was also removed from a conservative radio network after attempting to cheat in order to win a contest the radio network hosted. And those two examples speak nothing to the trouble she's had being civil with other conservatives .
Is this finally Sara Marie's political swan song? Much like the villains in b-horror movies, I suspect she'll return at some point when we all least suspect it. For now though, it seems, she and her husband are political pariahs - especially since the more popular and more politically powerful Dana Loesch has deemed her (and her husband Andrew) damaged political goods.
Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time he's worn several hats including leading on campus LGBT advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division , and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website .
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No. 20: LeBron's Decision
LeBron James went from being one of sports' most celebrated figures to one of its most hated after he announced his departure from the Cleveland Cavaliers on an overhyped live television program that proved embarrassing for almost everyone involved. Cleveland fans now hate James, who joined the Miami Heat, and James himself has said that he would leave differently if he had it to do over. Nevertheless, some African Americans couldn't help seeing a problem with a young black man taking so much flak for simply guiding his own destiny.
Captions by Cord Jefferson
No. 19: Tiger Woods Returns to Golf
After getting caught cheating on his wife , Elin Nordegren, in late 2009 with dozens of women, Tiger Woods went to rehab for sex addiction and dropped out of the PGA Tour indefinitely. He lost $22 million in endorsement deals almost immediately, and Nordegren moved back to Sweden. The divorce became official in August of this year. Woods announced his return to golf in March, of course, but he's since found it difficult to win any tournaments with the deftness of prior years.
No. 18: The Curious Case of Kanye West
Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out to rave reviews in November, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. As usual, however, West found a way to mar his successes with increasingly erratic behavior. In a confusing interview with Today prior to its release, West apologized for saying that President Bush didn't care about black people, but then he lashed out at host Matt Lauer. He subsequently canceled a performance on the program, claiming that he'd been tricked into looking foolish.
No. 17: South Africa Hosts the World Cup
For the first time in its 80-year history, soccer's World Cup championship happened in an African nation. This summer, South Africa hosted the tournament , and six African teams made the finals: Algeria, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. Though the world loved watching the games, the jury is still out on whether South Africa liked hosting them. According to new figures, the nation has recouped just a tenth of what it cost to host the tournament.
No. 16: Tyler Perry Does 'For Colored Girls'
Tyler Perry isn't known for his subtlety. It holds, then, that the writer and star of runaway hits like Madea's Family Reunion -- in which Perry cross-dresses in a busty latex suit -- was not the obvious choice to adapt and direct the screen version of Ntozake Shange's beloved play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf . Rumor even had it that Oprah called Perry personally and questioned his ability to do the play justice. Still, Perry went through with it, and the result got mixed reviews .
No. 15: Desiree Rogers Resigns
A smart, fashionable social doyenne from Chicago, Desiree Rogers seemed to be the perfect White House social secretary. A longtime friend of the Obamas, she aimed to add more ethnic art to the White House's official collection and spice up administration events. But all of that came to a crashing halt when, one year into Rogers' tenure, Real Housewives of DC's Michaele and Tareq Salahi were able to crash a White House state dinner and cozy up to President Obama himself. Rogers resigned three months later, in February. She is now the CEO of Johnson Publishing.
No. 14: Alvin Greene's Primary Win
On June 8, 33-year-old novice politician Alvin Greene defeated veteran South Carolina legislator Vic Rawl in the Democratic Senate primary, despite the fact that Greene literally hadn't campaigned at all . How did he do it? After a series of rambling interviews, it was clear that Greene himself barely knew. Later, it came out that Greene faced a sexual harassment charge, and he was handily defeated by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint in the general election -- though he did walk away with nearly 30 percent of the vote.
No. 13: Bishop Eddie Long Sued
Eddie Long is the much esteemed head of the New Birth Missionary Baptist mega-church in Lithonia, Ga., where he presides over 25,000 worshippers weekly. An advocate of "curing" homosexuality, Long surprised his congregation when, in September, news broke that he faced accusations of sexual coercion from four young men, who claim Long used his power to intimidate them into sexual relationships. Long denied all the charges, but he recently opted for a private mediation , meaning that the public won't hear his defense or any additional details.
No. 12: Charlie Rangel Censured
After being found guilty of 11 infractions by the House ethics committee -- including not paying taxes and not disclosing hundreds of thousands in assets -- 21-term Rep. Charles Rangel was censured in December by a vote of 333 to 79. A censure is the most serious punishment, short of expulsion, that a congressperson can face. Rangel admitted to violating House rules but pleaded for leniency and said that he never maliciously tried to "enrich" himself. The scandal forced him from his post atop the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
No. 11: Kamala Harris Breaks Barriers
With the election for California attorney general too close to call for weeks, Republican Steve Cooley finally conceded to Kamala Harris on Nov. 24, making Harris the first African-American attorney general (and first female attorney general) in the state's history. Cooley had initially declared victory, but when the numbers showed that he was trailing by more than 50,000 votes, he bowed out. Harris, who had been San Francisco's district attorney, is biracial, which also makes her America's first Indian-American attorney general.
No. 10: Drug-Sentence Disparity Narrowed
In August of this year, President Obama signed a bill that was a long time coming for many black nonviolent drug offenders. Introduced in late 2009, the Fair Sentencing Act narrowed, but didn't eliminate, the sentencing disparity for possession of crack and powder cocaine. Since 1986 the disparity had been 100 to 1 in an effort to curtail the crack epidemic of the late '80s. Now the disparity is 18 to 1. Republican Senate Judiciary committee members refused to agree to eliminate the disparity completely .
No. 9: Fenty Goes Down in D.C.
He drastically (and controversially) revamped District schools and revitalized blighted areas, but Adrian Fenty was unable to coax a second term out of Washington, D.C., voters. The capital's youngest mayor ever, Fenty lost the Democratic primary to D.C. City Council Chairman Vince Gray. The embarrassing defeat solidified what many had surmised: Black voters were turning away from Fenty, who some perceived as arrogant -- this in a city that re-elected Marion Barry after he was caught smoking crack with prostitutes.
No. 8: The NAACP Takes on the Tea Party
At a convention in Kansas City, Mo., in July, the NAACP passed a resolution condemning "extremist elements within the Tea Party." Though largely ceremonial, the resolution sparked outrage by Tea Party leaders, some of whom accused the NAACP of being racist. Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams had to step down after saying that the NAACP should go to "the trash heap of history" and writing a racist "satirical" open letter. Though highly publicized, the resolution couldn't stop the Tea Party's momentum with voters .
No. 7: A Sky-High Black Jobless Rate
Though the economic slowdown has caused devastation across the globe, no group in America has been hit harder than the black community. Overall, the national unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for months now, but black unemployment is significantly higher, at 16 percent. And for black men, that number jumps to more than 20 percent . With jobs numbers looking grim , 2011 is looking to be another bad year for African Americans seeking work.
No. 6b: Black Republicans Enter Races and Win
When 32 black Republicans threw their hats into the ring for the congressional midterm elections, media outlets everywhere went hog wild with the "year of the black Republican" theme. Eventually all but two were defeated -- Tim Scott in South Carolina and Allen West in Florida -- but their victories weren't insignificant. Both men are the first black Republicans representing their states in Congress since Reconstruction, and Scott actually beat political heavyweight Strom Thurmond's son, Paul, to win the GOP nomination in his state.
No. 6a: A Senate 'Blackout'
On the other hand, Roland Burris, who replaced Barack Obama as Illinois senator, lost to Republican Mark Kirk this year. This left no African-American lawmakers in the nation's most powerful legislative house. In his farewell speech, Burris said, "[W]hen the 112th Congress is sworn in this coming January, there will not be a single black American who takes the oath of office in this chamber. This is simply unacceptable." Since Reconstruction, the Senate has housed only four black senators.
No. 5: Sherrod-Gate
On July 19, USDA executive Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign after a video of her surfaced on far-right activist Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, in which she appeared to be making racist comments. The NAACP denounced her, and she was hastily canned. Sherrod was exonerated when the original video emerged, showing that Breitbart had manipulated footage to smear her. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered her a new position, but she rejected it . The NAACP apologized, too. Sherrod now travels the country speaking about diversity.
No. 4: Health Care Reform Passes
Nearly 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt made health care reform a major thrust of his campaign for president on the Progressive Party ticket. Though Roosevelt and subsequent presidents were unsuccessful, Obama picked up where his forward-thinking predecessors left off, and in March, the Affordable Care Act became law. The law includes several programs that will be especially beneficial to African Americans. The government estimates that more than 30 million more people will get medical insurance because of health care reform.
No. 3: Republicans' Midterm Gains
Just two years after putting Barack Obama into office, American voters took to the polls on Nov. 2 and voted roundly against his party , spurred on by months of fringe fearmongering and concerns about the economy. In the end, the Democrats lost just six Senate seats, keeping their majority, but gave up 63 House seats, tipping the balance of power in Congress back to the GOP. For the next two years, expect a monolithic Republican voting bloc to promote gridlock and thwart the president's ambitions.
No. 2: BP Oil Spill
Beginning with an explosion that killed 11 people in April, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gushed for three months before it was capped. By that time, almost 200 million gallons of oil had been dumped into the fauna-rich Gulf of Mexico. The region's fishermen found their catches mostly inedible, with some fisheries and oyster houses actually forced to shutter, making our nation's greatest environmental tragedy a financial catastrophe as well. The cleanup created jobs, but few of those went to minorities .
No. 1: Earthquake in Haiti
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12 was a grim way to ring in 2010. Almost a quarter million perished, with hundreds of thousands more sustaining brutal injuries. Of those lucky enough not to lose their lives, 1 million lost their homes, flooding Haiti's countryside with the displaced. In the aftermath, the costs of confronting a cholera epidemic and rebuilding still-leveled city centers are quickly outstripping foreign aid. Sadly, the Haiti-quake aftermath is bound to be a 2011 story as well.
What would you add to this list? Weigh in below.
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Only a month away, National Hunting and Fishing Day is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the conservation efforts of outdoorsmen and women across the nation. Read More >>>
Ammoland Inc. Posted on August 26, 2016 by AmmoLand Editor JS
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Graystone : Now If FLIR is interested in marketing - and good will - they should "donate" a unit to the ECPD. tomcat : @ Wild Bill this liberal POS xander13 fits the profile you described in one post you made on this... VT Patriot : Amen Mrs. Hodges. I believe we are all here to help you and your heroic son. Please keep us... JP : Dumber in the head than a hog is in the a$$... Just say'n.... JP ... Green Mtn. Boy : Seeing as how civics and government of the U S Constitutional Republic is no longer taught in government education centers,rather... |
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Ban, a dog which was rescued last week atop debris in the Pacific Ocean three weeks after the tsunami hit northern Japan, has been reunited with its owner.
Kyodo news :
"After watching a TV news report on the rescue, the owner of the female dog visited the animal care center where she was being looked after, to take her back. 'We'll never let go of her,' the owner was quoted as saying by a center official, while the dog happily wagged her tail when the owner appeared."
Watch the reunion, AFTER THE JUMP ... |
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Ban, a dog which was rescued last week atop debris in the Pacific Ocean three weeks after the tsunami hit northern Japan, has been reunited with its owner |
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Ammoland Inc. Posted on May 6, 2016 by Ammoland
Ammoland Inc. Posted on October 26, 2015 by Ammoland
Wild Bill : @Tcat, He must have gotten the wrong idea and made himself fit the hard core unemployable profile. Now, his career... VT Patriot : Hah, you used the words 'thought, facts and truth' and 'left' in the same sentence. That is a mistake.... VT Patriot : Saul, I read your comment and was ready to applaud it until the last part. Those that are rioting... Graystone : Now If FLIR is interested in marketing - and good will - they should "donate" a unit to the ECPD. tomcat : @ Wild Bill this liberal POS xander13 fits the profile you described in one post you made on this... |
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Learn from Cuba It is in some sense almost an anti-model, according to Eric Swanson, the programme manager for the Banks Development Data Group, which compiled the WDI, a tome of almost 400 pages covering scores of economic, social, and environmental indicators. Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Banks dictum that economic growth is a pre-condition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not, downright wrong. - It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations . It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Banks Vice President for Development Policy, who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself. By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999; Chiles was down to ten; and Costa Rica, at 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999. Similarly, the mortality rate for children under the age of five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50% lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cubas achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999 . Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable, according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area. Indeed, in Ritzens own field, the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100% in 1997, up from 92% in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations - higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90% rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries . Even in education performance, Cubas is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile. It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7% of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin American and Caribbean countries and even Singapore. There were 12 primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country . The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one. The average youth (age 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at 7%. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is 7%, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy. Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40% to zero within ten years, said Ritzen. If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say its not possible. Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canadas rate. Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world . The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not. What does it, is the incredible dedication, according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since. Please tell us how it is that capitalism has motivated the US to achieve these things? (Clue: the US hasn't achieved these things.) How's this for lack of motivation?
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/emergencies/2004_t... Oxfam America recently studied the experience of Cuba in its development of disaster prevention and mitigation programs. Situated in the Caribbean Sea, Cuba frequently stands in the way of serious hurricanes. While its neighbors are battered, losing lives and property, Cuba is unusually good at withstanding these calamities, and suffers much fewer dead. Oxfams report, entitled Weathering the Storm: Lessons in Risk Reduction in Cuba cites a number of attributes of Cubas risk reduction program that can be applied by other countries. Three in particular are transferable to Asia and other regions: Disaster Preparedness: Cuba was especially good at mobilizing entire communities to develop their own disaster preparations. This involves mapping out vulnerable areas of the community, creating emergency plans, and actually simulating emergencies so people can practice evacuations and other measures designed to save lives. When disaster strikes, people know what to do. Commitment of Resources: Cubas strong central government prioritizes resources for its civil defense department. This helps the country to build up a common understanding of the importance of saving lives, and the citizens trust that their contributions to the government are well used for this purpose. Their collaboration on developing emergency plans helped build confidence in the government, so people trust in the plan they helped develop. Communications: The communications system for emergencies in Cuba builds on local resources. Using local radio stations and other media to issue warnings on potential hazards also reinforces the disaster preparations. Since the local population is already involved in mapping risks and creating emergency plans, they are more inclined to act on emergency bulletins. Good communications, packaged simply, and built on existing, commonly used resources, is another way to build trust in disaster preparations. Cuba is a unique example. There is a strong central government committed to protecting all its citizens, even the poorest and most isolated who are typically the most at risk. The most common natural disaster in Cuba is a hurricane, a threat visible for days and even weeks in advance. Yet building a culture of disaster preparedness, and involving local communities in mitigating risks, are strategies that can be applied in many other places, regardless of how rich or poor a country might be. And then there are many more examples of the work of "idiots" in Cuba ... here .
http://www.poptel.org.uk/cuba-solidarity/democracy.htm This system in Cuba is based upon universal adult suffrage for all those aged 16 and over. Nobody is excluded from voting, except convicted criminals or those who have left the country. Voter turnouts have usually been in the region of 95% of those eligible . There are direct elections to municipal, provincial and national assemblies, the latter represent Cuba's parliament. Electoral candidates are not chosen by small committees of political parties. No political party, including the Communist Party, is permitted to nominate or campaign for any given candidates. Last time I was there under 20% of the Assembly were members of the communist party. The final phase of the Cuba electoral process you mention is the Ratification election. This final step ensures that the candidate who won the election in a multi candidate election is ratified by at least 50% +1 of the voters in their district. One can't hold a seat in the Assembly without the support of a majority in their district. The Ratification election ensures this. If the elected candidate can't achieve the 50% +1 threshold, then a new election is called - starting over from the nomination process. There are alternate parties in Cuba, contrary to uninformed rhetoric. Here are some examples. There are dozens of other small alternate parties,
http://www.gksoft.com/govt/en/cu.html * Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) {Communist Party of Cuba} * Partido Democrata Cristiano de Cuba (PDC) {Christian Democratic Party of Cuba} - Oswaldo Paya's Catholic party * Partido Solidaridad Democratica (PSD) {Democratic Solidarity Party} * Partido Social Revolucionario Democratico Cubano {Cuban Social Revolutionary Democratic Party} * Coordinadora Social Democrata de Cuba (CSDC) {Social Democratic Coordination of Cuba} * Union Liberal Cubana {Cuban Liberal Union} |
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By John Oliver "The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste." HBO: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Native Advertising
By Cathy Stripe Lester On August 5, Michigan taxpayers will be asked to vote on Proposition 1, which is being presented in commercials as a way to "help small businesses and create 15,000 new jobs ... without raising taxes!" If that sounds like a conjuring trick, it is - smoke'n'mirrors, my friends. And if you [...]
By Victor Argo "For them, a stable country is a country with a strong government favorable to the United States": When Western governments pompously talk about "stability in the Middle East", the interest and the security of the people of the region are seldom on their minds, writes Victor Argo. Stability, stability, stability. Comments on [...]
By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch For America's national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in [...]
By Tina Casey via Cleantechnica File this one under E for ewps, at least as far as the export market for US fracked natural gas goes. The US natural gas industry has been leaning thishard on the Obama Administration to approve more overseas sales, but international fossil fuel giant Saudi Aramco has just announced big [...]
By Michael T. Klare via Tomdispatch Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share [...]
CNN: "A highway patrol officer was caught on camera hitting a woman with what a witness says were "knockout punches." Aviva Shen at Thinkprogress writes: "The officer said the woman was walking barefoot along the freeway on Tuesday and refused to stop when asked. The video shows the cop tackle her, pin her down, and [...]
By Noam Chomsky via Tomdispatch The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in [...] |
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Initially, I wasn't going to recommend this film. I still cannot really do so for the most persons, and that is not in my book a sign that it is great cinematic art. I am happy, for example, to recommend MUD, the film most scandalously left off this year''s list of Oscar-nominees for Best Picture, to any movie-lover.
My initial ambivalence surprised me, because as regular Carl's Rock Songbook readers know, I have a thing for re-living and re-thinking the 60s music scenes, and have given special attention to Joan , Bob , and the folkie phenomenon. And ever since some comments here got me digging deep into TRUE GRIT, I've learned to respect the cult of the Coen Brothers, and to approach their films with high expectations. I've been further encouraged in this by some of the philosophy-prof essays here , and especially by observations from a friend of mine I'll call my "Coen Brothers guy." So, I figured I must be just about the perfect potential audience member for this film.
And yet, it left me puzzled and put off. For one, it doesn't have much of a plot. It was also egregiously depressing--not in the usual tragic, existential, or axe-grinding modes, but in some unique Coen-mode of everyday futility.
But I eventually realized that this is a film that keeps working in your head--it contains puzzles, mysteries, and haunting images, and these eventually drew me to see it again.
What INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS does is jump into an ongoing story of failure, that of a folk singer. The major reasons for the failure are elusive, but some of the minor reasons are just matters of bad luck. The singer is Llewyn Davis, a composite of various folkies, but particularly modeled upon Dave Van Ronk, the subject of the book The Mayor of MacDougal Street. The Coens have said Ronk was "...probably the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up. But in our minds he was the folk singer, 'the generic folk singer...'" As the final scene underlines, he was in the same spot and time Dylan was when he was discovered. The film conveys that musically, Davis (i.e., Van Ronk) had extremely high-quality stuff, in Joan's and Bob's league, or just below theirs, with the slight inferiority perhaps due to it lacking certain markers of distinctiveness. Surely there were and are some folk fans who regard it as in fact superior.
But contrary to some of its marketing, this film is not a celebration of the Greenwich Village scene or the late 50s/early 60s folk movement. It assumes you know something about those already, and if it does give you some solid portrayals of folk-music performance, what it more typically does is show you the most unflattering aspects of whole scene.
American Bohemia is presented as a kind of special hell within the larger uncaring and over-commercialized American society of the early 60s. We meet at least three pretty despicable bohemian persons, Davis's ex-lover Jean, the club owner, and the famous folk impresario Bud Grossman; and on a road-trip Davis takes to Chicago, we meet two decidedly monstrous ones, an incommunicative hoody young beat-poet, and a demonically arrogant elder jazz musician addicted to heroin. Even the folk-music loving academic couple that lets Davis crash at their place is revealed to have an exploitative side to their sunny niceness. And Davis himself isn't terribly admirable.
The legendary bohemian practice of living hand-to-mouth, sleeping on couch after couch, which hagiographic accounts of Dylan often underline, is shown to involve degrading and tension-producing relations for all concerned. We get that flat-out denial of the retrospective romanticization of this period again and again: the road trip across America is awful, meeting Bud Grossman at the famous Gate of Horn is awful, being signed with a legendary ma and pa folk record company is awful, and so on.
You know the cover of the second Dylan LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, where you see young Bob in the rusty suede highways-and-byways-evoking jacket with the bohemian girlfriend on his arm, as they walk down a Village street covered with grimy snow?
Well, imagine that without Bob and his smiling Suzi, so that all we're left with is the grimy cold street, and maybe somewhere in the corner we see some shivering and beat-up guy with his back half-turned to us. That's the world of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. What it's telling us, perhaps even too insistently, is that the since-lionized folk/beatnik Bohemia was a cold and dreary place for most of its aspiring artists.
This is perhaps most underlined when, after Davis has undergone his horrific road-trip to Chicago for the sake of playing for Bud Grossman, he finally gets to. The song he plays is beautiful, and Grossman listens intently, but with an unreadable face. We're so ready for the redemption moment, for Davis's suffering to pay off. He's just spilled out the treasures of his soul! And Grossman, without changing expression, says, "I don't see a lot of money in this." But words cannot convey how brutal the moment feels.
It's a deliberately anti-iconic film.
The lesson from Davis's failure? Well, I suppose I could quote Tocqueville about equality making each of us fairly-talented ones thinking the democratic world is going to make us stars, or at least reward us with some paying gig, but maybe, there is no lesson . The Coen's common tack of forcing the audience to confront the possibility of nihilism being true , of human life being essentially meaningless, which for them has usually played out within a crime drama, here occurs in a mundane set of events.
The failure seems fated, as Davis cannot even succeed in getting out of the folk-singer life: when he tries to give up and rejoin the merchant-marine, a nobody's-fault mishaps (along with corrupt union rules) keep him from being able to. And one scene initially appearing to be a repeat of an earlier one, along with another actually being such, make it seem as if Davis is caught in a time-loop. That''s how cyclical and pointless his life is.
Most of what happens to Davis we can hardly say he is responsible for. Nor does it matter much how he deals with it. He's no whiner, but his usually toughing things out stoically doesn't make him a winner. Yes, in two scenes he takes out his anger on persons who don't deserve it, but there is no suggestion that if had been nice he would have gotten a break. There's no apparent moral to his story.
In sum, it's an egregiously depressing story, and pointless beyond reminding us that life often feel pointlessly random, that only the Coens could get away with putting on film.
That's what put me off. I was focusing too much on the "career" story, or to paraphrase a repeated line in the film, the "what-you-do?" story.
I hadn't yet digested the significance of the cats and abortions.
Initially, there are two abortions, and two cats, to consider. Subtly but nonetheless insistently, the film suggests that Davis's responses to them matter, and regardless of how the story of his folk-music career turns out.
Well, actually, there are two abortions that turn out to be only one, and one cat that turns out to be really two.
And actually, careful viewers come to realize that the two cats turn out to be three.
In the most haunting scene in the film, sometime in the middle of the wintry night after he drives by Akron, Ohio, where he knows his two-year old child lives, whom he until recently thought was aborted, Davis encounters one of those cats again, apparently one he abandoned, when it darts out in front of his car. He hits it, stops, and he briefly sees it slightly bloodied and limping off into the night. There is some connection between him having abandoned a child of his to die, by an abortion that never happened, to his having abandoned and now wounded a cat. Both will be wounded for life.
That's how the cats and the abortions come together, outside the similar confusion about how many of each there really are. But let's take them in turn.
The most notable instance of energy-wasting mishaps occurring in Davis's life is when a cat darts out of one the apartments he's crashing at, and while he runs to grab it, the apartment door locks behind, and he's thus forced to keep the cat with him in his errands across NYC until those apartment owners return. But the cat escapes while he's staying at another apartment, because he opened a window to smoke. But, later--saved!--he sees the cat strolling by a cafe, and snatches it up.
But, as we later learn in a pretty funny scene, that was actually a different cat, a look-alike. So then he's stuck with this second cat--he doesn't know who it belongs to. Davis is a compassionate enough guy that he keeps it with him, even as he journeys to Chicago. However, on this road-trip, he finds himself in a situation where he has to hitch-hike in the wintery dawn, or face possible police-entanglements, and it simply won't work to be thumbing rides, while trying to hold onto a guitar-case and a cat. He leaves it in the car where the creepy addict character is passed out. It poignantly looks into his eyes, and he turns away.
The film in a sense punishes that abandonment, by having him hit apparently the same cat, when he's driving back the other way from Chicago. What are the chances of that?
Well, they are actually zero, since some earlier dialogue let us know that when he abandoned the cat, the car was less than three driving hours from Chicago. And where does he hit it? Somewhere further past Akron, Ohio, on the way back to NYC. I checked, and the driving distance from Akron to Chicago is 365 miles, likely six hours driving time. Davis has only been in Chicago one day. That means that when he hits what looks like the same cat, he is a minimum 180 miles further East from where he abandoned it about 24 hours before. So, whatever Davis thinks, and whatever the film makes us initially think, it is in fact a third look-alike cat!
But the Coens do their best to keep the puzzle and possibility open, as we later learn that the first cat Davis lost miraculously made its way from Greenwich Village back uptown to Washington Heights, and at one point Davis's eye fixes on a poster for Disney's INCREDIBLE JOURNEY, the one where pets find their way home across hundreds of miles of wilderness. So maybe that second cat could have travelled that far on the interstate?
Well, I am ashamed to say that I now have done the internet research to know that among the documented stories of amazing pet return-home journeys, no cat has ever covered 180 miles in a day.
Llewyn Davis has a reputation, to some degree exaggerated by the jealous suspicions of others, for sleeping around. A fact of bohemian life, we might say, of the revolution soon to be mainstreamed. Arguably, a key piece of the male folk-singer mystique.
Two years previously, he arranged and paid for, with what I guess counts as bohemian chivalry, a woman he impregnated to get an abortion (then illegal) from a competent doctor, and in the film we see him do the same for Jean. So it seems we are dealing with a man responsible for two abortions.
But when he goes to arrange the second, in a scene also remarkable for the ridiculous lengths to which the doctor resorts to euphemism to speak of anything but "baby, "birth," and "abortion," he learns that the first was never done. His old lover decided to go back to her hometown Akron and have the baby, without telling him. He's a father.
Could INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS be an anti-abortion film? Well, we can't tell whether it endorses the moderate pro-choice position of wanting abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare," but it is almost certainly against abortion itself.
There is only one way it could not be, and that is if you decide that it teaches that nihilism is the truth, revealed here by the pointless failure of Davis's career, so that his having to obtain abortions for women he impregnated is just another absurd, annoying, and energy-sapping aspect of that, his irrational guilt instincts causing him to have to scrounge for money, and so that his learning that one of these abortions didn't occur is just another sort of misfortune, saddling him with sentiments that he will have no way to really act upon (it is unlikely the that the mother of the child wants to see him), and probably causing him to draw some kind of superstitious karmic connection between a random coincidence of having hit a cat that looks just like one he abandoned, and his driving by the town his child may be living in. And besides, we know it is only the Coens who have set up the set of coincidences. It is only in movies and old religious tales that such connections are so neat. The truth the film is onto is that even something as apparently momentous as birth and abortion is a function of arbitrary factors. We know the film is onto such truths because it indicates that the very connection Llewyn likely draws between hitting the cat and passing by Akron is based on a factual error.
Well, that's pretty stretched, and it's flying in the face of lots of hints from the film.
Item: regardless of the mistake about the cat identity, the film clearly invites us to judge Llewyn poorly for abandoning the second cat, to associate that with his abandoning these two children to death or fatherlessness, and to see the hitting of the cat as a sign of his sin, and of how the one child will be wounded for life by it.
Item: the film clearly portrays Llewyn as considering whether to spontaneously take the off-ramp to Akron, where he has every reason to think his two-year old child is. The accident with the cat is the next scene.
Item: despite the title of the film, which is that of Davis's solo LP, what is "inside Llewyn Davis" remains pretty unknown to us. However, there is a moment that seems to offer it up, which is when Bud Grossman oddly, perhaps mockingly, says, "play something from Inside Llewyn Davis ." Davis's choice is an old folk song, "The Death of Queen Jane," in which a long-in-labor Jane asks for her side to be cut open to save her baby. That is, the heroine asks for her life to be taken for the sake of the baby's, the very opposite of what is enacted by an abortion. Thinking about such, perhaps even subconsciously, is one of the main things inside Llewyn Davis.
Item: the Saturday night Davis gets beat up by the cowboy-like guy who strangely asks him "what you do?" is the night of Jean's abortion. This is also the conclusion of the film--so more significant than it ending with Dylan''s first performance in Greenwich Village, is it ending (and beginning) on the evening of the day of the abortion, the one that really happens.
The career of Davis, i.e., the apparent "what he does," is not what really matters. Earlier in the film, when his sister suggests, that perhaps he should give up on the music thing, he protests the idea by saying, "And what, just exist ?"
The anti-abortion message hidden within INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is that making the way for, and taking the responsibility for, others to exist, may be more important than the apparent path of what is best for one's "doing," even for one's artistic creative doing. Davis should have risked going to Akron to see his child. And he should never have lived in a way that risked bringing children into the world (i.e., conceived), that he was implicitly resolved to either abandon or abort, in the first place.
This seems a bit too pat, however, as if Davis could have applied these lessons and made things right. Or as if a younger Davis could have ever even known these lessons, and thus not have become the Davis we meet. I think what the Coens actually offer, through the strange incidents involving cats, is an opportunity for Davis, and thus us, to glimpse the mystery that lies outside the cyclical trap of a life he was living. They are not saying his pulling off into Akron would have lead to anything solid or otherwise easily got him out of that life. But they really are wanting us to see that missing out on being a father in some unfamous place like Akron is a greater and more poignant loss than missing out on being the likes of Bob Dylan.
Well, we''ll see what my "Coen Brothers guy" makes of all of this. But those of you who have seen it, what do you say? |
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Initially, I wasn't going to recommend this film. I still cannot really do so for the most persons, and that is not in my book a sign that it is great cinematic art |
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In 2005 Gaza was unconditionally given to the Palestinians. They quickly handed it over to Hamas, made it a terror fortress, and smuggled in all the weapons of war that they could (which brought about a blockade). All efforts of peace since then have been met with "Massacre all the Jews!"
There is one very vital thing that must be said to all the Arabs of Palestine, as well as their supporters and defenders around the world. If you want to have peace and co-exist with Israel without war, violence, and death then stop voting in and supporting fundamentalists and extremists who's pastime is strapping bombs onto innocent women and children and launching rockets at Israel. And stop excusing such bloody actions when they occur. Leave Israel alone and you will soon have both peace and harmony with the Jew. If you are a peaceful Muslim then you must reject murder and terrorism in the name of Allah. If you are rational Westerner, you must do the same. It's that simple.
One must wonder why such focused and massive worldwide attention is spotlighted on this decades long conflict every time Israel finally decides to stand up for itself against those seeking its national destruction and the extermination of its people. Far worse death and destruction is being perpetrated nearly daily in both Syria and in ISIS controlled Iraq. Do you have any idea of the number of horrendous honor killings perpetrated every single year throughout the Muslim world? Yet I hear only selective complaining from Progressives, the Left, and a few shrill voices of the conspiracist, racist Right when it comes to the Gaza conflict.
Often the very people suddenly all concerned about the plight of the poor Palestinian Arabs are the exact same people the inhabitants of Gaza would eliminate from the face of the earth under Sharia law if given the chance. As a Westerner, if you find that your chosen ideology ends up leading you to align yourself with Islamists and terror groups against a Westernized, civilized, and modern democratic nation-state then perhaps it is time to seriously reexamine your current belief system. Making common cause with militant Muslims rarely turns out well.
Even more disturbing is that there are so many progressive Jews who appear to be so self-loathing as to support and defend the very people who seek the extermination of their own people and race. It is almost beyond comprehension that those who advocate a second holocaust are extended such sympathy by the people they seek to eliminate. I, for example, would not shed a tear for those who would seek the extermination of my race while waving blood-stained hands in the air. That just wouldn't happen. I would instead be proud to defend my people from such as those. In Islam, the infidel is offered three choices; death, conversion, or subjugation. In modern times the Jew is offered only death. If there is one thing Israel is very good at, it is protecting it's own. Those hostile to the existence of the state of Israel continue to learn that lesson the hard way.
The ultimate irony is that most Westerners who defend Hamas and attack the right of Israel to exist or defend itself would be persecuted and even executed under Sharia law because of their life choices, racial heritage, and beliefs. How they cannot see that is impossible to understand or fathom. For otherwise supposedly intelligent members of Western Civilization to stand up and defend Muslim fanatics and terror groups just because they oppose Israel is a sad and pathetic thing so see. It should be disturbing to all those who value the concept and values of civilized man and the West over the barbarian peddling only death and destruction.
Here is some footage of Hamas shooting rockets next to crowded hotels, apartment complexes, and even right next to a UN flagged building.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMiG9JD2OxM]
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_fP6mlNSK8] From NDTV's accompanying article :
Israel has argued that that [Hamas'] rockets are fired from civilian areas, and this is why its retaliatory strikes can result in civilian casualties...this morning, NDTV witnessed one such rocket silo being created under a tent right next to the hotel where our team was staying. Minutes later, we saw the rocket being fired, just before the 72-hour ceasefire came into effect. It began with a mysterious tent with a blue canopy that bobbed up yesterday (August 4) at 6:30 am in an open patch of land next to our window. We saw three men making a multitude of journeys in and out of the tent, sometimes with wires. An hour later, they emerged, dismantled the tent, changed their clothes and walked away. The next morning - today - we woke to news of the 72-hour ceasefire but just before it was to take effect, the rocket next to our hotel was fired. There was a loud explosion and a whooshing sound. The cloud of smoke that rose was captured by our cameraperson. This report is being aired on NDTV and published on ndtv.com after our team left the Gaza strip - Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired . But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel's offensive on Gaza's civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones .
Hamas and similar groups need to be hunted down and destroyed. War is never pretty and the collateral damage is always very regrettable, but sometimes wars need to be fought. And one should always use overwhelming force if possible to make sure you win. That's how it's done. It's how one assures themselves of victory. One never heard the rhetoric of proportional response when it came to Pearl Harbor and defeating Imperial Japan in WWII, and such bizarre arguments are only trotted out like a one trick pony when it comes to Israel fighting it's enemies. Muslim terrorists of all stripes deserve no mercy as they will never compromise or change and show no mercy themselves. They seek only to kill and destroy and we see that all across the Middle East right now. The evidence is the news and headlines we see every single day. |
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TERRORISM |
In 2005 Gaza was unconditionally given to the Palestinians. They quickly handed it over to Hamas, made it a terror fortress, and smuggled in all the weapons of war that they could (which brought about a blockade). All efforts of peace since then have been met with "Massacre all the Jews!"
There is one very vital thing that must be said to all the Arabs of Palestine, as well as their supporters and defenders around the world. If you want to have peace and co-exist with Israel without war, violence, and death then stop voting in and supporting fundamentalists and extremists who's pastime is strapping bombs onto innocent women and children and launching rockets at Israel. And stop excusing such bloody actions when they occur. Leave Israel alone and you will soon have both peace and harmony with the Jew. If you are a peaceful Muslim then you must reject murder and terrorism in the name of Allah. If you are rational Westerner, you must do the same. It's that simple.
One must wonder why such focused and massive worldwide attention is spotlighted on this decades long conflict every time Israel finally decides to stand up for itself against those seeking its national destruction and the extermination of its people. Far worse death and destruction is being perpetrated nearly daily in both Syria and in ISIS controlled Iraq. Do you have any idea of the number of horrendous honor killings perpetrated every single year throughout the Muslim world? Yet I hear only selective complaining from Progressives, the Left, and a few shrill voices of the conspiracist, racist Right when it comes to the Gaza conflict.
Often the very people suddenly all concerned about the plight of the poor Palestinian Arabs are the exact same people the inhabitants of Gaza would eliminate from the face of the earth under Sharia law if given the chance. As a Westerner, if you find that your chosen ideology ends up leading you to align yourself with Islamists and terror groups against a Westernized, civilized, and modern democratic nation-state then perhaps it is time to seriously reexamine your current belief system. Making common cause with militant Muslims rarely turns out well.
Even more disturbing is that there are so many progressive Jews who appear to be so self-loathing as to support and defend the very people who seek the extermination of their own people and race. It is almost beyond comprehension that those who advocate a second holocaust are extended such sympathy by the people they seek to eliminate. I, for example, would not shed a tear for those who would seek the extermination of my race while waving blood-stained hands in the air. That just wouldn't happen. I would instead be proud to defend my people from such as those. In Islam, the infidel is offered three choices; death, conversion, or subjugation. In modern times the Jew is offered only death. If there is one thing Israel is very good at, it is protecting it's own. Those hostile to the existence of the state of Israel continue to learn that lesson the hard way.
The ultimate irony is that most Westerners who defend Hamas and attack the right of Israel to exist or defend itself would be persecuted and even executed under Sharia law because of their life choices, racial heritage, and beliefs. How they cannot see that is impossible to understand or fathom. For otherwise supposedly intelligent members of Western Civilization to stand up and defend Muslim fanatics and terror groups just because they oppose Israel is a sad and pathetic thing so see. It should be disturbing to all those who value the concept and values of civilized man and the West over the barbarian peddling only death and destruction.
Here is some footage of Hamas shooting rockets next to crowded hotels, apartment complexes, and even right next to a UN flagged building.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMiG9JD2OxM]
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_fP6mlNSK8] From NDTV's accompanying article :
Israel has argued that that [Hamas'] rockets are fired from civilian areas, and this is why its retaliatory strikes can result in civilian casualties...this morning, NDTV witnessed one such rocket silo being created under a tent right next to the hotel where our team was staying. Minutes later, we saw the rocket being fired, just before the 72-hour ceasefire came into effect. It began with a mysterious tent with a blue canopy that bobbed up yesterday (August 4) at 6:30 am in an open patch of land next to our window. We saw three men making a multitude of journeys in and out of the tent, sometimes with wires. An hour later, they emerged, dismantled the tent, changed their clothes and walked away. The next morning - today - we woke to news of the 72-hour ceasefire but just before it was to take effect, the rocket next to our hotel was fired. There was a loud explosion and a whooshing sound. The cloud of smoke that rose was captured by our cameraperson. This report is being aired on NDTV and published on ndtv.com after our team left the Gaza strip - Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired . But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel's offensive on Gaza's civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones .
Hamas and similar groups need to be hunted down and destroyed. War is never pretty and the collateral damage is always very regrettable, but sometimes wars need to be fought. And one should always use overwhelming force if possible to make sure you win. That's how it's done. It's how one assures themselves of victory. One never heard the rhetoric of proportional response when it came to Pearl Harbor and defeating Imperial Japan in WWII, and such bizarre arguments are only trotted out like a one trick pony when it comes to Israel fighting it's enemies. Muslim terrorists of all stripes deserve no mercy as they will never compromise or change and show no mercy themselves. They seek only to kill and destroy and we see that all across the Middle East right now. The evidence is the news and headlines we see every single day |
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We are starting to suspect that David Barton either owns a time machine or else he simply has a tendency to exaggerate about the amount of work that he does.
Last year, Barton was the keynote speaker at the Family Leader's " Celebrate The Family " dinner where he delivered his standard presentation, but one thing caught our attention, which was his standard assertion that he speaks to hundreds of groups every year. In this case, Barton said that he personally "spoke to over 600 different groups" in the last year, which averages out to speaking to a group and a half every single day for an entire year.
That seemed a little hard to believe simply on its face. But it becomes even harder to believe in light of his later assertion that he owns a ranch that requires him to work "from sun up to sun down" fourteen hours a day during the summer.
"We wish we had eight hour days like people in the city have," Barton said . "We never get eight hour days; that would be a vacation. We work all the time":
How on earth does Barton manage to speak to more than 600 groups every year while also working all day long on his ranch during the summer? |
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The Battle of Okinawa codenamed Operation Iceberg, was a series of battles fought in the Ryukyu Islands, centered on the island of Okinawa, and included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War during World War II.
[revad1]
The 82-day-long battle lasted from April 1st until June 22nd, 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland (code named Operation Downfall). This color documentary brings you a glimpse of one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific.
Do you think this was the most important battle of WWII? Sound off and share your opinions and comments in the section below. |
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In 1992, while back in Miami, he decided to join a Columbia-sponsored trip to Cuba. The island had just begun to absorb its body blow from the fall of the Soviet Union. Over a period of eight days, de Leon traveled the length of the country and met with everyone from jailed dissidents to those who'd passed judgment on them.
De Leon knew his journey could come at great personal cost. It was no accident he waited until the day before he left his parents' house to tell his family about it. The experience on the island and what awaited him when he came home would serve as a painful and instructive primer on the issues of free speech in Miami's Cuban community.
After the visit he returned to the public defender's office, where he worked until this past May 25. In 1997 he became president of the ACLU. Next week de Leon will step down from that post and move to Bogota, Colombia, where a U.S. government-funded job awaits him. He will be part of a team implementing a new constitution for the country, as well as establishing a public-defender system and a constitutional court.
New Times caught up with de Leon in the ACLU's new suite of offices at 4500 Biscayne Blvd., as he was preparing to leave for Latin America. In a conversation over several days and many subjects, the activist and attorney talked frankly about his Cuban identity, police abuse in the inner city, juvenile justice, intolerance, and the future of Miami. Here are some excerpts:
What do you think you inherited from Cuban culture?
I think what being Cuban has added to my identity is a strong sense of roots and a connection to my family. [I have] a real love of the cultural aspects of being Cuban -- like the music and an appreciation of the drama of life. For Cubans everything is drama. It's a very emotional culture. If so-and-so said something in a certain way, [we take it as] a personal affront. There is a wonderful humanity about the [Cubans].
On the other hand, I'm about as much of a hybrid as any member of any first-generation immigrant group [can be.] There are things about American culture that I connect to, that I don't think my parents connect to at all. For example I have more faith in institutions than in personal relationships as a governing force. We as Cubans [tend to] think it is a question of who you know and who can help you out. There is a certain solidarity with your neighbors in Cuban culture that I like, but at the same time, in terms of achieving things professionally, I think the American approach is more of a meritocracy. It's more what you [can] do.
In 1992 you went to Cuba. What was that like, and how did your family respond?
Up to that point in my life, it was probably the most significant decision I'd ever made. I knew it would be devastating to my parents, particularly my mom.
All my life, the mythology of Cuba loomed large in everything. It really brought up a lot of stuff in terms of who I was and my identity. A lot of people go through this when they [return] or go to that country for the first time.
I felt as much connection to those people on the island as I did to any Cuban in Miami. I think it is one family. [We] share the basic human component that unites everybody from that island. And the physical beauty was astounding to me.
Ironically the trip helped me understand why my parents and their generation felt such profound hatred for Castro because they lost or left behind this spectacular jewel. It gave me a keener understanding of the suffering and pain of my parents.
When I came back, I had to leave my house. It was awful. It was a very difficult period in my family. They didn't understand why I went. They thought my going signaled some kind of support for Castro, when my trip had nothing to do with politics. It took months before family members started talking with me. We worked through it, but it was tough.
What were some of your most memorable cases as a public defender?
One of my most memorable cases was a wonderful young man who got himself involved in some sort of operation with his fellow high-schoolers, white middle-class kids allegedly involved in a drug lab that manufactured distilled cocaine for distribution. My kid was lower-middle class and could not afford the high-priced attorneys that the other kids could.
When the evidence came in, there were literally boxes, like moving boxes, full of cocaine. People had to clear the courtroom because the fumes were so strong.
They were allegedly involved in this big operation, yet they were all charged as juveniles. I think it was perfectly appropriate for the state attorney to keep those cases in juvenile court. The kids ended up being productive members of society. Yet I've had African-American kids transferred over to the adult court system for having a rock of cocaine.
It brought home several things: the disparity between justice for African Americans and whites, that kids who are involved in this stuff at the age of fifteen or sixteen don't have an understanding of the full moral repercussions of their actions, and that they can be rehabilitated.
In another case that really stands out, I had a fourteen-year-old African-American male charged with burglary. [He] had absolutely no familial or structural support in his life. The judge said, "Listen, there ain't nothing out there for this kid, so for the safety of the community, let's ship him off to adult court."
Based on our experience, we knew nothing but bad could come [from] sending a fourteen-year-old kid with no family support to jail. His only coping mechanism was going to be dealing with adult criminals. He'd have no support when he got out. He ended up being involved in the attempted murder of somebody by the age of sixteen. We created a crime. We created circumstances that led to further victimization in our community.
John de Leon says two of his most memorable cases while at the ACLU were his advocacy on behalf of nine students from Killian High School, arrested and suspended for publishing a satirical pamphlet; and opposition to the so-called Cuba ordinance passed by the county commission to cut off public funds for groups with ties to Cuba and prevent the island's artists from performing in public facilities.
Why those two?
Killian because it was a precursor to a lot of stuff that is happening in terms of the rights of students. Given the zero tolerance after Columbine, these are issues we will have to deal with around the state. I think Killian is critical, because the way we train students in what their rights are translates into how they're going to impose those rights when they become leaders and full citizens.
When totalitarian tactics [like the strip searches of the Killian Nine] are used against students and are met with approval by other students and authority figures, people think those tactics are okay. That's going to translate into how our country will be run. When people come into schools with those [metal detector] wands and tell kids to line up against the wall and it's okay; when they make kids go through metal detectors to their classrooms; when they write things, are arrested for it, and the courts say it's okay, you are getting on to a very dangerous slope. So yes, Killian was important.
The Cuba ordinance, I think, is a milestone. Four or five years ago people were calling me up, afraid to say publicly the Cuban ordinance needed to be repealed. It was really offensive to me to live in this community and think that people thought they would lose their funding because they [took a position like that]. It was a case that finally [stopped] our government from picking and choosing who could perform in public. The folks who had the courage to take a position on that issue all feel good about having done so.
But what is wrong with politicians deciding how tax dollars should be spent in public facilities?
Ultimately government is the will of the majority. The government should not dictate who I see, or what you see, or what anyone else sees or hears in a democracy! The moment that happens, there is a tyranny of the majority. People need to understand that. [Examples] of that are people being afraid to speak or communicate publicly about issues they hold strong opinions on. When someone calls me in the United States of America in the year 1998, and says they are afraid for their livelihood if they say something they'd be free to express in any other community in America, it's frightening. Those are the consequences of shutting down free speech. It goes way beyond Los Van Van or Manolin playing some concert.
Under your direction the ACLU has built a real presence in the inner city, including a recently opened resource center at 4055 NW Seventeenth Ave., in the Brothers of the Same Mind building. What is the role of the organization regarding issues of race and politics?
I think the establishment is clearly trying to criminalize African Americans. If not intentionally, they are de facto trying to do that. They want to disenfranchise as many people as possible. We have these awful anti-democratic laws that call for individuals who have pleaded to some sort of felony and have completed their time from ever voting again or participating in democracy. These laws disproportionately affect African Americans in Florida. There are [hundreds of thousands] of people who can't vote anymore.... Given the results of the last election, when 500 votes made the difference, [several hundred thousand] votes certainly makes a difference. And believe me, the Republican legislators know which votes they are deliberately [discounting] in future elections through disenfranchising people.
There are issues of racial profiling, which have always been here but have come to light now, involving not only motorist stops but stopping people for "shopping while black," as they say; "walking while black" in their neighborhoods; "breathing while black" -- in essence being black in America. The ACLU is an organization dedicated to preventing this sort of abuse.
John de Leon has been a regular presence at angry meetings about police killings of young black men. Most recently he mourned Nick Singleton, an unarmed Overtown teenager gunned down by Miami police this past May 5 as he ran from a jeep he was suspected of stealing.
Has policing in the inner city improved since McDuffie? What still needs to be done?
I think the fact that the composition of the police department is more reflective of the makeup of this community has helped tremendously. Cops aren't seen as much as an occupying force. Whether they are or they aren't is another issue. I thought the reaction of the police chief [Raul Martinez], in terms of trying to get the community together, was a good sign, and they are reacting a little bit better. All those things are favorable.
There is no mistaking, though, that we haven't done anything institutionally since McDuffie except to change the makeup of the police department. In twenty years they haven't done anything to improve mechanisms by which African Americans and other minorities will feel they can have an impact on abusive police. Twenty years ago the communists were still in power in the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall was still up, South Africa was ruled by a white minority group.... And we haven't been able to institute any kind of civilian review or citizens investigative panel with subpoena power and oversight? It's pathetic.
My philosophy is that this country has gone through more than 200 years and world wars where people have died because they didn't want the arbitrary use of police power by the government. They died so that the police would not engage in violations of civil rights. They did not die because they wanted to lower crime rates in the inner city. That needs to be ingrained in each of these police officers. Ultimately in this democracy if we can't dictate the terms of accountability for police who kill members of our community, then we are on our way to a police state.
What about the argument that strong policing is necessary to rein in crime in the inner city?
It's in the fight against some perceived evil where we most often end up giving up some of our rights. Say it is a sexual predator we are afraid of, and we [order] indefinite detention despite no finding that [he or she] has committed a violation of the law. Or it's the war on drugs, where our inner cities are being decimated by evil drug dealers, and [we agree to violate] some people's rights [with illegal stop-and-frisk laws] in order to save others. It's that whole notion of "Let's burn the village in order to save it."
Would you be saying that if the sexual predator lived next door?
The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to act as a buffer against [the] vigilantism that results when there is a criminal act done against someone in the community we care about. Of course if it were my family member victimized by some sexual predator, I'd want that person identified or detained. But believe me, the moment you take away the rights of that drug dealer or that predator, it's not going to stop with them. Ultimately it will have an impact on you.
Other than through lawsuits, how does the ACLU protect First Amendment rights of free speech?
There is nothing like listening to people and trying to understand where they are coming from. To the extent that we can foster safe places where people can feel comfortable that [their] ideas can be discussed without [risking] violence, that's one role the ACLU can play. The First Amendment is not there to protect polite speech. It is there to protect real raw speech that comes from people's personal experiences.
The Los Van Van concert [in October 1999 Cuba's premier timba dance band, closely identified with the Castro regime, played an unprecedented concert in Miami] was a great example. It took a lot of doing to make sure the event went forward. The ACLU promoted the freedom of someone like [concert organizer] Debbie Ohanian to do her concert at the Miami Arena and also supported the protesters outside to be able to demonstrate. That was a good example, as unpleasant as it appeared to everybody, of the First Amendment in action.
I thought it was a good thing in terms of the growth of the community.
Has Miami grown more tolerant then?
I think we're in a dramatically different place in terms of the consequences that are taken against people who take positions that aren't popular. Given that the worst-case scenario was what was going on 25 years ago, when people were being killed, it could only improve. I don't think there is a real credible threat of physical harm anymore.
But are people potentially going to lose jobs or business because they take certain positions? I think that is still there. We saw that as a result of Elian Gonzalez. People were treated differently by their co-workers as a result of the positions they took. If we are going to live in a democracy, there are going to be consequences for the position you take, which can include personal relationships breaking up.... Nothing will ever change that. We have a Bill of Rights [to prevent] the government from imposing certain viewpoints on people.
The culture of fear is the legitimate remnant of the years of terror in Miami in the Seventies, when all the bombing was going on. That is part of our psychic history. It stays with a lot of people, and that is the terrible toll of terrorism. The remnant of the church bombings in the Fifties stays with African Americans.
People still have that ingrained in them, but I think we need to recognize we are in a different place now. We are in a different place in the year 2001 than we were in 1976, when they attempted to assassinate Emilio Milian.
Like FDR said, the thing we have to fear the most is fear itself. What we need to do, all of us, whoever we are, is have a little bit of courage in terms of being free to state our political convictions and what we believe about a particular issue. When we state those things, the consequences aren't generally as bad as we think.
Does language seriously divide us in Miami?
There are people who have an interest in making sure one group or another doesn't hear what another group is saying. It is bad enough that we have these cultural differences, but when the language is used as another tool of segregating ourselves as a community, it doesn't make it easier. We are going to have to start understanding one another's points of views.
Can anything be done about stations like Radio Mambi (WAQI-AM 710) that seem to traffic in creating divisions?
Putting my First Amendment hat on, there is something to be said for encouraging people to speak their minds. It is always better to hear what people are saying and thinking rather than trying to repress it.
If what they are saying is reflective of the worst aspects of the community, then isn't it better to know it? I think it is.... A remarkable number of people of all languages listen to radio in this community. I think we just need a new group of people who'll start putting [better] things on the air.
In addition to his ACLU and public defender work, de Leon finds time to volunteer. He is a board member of one of Miami's most successful new civic organizations: the Urban Environment League. The group's aggressive advocacy for public parks and proper planning has landed it and de Leon in the middle of important debates such as the fate of Bicentennial Park.
Where is Miami in its development, and what does it most lack?
I think Miami is going through an organic process. The extent to which it moves forward or backward depends on us. We are helping to define the city. It is very exciting.
The single most critical factor in how we grow is how our city leaders, whether political or civic, see themselves as stewards for future generations. If our decisions continue to be made based on the short term -- for example we are building a stadium for a baseball team that needs a venue for the 2003 season, rather than building it because fifteen years from now it will be the centerpiece of a redevelopment of the area -- then we are doomed.
Developers are short term. They are businessmen. They care about putting money in their pockets now or in the next year. They could care less what happens in ten or fifteen years. Therefore it is a responsibility of our elected officials, and they have the power to act as stewards, to protect not this generation but the next generation and future generations after that. Unfortunately it hasn't historically been the case in this community
What does Miami need to make it a world-class city?
Civic culture. It is lacking individuals who are willing to create civic organizations that are going to last and have an impact. I think that is in part a result of people thinking that they can't make a difference. Because there is no history of civic organizations that had real power in this community. They don't know the power of civic groups.
In Miami in particular, it is amazing what a couple of people can do and what movements people can create in this community. I think individuals are more able to make an impact directly [here] than in any other city.
But this is open for the bad as well as the good. We have a long and colorful history of shysters coming in and spreading a few dollars around and becoming "community leaders," and then all of a sudden they are indicted. That history has been repeated, I think, since the Twenties.
And this will not be a great city until we start dealing with the issues of the divisions among the ethnicities. It is ridiculous that we don't have great public spaces where people get together. In a community that is so divided, our city leaders don't see the necessity. If we are able to create a vibrant and healthy downtown area, I think that will help unite us. People will be able to see each other in a nonconfrontational way.
You are about to move to one of the most dangerous nations in Latin America. Why?
This is going to be a learning experience for me as well as an opportunity to contribute. Colombia is in the middle of a civil war. In most other conflicts that I know of, people or countries reach a point of exhaustion and bankruptcy. This conflict is being subsidized by narcos, and the money is not going to end. [Also], you have the inequities found in any society in terms of problems of poverty and social injustice. [Colombians] have to confront those issues while being in the middle of a civil war.
I happen to think Colombians are correct in making the decision to provide justice to people, not having people languish in jails that are [below] international standards, and instituting innovations like alternative dispute resolution, and providing people with [the means to sue] the government for violations of constitutional rights.
I think that anything that can be done institutionally to ... undermine the factions that are trying to [destabilize] democracy [is hopeful.]
If Colombia is able to somehow deal with the problems it is going through, I think it can serve as a model for what can happen in other countries in Latin America, given the same pressures.
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In a way the ACLU has a similar role, doesn't it?
I think so. The ACLU is probably one of the most conservative organizations in this country. When you empower people who are powerless, it only leads to a greater feeling of the legitimacy of the system.
What do you think will be your legacy from your tenure at the ACLU?
I think there has been a monolithic view by too many about what it means to be Cuban or Cuban American. Even a lot of the people who are conservative on the Castro issue or the Cuba issue unfortunately have been wrongly painted as individuals who don't understand what it means to live free and support freedom. To the extent that I have helped others understand that Cubans care about these issues whatever their political views, I hope it's given a greater insight about what it means to be Cuban American. |
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Syrian refugee settlement, Bekaa valley, LEBANON -- The sign placed by Lebanese General Security and Tourism officials on the western side of the Masnaa border crossing from Syria to Lebanon greets arrivals. It reads: "WELCOME TO BROTHERLY LEBANON."
Well, at least it used to. That was until some obvious miscreant recently defaced the fine sign and wrote with a red magic marker: "These words are a sick joke and an obscenity!" And then the derelict apparently felt obliged to correct the sign. So for now, at least, Lebanon's Welcome sign at the Masnaa border crossing corrupts a bit St. Matthew's 11:25-30 account of Jesus Christ ministering to refugees and reads: "Abandon all hope ye from Syria and Palestine who travail are heavy laden and who seek refuge here."
Rejected Syrian refugees at the Lebanon border, December 25, 2014 (Photo courtesy of Franklin Lamb)
For the past year or longer, Lebanese officials have been unwittingly metastasizing Da'ish (ISIS) inside Lebanon from the border of occupied Palestine south up to Tartus Syria up north. This is one but not the only consequence of Lebanon's intensification of its multifaceted and self-destructive assault on refugees from Syria who are fleeing here for their lives.
Many Lebanese officials from across the fragile sectarian spectrum are neglecting their legal, political, and moral obligations as they remain silent when one of their grandstanding cabinet colleagues proclaims to applause that "Refugees from Syria give off a 'terrorism radiation' and we don't want them." When a government's own refugee minister labels Syrian refugees a "gangrenous and radioactive terror threat", jihadists rejoice and shout "Allah Akbar!" and more black Da'ish flags flutter in Lebanon.
Three months ago, Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas avoiding even the R-word ("refugee"), which he claims makes him gag, and announced that Lebanon "no longer officially receives any displaced Syrians" and he advised AFP that "the new visa requirement is intended to prevent Syrians from taking refuge in Lebanon."
Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, sharply demurred, arguing that the visa measures were a result of Lebanon's own failure to implement a refugee policy early in the Syrian conflict. Khatib said Lebanese concern about the refugee influx was "both real and exaggerated", admitting that wages have gone down and rents have increased, but also that Lebanese employers have exploited Syrians willing to work for lower wages.
The BBC's Middle East correspondent Paul Wood reported recently from Mashha in northern Lebanon that one resident told him, "I used to earn $1,000 a month. They (Lebanese employers) sacked me, and hired four Syrians instead."
Unlike Jordan and Turkey, Lebanon has rejected the advice of the UN and has refused to create refugee camps, meaning refugees are dispersed throughout the country and setting the stage for a humanitarian nightmare. Lebanon's complex sectarian make-up also plays a role given that most Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims, like the Palestinian refugees before them, raising fears they could change the country's delicate sectarian balance.
Their crime is that they are Syrians... (Photo courtesy of Franklin Lamb)
This fear is irrational. The reason is that neither Palestinians nor Syrian refugees want to stay in Lebanon with its fatal sectarianism, and it is estimated by UNWRA and the UNHCR that more than 95 percent of each group of refugees will depart Lebanon for Palestine and Syria just as soon as they can go home.
This week, Lebanon is doing jihadists another favor while adding to its own already deeply deplorable record of human rights abuses toward women, children, domestic workers, and Palestinian refugees, among others. Deprivations of elementary civil rights that are making Da'ish somehow more appealing in the eyes of many Sunni refugees seeking temporary sanctuary from a conflict that has killed more than a quarter million of their countrymen and displaced at least ten million, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
Until seven months ago, Syrians who entered Lebanon through an official border crossing and who were in possession of a passport or Syrian ID card could receive a free, six-month, renewable visa, one time, and a residency permit without charge. Subsequent renewals required payment of a US$200 fee. Many who could not return to Syria or afford the new fee were forced to stay on illegally.
On June 2, 2014, the Lebanese government changed the entry requirements for Syrians and blocked entry to all Syrian except those who could provide proof that they came from areas where there is fighting near the Lebanese border. Anyone who returned to Syria from Lebanon lost their refugee status and could not return.
Syrian refugees have been denied the right to seek asylum, and some have been forcibly returned to Syria by the Lebanese authorities without even a grace period. The new unannounced changes led to families being separated--again, in violation of international refugee law.
As of this week, and for the first time since its independence in 1943, Lebanon requires a visa for Syrians--something Syria has historically not required from any Arab country. This means that more than 90 percent of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives and appearing at the Lebanon border will be forced back to Syria to face their fate. Lebanon is imposing unprecedented new restrictions on the entry of Syrians, requiring them to provide the length and intention of their stay with nearly impossible to satisfy Kafkaesque restrictions in an effort to block them from entering. UNHCR, the UN's refugee body, fears the measures mean that Syrians fleeing violence in their own country are now blocked at the border.
As of this week, all Syrians must apply for one of six types of entry visas in Lebanon: business, medical, student, tourist, transit, and "short stay." The key omission, and in fact the real reason for this new visa requirements, is that Lebanon has just eliminated the very concept of a refugee entry visa for Syrians. Tourist visas must be accompanied by a hotel reservation and proof that the traveler has $1,000. Ron Redmond, a senior representative the UNHCG advised the media yesterday that "The UN understands the reasons Lebanon cite for doing this, but at the same time our job is to ensure the refugees aren't pushed back to someplace where they may be in grave danger."
Omar Ghannoum, who works for an international aid organization that offers legal advice to Syrian refugees, told Germany's broadcaster Deutsche Welle recently that Syrians in Lebanon cannot move around freely anymore. These refugees live in permanent fear of being caught by the police. They tend to stay at home, which means that they cannot go to work, and cannot pay their rent. It's a vicious circle."
Lebanon's latest assault on Syrian refugees could not be more illegal under principles, standards, and rules of international humanitarian law. While Lebanon has consistently refused to join the 147 countries that have signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, it is nonetheless bound to honor its provisions under international customary law, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention against Torture.
As required by the binding international legal norm of non-refoulement, Lebanon is obligated not to return individuals to a situation where they would be at risk of persecution or serious human rights abuses. This same international law of non-refoulement prohibits Lebanon from rejecting Syria refugees fleeing for their lives and asylum-seekers at the border. At a bare minimum, Lebanon is required to permit entry to Syrian refugees seeking asylum while they investigate whether they need to be protected as refugees. It refuses this obligation as well.
According to Article 1 of the Refugee Convention, a Syrian refugee is a national of that country who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.
The Lebanese government accordingly is obligated to grant refugees fleeing Syria the right not to be forcibly returned, or refouled (Article 33).
Lebanon, in gross violation of international humanitarian law, also rejects the rights of Syrian refugees not to be barred entry or expelled, except under certain strictly defined conditions (Article 32), as well as exemption from penalties for illegal entry into Lebanon, the right to work (Article 17), the right to housing (Article 21), the right to education (Article 22), the right to public relief and assistance (Article 23), the right to freedom of religion and free access to courts (Articles 4 and 16), freedom of movement within the territory (Article 26), and the right to be issued identity and travel documents (Articles 27 and 28).
More than 50 Lebanese municipalities have also been targeting Syrian refugees with illegal Zionist and South African apartheid-type curfews that restrict refugees' movements and contribute to a climate of discriminatory and retaliatory practices against Syrians generally. Such curfews violate international human rights law and are even illegal under Lebanese law.
" Lebanon's latest assault on Syrian refugees could not be more illegal under international humanitarian law." [ Tweet this! ]
Despite broad international criticism, many municipal police, and several local vigilante groups, continue to enforce the illegal curfews despite the fact that as far back as April of 2013, then Interior Minister Marwan Charbel declared was there was no legal basis for the curfews and that local municipalities did not have the right to infringe on the authority of the state-wide security forces by imposing them.
The British-based non-governmental organization (NGO) Legal Agenda has also publicly denounced the curfews, calling them a form of collective punishment and a violation of human rights. Less than six months ago the Norwegian Refugee Council, to its great credit, issued a fact sheet for lawyers about the curfews advising that they had no basis in Lebanese law.
Nadim Houry, the brilliant and indefatigable deputy Middle East Director for Human Rights Watch, has noted that, "These curfews are just contributing to an increasingly hostile environment for Syrian refugees in the country. The Lebanese authorities have presented no evidence that curfews for Syrian refugees are necessary for public order or security in Lebanon."
The simple fact of the matter is that anyone lawfully present in a country has the right to freedom of movement. This principle is enshrined in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Lebanon has ratified. Only under very limited circumstances--not present in this case--can restrictions to movement be enacted and they must be enacted in law and must be required "to protect national security, public order, public health, or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others."
Furthermore, the restriction of movement must be proportionate, including in judging the areas it applies to, the time, the number of people affected, and the impact it has on their lives, in comparison with the aim achieved by the law. Lebanon has no such law.
As Human Rights Watch has argued, restrictions on rights cannot be imposed on a discriminatory basis, including by nationality. This is a fundamental principle of human rights law that applies even during emergencies. The prohibition on discrimination against Syrians as opposed for example against Americans in Lebanon means any difference in treatment on the grounds of nationality must be very strictly justified. Lebanon has not and frankly cannot meet this burden of proof.
Lebanon's Legal and Brotherly obligations
Lebanon's international obligations to Syrian refugees fleeing the carnage next door include but are not limited to the following.
Lebanon must cease blocking Syrians and Palestinians escaping the conflict in Syria from accessing the territory of Lebanon under the principle of non-refoulement , a customary norm of international law binding on all states. Visa requirements that result in rejection at the border are amongst the prohibited measures.
Lebanon is obligated to cancel prohibitive fees for renewing visas, or the refusal to renew visas, which result in refugees being considered to be staying illegally in the country.
The Government of Lebanon must immediately cancel the new visa and resident requirements and allow all persons fleeing the conflict in Syria, who are normally resident in Syria, to enter Lebanon until such time that it is safe for them to return.
The Lebanese government must instruct municipalities to stop imposing curfews on Syrian refugees, to stop condoning vigilantism and to protect Syrians in Lebanon from retaliatory measures.
The government of Lebanon must cancel the broad 'security campaign' targeting Syrian workers that is currently being launched across Beirut. The unannounced raids on businesses that employ Syrian workers have been ongoing since December 10, 2014.
The Lebanese government should coordinate closely with the U.N. and develop criteria to ensure those suffering violence are able to cross into Lebanon.
Lebanese General Security officials at the Masnaa border crossing must ensure that no one fleeing Syria is forcibly returned to Syria in any manner whatsoever, including rejection at the border. General Security must immediately revoke all instructions to border officials and airlines which violate the principle of non-refoulement.
Refugees from Syria much be allowed to renew their residency in Lebanon until it is safe for them to return. Lebanon is obliged to waive the fees for renewal of visas for refugees from Syria or only charge a nominal fee.
Lebanese officials must make every effort not to separate families, particularly in cases where children are attempting to join their parents who are already in Lebanon. All children born in Lebanon must be registered in accordance with Lebanon's obligations under the Convention on the Right of the Child, which means allowing refugees from Syria to register their children's births regardless of visa status.
Lebanon must allow Syrian refugee children to register for secondary school and take their exams even if their visas have expired, in accordance with Lebanon's obligation under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to make secondary education available and accessible to every child. Lebanon must also publish clear and transparent information about administrative procedures relating to refugees' stay, legal status, and rights in Lebanon.
Measures can and should also be immediately taken on the level of the international community to end Lebanon's cold war on refugees from Syria, a crisis torn country where it is claimed more than 76,000 people were killed in 2014, including almost 18,000 civilians.
A couple of examples....
Firstly, while donor states should continue to assist the Lebanese government to meet the needs of the Syrian refugee and local populations, they should suspend aid to Lebanon, including military aid, while they investigate to what extent municipalities receiving their assistance are imposing unlawful and discriminatory restrictions on Syrian refugees. If such reports are shown to be accurate, donor countries should immediately suspend that assistance until Lebanon complies with international humanitarian law on the subject of refugees.
Secondly, while its not this observer's right to advise the government of Syria on how to conduct its foreign relations, and taking note of the important fact that Syria's ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdul Karim Ali, said this weekend in a statement quoted by Lebanon's National News Agency that his country urged Lebanese "coordination" with Damascus, his government can do rather more.
Syria's Foreign Ministry can employ the same "Reciprocity principle" of international relations that Lebanon continues to illegally use against the Palestinian refugees here for the sole purpose of denying them the elementary civil rights to work and to own a home. Syria can and should tell Lebanon's "government" that unless the discriminatory measures taken against her temporary refugee citizens seeking refuge in "Brotherly Lebanon", Damascus may employ the identical restrictive visa measures against Lebanese citizens seeking to enter Syria. This visa reciprocity measure is nearly universally applied among nations, and they determine how tough or easy to make it for each country's citizens to enter the others.
This action by Syria may well assist Lebanese officials to recall the treatment the people of Syria granted to the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who stormed into Syria during their own 1975-1990 civil war and during the July 2006 Zionist aggression against Lebanon that killed hundreds of Lebanese and destroyed much of the country's road, electric, and social service infrastructure and housing.
This observer arrived in Damascus from Washington in mid-July 2006 and recalls as if it were just last summer the Syrian people opening their homes and hearts to Lebanese refugees. I visited and saw first-hand Syrian homes, vacant apartments, schools, civic centers, two hospitals and clinics, parks opened to the Lebanese refugees. The Syrian people asked nothing in return. Lebanese were given free clothes and household necessities, medical, dental, optical and psychiatric care because they were refugees and needed help. Also food and cash vouchers.
Perhaps most importantly, the people of Syria gave refugees from Lebanon brotherly love and help in rebuilding their shattered lives until their return to their country.
As Genesis 4:1-9, the Holy Koran and the Pentateuch instruct us: We are our brother's keeper. |
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DETROIT ( ChurchMilitant.com ) - A federal court dismissed a lawsuit Monday seeking to force Catholic hospitals to perform emergency abortions.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, threw out a lawsuit Monday from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that sought to force Trinity Health Corporation, based in Livonia, to provide abortions against Church teaching .
Trinity, which operates 86 hospitals in 21 states, was sued last October by the ACLU for allegedly failing to provide emergency abortions for women with life-threatening complications.
Judge Gershwin A. Drain threw out the "dubious" case, reasoning that there was "not sufficient standing" after "considering the vagueness of the allegation."
Judge Drain stated,
Obviously, pregnancy alone is not a 'particular condition' that requires the termination of said pregnancy. To find the claim ripe for review on the facts pleaded before this Court would be to grant a cause of action to every pregnant woman in the state of Michigan upon the date of conception.
A federal judge in Grand Rapids dismissed a similar case last year when the ACLU sued Muskegon's Mercy Health Partners, which also refused to perform emergency abortions.
At that time, U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell dismissed the lawsuit without a hearing. Judge Bell said he threw out the case because the court has no jurisdiction over Church policy and that it's improper for courts to interfere in religious doctrinal decisions.
Judge Bell wrote, "It is not up to the Court to mandate the larger structural and policy reform to Catholic hospitals that Plaintiff seeks; that issue is left to the Church and its tribunals."
Kevin Theriot, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, representing Trinity, said in a press release Monday, "No law requires religious hospitals and medical personnel to commit abortions against their faith and conscience, and, in fact, federal law directly prohibits the government from engaging in such coercion."
"Those who doubt that anyone would ever try to force someone to commit an abortion need only look at this case," remarked Matt Bowman, co-counsel in the case. "This is precisely what the ACLU sought to do. The court came to the right conclusion in putting an end to their quest."
Eve Pidgeon, spokeswoman for Trinity, affirmed ,
Catholic directives are entirely consistent with high-quality health care, and our clinicians continue to provide superb care throughout the communities we serve. We are proud that more than 25,000 licensed physicians work directly with our health system and share our commitment to people-centered care.
Ten out of the 25 largest hospital systems in the United States are Catholic, providing nearly one out of every nine hospital beds.
To learn more about the crisis in many Catholic hospitals, watch " Mic'd Up--Catholic Hospital Crisis ." |
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California's 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent's edge for hundreds of miles and sprawling east across mountains and desert, could come to an end next year -- as a controversial plan to split the Golden State into three new jurisdictions qualified Tuesday for the Nov. 6 ballot.
If a majority of voters who cast ballots agree, a long and contentious process would begin for three separate states to take the place of California, with one primarily centered around Los Angeles and the other two divvying up the counties to the north and south. Completion of the radical plan -- far from certain, given its many hurdles at judicial, state and federal levels -- would make history.
It would be the first division of an existing U.S. state since the creation of West Virginia in 1863.
"Three states will get us better infrastructure, better education and lower taxes," Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who sponsored the ballot measure, said in an email to The Times last summer when he formally submitted the proposal. "States will be more accountable to us and can cooperate and compete for citizens." |
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In the past few years, a new character has appeared on the streets of Britain's cities. He - it's usually a he - appears at dusk. He speeds along quietly. The box on his bike bears the distinctive turquoise-and-white logo of a kangaroo. Somewhere along the road, a door opens and city-dwellers get a glimpse into a lamplit, middle-class home before the customer takes his dinner and shuts the door.
Deliveroo, a service that delivers food from its users' favourite restaurants, is the latest manifestation of the app-based economy. Just pop in your postcode and feast on the choices. But Deliveroo's real recipe for success is a network of more than 3,000 bike riders and scooter drivers.
Will Shu, the 36-year-old who co-founded Deliveroo in 2013, knows the worlds of both the rider and the customer. As a US expat investment banker working late in Canary Wharf, east London, he dreamed of feasting on his favourite dishes instead of the same Tesco ready-meal every night. As well as being the co-founder of the start-up, he became its first delivery man. He made early sales to fellow bankers, who were amused at the prospect of summoning their friend to their door with food. These days, Deliveroo is reportedly nearing "unicorn" status - a start-up valued at more than $1bn, in industry parlance.
After protests by Deliveroo riders, however, Shu finds himself cast as the fat-cat CEO. The dispute boils down to a new pay plan. Before, riders were paid PS7 per hour, plus PS1 per delivery. Now, they would be paid PS3.75 per delivery, with no hourly rate at all.
A significant number of riders in London turned up to protest at the company's headquarters. Not only did they fear that they would earn less on the new contract, but they were worried that their earnings would be less predictable, especially in the slow summer months. Anonymous riders began to post stories online of long hours and instability. Deliveroo members of the courier branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) began to strike.
Then politicians joined in. The shadow business secretary Jon Trickett described the new plan as "Victorian". The government said that Deliveroo should pay workers at least the "National Living Wage" of PS7.20 per hour, unless the company could get a court to rule that drivers and riders are self-employed.
In response, Shu launched a charm offensive. He told BBC Radio 4 that the riders were "the lifeblood of our company". They made roughly PS9.20 an hour, he said, and would earn more under the new scheme. It was also only a trial, and riders could choose to be on it. After all, he explained, he knew how demanding the job could be: "I was a rider every single day myself, seven days a week for the first nine months of the company, eight hours a day."
The union negotiators were unconvinced. According to the IWGB, this "choice" was conditional on workers accepting new delivery areas. There are also concerns about payment outside peak hours.
Even if Shu's dispute with his workers comes to an amicable end, Deliveroo is just the latest start-up to become embroiled in this kind of furore. Uber, the low-cost taxi service, works on the premise that drivers are self-employed and that the firm simply connects them to customers. In July, the GMB union brought two cases to an employment tribunal to test the firm's claim that its workers were self-employed. Union research suggests that some Uber workers earn significantly below the minimum wage.
This is not just a problem for fashionable start-ups. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of self-employed people in the UK has risen sharply. In May, it stood at 4.8 million, a record high. Though the government presents this as evidence of Britain's "entrepreneurial spirit", it is, in fact, a symptom of our new labour market, in which responsibility for profits has been shifted to the employee.
Another legacy of the crisis is depressed wages. Consider what the Deliveroo riders are demanding: the right to be paid roughly the minimum wage per hour. These are not bankers' wages. Based on the SpareRoom website's rental index, a Deliveroo driver making one delivery per hour would have to work nearly 74 hours to cover the average UK rent for a single room. It's no wonder that 90 per cent of them have another job.
Speaking to the BBC, Shu again put himself in his drivers' shoes. "I know exactly what it's like," he said. "I know the hardships." But when asked what he was paid, he replied: "I didn't take a salary."
This is telling. Shu clearly had enough savings from his banking days to support himself through those uncertain months. His decision to throw himself into self-employment came after a stint at business school.
Uncertainty is all the more damaging when you have rent to pay, you don't earn enough to save, and the chances of falling off your bike in traffic are much higher than those of becoming a top-of-the-food-chain CEO. Shu has already changed the street life of the UK's cities and spiced up urban dinners. In resolving this dispute, he has the power to change his riders' lives, too. > Want a quick fix to homelessness? Reform private renting |
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By Roger Sheety
A June, 2013 speech by Bill Clinton honoring war criminal Shimon Peres has highlighted the extent to which Israeli anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bigotry has become acceptable within Western mainstream discourse.
In a racist echo of Golda Meir, who once admitted that she had trouble sleeping because of the number of Palestinian babies being conceived, Clinton said: "No matter how many settlers you put out there [in the West Bank], the Palestinians are having more babies than the Israelis as a whole.... You've got an existential question to answer."
Clinton, who was reportedly paid $500,000 to publicly share his hatred of Palestinian babies, couched his bigotry as part of a speech on "peace" and the bankrupt "two-state solution." Said Clinton: "If you don't have a vision of where you want to wind up, bad things are going to happen sooner or later.... You have a better chance if you are driven by a vision of peace and reconciliation." In plain language, if Israel does not return a mere 22 percent of the 100 percent of Palestinian land it stole, it will soon (horror of horrors) be overrun with Palestinian children.
Clinton's racist comments, reported worldwide by mainstream media mostly without irony, were also an extension of current U.S. President Barack Obama's own fear and hatred of Palestinian children, which he expressed clearly in May of 2011 to the delight and cheers of his American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) audience in Washington:
"Here are the facts we all must confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder--without a peace deal--to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state."
For Palestinians, of course, neither Clinton's nor Obama's morally abhorrent remarks come as a surprise since they have long been accustomed to Israeli racism and its accompanying violence and brutality. Racist terms like "demographic bomb" and "demographic threat" are so common in Israeli media and discourse that they barely register any protest in the so-called "Jewish and democratic state."
We are not talking about Israeli soccer fans thuggishly chanting "death to Arabs" at sporting events (a common occurrence these days), but rather racist incitement from the highest elected officials. Both Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, have used the phrase "demographic threat" in public statements regarding Palestinian citizens of the state. In 2003, as finance minister, Netanyahu would say, "If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens" ("Netanyahu: Israel's Arabs are the real demographic threat," Haaretz, December 18, 2003).
Similarly, Peres would publicly muse in 1977 on the "problem" of the growing Palestinian population of Jerusalem: "I do not want to wake up one morning to discover that Jerusalem is subject to the demographic fate of [the] Galilee" ("Israel's Geographic-Demographic Threat to Identity," Royal United Services Institute News Brief, January, 2011). Ehud Olmert, as well, in a speech to the Knesset in 2007, would speak in alarming tones of a pending "demographic battle drowned in blood and tears."
In 2009, Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Atias would instigate hatred against Palestinian citizens of the state and justify apartheid in a speech to the Israel Bar Association. "I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel," said Atias. Speaking in particular against the Palestinian population of the Galilee, he added: "If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don't think that it is appropriate [for Arabs and Israeli Jews] to live together" ("Housing Minister: Spread of Arab population must be stopped," Haaretz, July, 2009).
Michael Oren, the current Israeli Ambassador (and chief propagandist) to the U.S., would even write a lengthy and deeply racist article published in Commentary magazine in 2009, titled "Seven Existential Threats," and which included the sub-heading "The Arab Demographic Threat." He would opine in a grave, apocalyptic voice that "the Palestinian population on both sides of the 1949 armistice lines is expanding far more rapidly than the Jewish sector and will surpass it in less than a decade."
This trend must not continue, continues Oren, because "Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist."
Israeli academics and intellectuals, too, have joined the racist chorus of incitement and, simultaneously, of justification of war crimes against Palestinians. So Benny Morris, for example, after documenting the destruction of Palestine, the massive ethnic cleansing, the theft of land, and the massacres and rapes of innocents, would then vindicate every crime of the Zionist colonial-settler state from 1948 to the present.
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing," said Morris in a 2004 interview with Ari Shavit. "That is what Zionism faced [in 1948]. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."
Then, jumping ahead six decades, he refers to Palestinian citizens of the state, who were not ethnically cleansed, in typically racist terms: "The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state" ("An interview with Benny Morris," Counterpunch.org, January, 2004). Morris would thus set the stage for future ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including the current operation in the Naqab ("Negev") where tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin have been targeted for forcible removal from their ancestral lands.
Furthermore, these terms, once used exclusively against Palestinians, are now also utilized by both Israeli officials and citizens to shamelessly incite hatred against African asylum seekers, as well as African Jews who are, nominally, citizens of the state. As reported by Haaretz in 2010, for instance, Netanyahu said, the "flood of illegal workers infiltrating from Africa [was] a concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country." Without skipping a beat, he would then associate asylum seekers with smuggling of drugs, terrorism, and general decadence, and so justifying the building of yet another apartheid wall to keep out the unwanted ("Netanyahu: Illegal African immigrants--a threat to Israel's Jewish character," Haaretz, July, 2010). See, in addition, the superb work of David Sheen who has meticulously documented recent shockingly fanatical anti-African marches in Tel Aviv, organized and led by elected Israeli officials and community leaders, in dozens of official reports, interviews, and video testimonies (www.davidsheen.com/racism/).
It is impossible to imagine Clinton, Obama, or any major political figure for that matter, talking about any other national, ethnic, or religious group in such unapologetically racist terms. Would either have made analogous comments regarding, for example, indigenous South Africans during the days of South African Apartheid? Or against North American First Nation peoples today? Would an Australian or Canadian housing minister ever speak about a minority group within their countries with the same unabashed hatred as Ariel Atias? Had they done so, the response of Western liberal pundits and intellectuals would have been swift and indignant--and rightfully so.
Ethnic cleansing, land theft, destruction of hundreds of ancient towns and villages, massacres, military occupation, and apartheid over six and a half decades in Palestine are all deeply tied together with Israeli/Zionist racism. Indeed, Israeli bigotry has often been and continues to be used to sanction and sanctify Israeli crimes against humanity; thus do attitudes and actions simultaneously fuel and feed off each other. That even supposed progressives have adopted Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians in their public statements as their own (with little or no controversy), and therefore also excusing Israeli crimes, shows the vile depths to which mainstream media discourse has sunk.
- Roger Sheety is an independent writer and researcher. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
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In New York City Saturday, more than 10,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Trump administration's immigration crackdown and to demand the reunification of all migrant children separated from their parents during the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" crackdown.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! Here in New York, over 10,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge.
STACY LEMELLE : My name is Stacy LeMelle. And I'm here in Foley Square in New York City, and we're here to march across the Brooklyn Bridge, to march for immigrants and to march that families that have been separated are brought back together. I'm here because New York City is a city of immigrants. Part of the reason the city is so great is because of immigrants and immigrant energy. And my family has been in this country for many generations. But I know that I walk around New York, and there are immigrants in fear. There are immigrants who have had their families separated. So, I want immigration policies that are not based on hate.
PROTESTERS : Say it loud! Say it clear! Refugees are welcome here! Say it loud! Say it clear! Refugees are welcome here!
CRISTINA CARTAGENA : My name is Cristina Cartagena. I'm born and raised here in Queens, New York. I'm from immigrant parents. I brought my family here, because since we were born here, we have a privilege and a right to stand up for those people who weren't and who deserve asylum here and who are fleeing from circumstances that we can't even imagine, and they deserve to be here.
PROTESTERS : Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!
ADRIAN WINTER : My name's Adrian Winter, and I'm marching across the bridge today with my daughter, because I think for the majority of my life I've seen the country moving forward in a good direction, and now I see it turning backwards. When we were talking to her this morning and telling her where we were going, we were just saying that there are people taking their parents away from their children, and we don't like that, and it's bad, and it's wrong, and we're here to say that it's not a good thing to do. And we keep it in simple terms. And she understands it. She understands what it's like when she loses track of us for a couple minutes.
PROTESTERS : Resistance is not enough! Revolt! Revolt! Revolt! Resistance is not enough! Revolt! Revolt! Revolt!
REP . NYDIA VELAZQUEZ: We're sending a message today to Donald Trump that we will not stand while he is torturing and terrorizing our children. We are fighting the "zero tolerance" policy of this administration. We want these children to be reunited with their families.
REV . MARIE TATRO : My name is Reverend Marie A. Tatro, and I am a priest in the Episcopal Church. My job is to protect and serve God's people who are most vulnerable and who are most at risk. And so, this movement is essential, and it's core to our theology as a church. "Never again" means never again. We've been down this road before. The seeds of fascism are being planted. And we need to learn from our history. We need to learn from our mistakes and point out the evil and the sin where it is. And I'm hopeful that people in our country will rise up before it gets to that stage.
AMY GOODMAN : Thanks to Charina Nadura and Nat Needham. When we come back, we go to ground zero for "zero tolerance," to the U.S.-Mexico border. Stay with us. |
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10 Things You Can Do to Prevent War
Preventing war can be a citizen activity! Read how you can participate in the growing anti-war movement.
1. Educate yourself on the issues. To stop terror and avoid war, we must first understand what causes it, and what approaches have, and haven't, been successful in the past. So far, America's "War On Terrorism" seems to be focused exclusively on the movement that has apparently spawned the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks: radical, violent fringe conservative Sunni Muslims, from an area that stretches geographically from Northwest Africa to Southeast Asia. It can only help if we learn more about the history, culture, religions and economies of those parts of the world; the West's historic and current religious, military, political and economic relationships with them and with Islam; and how those conditions, from colonialism through global economic changes and geopolitical rivalies, have contributed to poverty, desperation, hatred and, at times, religious fanaticism today. Part of how we've gotten here is the West's tendency to impose our own cultures, values and expectations on these regions without taking the time to understand where the people we're dealing with are coming from. People interested in stopping terror and avoiding war cannot afford to repeat that mistake. 2. Develop a closer, more respectful relationship to Muslims and the Islamic world. As the world shrinks, this is actually something we should be doing with all cultures and religions, but for the purposes of our current War on Terrorism, it is particularly important that, much as Christianity and Judaism have learned to live in greater harmony after two millenia of tension, Western cultures and religions must find and develop our common interests with the Islamic world. Just as with any minority or "other," the more we each work with and understand people of the Islamic faith, the less they will seem strange and threatening and the more we will recognize each other as individuals and as human beings. 3. Communicate! Don't be afraid to speak out, and to listen: talk with your neighbors, your friends, relatives, co-workers, classmates. Learn from the people you disagree with, but don't shy away from voicing your opinions in places where they're unpopular. Call in to radio and television talk shows. Write letters to the editor and opinion articles for your local community newspapers. Visit their editorial boards. 4. Take your case to the community. Set up community forums, teach-ins and panels, to educate the public, to air out differing opinions and to force politicians to go on the record with their beliefs. Table at community events. Write and circulate flyers, with information on the issue, lobbying and contact information, publicizing events or putting out powerful graphic images. Circulate petitions that you can then use both to notify people of future events (and to recruit volunteers to help organize them!) and to lobby elected officials or other prominent community figures. Take out ads in your local newspapers. Make your advocacy visible, so people will think -- even if local media is hostile -- that your cause is popular and widespread. Set up and publicize your own web site or list-serve. 5. Raise money for the Third World. Rather than collecting money for survivors' families or to rebuild the World Trade Center, send it where it's more desperately needed: to the countries whose crushing poverty helps spawn terrorism. A more economically just world will be one with less terror. Donate your own money, or organize events where your whole community can pitch in and help: benefits, readings, raffles, auctions, walk-a-thons and so forth. Consider working jointly with a local mosque or Third World community center. 6. Publicize and oppose racial profiling, the curbing of civil liberties and the backlash against immigrants. This is both a local and a national issue, involving everything from new INS and Justice Department programs and regulations to local police behavior and cases of isolated bigotry. While this is in many ways a separate issue, bear in mind that it's easier for our government to pursue an irresponsible or counter-productive military-oriented solution if more of the public hates and fears people who look like the enemy. When civil liberties are taken away in an emergency, they're rarely restored afterwards; and when a precedent is set whereby constitutional rights can be denied to any one group, you could be next. 7. Lobby for Congress and the White House to pursue policies that minimize civilian deaths; rethink our national defense and foreign policy priorities; and change global economic institutions and trade agreements so that they create less, not more, poverty and death. Send a letter (preferably handwritten) or card, make a phone call (faxes and emails are less effective, but better than nothing), go to the forums of public officials, visit their offices. Much of our ability to minimize future terrorist activity depends not just on better security at home, but policies abroad that work consistently to promote the ideals of freedom and democracy America stands for. Powerful special interests often keep the White House and Congress from doing the right thing; it's up to us, the public, to require that when they act in our name, they treat others the way we would want to be treated. We, the public, are the people whose lives are on the line in this conflict; we have a right to demand that the people acting for us make our safety a priority, and not put us in further jeopardy by making matters worse. 8. Participate in or create visible public events for the same goals. It's not enough to send a letter. To create the public momentum to convince an elected official to do something s/he might think isn't in his personal best interest, s/he has to think it's the right thing to do and that a lot of people agree with them. Attend or organize vigils, rallies, marches, parades, art festivals, music events, nonviolent direct actions or civil disobedience. Be creative, have fun, be visible, get the word out. 9. Work the media, or be the media. Send out press releases, talk with reporters and editors, make sure when you're doing public events that local media outlets know about it, and offer something they'll want to cover. Train yourself to give interviews and be articulate. Start your own newsletter or radio or cable access TV show, or contribute to others. Support independent media that's willing to provide critical information and alternative viewpoints not as easily available in big mainstream outlets. 10. Reclaim patriotism! We all want the most effective possible course for stopping terrorism. Disagreeing with our government's proposed strategies isn't treason -- it's the highest form of citizenship in a participatory democracy. We're becoming activists on this issue because we love our country, as well as our community and the world. Don't let anybody claim that you're "blaming America" or "betraying the President." We're proud to live in a country where we have the right, and the obligation, to speak out when our government is wrong. We're speaking out because we care. Unthinking obedience is the point at which our democracy has broken down. Geov Parrish is a political columnist for WorkingforChange.com and a longtime peace activist.
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Jammu: Militants are roping in surrendered terrorists and "overground workers" of terror outfits in a desperate effort to revive terrorism in the Jammu region, a top police official said on Monday.
Representational image. PTI
SD Singh Jamwal, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Jammu, said that the militants' attempts to revive terrorism continue to be foiled by alert security forces.
Police has scuttled two attempts to revive militancy in the region this year by busting two terror modules and arresting nine militants in the Doda and the Ramban districts of the region, he said.
"Jammu region is virtually a militancy-free zone, but there are continuous attempts by anti-national elements to revive militancy and they are in touch with surrendered militants and sympathisers," Jamwal told PTI .
"This time the situation in Jammu region is under control but they are making attempts by roping in surrendered militants, overground workers, and their attempt is to vitiate the peaceful atmosphere," the IGP said.
He said the recent militant attack in Banihal and the earlier incident in Doda were part of the nefarious designs of the militants but police had cracked both the cases within 72 hours by arresting nine culprits and seizing the weapons, including snatched service rifles.
In May, a special police officer was killed and another injured when terrorists attacked their post in Tantra in Doda district, he said.
An SSB jawan was killed and another injured when their patrol party was attacked in Banihal area of Ramban district last month. The militants fled from the scene with the service rifles of the slain and injured SSB jawans, Jamwal said.
Five terrorists were arrested in connection with the Doda attack. Three newly recruited Banihal youth and another person from south Kashmir, who provided a pistol to them, were arrested in connection with the attack in Banihal, he said.
Jamwal said the security forces were watching the minutest movement of the suspects to frustrate them.
"We have full control over the situation and we are monitoring and watching the minutest movement of the suspects. Their attempts are on but we have not allowed them to succeed in their nefarious designs," the Jammu region police chief said.
He said it was the counter-insurgency plan that did not allow the terrorists to settle down and as a result both the modules set up in Banihal and Doda were busted within the shortest possible time.
Jamwal said only three militants were active in Kishtwar district and "efforts are on to neutralise them".
"Kishtwar belt is very vast and connected to south Kashmir. We have three listed militants in our records operating in Kishtwar, one of them, Jehangir, is the oldest surviving militant. There are no other militant active in the region," the IGP said.
He said there were chances, that when the pressure on militants in south Kashmir builds up, they might try to shift their base to this side of Pir Panjal.
"But we are alive to the situation and have taken necessary precautionary measures to ensure they do not succeed," he said.
Jamwal said there was synergy among various security agencies working on the ground to maintain law and order and peace in the region.
"Army, police and other security forces are working closely along with intelligence network on the ground. Though there is no major threat but the chances of militants spreading their tentacles remains," he said.
Jamwal said since nomads move along the high altitude areas, all police posts along their routes have been directed to maintain tight vigil to ensure that terrorists do not mingle with them and come to this side.
The officer said despite frequent ceasefire violations along the International Border (IB) and Line of Control (LoC) there was no breach of the fence along the borders.
"In some cases, the cross-border firing was aimed at giving cover fire to the infiltrating militants but no such activity was witnessed and there was no breach of the fence.
Recently a tunnel along the IB was unearthed, scuttling the attempt to push militants into this side," he said.
Jamwal said multi-tier security arrangements were in place along the LoC in Rajouri and Poonch districts to foil infiltration of militants from across the border.
"There was no report of any militant activity reported from the twin districts. That means there was no breach of the border fencing and the alertness of the Army despite frequent cross-border firing had ensured zero per cent infiltration (of militants)," he said. |
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Militants are roping in surrendered terrorists and "overground workers" of terror outfits |
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[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]
. . . [E]very one of these candidates says, "Obama's weak, Putin's kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he's going to straighten out." And then it turns out, they can't handle a bunch of CNBC moderators. If you can't handle those guys, I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
Thus spoke President Obama, who, along with Hillary Clinton, has refused ever to participate in a debate on Fox News, presumably because Democrats quake in fear of questions from Megyn Kelly.
After the laughable, unprofessional performance by CNBC "moderators" ("extreminators"??) during last week's Republican debate, there's been a lot of discussion about changing the rules for future debates. There was even a summit outside D.C. bring together representatives from most of the presidential campaigns, to work out a set of rules/demands such as a ban on "gotcha" questions (however one defines the term).
It's not the first time people have considered reforms of a broken system, in which leftists and partisan Democrats (the vast majority of political reporters at the national level) ask mostly supportive questions at Democratic debates and, at Republican debates, try to make the candidates look silly or extreme. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (for whom I worked as senior researcher in the 2012 campaign) once suggested that the candidates themselves conduct the back-and-forth during a presidential debate, with a moderator present only to keep things moving along.
The problem of news media bias has been obvious for years--decades--but, in the context of the debates, it wasn't dealt with at an earlier point because the Republican Party hierarchy has been focused on its main priority, preventing the nomination of a candidate from the mainstream/grassroots/Reagan/Tea Party wing of the party. GOP bigwigs fiddled with the debate system for this election, but with the intention of ensuring that the nomination would quickly fall to a candidate with high name ID and lots of money. (The plan was to help Jeb Bush or, if he failed, another Establishment candidate, but that plan didn't work very well in the Age of Trump.)
The Left dominates the news media (along with the entertainment media, the academic/pseudointellectual world, and the Too Big to Fail businesses that depend on government cronyism and are perfectly willing to cut deals with the Obama/Clinton/Sanders crowd if money is to be made). News media bias provides the Left with a tremendous advantage, one akin to a sport team having all the game officials on its side. Every activist on the conservative, libertarian, or free-market side has to deal with this bias throughout the day every day.
At least there are alternative sources of information today. In the dawn of the conservative movement, in the late '50s and early '60s, liberals could slime conservatives to their hearts' content without fear of being contradicted in the media. Conservatives were usually ignored in the media, and when they weren't ignored, they were depicted as bigots and fascists.
In 1964, when Republicans gathered in San Francisco to nominate conservative Barry Goldwater for president, CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr suggested on the air that Goldwater's upcoming trip to a U.S. military installation in Germany was part of an effort to hook up with likeminded Nazi sympathizers. Drew Pearson, the leading investigative columnist of the day, noted that "The smell of fascism has been in the air at this convention."
It's no surprise that California Governor Pat Brown said he detected the "stench of fascism" in the air, adding: "All we needed to hear was 'Heil Hitler.'" Or that George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, said he saw "a parallel between Senator Barry Goldwater and Adolph Hitler." But most of the news media actually took such insanity seriously and passed it along as if such comments represented sanity, just as today they take seriously the GOP's War on Women, the GOP's War on People of Color, the GOP's War on Science, and so on.
Cast study: Oklahoma City
Flash forward 31 years from 1964, to 1995, and we saw the madness of the media in the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who had no coherent political philosophy.
Supposed white supremacists, they committed the bombing in revenge for the deaths of members of the Branch Davidian cult--most of whom were "people of color." McVeigh, who today is often cited as an exemplar of Christian terrorism, was an agnostic. He was also a supporter of animal rights and a critic of free trade, but, despite massive efforts, no one has been able to attach to him any sort of coherent philosophy. Nevertheless, the Left pounced, with President Clinton attempting to blame the bombing on talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. The media did their part to help [quotes collected in 1995 by the Media Research Center].
"In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast." -- Time Senior Writer Richard Lacayo, May 8, 1995.
"Mr. Panetta [White House chief of staff Leon Panetta], there's been a lot of anti-government rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act, do they feed on that kind of rhetoric, and what impact do you think it's had?" -- CBS's Bob Schieffer, April 23 Face the Nation .
"The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that's been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men. While no one's suggesting right-wing radio jocks approve of violence, the extent to which their approach fosters violence is being questioned by many observers, including the President. . . . Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: detail a problem, blame the government or a group, and invite invective from like-minded people. Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue." -- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, April 25.
"The Oklahoma City attack on federal workers and their children also alters the once-easy dynamic between charismatic talk show host and adoring audience. Hosts who routinely espouse the same anti-government themes as the militia movement now must walk a fine line between inspiring their audience -- and inciting the most radical among them." -- Los Angeles Times staff writer Nina J. Easton, April 26.
"The bombing shows how dangerous it really is to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies. For two years, Rush Limbaugh described this nation as `America held hostage' to the policies of the liberal Democrats, as if the duly elected President and Congress were equivalent to the regime in Tehran. I think there will be less tolerance and fewer cheers for that kind of rhetoric." -- Washington Post reporter David Broder in his April 25 column.
"It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, and you know, gone berserk . . . This is the essence of the angry white men taken to some extreme, some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that. But it's the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington." -- Washington Post reporter Juan Williams [now Fox News] on CNN's Capital Gang , April 23.
"To what extent, if any, do you think the political rhetoric to which you just referred has helped cause a climate in which people could go in that direction? In other words, the rhetoric which says, not just against big government, or liberal government, or dishonest government, but `I'm against government, government is the enemy?'" -- Sam Donaldson to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Morris Dees, April 23 This Week with David Brinkley .
"Unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say `Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?', you know we're going to have some more events. I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles . . . creates a climate of violence in America." [referring to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole] -- Columnist Carl Rowan, April 25 Washington Post story.
"Public antagonism toward government has been one of the principal themes of American political discourse for nearly two decades, growing in shrillness in the past year. This sentiment has been voiced and amplified by the new Republican House, which just this month completed its 100 days of action, much of it aimed at paring back the growth of the federal government. But now that an attack on a government building has left scores dead, including children, the allure is coming off the anti-government rhetoric." -- Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief David Shribman in a front-page "news analysis," April 25.
"If the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing really view government as the people's enemy, the burden of fostering that delusion is borne not just by the nut cases who preach conspiracy but also to some extent by those who erode faith in our governance in the pursuit of their own ambitions." -- Time Senior Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, May 1.
"Who has played the politics of paranoia better in this country in the last twenty or thirty years? Answer? Republican Party . . . Politically, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republicans have very skillfully exploited fear." -- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas on Inside Washington , April 29.
The Giffords smear
It's a pattern we've seen again and again. When U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords (D-Arizona) and others were shot by a Bush-hating madman in 2011, it was blamed again on the rhetoric of conservatives and their allies. Specifically, it was blamed preposterously on Sarah Palin, on the ground that one of the staffers at her PAC had used printers' registration marks, resembling crosshairs, to make "target districts" where Republicans might pick up seats in the next election. (The marks did not target individuals, as was obvious from the fact that one of the targets was a district where the Congressman was retiring. And, of course, "targeting" states or districts is something that every party does in every election; the term is akin to, say, a restaurant chain "targeting" families as potential customers.)
The smear of Palin was particular vile in that, as I reported that day, it was led by people from the left-wing Daily Kos website, which had recently declared Giffords, in a headline, "DEAD TO ME" for supposedly betraying her party by voting against radical Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. Yes: The closest thing to a death threat against Giffords was issued by the people who, within minutes after the shooting, falsely blamed Palin for issuing what they claimed amounted to a death threat. And the major media not only accepted the Palin smear as reasonable, and repeated it endlessly, but they made it the focus of all the major Sunday morning "news" interview shows that followed the tragedy.
No diversity
The fact is that the elite media are themselves far outside the mainstream of American thought. There has always been media bias - reporters helped cover up FDR's loss of mental faculties and JFK's pathological recklessness - but, in the past, even the highest levels of the media included a few conservatives. Today, decades of blacklisting (banning conservatives) and graylisting (hiring them only on very rare occasions) have left us with countless newsrooms in which opinions range from liberal to Far Left. Diversity has vanished from the newsroom, replaced with pseudo-diversity--people with different skin colors who pretty much think alike.
From 1970 to 2013, the Washington Post has an ombudsman, someone whose job was to serve as an in-house critic and to represent readers in dealing with the paper's content creators such as editors and writers. In one of the last columns by the last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, he dealt with readers' allegation of bias on the issue of same-sex marriage ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/patrick-pexton-is-the-post-pro-gay/2013/02/22/fab8235c-7c53-11e2-a044-676856536b40_print.html ).
I get a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls from readers who assert that The Post has a "pro-gay agenda" and publishes too many "puffy" stories about gay marriage, and that it even allows too many same-sex couples to appear in the Date Lab feature in Sunday's WP Magazine . [In Date Lab, the Post sets up and covers a couple on a blind date. --SJA ]
"The conservative, pro-family side gets short shrift," as one reader recently put it, and The Post "caters slavishly to Dupont Circle." [That's the famously gay neighborhood in D.C. near CRC headquarters. --SJA ]
Indeed, that reader got into a vigorous three-way e-mail dialogue with a Post reporter and me over the issue, an exchange that goes to the heart of the question of whether The Post, and journalists in general, are hopelessly liberal and genetically tone-deaf to social conservatives.
Here are excerpts from that dialogue, with the reader's and reporter's names kept out of it at their requests.
The reader wrote that Post stories too often minimize the conservative argument: "The overlooked 'other side' on the gay issue is quite legitimate, and includes the Pope, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, evangelist Billy Graham, scholars such as Robert George of Princeton, and the millions of Americans who believe in traditional marriage and oppose redefining marriage into nothingness. ... Is there no room in The Post for those who support the male-female, procreative model of marriage?"
Replied the reporter: "The reason that legitimate media outlets routinely cover gays is because it is the civil rights issue of our time. Journalism, at its core, is about justice and fairness, and that's the 'view of the world' that we espouse; therefore, journalists are going to cover the segment of society that is still not treated equally under the law."
The reader: "Contrary to what you say, the mission of journalism is not justice. Defining justice is a political matter, not journalistic. Journalism should be about accuracy and fairness.
"Good journalism also means not demeaning conservatives as 'haters.' "
The reporter: "As for accuracy, should the media make room for racists, i.e. those people who believe that black people shouldn't marry white people? Any story on African-Americans wouldn't be wholly accurate without the opinion of a racist, right?
"Of course I have a bias. I have a bias toward fairness," the reporter continued. "The true conservative would have the same bias. The true conservative would want the government out of people's bedrooms, and religion out of government."
That discussion is most revealing about journalists.
Most journalists believe that through writing about life as it is, showing people's struggles and contradictions, we get closer to the truth. The democracy, being more fully informed, then makes better decisions, and perhaps people's lives improve as a result.
Alongside that do-gooder instinct is a strong desire for fairness because, being out in the world, reporters encounter a great deal of unfairness. We want to expose that and even rub your noses in it. In a way, we're shouting, through our stories: "This is unfair! Somebody do something!" Conservative and liberal journalists alike feel this way.
And because our profession lives and dies on the First Amendment -- one of the libertarian cornerstones of the Constitution -- most journalists have a problem with religionists telling people what they can and cannot do. We want to write words, read books, watch movies, listen to music, and have sex and babies pretty much when, where and how we choose.
Yet many Americans feel that allowing gay men and lesbians to marry diminishes the value of their heterosexual marriages. I don't understand this. The lesbian couple down the street raising two kids or the two men across the hall in your condominium -- how do those unions take anything away from the sanctity, fidelity or joy you take in your heterosexual marriage? Isn't your marriage, at root, based on the love and commitment you have for your spouse, not what you think about the neighbors?
That's why many journalists have a hard time giving much voice to those opposed to gay marriage. They see people opposed to gay rights today as cousins, perhaps distant cousins, of people in the 1950s and 1960s who, citing God and the Bible, opposed black people sitting in the bus seat, or dining at the lunch counter, of their choosing.
Still, just as I have written that The Post should do a better job of covering and understanding the anti-abortion movement , The Post should do a better job of understanding and conveying to readers, with detachment and objectivity, the beliefs and the fears of social conservatives.
Wow.
In other words: We don't have same-sex marriage opponents in our newsroom 'cause we don't hire bigots. But don't worry: Our lack of bigots in the newsroom won't stop us from covering the same-sex marriage issue fairly.
Regardless of what one thinks on the issue of same-sex marriage, those comments reveal the Post newsroom's lack of diversity--true diversity, including political orientation. How many Posties are Republicans, or traditionalist conservatives, or supporters of the Tea Party movement? (The issue is not just political orientation. For example, I wonder how many Posties come from Baptist families. Do you think it's close to Baptists' 11 percent of the population? Ha!)
When you watch something like the CNBC debate, and you see nothing but contempt directed at Republican candidates, while, at Democratic debates, a socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and an on-the-take pathological liar are treated as serious, thoughtful candidates for the nation's highest office, you shouldn't be surprised.
And when their stories depict Republicans as weirdo extremist creeps and Democrats as saviors of the planet and lovers of the downtrodden, they're just being objective, just reflecting the reality in which they live. |
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Canadian band The Grey can't enter the US for five years because they told US border guards they weren't playing a gig in the US. The guards checked the band's online touring schedule and went ballistic.
We were treated as terrorists at first. When we first went, one by one, into the room with the interrogating officer they used that line about "America is at war, and Canada may not take that seriously..." and "since 9-11, we take these things seriously." Then they realized that we were not making any money doing what we do, and that we were more naive than anything else. Some of the other guards even told us that the whole thing was bullshit, and that it was overzealous and a waste of paperwork.
The decision to deport and ban us from the US was made entirely by officer Kurt Tennat, the supervising officer. He said he had consulted his supervisor by phone, but we don't know for sure. No court proceedings, no legalities, no chance.
Reader comment: Michael Sider says:
Bands travelling from the U.S. to Canada often have had similar experiences, even long before 9-11. I brought many U.S. bands to Vancouver in the early 90's and they were mercilessly hassled, often turned back to the U.S. We kept trying to determine what exactly the rules were, but every response was different. We managed to contact someone high up in Canadian Immigration through a friend of a friend, and their response was that the laws are intentionally ambiguous so that it is up to the discretion of individual border guards whether ANYONE crosses the border, and no recourse if you don't like their conclusion. One trick that often worked was if the band told the border guards that they were coming to Canada to record (helps to have someone in Canada willing to confirm the story), as this means they are going to be spending money in Canada rather than earning it... may work for bands going to the U.S. as well, don't know. |
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I hear that Harriet Harman is grumbling that she never wanted to be Labour's acting leader for a second time and blames Ed Miliband for leaving the party in the lurch.
Harman, who also stepped up from deputy to sheriff after Gordon Brown left office in 2010, has had her bouquets replaced by brickbats over the past few weeks. Favourable reviews have turned into a wall of moans in parliament. The first task of an acting leader is to hold the party together. Harman split hers right away over welfare cuts - in particular, David Cameron's plot to breed Tory voters by ensuring that only wealthier families can afford to have three children or more.
My snout overheard Harman accusing Miliband of abandoning his post, arguing that her former boss should have overseen the election of a successor. Meanwhile, according to my snout, the carefree Ed is telling anyone who will listen how much he is enjoying life as a backbencher, adding insult to Harman's injury after he left her to pick up the pieces. If the Labour Party were a card game, it would be Unhappy Families.
No Tory is grander in his own lunchtime than Sir Nicholas Soames, a blue blood who says what he likes and likes what he says, in a booming voice. Soames is a traditionalist who prefers the natural order of life, as one might expect from a grandson of Winston Churchill. The hereditary politician is exercised by his colleague Charlie Elphicke's barnet. Tories report that Soames chunters disapprovingly that a member of the Whips' Office is now dyeing his hair. I'm sure it's all a misunderstanding.
The tightly knit SNP displays a Leninist discipline that is the envy of old lefties. To date, the only discernible split is between the "wets", who drink in the Sports and Social, and the "drys", who prefer Westminster's restaurants. One Labour MP says that she knows when the Nats are on manoeuvres by the thud of 56 pairs of boots marching in unison. Most SNP MPs have offices in a block near the Red Lion; the Cry Freedom brigade refers to it as Caledonia House, a bit of England that is for ever Scotland. Until independence, anyway.
Andy Burnham's step to the left surprised an informant who recalled the Labour leadership hopeful referring to Tony Blair as "my mate" in a Brighton bar at the 2006 TUC conference. These days, it's: "Tony who?"
Austerity policy applied to the food, if not the booze, at a smug George Osborne summer preening session in front of invited hacks at the Treasury. The nibbles were smaller than a teacher's pay rise but the alcohol flowed mightily well. The Chancer of the Exchequer's crash diet has lost him a couple of dozen pounds. The national debt has soared by PS400bn.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror > Tracey Thorn's audiobook diary: plentiful bananas, dry mouth and self-doubt |
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We've had at least two big budget superhero movies come and go, which means that summer is officially here. As the days get longer, the temperatures get higher, and the school days get nonexistent, you might be wondering what yo're going to do with a little extra free time on your hands? Luckily, we've got you covered with a thorough survey of the summer's comedy flicks. So if you're feeling burnt out from the big-budget destruction porn of the week, why not give one of these a go?
Walk Of Shame
In this entry into the "one crazy night" sub-genre of films, Elizabeth Banks plays a reporter with an opportunity to become a news anchor. But when a one-night stand leaves her stranded with no car, phone or money, she has to trek across LA on foot to make it to her interview--and get into plenty of hijinks and shenanigans along the way.
In Theaters: Now
Comedy Pedigree: Writer/director Steven Brill, Elizabeth Banks , Gillian Jacobs, Kevin Nealon, Bill Burr, Tig Notaro, Nicey Nash
Worth It? The trailer feels broad and hacky. Plus, Brill doesn't have the greatest track record with studio comedies (though Heavyweights is a stone-cold classic and I am a staunch Drillbit Taylor apologist). Yet, Banks is an unjustly underrated comic actress who can carry a premise like this with likable slapstick aplomb, and the rest of the supporting cast is stacked with funny female firepower. If you have a lazy afternoon where you just wanna get out of the house, this might be worth a matinee price.
The basic premise of this movie is summed up on the poster: "Family Vs. Frat". It's the kind of high-concept elevator pitch that studio execs love, promising an unending supply of comedic conflict when an unruly fraternity led by Zac Efron and Dave Franco is established next to the home of Seth Rogen , Rose Byrne and their new baby.
In Theaters: Now
Comedy Pedigree: Director Nicholas Stoller, Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lisa Kudrow, Ike Barinholtz, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress, Brian Huskey, Jerrod Carmichael, Jason Mantzoukas, Natasha Leggero, cameos from the Lonely Island and Workaholics guys
Worth It? Absolutely. While it may seem like an immature bro-fest on the surface, advance word says it's the best studio comedy since Bridesmaids , and home to many subversive critiques of "dude culture" that recall This Is The End at its best. Stoller is a deft and diverse director, and Byrne is being hailed as stealing the show from her male co-stars. Go see it.
Promising a return to his low budget Swingers -esque roots, writer/director/star Jon Favreau is a chef whose delicacies are as delightful as his personal life is prickly. After failing in LA, he returns home to Miami to open up a food truck, reunite with his ex-wife and son, and try and put his life back together.
In Theaters: Now
Comedy Pedigree: Jon Favreau , Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Robert Downey, Jr., Amy Sedaris, Russell Peters
Worth It? The trailer is an odd mishmash of tones, spending lots of time on an "edgy" Twitter joke that sorta fizzles, yet also promising heartwarming stuff that feels authentic. Some reactions indicate that Favreau's story is a little too self-indulgent for its own good--genius creative (Favreau) becomes disillusioned by the corporate world (the Iron Man movies) and returns to his roots to reclaim his genius ( Chef itself)--so it's probably a safe bet to wait until Netflix .
Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore hit their cinematic hat trick (following classic The Wedding Singer and not-so-classic 50 First Dates ), playing a pair whose initial bad date goes horribly, yet are surprised to find themselves on the same trip to Africa. As their families mix and the requisite set pieces are had, will the two find that they actually love each other? (If you actually don't know, you've never seen a movie before)
In Theaters: May 23
Comedy Pedigree: Director Frank Coraci, Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore , Terry Crews, Joel McHale, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kevin Nealon
Worth It? Sandler will always have a special place in my heart. He's made a series of ultra-silly, absurd movies that are, frankly, untouchable, and when he lets himself stretch and act, he can really give nuanced, interesting performances. But lately, his output has felt lazy, half-baked and borderline disrespectful to its audience, and judging by the laugh-free trailer, this movie is an unfortunate entry in that trend. Skip it.
A Million Ways To Die In The West
Adding to a genre whose entries include Blazing Saddles and Paint Your Wagon, co-writer/director/star Seth MacFarlane 's latest takes place in a Old West town where the world seems out to get everyone. He plays a cowardly sheep farmer who must learn bravery and confidence in the face of constant peril.
In Theaters: May 30
Comedy Pedigree: Seth MacFarlane, co-writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, Sarah Silverman, Neil Patrick Harris , Ralph Garman, Bill Maher, Gilbert Gottfried, Christopher Lloyd
Worth It? MacFarlane's comedy style is more hit-and-miss than a blind boxer. The trailer made me laugh quite a bit as it hearkened to the gag-a-minute style of comedy popularized by maestros Mel Brooks and Zucker-Abrams-Zucker. When MacFarlane actually cares about his comedy, it shows, and this one has me cautiously optimistic.
Obvious Child
One of the bigger breakout Sundance hits, this indie dramedy stars SNL -alum-turned-alt-comedy-star Jenny Slate as a sad-sack Brooklyn stand-up comic who inadvertently gets pregnant after a one-night-stand, and must decide what to do with her new arrival. So, sorta like Walk Of Shame meets Lena Dunham ?
In Theaters: June 6
Comedy Pedigree: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman, David Cross , Gabe Liedman, Richard Kind
Worth It? Your mileage may vary in terms of enjoying "sad Brooklyn chic" as a newly popular sub-genre of comedy, but by all accounts this movie rises above any trappings and delivers laughs sharply and poignantly. Slate is said to give the performance of a lifetime, and for many viewers in a similar boat, this one will hit home. Find out which art theatre this is playing at, and go see it.
Ping Pong Summer
Promising quirky yet understated laughs, this coming-of-age indie revolves around a hip-hop and ping-pong obsessed 13-year-old with the righteous name of Rad Miracle, and the one summer everything changed for him.
In Theaters: June 6
Comedy Pedigree: Amy Sedaris, Judah Friedlander, lots of unknown kids
Worth It? Being overly quirky is a dangerous trap to fall in, and this movie seems to be toeing that line. If it can deliver its unusual affectations without sacrificing realness, it'll be your favorite feel-good sleeper of the summer. Luckily, this one is also coming to VOD, so check it out from the comfort of your home.
22 Jump Street
In the sequel to the adaptation of the 80s TV show (yowza!), Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum return as undercover cops trying to bust a college drug ring, but inevitably get caught up in action-packed hijinks.
In Theaters: June 13
Comedy Pedigree: Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, co-writers Michael Bacall and Rodney Rothman, Jonah Hill, Dave Franco, Nick Offerman , Rob Riggle, The Lucas Brothers
Worth It? By all accounts, no one was expecting the first one to be good. And yet, it absolutely was thanks to clever self-referentiality, go-for-broke performances from the two leads with impeccable chemistry, and a genuine sense of fun AND danger in its action-comedy direction from Lord and Miller. Can the sequel repeat the magic? With the main cast returning, the directors fresh off the magical Lego Movie , and a riotous trailer, all signs point to yes. Previous page You're on page 1 You're on page 2 Next page |
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While the left talks a lot about tolerance, it seems they don't understand the meaning of the word. They expect people to be "tolerant" of whatever they support when in actuality they want cheerful acceptance and approval. Meanwhile, they refuse to tolerate anyone from any favored group who supports gun rights.
Particularly women.
As claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault by famous men-the vast majority of whom are well-known liberals-continues to rip through the headlines, the mainstream media seems indifferent to a different brand of #MeToo. In this case, it's something far more horrifying that sexual harassment or even some very inappropriate behavior.
Pro-gun women are getting death threats by the peaceful, tolerant progressive.
Over at the Washington Free Beacon, Steven Gutowski writes about the travails of some pro-gun women , writer Steven Gutowski who have faced not just sexual harassment due to their stance on guns, but violent ones as well, and these are names you're likely to recognize.
First, Gutowski writes about rape survivor Kimberly Corban, who has had some horrific things said to her, not just regarding guns but also her rape. After all, they seem to figure, the fact that she was raped was the catalyst for her becoming a firearm advocate apparently makes that fair game in their warped, demented little world.
Next, he brings up NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch who famously was forced to move back in October after the harassment reached truly terrifying levels. That included being sent a photograph of her home, for crying out loud.
Last, is a name that should be familiar to longtime readers of Bearing Arms , and that is former editor Jenn Jacques. (Language warning in what follows)
"Stick that gun in your cunt bitch and pull the trigger," Twitter user John T. McFarland said to Jenn Jacques in September 2015.
Jenn Jacques, a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum and editor at large for BreachBangClear.com who has been recognized by the National Shooting Sports Foundation for her work promoting gun safety, said she's often stunned by the hypocrisy of the harassers and thinks online anonymity enables their behavior.
"I've heard a lot of 'do us all a favor and swallow your gun,'" she said. "It's just so bad. The thing is they all claim to be against gun violence. They all claim to be the tolerant left but they are literally the most violent, heinous people out there. I'm sure a lot of it is that they're hiding behind a computer screen."
After Bob Owens, a respected gun writer who worked closely with Jacques at BearingArms.com, took his own life in May , Jacques said she received a wave of harassment. While most reacted to Owens's passing with grace and compassion, a group of gun-control activists reacted by tormenting his friends and family through vile messages on Twitter and Facebook. Jacques said some even encouraged her to kill herself.
"After Bob died, people would be like 'one down, one to go,'" she said. "How could you say that to anyone?"
This is the level of discourse we often see from the left toward women.
While I've gotten some of that from time to time, especially the time Piers Morgan retweeted my New Years wish that he'd go back to England where the gun laws were more to his liking, it's nowhere near this level. Plenty wished me or my children to be the victim of a shooting, but I don't remember anyone ordering me to shoot myself, and absolutely no one wanted me raped and brutalized in the process.
Townhall's Matt Vespa commented that he's never gotten a death threat despite extensively writing about Second Amendment issues. Since I've started writing for Bearing Arms , where my entire focus is on guns and gun rights issues, I haven't either.
But neither Vespa nor I are women, and that makes a difference.
The fact of the matter is that progressive despise anyone who goes off the reservation. If you're part of a group they declare is "theirs," then doing anything other than voting Democrat is grounds for anything and everything. At least in some of their minds.
The tolerant left has proven they're not that tolerant. They don't want to tolerate anything. Like I said, it's like they don't even understand the meaning of the word.
Author's Bio: Tom Knighton Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/ |
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This week has seen a rash of upsetting Supreme Court rulings, including the upholding of Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban , deciding misleadingly named "crisis pregnancy centers" don't have to reveal their anti-abortion agendas, and issuing a damaging blow to unions' negotiating power . It may have felt like SCOTUS news couldn't have gotten any worse. I miss that feeling.
Wednesday afternoon it was announced that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be retiring next month, after 30 years on the bench. The 81-year-old is currently the court's longest-serving Justice, and has frequently been the swing vote in landmark ideological cases. He voted to legalize same-sex marriage , as well as to preserve Roe v. Wade on numerous occasions . Not that Kennedy is a sure champion for liberal causes. He was, after all, appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan, and has been behind plenty of less-than-left rulings, most notably having written the majority opinion on the Citizens United case , which restructured campaign finance law in a way that essentially led to the creation of super PACs. He also voted in favor of all three of those aforementioned rulings this week.
Nonetheless, his departure from the bench will be devastating. After Republicans refused to allow President Obama to nominate Justice Scalia's replacement in 2016, Trump was able to appoint the ultra-conservative and relatively ultra-young Neil Gorsuch. This is a man who once described LGBTQ rights as part of liberals' social agenda and who has repeatedly favored "religious freedom" over reproductive rights.
Do we dare imagine that when nominating a replacement for the bench, there might be a chance Trump would choose a moderate successor, similar to Kennedy himself, rather than another far-right socially conservative judge like Gorsuch? It doesn't seem likely. Knowing how fixated Trump is on "loyalty," it's not surprising that he has railed against Gorsuch on the issues where they've disagreed. It's not far-fetched to imagine Trump will be vetting his shortlist names based on where they stand in regard to his own existing stances, such as his "zero policy" immigration tactics.
And then there's issue of abortion. Both parties have long made this their ride-or-die issue, and with Republicans in full control of the government, already controlling the House, Senate, and presidency--not to mention seeing the rise in power of Mike Pence, whose lifelong goal is to outlaw abortion once and for all--reproductive rights have been heavily under attack. Now that Trump has the power to fully flip the ideology of the Supreme Court, what better way to win the favor of his Republican base than to be the administration that reversed Roe v. Wade?
Trump has said that he'll pick Kennedy's replacement from the same shortlist he used to nominate Gorsuch. Looking over the names listed, it's a depressing bunch. Nearly all of them have lengthy track records of opposing reproductive rights. One of them voted against the recent decision to allow a detained immigrant teenager to seek an abortion. Another called Roe v. Wade the "worst abomination in the history of constitutional law." Another nominee is the man who coined the term "partial-birth abortion."
Vox has a great in-depth breakdown of all the ways in which "an America after Anthony Kennedy looks significantly different from America before," and the issues this new court is likely to face, from reproductive rights to capital punishment to affirmative action to civil rights for various communities.
This news is bleak. It feels like a giant step towards the very real Handmaid's Tale scenario we fear and it's hard not to burn with rage at everyone who contributed to Trump's rise to power, starting with every single Jill Stein voter and the infamous 53% of white women who outed themselves as full-on Serena Joys in their complicity.
I'm not going to tell you not to feel that rage. I'm feeling it, along with intense fear. I wish I could offer some sort of hope or solution, but really, all I've got is the reminder to know your representatives and to call them often. It really does matter. Follow groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL on Twitter or sign up for their email newsletters. Stay informed and stay active.
(image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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-- The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone , hate speech, and trolling.-- |
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Photograph: Michael B Thomas / AFP / Getty
An 18-hour ride on an old - and late - charter bus would be enough to fill the most seasoned traveler with apprehension and anxiety. But waiting to board exactly such a bus with 40 other black people, mostly strangers, to ride halfway across the country to St Louis, Missiouri, we were praying for more than just functioning air conditioning.
On our way to Ferguson as part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) ride, we were hoping for safe travels: some of us were aware that hundreds of black people traveling long distances could easily be cause for police stops; others had stories to tell about their encounters with police . When we arrived and met people who had been on the road for 36 hours or more, we were hardly even tired, despite the uncomfortable rest. But we were all rightfully enraged, and ready to fight for justice.
The BLM Ride was organized in the spirit of the early 1960s interstate Freedom Rides in the racially segregated south, after the visuals of Michael Brown's lifeless and blood-drenched body brought to mind images of lifeless black bodies hanging from lynching trees in the all-too-recent past, after the militarized police forces looked all too similar to the response of police to protestors during the civil rights movement.
The ride was a call to action for black people and their allies to fight for justice - not just for Brown and his family, but for all of us. It was a tangible example of self-determination in the face of anti-black violence on the part of Ferguson residents and those of us who traveled from across the country to join them.
But the real work begins now: Nearly a month after Brown's brutal killing, after the camera crews have left and in a moment when justice has yet to be realized, many more of us have decided that we could not allow Ferguson to be portrayed as an aberration in America: it must remain understood as a microcosm of the effects of anti-black racism.
So, many activist groups have returned to our local communities prepared to fight for justice. Several hundred BLM Riders - many of whom possess expertise in community organizing, law, youth development, public policy, media, the arts and more - will actively support the demands set forth by the local Ferguson community and will work both within our respective communities and nationally to address blue-on-black violence.
We may have ridden home by now, too, but we won't forget Ferguson: We will seek justice for Brown's family by petitioning for the immediate arrest of officer Darren Wilson and the dismissal of county prosecutor Robert McCullough . Groups that are part of the local Hands Up Don't Shoot Coalition have already called for Wilson's swift arrest, and some BLM riders also canvassed McCullough's neighborhood as a way of raising the public's awareness of the case. We will help develop a network of organizations and advocates to form a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the US. The Justice Department's new investigation into St Louis-area police departments is a good start, but it's not enough. Our ride was endorsed by a few dozen local, regional and national organizations across the country - like the National Organization for Women (Now) and Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation - who, while maintaining different missions, have demonstrated unprecedented solidarity in response to anti-black police violence. We hope to encourage more organizations to endorse and participate in a network with a renewed purpose of conceptualizing policy recommendations. We will also demand, through the network, that the federal government discontinue its supply of military weaponry and equipment to local law enforcement . And though Congress seems to finally be considering measures in this regard, it remains essential to monitor the demilitarization processes and the corporate sectors that financially benefit from the sale of military tools to police. We will call on the office of US attorney general Eric Holder to release the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years, both while on patrol and in custody, so they can be brought to justice - if they haven't already. And we will advocate for a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools. This money should be redirected to those federal departments charged with providing employment, housing and educational services.
We have to move out of our myopic understanding of local organizing and build a national and international movement that prioritizes all black life. Local, community-based advocacy organizations like the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, as well as groups organized by fearless young activists like Lost Voices, have committed to fighting until justice is served for Mike Brown. Our group is proof that dedicated and skilled black folks can work - together - to end state violence, homelessness, joblessness, imprisonment and more inside black communities.
We have a moment, inspired by those working on the ground in Ferguson, to transform black people's relationship to this country. The time is now. If we don't pick up the mantle for justice, we will miss it yet again. |
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On our way to Ferguson as part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) ride |
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Now that Turkish troops have seized the formerly Kurdish-held city of Afrin, Syria, the next target on their list might be the Kurdish town of Manbij - where U.S. troops are stationed as part of the war against the Islamic State.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to take Syrian city of Manbij in order to thwart what he calls a "terror corridor" near the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkey has been using the unrest caused by the Syrian civil war to target the Kurds, which it views as a threat.
Turkish attacks on Kurdish strongholds like Afrin have forced Kurdish leaders to pull their fighters from helping the U.S. in its fight against ISIS in Syria. The Kurds have proven themselves to be a crucial U.S. ally in combating the Islamic State.
Up to 150,000 civilians have fled Afrin since Friday. Kurdish leaders revealed that their fighters escaped the city along with the refugees, noting, however, that many remained behind to fight a guerrilla war and turn the city into "a permanent nightmare" for Turkey.
"We wish to announce that our war against the Turkish occupation and the ... forces known as the Free [Syrian] Army has entered a new phase, moving from a war of direct confrontation to hit-and-run tactics, to avoid larger numbers of civilian deaths and to hurt the enemy," the Kurdish militia said in a statement.
Turkish-backed Syrian rebels who participated in the attack looted Afrin and tore down a statue of Kawa, a mythological Kurdish blacksmith. The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces called the destruction of the statue the "first blatant violation of Kurdish people's culture and history since the takeover of Afrin."
The U.S. has recently increased its presence in Manbij . While the city itself is Kurdish territory, the U.S. has tried to assure Turkey that the Kurdish Y.P.G. militia is not in control of the city.
"The coalition has increased its force presence in and around Manbij to deter any hostile action against the city and its civilians, to enhance local governance and to ensure there is no persistent Y.P.G. presence," an American military spokesman said, according to the New York Times. This is all part of a balancing act that the United States has been trying to play in order to continue allying with the Kurds to defeat the Islamic State, while avoiding any conflict with Turkey.
Despite this insistence, Turkey has stated that it views Manbij as a Y.P.G. stronghold. Further complicating matters, some of the Syrian rebel groups who have been fighting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's regime, have allied with Turkey against the Kurds.
The Kurds primarily inhabit a region called Kurdistan that stretches across the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of Armenia. The Turkish government and the Kurds have been at odds for decades.
In a push for greater autonomy, a Kurdish militant group called the PKK has been fighting in Turkey since 1978. Turkey, the EU, and the U.S. have all declared the PKK to be a terrorist group, but the U.S. sees a difference between the PKK and other Kurdish groups, while Turkey views them all as terrorist organizations. |
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Now that Turkish troops have seized the formerly Kurdish-held city of Afrin, Syria, the next target on their list might be the Kurdish town of Manbij |
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Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian held talks on Syrian situation with Mikhail Bogdanov, Putin's special envoy to Middle East, and UN Special Envoy to Syria Stafan De Mistura, in a trilateral meeting in the Austrian capital of Vienna on Saturday.
Amir-Abdollahian referred to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut , adding "the occurrence of these tragic disasters attest to the fact that adopting double standards in countering terrorism and dividing this scourge into good and bad, will cause severe consequences for the whole region and the world; no country will ever benefit from strengthening terrorism."
The Iranian official highlighted the need for focusing this round of Vienna Syria talks on resolute and effective actions against terrorism and sending a firm and strong message to terrorist groups on countries' collective efforts to battle terrorism.
Amir-Abdollahian also met with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on the sidelines of Vienna talks, condemning the Friday terrorist attacks in Paris and extending his condolences to the government of France.
Fabius said on Saturday that he would return back to France after the meeting on Syrian settlement to attend to the emergency situation in his country following the seven attacks that killed 130 people and wounded several dozens. ISIL terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif heading a delegation comprised of Abbas Araghchi and Hamid Baeidinejad, left Tehran for Vienna to join the peace talks on Syria this morning. Zarif's attendance was announced after President Rouhani's visits to France and Italy were postponed due to Friday's deadly terror attacks in Paris.
The Vienna discussions will bring together about 20 countries and international bodies to reach a road-map for peace to end Syria's more than four-year civil war.
The Saturday talks are overshadowed by the recent terrorist attacks carried out in Paris and Beirut, which led to the death and injury of several innocent civilians.
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Amir-Abdollahian also met with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on the sidelines of Vienna talks, condemning the Friday terrorist attacks in Paris and extending his condolences to the government of France.
Fabius said on Saturday that he would return back to France after the meeting on Syrian settlement to attend to the emergency situation in his country following the seven attacks that killed 130 people and wounded several dozens. ISIL terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif heading a delegation comprised of Abbas Araghchi and Hamid Baeidinejad, left Tehran for Vienna to join the peace talks on Syria this morning. Zarif's attendance was announced after President Rouhani's visits to France and Italy were postponed due to Friday's deadly terror attacks in Paris.
The Vienna discussions will bring together about 20 countries and international bodies to reach a road-map for peace to end Syria's more than four-year civil war.
The Saturday talks are overshadowed by the recent terrorist attacks carried out in Paris and Beirut |
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Brittany McMillan * 17 Surrey, Canada Founder, Spirit Day If you wore purple on October 20--as did Cher, the Jersey Shore cast, Raising Hope star Martha Plimpton, Conan O'Brien, the ladies of The View, and some of the White House staff--you can thank Brittany McMillan. McMillan, a Canadian high school student, is making a huge impact in the U.S. with Spirit Day, when teenagers and adults wear purple to show solidarity against anti-LGBT bullying. Compelled to do something after the high-profile LGBT suicides of 2010, McMillan began the initiative as a grassroots effort, but after the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation encouraged celebrities to join in, millions of people wore purple and altered their Facebook and Twitter profiles in solidarity. "Spirit Day only takes place one day out of the year, but homophobia happens every day," McMillan says.
Mike Munich * 25 Los Angeles Entertainer "I want to blur the line of gender roles and sexuality and prove that there is no box one must force oneself to fit inside," Mike Munich says. The desire to provoke comes naturally to the singer-dancer, who also has an extensive portfolio as an underwear model. It might also have rubbed off from his association with another pair of rule-breakers he's worked alongside recently: Adam Lambert at his controversial 2009 American Music Awards performance and Lady Gaga in her "Born This Way" video. Munich also helped carry Gaga's famous egg vessel when she arrived at the Grammy Awards last year. Munich hopes to soon generate his own headlines when he completes the album he's working on, having already released two singles, "Beat the Beat" and "Referee." The performer thinks back on his childhood, when he was bullied so mercilessly he had to change high schools. "I want to encourage people, especially kids, to explore, discover, and be true to themselves and not be afraid of what they find inside," he says.
Faith Cheltenham * 32 Los Angeles President, BiNet USA Faith Cheltenham's been trying to accentuate the B in LGBT for almost 15 years now. "In college I pushed for acknowledgement that bisexuals existed," she says. "But [our existence] would seemingly be invisible within the organizations I was involved with." A social media producer by day (Duchess Sarah Ferguson is one client), Cheltenham now promotes bisexual visibility as president of BiNet USA, a nonprofit volunteer organization. Through its website, the umbrella organization promotes visibility for a group often marginalized--even among the L, G, and T communities--by disseminating articles, history lessons, links to local groups, and a calendar of bisexual-themed events around the globe. Cheltenham, a new mom, sees BiNet USA as her contribution to the equality struggle: "[I'm just] one piece in a tapestry of people fighting for freedom."
John Carroll * 30s New York City Dancer "I felt like Nomi Malone in Showgirls watching Goddess," dancer John Carroll says, recalling the moment he first saw the provocative posters for Broadway Bares, the annual striptease event in New York that raises money for HIV/AIDS organizations. "I couldn't believe my eyes and I was determined to be a part of this organization." Although he grew up an hour from Manhattan, it seemed like a long journey to Broadway for Carroll, who battled both spinal meningitis and relentless bullies as a child. "My career has taken me far beyond my childhood dreams," says Carroll, who has shared the Broadway stage with legends including Patti LuPone in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Bernadette Peters in Follies . Carroll also never dreamed he and longtime boyfriend Michael Gallagher would became one of the first same-sex couples to legally wed in New York last summer. "From being run out of school for being gay to standing hand in hand with the man I love, being part of LGBT history was a full circle blessing for me."
Vincent Pompei * 35 San Diego Conference Chair, Center for Excellence in School Counseling and Leadership (CESCaL) When Vincent Pompei became a schoolteacher, he designated his classroom a safe space for LGBT students. But when another teacher in his conservative public school found out Pompei was gay, there was no safe space for the teacher to hide from bullying at the hands of fellow educators and the school's administration. So he filed a formal complaint with the district. The administrator in charge was subsequently removed, and Pompei started conducting LGBT awareness training for teachers across the district. That experience empowered him to get involved in the Center for Excellence in School Counseling and Leadership, which just held its Supporting Students--Saving Lives Conference (CESCAL.org), attended by 500 educators from 29 states, sponsored by Southwest Airlines, and endorsed by President Obama. "There are a lot of kids for whom it hasn't gotten better yet," says Pompei, who was also a victim of bullying as a child and who is now the Supporting Students--Saving Lives conference chair. "We don't want to just prevent suicide, we want children to know that the people around them are going to love them, protect them, and welcome them for who they are." The next conference is Feb. 15-17, 2012 in San Diego.
Martin Rawlings-Fein * 34 San Francisco Filmmaker, Choosing to Be Chosen As a bisexual transgender Jewish man, Martin Rawlings-Fein is a member of three sometimes-marginalized segments of the LGBT community. "People like to box us in and put us in places where we don't really fit," he says. "It can be overcome if we talk to each other." Rawlings-Fein is filming LGBT people who've converted to Judaism for what will become a feature-length documentary, Choosing to Be Chosen , and he's created several short films showcasing trans people's diversity. He contributed to the Lambda Award-winning anthology Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community , and on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's LGBT Advisory Committee he headed up groundbreaking research on the impact of bisexual invisibility. An information technology professional and married father of two, he's now running for San Francisco school board.
Jose Lugaro * 35 New York City Development Director, NY LGBT Center While nearing graduation at Penn State University, Jose Lugaro discovered the business side of nonprofits, which he says changed the course of his life. Since then, he's worked as a fund-raiser for LGBT organizations--on staff and as a volunteer--helping to raise millions for causes he believes in. As deputy director of development at Chicago's Center on Halsted he secured a $1 million donation, its largest gift ever from an individual, and now, as the director of development for New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, he oversees all fund-raising that supports the center's $7.5 million annual budget. Among the rewards is witnessing firsthand the impact of his efforts. "I see it in the eyes of the people who walk through our doors. Each and every one of them is at different stage in their journey and they have one thing in common. The center is there for them, whatever their need."
Justin Torres * 32 San Francisco Author, We the Animals Justin Torres unflinchingly describes growing up the youngest and smallest of three brothers and the son of a strict father in his new book, We the Animals . Torres's first novel is already a critical success, with a mention in O, The Oprah Magazine and an NAACP image award nomination. The story's unnamed narrator is a queer boy "looking at his family from that perspective," Torres says. He's a peacekeeper, as Torres writes, "which sometimes meant nothing more than falling down to my knees and covering my head with my arms," while his brothers swung away, "until they got tired, or bored, or remorseful." The protagonist's mother knew even while pregnant with her first son that what grew inside her belly was a "heart ticking like a time bomb." None of that messy view of family stops Torres and his partner from dreaming about starting their own, he says.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Julia Wallace * 29 & 32 Durham, N.C. Historians, Mobile Homecoming In 2009, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Wallace were at a conference in North Carolina, attended primarily by black lesbians, and realized they were the youngest people there. Listening to the older women, "it became very obvious that the choices they had made and the things they had done had made things better for us," Gumbs says. Adds Wallace: "We became very excited about the experiences they had." That led the partners in life and work to get on the road and seek out African-American LGBT elders (basically, anyone older than they are) around the nation for a project called Mobile Homecoming. Gumbs and Wallace are documenting their subjects' lives through video and audio interviews that they plan to assemble into a documentary film by the end of next year, and they are also holding intergenerational events and collecting photos, manuscripts, and other artifacts for an archive of black LGBT life. The effort "has been affirming and sometimes overwhelming," Gumbs says. In some cases, "people have been waiting all their life for someone to listen to them." Wallace says the project made her realize "we have a responsibility to our elders and our ancestors to take care of each other." In addition to Mobile Homecoming, Gumbs's projects include BrokenBeautiful Press, a website where activists can share resources, and Brilliance Remastered, which offers online seminars, individual coaching, and other assistance for scholars. Wallace is founder of Queer Renaissance, which uses the Internet and other media to connect artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and others. Soon the busy duo will be collaborating on a children's book as well.
Amelia Roskin-Frazee * 16 San Francisco Founder, Make It Safe Project Though she's only a freshman in high school, Amelia Roskin-Frazee's resume of activism is hefty. She established her middle school's GSA, she's one of 18 student ambassadors for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, and she founded her own LGBT organization. "I was going to my current school's library and I found that there were pretty much no books about sexual orientation or gender expression," Roskin-Frazee says. The dearth of LGBT literature inspired her to establish the Make It Safe Project, which provides schools with queer literature. Through her fund-raising efforts, she's purchased books like It Gets Better and Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens and distributed them to school libraries. "I've given around 20 boxes of books to schools and youth homeless shelters that otherwise didn't have these resources," she says. While she sees herself eventually being an "underpaid writer-teacher," Roskin-Frazee says LGBT advocacy will always be part of her life.
Kevin Hauswirth * 28 Chicago Social Media Director, Office of the Mayor Not long ago, if you had opinions about how your city should be run, you visited your alderman, wrote letters, or perhaps just grumbled to yourself. Now you can also share your input online, and you might hear back from the mayor, at least in Chicago. With social media director Kevin Hauswirth and two other technology team members, Mayor Rahm Emanuel aims to make city operations "transparent like never before," Hauswirth says. He facilitates communications between citizens and the mayor through Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, and other platforms, including a website where Chicagoans can offer suggestions for budget priorities. Thanks to Hauswirth, some citizens saw their ideas reflected in the most recent budget, and some received a call from the mayor. Whatever the next social media platform is, "we'll be there too," says Hauswirth, who adds that the mayor is not only tech-savvy but LGBT-friendly as well. Emanuel has officiated at civil unions ("It's really inspiring to see your boss up there," Hauswirth says) and supports full marriage equality.
Liz Feldman * 34 Los Angeles TV Writer, 2 Broke Girls Liz Feldman's been accomplishing great things since she was well under 40, under 20 even. At 18 the Brooklyn native was plucked from a New York City comedy club to become a regular on Nickelodeon's All That . According to Feldman, she has been in "the right place, right time" ever since. A writing gig on Blue Collar TV--"admittedly, a strange fit for a Jewish lesbian from New York"--led to a job on The Ellen DeGeneres Show , which earned Feldman four Emmys. Since leaving that post, she's been doing some old-fashioned sitcom writing, on Hot in Cleveland and now CBS's hit 2 Broke Girls . It's all part of Feldman's master plan to someday make a TV series with a lesbian lead. In the meantime she's still doing her scrappy Web series, This Just Out , on TheLizFeldman.com because, she says, "I wouldn't feel complete if I weren't interviewing lesbians in my kitchen."
Jason Franklin * 32 New York City Executive Director, Bolder Giving Jason Franklin's selfless spirit developed early. As a high school student he decried cuts to Oregon's education system, in college he volunteered for the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, and later, while getting his Ph.D. at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service, he worked to rebuild arts organizations in 9/11's wake. So it was a pretty seamless transition to his current job as head of Bolder Giving, a New York-based philanthropic organization with a singular mission. "We are the only organization in the country that focuses on how much to give," Franklin says. Through workshops and seminars, Bolder Giving shows philanthropists-in-training how much charity is possible for them and shares inspirational stories of people--from the super wealthy to the middle class--who've dug deeper in their pockets for causes important to them, including many LGBT causes. "Giving back will actually take care of you longer," Franklin argues, "because if your community is doing better, so will you."
Tucky Williams * 26 Louisville, K.y. Producer, Girl/Girl Scene With over a million views, Tucky Williams has much to celebrate with her show, Girl/Girl Scene . In what she describes as a "Web television drama series," Williams tells the story of lesbians living and loving in Louisville, Ky. Williams is the creator, executive producer, and writer, and she also plays the protagonist, Evan, in the series. "I wanted to show what my life was like as a young lesbian having fun," Williams said. "All the characters really enjoy being gay." Williams is a role model for many young Girl/Girl Scene fans--90% of her fan mail consists of gracious letters thanking her for producing a relatable show, while the other 10% asks Williams's advice on coming out. The first season recently wrapped, and Williams is working on season 2 with new cast members and a new directing team. As far as what fans can expect, she simply says, "We are going to explore deeper, darker emotions. And we're also going to have a lot more flashy, trashy fun."
Rachel Tiven * 36 New York City Exec. Director, Immigration Equality The Obama administration's announcement more than a year ago that the antigay Defense of Marriage Act is indefensible raises many unresolved questions regarding immigration for same-sex couples. As executive director of Immigration Equality, Rachel Tiven has been on the front lines in pushing the White House for action on behalf of thousands of binational couples faced with deportation or denied marriage-based green card privileges that straight married couples are afforded. A growing number of gay couples have seen their cases dropped and their futures brightened with the help of the organization. "The je ne sais quoi, the 'it' that makes us so magically unique as a nation, is that so many people from all over the world want to come here," Tiven says. "Diminishing, denying, or disrespecting this wellspring of our collective creativity is a threat to who we are as a nation." |
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This week in history: January 25-31 25 years 50 years 75 years 100 years
On January 26, 1991, nine days after the launching of an aerial assault on Iraq, more than 150,000 people marched in Washington, DC in opposition to the US war in the Persian Gulf.
On January 31, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam following a 37-day pause.
On January 25, 1941 the London Times reported that the Romanian military under the leadership of right-wing dictator General Ion Antonescu had wrested back control of Bucharest from the fascist Iron Guard.
On January 31, 1916, six German dirigibles attacked East Anglia and the Midlands in Britain, killing 70 people and injuring a further 113. |
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FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Intelligence on Iran Fails the Smell Test
Mr. President:
As the George W. Bush administration revved up to attack Iraq 15 years ago, we could see no compelling reason for war. We decided, though, to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on the chance he had been sandbagged by Vice President Dick Cheney and others. We chose to allow for the possibility that he actually believed the "intelligence" that Colin Powell presented to the UN as providing "irrefutable and undeniable" proof of WMD in Iraq and a "sinister nexus" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
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To us in VIPS it was clear, however, that the "intelligence" Powell adduced was bogus. Thus, that same afternoon (Feb. 5, 2003) we prepared and sent to President Bush a Memorandum like this one , urging him to seek counsel beyond the "circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
We take no satisfaction at having been correct -- though disregarded -- in predicting the political and humanitarian disaster in Iraq. Most Americans have been told the intelligence was "mistaken." It was not; it was out-and-out fraud, in which, sadly, some of our former colleagues took part.
Five years after Powell's speech, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee minced few words in announcing the main bipartisan finding of a five-year investigation. He said : "In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."
Iran Now in Gunsight
As drums beat again for a military attack -- this time on Iran, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and other experienced, objective analysts are, by all appearances, being disregarded again. And, this time, we fear the consequences will be all-caps CATASTROPHIC -- in comparison with the catastrophe of Iraq.
In memoranda to you over the past year and a half we have pointed out that (1) Iran's current support for international terrorism is far short of what it was decades ago; and (2) that you are being played by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claims about Iran: they are based on intelligence exposed as fraudulent several years ago. Tellingly, Netanyahu waited for your new national security adviser to be in place for three weeks before performing his April 30 slide show alleging that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program. On the chance that our analysis of Netanyahu's show-and-tell failed to reach you, please know that the Israeli prime minister was recycling information from proven forgeries, which we reported in a Memorandum to you early last spring.
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If our Memorandum of May 7 fell through some cracks in the West Wing, here are its main findings:
The evidence displayed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 in what he called his "Iranian atomic archive" showed blatant signs of fabrication. That evidence is linked to documents presented by the Bush Administration more than a decade earlier as "proof" of a covert Iran nuclear weapons program. Those documents were clearly fabricated, as well.
In our May 7, 2018 Memorandum we also asserted: "We can prove that the actual documents originally came not from Iran but from Israel. Moreover, the documents were never authenticated by the CIA or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."
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London: A Sikh MP in the UK has been abused and targeted with threats of violence from furious trolls who think he was not speaking enough on issues related to the community, according to a media report.
File image of Labour Party leader Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi. Twitter @TanDhesi
Tan Dhesi, who became Labour's MP for Slough in June, was accused of ignoring the plight of a British Sikh man who was arrested during his visit to India.
But Dhesi vowed to continue working for the whole public "regardless of background, colour or creed" rather than focussing on just one community, The Sun reported.
The abuse came after Dhesi won the right to speak at Prime Minister's Questions and used the slot to ask about a rail link in his local area.
Trolls said he should have asked about Jagtar Singh, a Scottish activist who was arrested in India, the report said.
One troll wrote to the MP saying: "...A Sikh British citizen is being tortured in Punjab and you're worried about rail. You have no response to that. You need a slap upside your head you fake Sikh!"
Dhesi reacted with fury and pointed out that he has repeatedly worked on Johal's case.
"It's hard enough serving as an MP without having to face constant abuse from various quarters (whether that's the far-right/extremists/others who feel that I'm only interested in 'my community's issues', or those from within my 'own' community who feel I don't do enough)," he wrote on Facebook.
"When people resort to abuse, they are actually doing a disservice to their own cause. I will do what I genuinely feel is right, rather than be forced by anybody to follow their priorities or way of thinking.
"I am not merely a Sikh MP/representative speaking solely on Sikh issues," Dhesi added. |
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INFORMED PEOPLE CAN NO LONGER FAIL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE UNDENIABLE LINK BETWEEN PROGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE HAMMER AND SICKLE
by John Eidson, (c)2018 A long trail of indisputable evidence shows that climate alarmism is a Marxist ruse to frighten citizens of western democracies to acquiesce to trillions of dollars in carbon energy taxes to be redistributed to poor nations of the world in the guise of "climate justice." Make no mistake about it: Green IS the new Red. The image above was provided by Courtney "Fett" Fettinger, a patriotic tattoo artist in Indiana. Website
(Feb. 6, 2018) -- Progressive environmentalists once tried to conceal the tight link between climate change hysteria and communism. Certain that the election of Barack Obama would lead to enactment of massive global warming taxes, climate alarmists suddenly felt safe at dropping all pretenses. As documented further below, two of the UN's senior climate officials openly acknowledged that man-made global warming theory has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with redistributing the world's wealth from rich nations to poor ones, communism's foremost goal. The increasing public use of clenched-fist imagery is another revealing indication that emboldened climate change communists are coming out of the closet.
The most recognized symbol of communism is the infamous hammer and sickle. Because it is widely identified with brutal oppression in places like China, Cuba and the former Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle is rarely displayed in public by communist warriors in America. Instead, they press the cause of forced global wealth redistribution by using the more innocuous symbol of the call for world communism: the clenched fist.
Clenched-fist imagery in America can be traced to the early part of the last century, when it was openly used within the U.S. labor movement. In 1917, the communist propaganda illustration below was published in Solidarity, the official organ of Industrial Workers of the World, a U.S. trade union committed to the cause of communism throughout the world, including here in America. "The Hand That Will Rule the World."
"Our goal is a communist America."
A leading member of the communist Progressive Labor Party, lifelong Democrat Mike Golash, was instrumental in helping organize Occupy Wall Street. During an August 12, 2012 "People's Assembly" meeting in the nation's capital, Golash was caught on tape telling student occupiers, "The goal of progressive labor is to overthrow capitalism and build communism in America." OWS was supported at the highest levels of the Democratic Party. The clenched fist logo of the Progressive Labor Party reveals its ties to communism. One of the Democratic Party's most loyal supporters, the PLP, is anti-American in the most profound meaning of the term.
The clenched fist and "climate change"
Today, clenched-fist symbolism can be seen not only at Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and labor union marches, but at events sponsored by every Democrat cause in America, from open borders, Black Lives Matter and LGBT activism to the relentless effort to convince voters to believe the hotly-disputed claim that the human use of fossil fuels is destroying the environment.
Progressive Environmentalism
Clenched-fist imagery used by the militant eco-group Earth First here , here , and here is more evidence of the strong ties between communism and progressive environmentalism. Promoted with great fanfare by the Democratic Party, it's no mere coincidence that the annual "Earth Day" celebration falls on April 22 nd , the same calendar date that Lenin, the Father of Soviet Communism, was born.
The People's Climate March
Clenched-fist imagery here , here , here , and here is used to promote the annual People's Climate March. Among the hundreds of Marxist organizations that sponsor the marches are Communist Party USA and the Progressive Labor Party. Two of the Democrat luminaries who march each year are Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose family holds substantial investments in oil companies, and Hollywood super-star Leonardo DiCaprio. A high school graduate with zero scientific credentials, DiCaprio, sporting facial hair that made him eerily reminiscent of Lenin , was invited by the UN to deliver an Earth Day 2016 speech warning citizens of the world about the alleged perils of "climate change." Using a movie star to press its case shows that the climate crisis lobby is attempting to sway a class of uninformed citizens referred to by Lenin as "useful idiots."
Green energy: Trojan horse for world communism
Clenched-fist imagery is a staple of climate alarmism. In 2011, the International Journal of Socialist Renewal published a clenched-fist poster promoting the 2 nd Annual Conference on Climate Change/Social Change. The poster reveals the hidden agenda behind climate change alarmism--using the call for green energy as a Trojan horse to bring about "social change," also known as "social justice," i.e., an unfair world saved from itself by communism. Clenched-fist imagery can be found throughout all facets of opposition to the production of any form of carbon-based energy. In 2015, a progressive group calling itself Bronx Climate Justice published a dramatic clenched-fist poster celebrating President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Resist capitalism, build communism, rise up in revolution.
A clenched-fist poster for the 2017 People's Climate March in Washington, DC reads "WE RESIST. WE BUILD. WE RISE." A line of the poster promotes the concept of "justice." Used throughout the Western world to advance victim vs. oppressor ideology (Marxism), the term "social justice" and its offshoots--climate justice, food justice, housing justice, education justice, healthcare justice, economic justice, immigration justice, etc.--are progressive code terms for socialism, the gateway to communism. The following are two of Lenin's most revealing quotes: "The goal of socialism is communism" and "Democracy is indispensable to socialism." The latter quote reveals Lenin's belief that the way to convert capitalist democracies to communism is to quietly infuse socialist doctrine into the popular culture.
Inside every socialist is a communist screaming to get out.
Lenin's quote " The goal of socialism is communism" acknowledges that totalitarian rule is so frightening to people in free and prosperous Western nations that it must be gradually slipped into those societies in bits and pieces. It is through that incremental process that socialism serves as an under-the-radar, transitional gateway to full-blown communism. The "Eat the Rich' class warfare image above illustrates that gradual progression--from capitalism (knife and fork) to creeping socialism (sickle and fork) to outright communism (hammer and sickle). If done via stealth, capitalist societies can be overthrown from within in a way that goes virtually unnoticed until it is too late--that is what progressives in America are attempting through global warming alarmism. The method through which that sinister sub rosa conversion is accomplished is known as cultural Marxism, a stratagem to overthrow Western nations from within developed a century ago by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the 20 th century.
The 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference was a subdued event due to the massive Climategate cheating scandal involving prominent scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climactic Research Unit. Despite the smothering pall of gloom, one speaker received a thunderous standing ovation when he called for the death of capitalism throughout the world. Among those wildly cheering the remarks of Venezuela's communist strongman, Hugo Chavez, were U.S. delegates representing President Barack Obama. As revealed below, the goal of climate alarmism is not to save the world from environmental disaster--the goal is to convert the world to communism. For that to happen, the greatest capitalist prize of all, the United States of America, must fall to the hammer and sickle. Voters who fail to see climate alarmism for what it is are unwittingly being led down the road to communism like sheep to slaughter.
The Hidden Agenda Behind "Climate Change"
by John Eidson | April 3, 2016
In a remarkably frank admission that laid bare the stealth agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres , Executive Secretary of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the UN's real purpose in creating climate fear is to end capitalism throughout the world:
This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she bitterly complained that America's two-party constitutional system is hampering the UN's global climate objectives. She went on to cite China's communist system as the kind of government America must have if the UN is to achieve its objectives. In other words, for the UN to have its way, America must be transformed into a communist nation.
Let that one sink in for a moment.
Figueres is not alone. Another high-level UN Marxist had comments of his own about the hidden agenda behind "climate change." If you're among those who believe progressives when they say all they're trying to do is save the planet, what Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer had to say will leave your jaw on the floor.
In an unguarded statement that found its way into the public domain, Edenhofer, co-chair of the UN IPCC's Working Group III, made this shocking admission on Nov. 14, 2010:
One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we're doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world's wealth.
On the same date, Edenhofer added this :
Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with protecting the environment. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which [re]distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated.
Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer, one of the UN's top climate officials, effectively admitted that the organization's public position on global warming is a hoax, and another senior UN official, Christiana Figueres, said in an official capacity that the United States must have a communist government for the UN to achieve its objectives.
Let all of that sink in for a moment.
Some wealthy and powerful elites in this country believe it's not fair that billions of people in the world sleep on the ground in mud huts, while Americans sleep on soft mattresses in air-conditioned comfort. The progressive elites who feel that way also believe that a significantly greater portion of America's wealth must therefore be "shared" (redistributed) to poor nations. Global wealth redistribution is the foremost tenet of communism, and those who advocate it are, by definition, communists, whether they are open about it or not .
The stunning pronouncements by Figueres and Edenhofer are all the evidence a rational mind needs to conclude that climate alarmism is being used as a Trojan horse to justify the massive new carbon taxes clamored for by powerful progressives like Barack Obama, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, none of whom have denounced the pro-communist, anti-American sentiments of two of the UN's top climate officials.
The words of one of those officials revealed that such taxes would be used not for environmental purposes, but to fund the most massive redistribution of wealth in the history of the world, literally trillions of dollars extracted under false pretenses from U.S. taxpayers, and given to the corrupt governments of every undeveloped nation on Earth, all in the guise of "climate aid."
Progressives in high places are attempting the largest heist in human history, a collusion to exfiltrate unprecedented sums of money from the world's largest capitalist nation. Why? The answer is obvious--to implement, on a global scale, the mandate set forth in The Communist Manifesto :
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Karl Marx
Outraged that Trump dealt their plan to redistribute America's wealth a major setback when he ditched their precious Paris Climate Accords, progressives would have you believe they're nothing more than environmentally-concerned Americans who would never even dream of participating in an effort to upend their country's capitalist system.
Trump knows that's a big lie. And now, so do you.
No intelligent person can fail to recognize that powerful progressives in this country are using "climate change" as a ruse to fundamentally transform the United States of America . But because the human ego is loathe to admit when it's been duped, many Americans will continue allowing themselves to be led like sheep into the closing noose of the hammer and sickle. By the time they realize what happened, it will be too late. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote about a Third Reich propaganda technique called the Big Lie: 'If you're going to lie, make it a Big Lie, keep repeating it and people will believe it.' That's exactly what he did, and millions of otherwise intelligent Germans believed the Big Lies that were relentlessly repeated. By the time they realized they'd been duped, it was too late.
Liberty is seldom lost all at once. Slavery is so frightful to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received. - 18 th century Scottish philosopher David Hume
Green is the New Red added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 |
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msnbc is celebrating black history by profiling game-changing black musicians and film directors throughout February.
Stanley Nelson is a three-time Emmy Award winning film director and producer, a MacArthur "Genius" fellow, and a National Humanities Medal recipient from New York City. He recently chatted with msnbc about his mentor, documentary film pioneer Williams Greaves, his latest film "The Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution," and the historical racism in Hollywood.
"What no one wants to talk about is that Hollywood, in it's history, was of the most racist institutions in this country ... If you watch a movie from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you see a black person come on screen and you cringe." Stanley Nelson
Describe who you are and what you do in one breath:
I am a producer and director of documentary films.
Describe some of the sights and sounds from your childhood and how they have influenced your films?
I grew up in Harlem in the '50s and '60s. My father was a dentist, my mother was a librarian. Some of the sights and sound that I remember was playing in the neighborhood, and fathers and mothers coming home from work. One of the reasons that I got into filmmaking was that I wanted to put in films the people and the lives that I knew and I remembered growing up that were not the images, especially of African-Americans, that I saw on screen.
Can you identify how you chose your subjects?
When we made the " Murder of Emmett Till ," it was one of the first civil rights movies that I made. There was a special attachment that people could have to the film because you were able to find witnesses, who were still around, who could talk in first-person about what happened. It adds a layer of emotionality that can connect to the audience.
As a filmmaker, the civil rights period is one where there's footage, music, and it's just old enough to look cool visually, than if you are doing a film about the '90s.
What was that "ah ha" moment when you realized documentary filmmaking was you?
It was a slow long process for me. I went to film school and I was really interested in fiction films because I didn't know anything about documentary. I got a job with William Greaves and started working with him on documentary films ... I realized there was so much freedom in documentary films.
Do you have an anecdote or a lesson you learned from William Greaves that you carry with you?
When I first started working with Bill, I was riding in his car one day and he said, "We're going down to Atlanta to shoot a film [ Just Doin' It: A Tale of Two Barbershops ] and I want you to do sound." I said, "I haven't done sound before." "Well you took sound in film school, right? Than you know how to do sound," Bill said. From that I learned that it's really important to learn the different technology, and it's not rocket science - you can figure it out .
One Stanley Nelson film everyone should see:
I saw the trailer and found it interesting when one of the subjects said that she was a cocktail waitress in a white strip club two weeks before she joined the Black Panther Party. It reminded me about what Dawn Porter said about portraying black folks in three dimensions.
It's a different way of looking at African-Americans. There's a difference between the Oscars ... there's a difference between nominating African-Americans or scattering them around the audience so we see them. So it looks like there are some African-Americans involved, but they're really not.
Given that your work is so entrenched in history from '60s, '70s, '80s, how does it inform how you look at the world present day?
History always reflects on today. One of the main things I've learned about history is that it's a roller coaster ride. We as Americans', especially we as African-Americans, want history to be this upward progression, " Up from Slavery ." But it's not, it's up and down and all around.
Social documentary has an amazing ability to effect social change. Support documentary film. Help raise awareness for issues that matter! -- Stanley Nelson (@StanleyNelson1) August 31, 2012
Have you identified similarities or differences in the Civil Rights movements and present day movements?
I hope you get a chance to see "Panthers", our latest film. The Black Panthers almost started 50 years ago as a result of police brutality in Oakland, California. That's how it started, policing the police which is a direct connection to where we are today ... so obviously there are so many similarities to what happened then and what's happening now.
I also did this New York Times op-doc and it compares the Panther movement with what's been happening in Ferguson.
If you had to choose two films and two songs to play on repeat ... forever (only one can be yours):
" Citizen King " and I don't have another one.
Oscars aside, what were some of your favorite films and documentaries of the year?
I liked "Selma" a lot, that was probably by far my favorite film in terms of filmmaking, passion, and meaning. " Citizenfour " and " Last Days in Vietnam " were really well made. I saw " (T)error " at Sundance and I liked that a whole lot.
What did you take away from the 2015 Oscar nominations and winners?
What no one wants to talk about is that Hollywood, in it's history, was of the most racist institutions in this country. You don't see black people. If you watch a movie from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, you see a black person come on screen and you cringe ... Hollywood has tried to move up with the times, but it's starting from further back than a lot of other places.
The snub of "Selma" was just awful. I'm on the Academy, so I get to see all of the films. The snub of "Selma" was wrong; I've seen the other films.
What can we expect from you in 2015?
We are doing a theatrical release of the "Panthers" in September. We're starting on a film "Tell them we are rising" for PBS on historically black colleges that helped shaped this country. It's part of a series "America Revisited," that includes "The Black Panthers", and then a four hour show on the slave trade "Creating a New World."
Advice for aspiring filmmakers?
Learn the technology. Learn how to edit. Learn the lighting. Learn how to use a camera. And it's important to learn why you want to make films ... if you don't love it, work at the post office.
What is your greatest form of validation as an artist?
I've had so many. I'd say, getting a [National] Humanities Medal from Obama this summer.
If you had a chance to talk to President Obama, what would you say?
Have fun! Don't let them get you.
If you had to rewrite history ...
I would cancel the Atlantic Slave Trade. I would want to see what history would be like without it.
Black History Month as a child in school? What do u make of it today?
I don't think there was "Black History Month" when I was a child. On the one hand black history should be every month, but on the other hand, at least for a month we can talk about black history. I'm happy that for some short time we think about African-American history. Happy in the context in that it should be every month. It should be part of our history all the time.
Keep up with Stanley on Twitter @StanleyNelson1 and Firelight media . |
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Stanley Nelson is a three-time Emmy Award winning film director and producer, a MacArthur "Genius" fellow, and a National Humanities Medal recipient from New York City. He recently chatted with msnbc about his mentor, documentary film pioneer Williams Greaves, his latest film "The Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution," and the historical racism in Hollywood.
"What no one wants to talk about is that Hollywood, in it's history, was of the most racist institutions in this country ... If you watch a movie from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you see a black person come on screen and you cringe." Stanley Nelson
Describe who you are and what you do in one breath:
I am a producer and director of documentary films.
Describe some of the sights and sounds from your childhood and how they have influenced your films?
I grew up in Harlem in the '50s and '60s. My father was a dentist, my mother was a librarian. Some of the sights and sound that I remember was playing in the neighborhood, and fathers and mothers coming home from work. One of the reasons that I got into filmmaking was that I wanted to put in films the people and the lives that I knew and I remembered growing up that were not the images, especially of African-Americans, that I saw on screen.
Can you identify how you chose your subjects?
When we made the " Murder of Emmett Till ," it was one of the first civil rights movies that I made. There was a special attachment that people could have to the film because you were able to find witnesses, who were still around, who could talk in first-person about what happened. It adds a layer of emotionality that can connect to the audience.
As a filmmaker, the civil rights period is one where there's footage, music, and it's just old enough to look cool visually, than if you are doing a film about the '90s.
What was that "ah ha" moment when you realized documentary filmmaking was you?
It was a slow long process for me. I went to film school and I was really interested in fiction films because I didn't know anything about documentary. I got a job with William Greaves and started working with him on documentary films ... I realized there was so much freedom in documentary films.
Do you have an anecdote or a lesson you learned from William Greaves that you carry with you?
When I first started working with Bill, I was riding in his car one day and he said, "We're going down to Atlanta to shoot a film [ Just Doin' It: A Tale of Two Barbershops ] and I want you to do sound." I said, "I haven't done sound before." "Well you took sound in film school, right? Than you know how to do sound," Bill said. From that I learned that it's really important to learn the different technology, and it's not rocket science - you can figure it out .
One Stanley Nelson film everyone should see:
I saw the trailer and found it interesting when one of the subjects said that she was a cocktail waitress in a white strip club two weeks before she joined the Black Panther Party. It reminded me about what Dawn Porter said about portraying black folks in three dimensions.
It's a different way of looking at African-Americans. There's a difference between the Oscars ... there's a difference between nominating African-Americans or scattering them around the audience so we see them. So it looks like there are some African-Americans involved, but they're really not.
Given that your work is so entrenched in history from '60s, '70s, '80s, how does it inform how you look at the world present day?
History always reflects on today. One of the main things I've learned about history is that it's a roller coaster ride. We as Americans', especially we as African-Americans, want history to be this upward progression, " Up from Slavery ." But it's not, it's up and down and all around.
Social documentary has an amazing ability to effect social change. Support documentary film. Help raise awareness for issues that matter! -- Stanley Nelson (@StanleyNelson1) August 31, 2012
Have you identified similarities or differences in the Civil Rights movements and present day movements?
I hope you get a chance to see "Panthers", our latest film. The Black Panthers almost started 50 years ago as a result of police brutality in Oakland, California. That's how it started, policing the police which is a direct connection to where we are today ... so obviously there are so many similarities to what happened then and what's happening now.
I also did this New York Times op-doc and it compares the Panther movement with what's been happening in Ferguson.
If you had to choose two films and two songs to play on repeat ... forever (only one can be yours):
" Citizen King " and I don't have another one.
Oscars aside, what were some of your favorite films and documentaries of the year?
I liked "Selma" a lot, that was probably by far my favorite film in terms of filmmaking, passion, and meaning. " Citizenfour " and " Last Days in Vietnam " were really well made. I saw " (T)error " at Sundance and I liked that a whole lot.
What did you take away from the 2015 Oscar nominations and winners?
What no one wants to talk about is that Hollywood, in it's history, was of the most racist institutions in this country. You don't see black people. If you watch a movie from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, you see a black person come on screen and you cringe ... Hollywood has tried to move up with the times, but it's starting from further back than a lot of other places.
The snub of "Selma" was just awful. I'm on the Academy, so I get to see all of the films. The snub of "Selma" was wrong; I've seen the other films.
What can we expect from you in 2015?
We are doing a theatrical release of the "Panthers" in September. We're starting on a film "Tell them we are rising" for PBS on historically black colleges that helped shaped this country. It's part of a series "America Revisited," that includes "The Black Panthers", and then a four hour show on the slave trade "Creating a New World."
Advice for aspiring filmmakers?
Learn the technology. Learn how to edit. Learn the lighting. Learn how to use a camera. And it's important to learn why you want to make films ... if you don't love it, work at the post office.
What is your greatest form of validation as an artist?
I've had so many. I'd say, getting a [National] Humanities Medal from Obama this summer.
If you had a chance to talk to President Obama, what would you say?
Have fun! Don't let them get you.
If you had to rewrite history ...
I would cancel the Atlantic Slave Trade. I would want to see what history would be like without it.
Black History Month as a child in school? What do u make of it today?
I don't think there was "Black History Month" when I was a child. On the one hand black history should be every month, but on the other hand, at least for a month we can talk about black history. I'm happy that for some short time we think about African-American history |
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Comedy actor Seth Rogen can make almost any story sound funny, but it helps when you have great material to work with. One personal story he told...
A mom shared a photo on Instagram in which she is nursing her three year old daughter. The mom reveals she is an extended nurser, and her older...
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There was a time when people kept photo albums for their precious memories. Now, we have Instagram. One young couple on a date at a football game...
A Missouri couple has been arrested after it was discovered that they kept four children locked up in plywood boxes for weeks. The children were...
A father was sentenced to 75 years in prison for sexually abusing his daughter. The 12-year-old perished in a house fire with her 16-year-old...
A North Carolina man is feeling vindicated after successfully suing his wife's lover. The wife was having an illicit affair with another man...
Angelina Jolie filed papers with court on Tuesday alleging that her estranged husband hasn't paid any 'meaningful' child support since the couple...
A flight cleaning crew in LaGuardia Airport in New York were shocked on Tuesday morning when they discovered a dead fetus on an American Airlines...
A woman who worked in a Mexican restaurant more than 20 years ago stole from her boss. She has carried a guilty conscience ever since, and finally...
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(c)2017 B3 Media |
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Religion | Document suggests Mars Hill Church bought its pastor's spot on the New York Times best-seller list
Warren Cole Smith | 3/05/14, 12:11 pm
Seattle's Mars Hill Church paid a California-based marketing company at least $210,000 in 2011 and 2012 to ensure that Real Marriage , a book written by Mark Driscoll, the church's founding pastor, and his wife Grace, made the New York Times best-seller list.
Christina Darnell & Lynde Langdon | 3/04/14, 02:45 pm
CHARLOTTE, N.C.--This town has more than 800 churches, but many of them struggle to reach the vast population of twenty- and thirty-something residents. One group seems to be figuring it out, though. On the first and third Tuesdays of the month, more than 400 young adults convene at First United Methodist Church on Tryon Street for CharlotteONE, a citywide ministry to young adults.
Keith Miller | 3/01/14, 09:30 am
"Am I too white to be your pastor?"
That's the question posed in a recent promotional campaign for River Pointe Church in suburban Houston. The church published full-page color ads featuring a picture of their pastor, Patrick Kelley, holding a sign bearing the borderline-bombastic message in the Houston Chronicle , encouraging people to attend their special Sunday worship service marking Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend. |
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MSNBC host and hack Toure let his vile show again this morning. He not only retweeted a disgusting tweet that said "Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win," but he doubled down on the moral bankruptcy by adding "this" in front of his retweet.
Twitter users were quick to react to this revolting remark.
Eeks! @TwitchyTeam @michellemalkin Toure agreeing people need to "get their abortions in now in case Reps win" https://t.co/iPMFmqI3
Kidding me right? RT @Toure : This!!! RT @IamEnidColeslaw : Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win
-- Shawn (@LivesInThought) September 4, 2012
@kenndawg1 Please tell me this was a poor attempt at a joke. @Toure @IamEnidColeslaw
To the Left, the killing of innocent children is hilarious. And celebrated. This utter disregard for not only women, but for life itself, is repugnant.
https://twitter.com/ManAhMean/status/243005725343891456
@toure Do the women who get abortions get a signed letter of congratulations from #obama2012 or is it auto pen?
-- Hockey Dad (@SafeSchoolsCzar) September 4, 2012
"Girls," hurry up and dispose of your child; you don't want to be "punished" with one, right?" Plus, you silly girls are probably too incompetent to handle a child. It takes a village to raise a child, if the Left believes you deserve one and are fit enough.
Revolting.
https://twitter.com/kristinaguess/status/243008888817987584
And they are using children, and pushing the killing of them, in order to scare women from leaving the Democrat plantation. Economy, shmonomy! "Girls" should only care about their fancy wombs and should despicably believe that their rights are solely predicated on the legal ability to abort their unborn children.
Oh, and Toure? Why are you so racist? Hurry up, girls, and kill those black babies! After all, the majority of babies killed in the womb are minority babies. In New York City alone, nearly 60% of unborn African-American children were aborted . Perhaps he is following in the footsteps of Ezra Klein, who said that pesky babies should be aborted because they are oh-so-pricey. Or in the despicable footsteps of Hillary Clinton, who also seeks to use the killing of the unborn as a cost-saving tool .
Toure pitifully plays the race card and whines about people calling President Obama "angry. " Totally racist! But the genocide of black children? Hunky-dory and should be encouraged. |
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Less than two months after taking power in the capital city of Pretoria, the opposition Democratic Alliance has announced that the size of the Pretoria municipal government would be cut, Eyewitness News reports. Federal Leader Mmusi Maimane is reported as saying: "The
The Johannesburg Metropolitan Council today elected Herman Mashaba as its Executive Mayor, making him the first openly libertarian mayor of a large South African city since the 1994 democratic election. The City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality had a population of over
Africa, relative to all the other continents, is not a free place. Only a handful of nations can boast about having a marginally functioning democracy, and even then, those countries' civil services are often extremely corrupt. Whereas Americans, for example,
The National Coordinating Committee of the pro-social justice South African political party 'Black First Land First' has issued a statement through its national spokesperson, Lindsay Maasdorp, declaring Micah X Johnson a martyr for 'black liberation'. Johnson, a former US Army private
South Africa is a place of contradictions. On the one hand, Dutch and English settlers who occupied and annexed large tracts of land, brought along with them various Western traditions, including the not-always-consistent respect for individuality. On the other hand,
Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker. Ads are what helps us bring you premium content! Thank you! |
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After victory in court, conservative activists talk on the record for the first time about their 21-month ordeal.
by Collin Levy
The John Doe investigation of Wisconsin conservatives collapsed last week with a powerful decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that called state prosecutors' theory of campaign-finance law "unconstitutional" and "unsupported in either reason or law." But the legal exoneration shouldn't pass without noting the hardship the secret probe imposed on its targets and on political debate in Wisconsin.
For the past few days, I've been talking to the targets of the task force of Milwaukee Democratic prosecutors, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board and Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. Their experiences, on the record here for the first time, reveal the nasty political sweep of an investigation that invaded privacy with surveillance of email accounts, raided homes with armed law enforcement, and swarmed individuals with subpoenas demanding tens of thousands of documents while insisting on secrecy.
One target did speak up in public in real time-- Eric O'Keefe, who went on the record in limited ways with me not long after he was subpoenaed in October 2013 as part of the prosecutors' investigation of conservative speech during the Wisconsin recall elections. The director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth knew that violating the gag order put him at personal risk, but he told me then that he had to fight because it was an assault on basic constitutional freedoms and "we have done nothing illegal." A Journal editorial exposed the extent and dubious legal basis of the Doe investigation for the first time. Continue reading -
It was lost amid news of President Obama's Iran deal, but this week Hillary Clinton released a 3,500-word explanation of her secret email system. While it is by far the most extensive statement the Clinton campaign has made on the issue, the explanation does not touch what has become a key question, if not the key question, of the email affair: Did Clinton withhold information from Congress?
The statement is in question-and-answer form. In it, Clinton asserts that she carefully followed every law and regulation that applied to her emails as secretary of state. She did absolutely nothing wrong, she says.
One of the questions asked is: "Did Clinton delete any emails while facing a subpoena?" Clinton's answer is no, she did not. According to the Clinton campaign: "The emails that Clinton chose not to keep were personal emails -- they were not federal records or even work-related -- and therefore were not subject to any preservation obligation under the Federal Records Act or any request. Nor would they have been subject to the subpoena -- which did not exist at the time -- that was issued by the Benghazi Select Committee some three months later." Continue reading -
On June 11, 1776, the Colonies' Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and formed a committee whose express purpose was drafting a document that would formally sever their ties with Great Britain. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston. Jefferson, who was considered the strongest and most eloquent writer, crafted the original draft document (as seen above). A total of 86 changes were made to his draft and the Continental Congress officially adopted the final version on July 4, 1776. Continue reading - |
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Earlier this week, a viral video of a child who cried about his cleft lip went viral. Now both the child and his family have become targets of online bullying.
In the heartbreaking video, 11-year-old Keaton Jones sobbed about the experience with his mother, Kimberly Jones, which she later put online at his urging.
In true Internet fashion, the video made the rounds on social media, garnering support and sympathy for young Keaton. Many, including athletes and celebrities like Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown and Captain America himself, Chris Evans, sent the child virtual hugs and invited him to join them at movie premiers, football games, and more.
The video served to highlight the issue of bullying. In the video, Keaton tearfully told his mother how students taunted his appearance, poured milk on him, and put food down his shirt. They told him he had no friends.
"I don't like that they do it to me," said Keaton. "And I, for sure, don't like that they do it to other people, cause it's not OK! People that are different don't need to be criticized about it. It's not their fault."
This is Keaton Jones, he lives in Knoxville and he has a little something to say about bullying. https://t.co/coyQxFp33V
Following the outpouring of sympathy, a man named Joseph Lam set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations for the family. It received over $57,000 before being put on hold.
Now both Keaton and his family has become the target of bullying as accusations of racism are being hurled at him. The Univision-owned African American culture website the Root accused Kimberly Jones of being a "racist money grabber."
The article cited MMA fighter Joe Schilling, who spoke to a person pretending to be Jones, who made references to "us whites," and demanded he give the family money instead of tickets to shows and other non-monetary gifts.
Further investigation reveals that the account once belonged to a teenager unconnected to the Jones family.
Schilling recorded the conversation with the fake "Kimberly Jones," creating no small amount of outrage toward the family after he published it on Instagram. He deleted it after learning of the hoax, and urged his followers to donate to the Speak Out Against Bullying non-profit organization.
Despite the update, the anger against the Jones family remains unabated.
In the post, the Root 's Yesha Callahan claims, without much evidence, that Keaton "may have called a few classmates the n-word," describing his mother Kimberly as "using his pain for her own interests."
Callahan cited a post purportedly made by Kimberly Jones on Facebook, in which the Tennessean mom wrote a short rant about "butt hurt Americans" upset by politics. In the post, some of her family members held up the American flag, while others carried the Confederate flag.
"It's ironic that she's willing to accept money from black athletes and other celebrities that she would probably consider 'butt hurt Americans,'" writes Callahan, even though Jones never set up the GoFundMe donation drive herself.
Professional race baiter Tariq Nasheed joined the chorus of condemnation against the Jones family, describing the mother as a "suspected racist who makes very problematic posts bullying Black protesters." His tweet was accompanied by several photos of the Jones family standing next to the Confederate flag, and has since gone viral with over 19,500 retweets.
The tweet created significant outrage on Twitter, with many social justice warriors focusing their ire on Keaton himself.
Following the backlash, Kimberly Jones told CBS News in a segment that aired on Tuesday explaining the Facebook post, which she says were intended to be "ironic."
"(Those were) the only two photos on my entire planet where I am anywhere near a Confederate flag," said Jones, who added that she spent much of her life being bullied herself because she didn't share those racist views.
Jones reiterated her claim that it was Keaton's idea to make and upload the video. "I knew it could be great and I knew it could be awful, and it has been," she said.
On Twitter, Jones' daughter Lakyn said that the posts were not intended to be racist, and denied allegations that her brother Keaton used the "n-word."
The latest Tweets and replies from Lake (@Lakyn_Jones). It is what it is LMU'22. The 865
The efforts to torment and bully Keaton Jones only highlight the hypocrisy of so-called "social justice warriors," who adhere to no moral code--not even their own--targeting anybody or anything that may further the agenda, no matter the cost.
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In 2008 my wife, being 5 months pregnant, yes 5 months; decided to have an abortion because she discovered the sex of the child was a boy. I was out of town and on the way home and asked her to just wait until I could come home and talk with her. She has suffered depression and had several miscarriages in the past and was already a mother of two precious children. She was able to find a doctor that did not give her a psychiatric evaluation and performed an abortion on her with a day or two of seeing her. Immediately after the abortion she felt remorse and wish she had not murdered our unborn son. But the deed was done and I divorced her and gained full custody of my daughter but was not able to gain custody of my step-son. It is law that women have the choice to have an abortion if it is legal in their state, but this should never be allowed after 3 months of conception or even allowed without a psychiatric evaluation being done. My step-son, daughter, x-wife, and myself has forever had their life altered. I wish I knew of this site when I first lost my son, but I am happy to find it now because of "Caylee's Law" and pray you will sign this petition to bring my story into the public's eyes. Forever a grieving father... |
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The election of a liberal Jesuit to the papacy thrilled Democrats in the United States, whose unholy alliance with the Catholic left goes back many decades. Barack Obama, one of the pope's most prominent supporters, has long been a beneficiary of that alliance. The faculty at Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., ranked as one of the top donors to his campaign.
In a grim irony, Obama, whose presidency substantially eroded religious freedom in America, rose to power not in spite of the Catholic Church but because of it. The archdiocese of Chicago helped bankroll his radicalism in the 1980s. As he recounts in his memoirs, he began his work as a community organizer in the rectory rooms of Holy Rosary parish on Chicago's South Side. The Alinskyite organization for which he worked -- the Developing Communities Project -- received tens of thousands of dollars from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Obama was close to the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. A proponent of the "Seamless Garment" movement within the Catholic Church in the 1980s, a movement that downplayed abortion and emphasized political liberalism, Bernardin was drawn to the socialism and relativism of the liberal elite. He was so "gay-friendly" that he requested that the "Windy City Gay Chorus" perform at his funeral. He embodied Obama's conception of a "good" bishop and one can see in his admixture of left-wing politics and relativistic nonjudgmental theology a foreshadowing of the rise of Pope Francis.
Cardinal Bernardin put pressure on his priests to work with Obama and even paid for Obama's plane fare out to a 1980 training session in Los Angeles organized by Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. The conference was held at a Catholic college in Southern California, Mount St. Mary's, which has long been associated with Alinsky's group.
This alliance between the Catholic left and the Democratic left explains the honorary degree Obama received from Notre Dame in 2009, even as he plotted to persecute the Church under Obamacare's contraceptive and abortifacient mandate. Notre Dame's former president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who supported honoring Obama, had been close to Monsignor John Egan, the socialist who started the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and sat on Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation board.
The unholy alliance also explains how the Democratic Party, despite its support for abortion and gay marriage, won a majority of the Catholic vote in Obama's two presidential elections. At the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, nuns such as Sister Simone Campbell shared the stage with abortion activists from Planned Parenthood. A liberal dean of a Catholic university, Sister Marguerite Kloos, even got caught in an act of voter fraud that year, forging the signature of a deceased nun on a ballot. As Thomas Pauken writes in The Thirty Years War , "the radicalization of elements of the Catholic clergy turned out to be one of Saul Alinsky's most significant accomplishments."
The election of Pope Francis was seen by Alinskyite activists as a dream come true. "I think that Pope Francis is quite an inspiring figure," Al Gore said at UC Berkeley in early 2015. The former vice president turned radical environmental activist called Pope Francis a "phenomenon" and laughed at his liberalism: "Is the pope Catholic?" Gore said that he is so "inspiring to me" that "I could become a Catholic."
Leftists frequently turn up at the Vatican, often invited by one of Pope Francis's closest advisers, the socialist Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga. Before the pope's visit to the U.S., a group of left-wing activists and officials from unions and organizations such as the SEIU and PICO (an Alinskyite group founded by the liberal Jesuit Father John Baumann) descended on the Vatican to confer with curial officials about the trip. Around the same time, over 90 members of the U.S. Congress sent Pope Francis a letter, urging him to focus upon politically liberal themes. The leader of this group was Rosa DeLauro, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.
In 2016, it was revealed through disclosures by WikiLeaks that the billionaire socialist George Soros bankrolled much of this lobbying. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to shape the pope's visit to the U.S. According to the leaked documents, Soros's Open Society Foundation sought to create a "critical mass" of American bishops and lay Catholics supportive of the pope's priorities. The documents made special mention of Maradiaga, a champion of PICO, as a useful ally for ensuring that the pope's speeches in the U.S. pushed socialism
The hacked e-mails exposed the depth of the plotting:
Pope Francis' first visit to the United States in September will include a historic address to Congress, a speech at the United Nations, and a visit to Philadelphia for the "World Meeting of Families." In order to seize this moment, we (Open Society) will support PICO's organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using the influence of Cardinal Rodriguez, the Pope's senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.
In the e-mails, the Soros operatives make it explicitly clear that they view Pope Francis as a propagandist for their causes:
At the end of the day, our visit affirmed an overall strategy: Pope Francis, as a leader of global stature, will challenge the "idolatry of the marketplace" in the U.S. and offer a clarion call to change the policies that promote exclusion and indifference to those most marginalized. We believe that this generational moment can launch extraordinary organizing that promotes moral choices and helps establish a moral compass. We believe that the papal visit, and the work we are collectively doing around it, can help many in our country move beyond the stale ideological conflicts that dominate our policy debates and embrace new opportunities to advance the common good.
After the meeting, they rejoiced at the success of the meeting, informing John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign:
Our visits were dialogues. We conveyed our view that the Pope is a World leader of historical significance; that his message of exclusion, alarm over rising inequality and concern about globalized indifference is important for the U.S. to hear and see animated during his visit; and that we intend to amplify his remarks so that we have a more profound moral dialogue about policy choices through the election cycle of 2016. In our meetings with relevant officials, we strongly recommended that the Pope emphasize -- in words and deeds -- the need to confront racism and racial hierarchy in the US...
Conversations that were originally scheduled for thirty minutes stretched into two hour dialogues. As in our breakfast conversation with Cardinal Rodriguez, senior Vatican officials shared profound insights demonstrating an awareness of the moral, economic and political climate in America. We were encouraged to believe that the Pope will confront race through a moral frame.
Further disclosures from WikiLeaks confirmed the plotting of Democratic officials to infiltrate the Catholic Church in order to "foment revolution" beneficial to their radical causes. In 2012, in the midst of Catholic backlash over Obama's contraceptive mandate, John Podesta received a note from Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress.
"There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church," Newman wrote to Podesta. "I don't qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would 'plant the seeds of revolution,' or who would plant them." Podesta replied that the Democrats had set up Catholic front groups to plant those seeds: "We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring moments, I think this one will have to be bottom up." Podesta was wrong. It would come from the top down, as the following year Francis rose to the papacy and began politicizing the Church in the exact manner that the progressives had envisioned. Indeed, Podesta would later encourage Hillary Clinton to enlist the pope's leftism in her campaign. In one hacked e-mail, he advised that she send out a tweet to "thank him for pointing out that the people at the bottom will get clobbered the most by climate change."
Podesta and his aides also discussed how they could exploit Pope Francis's support for Obama's Iran deal. Podesta was sent a report in which Christopher Hale of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good proposes getting bishops and cardinals to lean on senators temporizing about the deal.
In another e-mail, which underscores how the media and the Democrats teamed up to enlist Pope Francis in their politics, a liberal columnist, Brent Budowsky, counsels Podesta: "John, HRC should get ahead of the progressive curve before the pope's trip to the U.S. in September, which will be big deal for a week, saturation coverage, heavy progressive populist, impact after he leaves affecting the trajectory of the campaign. Here's my take, written more in news analysis style......Brent" In the attached column, Budowsky writes, "The visit of such a popular pope will almost certainly give a lift in principle to Democrats and liberals who cheer Francis and rededicate themselves to the values and visions he stands for."
Pope Francis has been influenced by The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , a book that sought to spread Marxism among the peasants of Latin America. The Alinskyite left in America regards that book as a classic. The author of the book is the late Paulo Freire and Pope Francis has made a point of visiting with Freire's widow. The meeting was set up by Cardinal Hummes, the Brazilian whom Francis credits with inspiring him to name himself after St. Francis. Pope Francis "considered the meeting with me because of the writings of Paulo, because of the importance of Paulo for the education of oppressed people, poor people, black people, for women, for minorities," Ana Freire said.
This article is excerpted from George Neumayr's new book, The Political Pope . |
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Barack Obama, one of the pope's most prominent supporters, has long been a beneficiary of that alliance. |
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Funny then that TBIJ 's founder and chief benefactor, Labour Party donor David Potter, is a tax avoiding non-dom. Potter has given some PS2 million to TBIJ since 2010 despite the fact that he has allegedly used his non-dom status to avoid paying income tax. It seems TBIJ are against tax dodging unless it's done by the man who bankrolls them...
The joke doing the rounds this morning in Labour circles is:
"Rupert Murdoch has three months to take out the trash. If he wanted to kill someone he could probably get away with it. Tom is now so obsessed with Corby he thinks it's Ed's Crewe."
Labour sources tell Guido that they are determined not to see a repeat of their Bradford by-election shambles. Former Brownite boot-boys Watson and Ian Austin are off to Louise Mensch's old constituency, along with half the party staff. They've despatched a team to find a decent office as at the moment they are working from the Labour Club. Gordon Paterson, former Labour Yorkshire organiser, is in charge of field operations at the moment and will probably be the agent. Labour confirmed to Guido last night that leave has already been cancelled. Dozens of HQ staff have been told they have to go up there full time.
Political advisers and the policy team are rather grumpy because they are being told there will be daily mini-buses from London and that they are all expected to be on them. Ed has also told staff in the leader's office that he wants them up there: "some of them don't mind to be honest because nice to be out of office but others moaning." One insider even says there has been talk of conference being scaled back. General Secretary Iain McNicol has apparently told staff that Corby is the single biggest party priority now until November. Everything else is now secondary, including Police Commissioner elections.
Gone is the complacency of Bradford and it's all hands to the deck. Obviously that is not what they are saying publicly though - as Guido revealed last night - the line is "we're not going to win" .
Thankfully the candidate has deigned to cut short his south of France holiday and is out on the stump.
Better late than never... |
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We are a few weeks removed from the shootings in Orlando and freshly in the middle of Pride season.
The night before the shootings, I published a tongue-in-cheek article for Matador Network titled, "Dear Straight Allies, Please Don't Come to Pride Until You've Understood These 6 Things." I've been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for about 10 years now, but I've never received as much hate for an article as I did for that piece.
The biggest critique was about the tone of the article. While tone policing is annoying, I can see why people would have a hard time with a heavily sarcastic article in the wake of a national tragedy.
Rather than sulk, I put my knowledge of our community to work and created these recommendations for allies struggling with how they can help their LGBTQ+ friends:
1. Be empathetic, and lend a listening ear to those who are struggling.
Listening can be a very powerful medicine. Sometimes people just need someone to hear their truth.
2. Hire queer and transgender people.
There are no state-level laws protecting against sexual orientation discrimination in 28 of the 50 US states . In 33 of the 50 states , transgender people do not have employment protections either. This means employees can be fired for simply being themselves in those states legally.
LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, face massive employment discrimination and are less likely to be hired. Giving someone a job with a living wage gives someone a pathway to a better quality of life.
3. Buy from a queer entrepreneur.
Not everyone has the ability to hire someone for full-time employment, but most people can support queer-owned businesses by buying a product or service. LGBTQ+ people are in every area of commerce.
Looking for new clothes? Grab a T-shirt from Trans is Beautiful , have a suit made from Sharpe Suiting or order a funky dance costume from dystrucxion .
Looking for a photographer , designer or model? What about home decor ? How about booking your travel with a queer-owned tour operator , hotel or travel group ? The possibilities are endless.
4. Donate to the Orlando victims GoFundMe page.
This page is run by a local nonprofit and has pledged to cover funeral expenses and support the families.
5. Forward these phone numbers to someone who may need to talk.
The Disaster Distress Helpline is 1-800-985-5990. This helpline connects people with immediate counseling to anyone who needs help processing the tragedy in Orlando. It's a 24/7 resource that responds to people who need crisis counseling after experiencing a tragedy. The helpline can also be accessed here .
You can also contact the English and Spanish hotline of the New York City Anti-Violence Project at 212-714-1141. The Trevor Project is a youth lifeline that can also provide support at 866-488-7386 at The Trevor Product .
6. Seek out the LGBTQ+ community.
You can do this by attending Pride events, patronizing your local LGBTQ+ bar or supporting other events in your community. A quick Google search will help you figure out what's available.
7. Attend a candlelight vigil when tragedy strikes.
Vigils across the country are being held in remembrance of the victims of the Orlando shootings and can be found or submitted to We Are Orlando . You can also find current information about how best to help those directly impacted by the shooting.
Unfortunately, the Orlando shooting was not the first tragedy to strike the LGBTQ+ community, and candlelight vigils have become commonplace in the wake of hate crimes.
8. Participate in Transgender Day of Remembrance.
TDOR is an annual day set aside to remember the victims of anti-transgender hate crimes. It's held every November in honor of Rita Hester, who died in November 1998. Rita's murder, like most anti-transgender murders, is still unsolved. You can find events to attend on the official TDOR website .
9. Sign a petition.
You can find one such petition here on Americans for Responsible Solutions .
10. Learn more about the movement against gun violence.
Every day, 87 Americans are killed by gun violence. Americans for Responsible Solutions has a list of facts about the current state of gun violence in America, as well as solutions it is proposing to create change.
11. If you're an activist, be patient and create space for answering questions.
Oppressed groups have zero obligation to educate the majority. Not all LGBTQ+ people will want to talk about this, process it or educate, but those who can and are able may want to explain to others why this tragedy was so horrific for the LGBTQ+ community.
12. Learn about some of the 200+ anti-LGBT bills introduced this year.
Our love, dignity and self-worth has been discussed and voted on in our state capitals and local communities this year. Some of these laws vilify LGBTQ+ people and present us in a light that is damning and fraudulent. Find out what policy officials introduced, voted and supported these bills and initiatives and lobby for these bills in your state and vote them out.
13. Support LGBTQ+ organizations that are working to defend and preserve our rights and community.
Centerlink is a good place to start. It has a handy list of LGBTQ+ organizations and a search tool for finding local LGBTQ+ centers.
14. Send a Safe Space Kit to an educator or youth service worker.
GLSEN's Safe Space Kit is an educator's tool kit with lessons on how to work with LGBTQ+ young people. They can be purchased for $15 on GLSEN's website .
15. Discuss queer theory with someone who knows more than you.
If you can't find someone in real life, online communities are always an option.
16. Volunteer with the Trevor Project.
LGBTQ+ young people are four times more likely to attempt suicide than straight young people. Nearly one quarter of all transgender young people have attempted suicide. The Trevor Project is an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organization that uses volunteers across a variety of programs. Fill out their application form for information on opportunities.
17. Donate to local organizations that are benefiting LGBTQ+ people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of color.
National organizations are wonderful and do great work, but local organizations are the most direct route to changes in your community.
18. Support those in your community who are most at risk.
Transgender women of color, queer youth (particularly those with unstable housing and unsupportive parents), queer women of color who face discrimination, queer people with disabilities and those of lower socioeconomic status are more at risk for a host of negative life outcomes because of the oppression they face and the obstacles in obtaining employment.
19. Don't talk over or interrupt as someone is processing their identity.
Let your LGBTQ+ friend speak their truth before you add your experiences. Sure, you're entitled to your feelings, but let those most impacted process first.
20. Learn a bit about queer history.
Try to understand a bit about where we come from and how we got to be where we are today. This blog is an excellent source of American queer history, and it is one of my favorite free resources for people looking to learn more about the queer underpinnings of the US.
21. Understand why we need LGBTQ+ safe spaces.
The attack on Orlando feels extremely personal to the LGBTQ+ community because it was an attack on the only place where we feel 100 percent free to be who we are.
Bars are not just places to grab a drink for us; they're places that teach us how to love ourselves and our people. They're how we accept being rejected by our families and how we accept that which we cannot change and rally around that which we can.
22. Stop sharing theories about the Orlando shooter's sexuality and background.
It isn't productive, and it doesn't help the victims or community move forward. In fact, it further alienates LGBTQ+ Muslims, plays on old stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people as being mentally ill and creates alternate narratives that can be damaging for the LGBTQ+ community.
While saying all of this, conversations about self-loathing, homophobia and the relationship toxic homophobia plays in society are important dialogue to have when done in an informed way.
23. Reach out to an LGBTQ+ person you know.
When tragedy happens in the LGBTQ+ community, reach out to your LGBTQ+ friends. Check in with them, ask if they are OK, volunteer to watch their kids or pet or bring them a hot meal if they are struggling.
Don't assume that every LGBTQ+ person will feel deeply impacted by the shooting in Orlando or a hate crime that happens in your city. Some will, and some won't. We're a diverse group of people.
24. Stay focused on the issues that actually matter.
When you're discussing LGBTQ+ issues, recognize that equality has not been accomplished just by passing marriage reform. Don't get distracted by other narratives. |
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The IRS is abusing its authority once again by employing the help of a private law firm in its case against Microsoft.
By Peter Roff * USNews
If there is one federal agency that has clearly run amok during the Obama administration, it's the United States Internal Revenue Service. From the harassment of tea party groups applying for nonprofit status to the defiance of congressional subpoenas, it's an agency badly in need of a thorough housecleaning.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is already under threat of impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives. That might be a good start, but removing him won't fix the problems any more than the ouster of his predecessor did. The problems run too deep. Congress needs to act, not just by stepping up oversight of the tax collectors but by jerking their chain and narrowing their authority.
From top to bottom the agency is engaged in a wholesale abuse of its authority - and is defying attempts to investigate what it has been doing. Groups on the right are still reportedly having their applications for tax-exempt status slow-walked through the process. Confidential data is still leaking out and the auditing process is out of control. Continue reading -
by Randolph J. May and Seth L. Cooper * Free State Foundation
Securing protection of American intellectual property (IP) rights internationally is an economic imperative. It is also a constitutional duty. In today's information economy, copyrights and patent rights provide critical financial investment incentives for research and development of new products and services. And IP constitutes a potent source of economic value and prosperity. According to an official U.S. Department of Commerce report, IP-intensive industries in America generated an estimated $5 trillion in revenues in 2010 alone, providing over 27 million jobs. Since then, those figures almost certainly have grown. Another report estimated that the copyright industries alone contributed $1.1 trillion in value added to the U.S. economy and employed nearly 5.5 million workers in the U.S. in 2014.
As IP becomes increasingly vital to our nation's wealth and prosperity, the need to ensure its protection on a global basis increases correspondingly. The American economy suffers staggering losses each year to international IP theft. According to the IP Theft Commission (2013), these losses likely exceed $300 billion annually. IP theft is an injustice to the IP owners, diminishes economic prosperity, and undermines job opportunities. Indeed, this is a reason why it is so important to conclude international trade agreements, such as the recently-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, that contain meaningful intellectual property protections. Continue reading -
by Dorothy Rabinowitz * Wall Street Journal
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney at a news conference after the Jan. 8 shooting of a city police officer. Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press
It required only half a minute for the mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Jim Kenney, to achieve national fame. On Friday, an already sensation-crowded day, it fell to the mayor to take part in the official pronouncements on the attempted murder of city police officer Jesse Hartnett, shot and severely wounded as he sat in his patrol car when a would-be assassin emptied his gun at him--13 shots in all.
Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., appointed just three days earlier, delivered the details with noteworthy eloquence: The wounded officer, bleeding heavily from three wounds, one arm useless, had gotten himself out of the car, chased the attacker and shot him.
The drama of this recital needed no amplification, but there it was anyway: Clear security video images showed the assailant in his flowing white dishdasha--a robe favored by Muslim men--running toward the patrol car, shooting, sticking his hand in the window, and racing speedily away. Pictures too of the police officer lurching out of the car to give chase. Continue reading -
America dodged the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, but much has changed. Today's world economic slide is starting to hurt us.
by Ruchir Sharma * Wall Street Journal
Plunging stock prices and slowing economic growth in China have raised anew the question of how much events abroad really matter to the U.S. Many of the answers are quite placid, drawing on the precedents of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, when there was similar concern about impacts at home, which never came. The U.S. grew at a 4.5% annual pace during those two years. For much of 2015, when U.S. growth remained steady despite volatile and weak growth in the rest of the world, the optimists said it was like 1997-98 all over again.
That may be, but the world has changed a lot in two decades. After 1998, the U.S. share of global GDP topped out at 32% but has since fallen to 24%, based on my analysis of raw data from the International Monetary Fund, while the emerging-world share bottomed out at 20% but has since doubled to nearly 40%. In that time, China has supplanted the U.S. as the largest contributor to global growth. Continue reading -
by Michael Pento * CNBC
The S&P 500 has begun 2016 with its worst performance ever. This has prompted Wall Street apologists to come out in full force and try to explain why the chaos in global currencies and equities will not be a repeat of 2008. Nor do they want investors to believe this environment is commensurate with the dot-com bubble bursting. They claim the current turmoil in China is not even comparable to the 1997 Asian debt crisis.
Indeed, the unscrupulous individuals that dominate financial institutions and governments seldom predict a down-tick on Wall Street, so don't expect them to warn of the impending global recession and market mayhem.
But a recession has occurred in the U.S. about every five years, on average, since the end of WWII; and it has been seven years since the last one -- we are overdue. Most importantly, the average market drop during the peak to trough of the last 6 recessions has been 37 percent. That would take the S&P 500 down to 1,300; if this next recession were to be just of the average variety. Continue reading -
by Joel B. Pollak * Breitbart
President Barack Obama promised his final State of the Union address would be short. Dana Bash of CNN called it "low-energy." One thing it was not was accurate-or honest. Here are Obama's top ten lies, in chronological order.
1. "[W]e've done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters." This is pure fiction. Obama has doubled the national debt, and it's not because he cut the deficit. Rather, he spent staggering amounts of money in his first months in office-which he assigns, dishonestly, to the previous fiscal year, under George W. Bush. He "cut" (i.e. spent more gradually) from that spending, but only under protest, after Republicans took the House in 2010.
(Update: It is true that Obama's 2015 budget deficit was about 25% of his 2010 deficit. But he referred to "deficits," plural. Until last year, all of Obama's deficits were worse than all of Bush's deficits except for the last two.)
2. "Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction." With that line, Obama took a shot at his would-be Democratic successors, as well as his Republican critics. But the truth is that despite the slow recovery-the slowest since World War II-labor force participation is the lowest it has been in decades. Wages are stagnant, household incomes still have not recovered from the recession, and young people see a bleak future. Continue reading -
How come more people are retiring in their early 20s? Why are middle-age men becoming stay-at-home dads? What's keeping women out of the workforce other than illness, kids or school?
Those are some of the questions raised in a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report that shows changes over the past decade in why people stay out of the labor force. Finding answers is key for the Federal Reserve as it maps the contours of a job market that's becoming harder to predict with the aging of the baby boomers and shifting household priorities.
Here's what the bureau found, broadly: Thirty-five percent of the U.S. population wasn't in the labor force in 2014, up from 31.3 percent a decade earlier. (You're considered out of the workforce if you don't have a job and aren't looking for one. That's distinct from the official unemployment rate, which tracks those out of work who are actively job hunting.)
Drilling down into the numbers reveals more about the shifts in the reasons some people forego a paycheck. In all age groups, for instance, more people cited retirement as the reason for being out of the labor force, and it wasn't just older people. Continue reading -
Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.
by Joel Kotkin * The Daily Beast
The End of Localism
This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders--the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat--gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.
For many of the world's leading countries--China, Russia, Saudi Arabia--such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won't have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.
The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the "coercive power of the state" to make people live properly by his lights. California's high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters. Continue reading -
From immigration to abortion to the power of unions, the Supreme Court is entering this election year with a full plate of politically charged cases.
AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
by Sam Baker * NationalJournal
The Court hasn't officially agreed to hear this one yet, but most experts think it will--and that a decision will come by the end of June. That's certainly the Obama administration's hope; winning at the Supreme Court is the only way Obama will be able to implement his Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, or DAPA, which would allow some 4.3 million undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.
A ruling for the Obama administration would allow DAPA to take effect--and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has said she would stretch the policy even further. A loss for the administration, on the other hand, would vindicate Republican criticisms that DAPA went too far, and would give a Republican president a way out of the program without rolling back any legal protections himself. Continue reading -
By Stephen Moore * Washington Times
Photo by: Seth Wenig In this July 9, 2015 file photo, a Wall Street sign is seen near the New York Stock Exchange in New York. U.S. stocks moved lower on the last day of the year as the market headed for a sluggish end to 2015. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
The stock market closed down for 2015 reversing one of the few positive accomplishments under the Barack Obama presidency. This has been a pretty prosperous time for the top two percent. For most Americans though -- not so much.
A new report from Sentier Research based on Census data finds that median household income of $56,700 at the end of 2015 stood exactly where it was adjusted for inflation at the end of 2007.
That's eight years of virtually zero income gain. And President Obama and his Washington political pundits wonder why voters are in such a cranky mood.
Last week the Joint Economic Committee of Congress issued a report on the Obama recovery loaded with even more dismal news. On almost every measure examined, the 2009-15 recovery since the recovery ended in June of 2009 has been the meekest in more than 50 years. Continue reading - |
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With Alabama in the peak of deer season, freezers are getting full, which means it's time to prepare some tasty venison.
As a buddy and I were discussing on a trip home from a hunting excursion, venison got a bad rap back in the day because of several reasons. Most deer hunting in the mid-20th century was done in front of a pack of hounds on a hot deer trail. Plus, it was verboten to shoot a doe back then. Hence, bucks replete with rutting hormones or lactic acid from being chased by the hounds, or both, made some of the meat less than palatable.
There was also the practice of hauling a nice deer around in the back of the truck to show all your buddies that contributed to the venison stigma.
That last practice is what really irks Scott Leysath, aka The Sporting Chef, when he hears people complain about the taste of venison. Leysath, who has roots in Grand Bay, Ala., and once produced the "Hunt, Fish and Cook" show out of Huntsville, said the care of the deer carcass right after it is harvested is a crucial step to tasty venison.
"I've spent a lot of time in Alabama," Leysath said. "Despite this recent cold spell, it can be a little warm during deer season. When I see people driving around with deer in the back of their trucks before it has been field-dressed, it makes me cringe. As with any animal, you need to get deer cleaned and cooled as fast as possible. If you ride around with the deer in the back of the truck, it's not going to encourage it to taste good when it's cooked."
The best-case scenario, according to Leysath, is to have access to a walk-in cooler where the skinned deer carcasses can be hung for at least a week. He hangs larger animals for up to two weeks. The failure to properly age the venison can lead to a chewy meal.
"I actually had a buddy of mine from Centre, Ala., call me and say he had done everything I told him to do to prepare the venison," Leysath said. "He said, 'I did not overcook the backstrap. It was 130 degrees in the center. I made that balsamic dressing to go with it. But it was really, really, really tough.'
"I asked him when he shot the deer. 'Yesterday.' He hadn't given that meat a chance. It has to go through rigor for 24 hours, and then you have to let it hang or age. If that backstrap had been aged for a week, it would have been a whole different animal."
Leysath said that venison that is frozen soon after harvest can still benefit from the aging process. If you don't have access to a walk-in cooler but have room in a refrigerator, you can put the meat on a rack above a pan and let it age. Another option is to use a large ice chest, but don't put the venison in the ice. Arrange some method to keep the venison elevated above the ice and ensure the temperature inside the ice chest doesn't get above 40 degrees.
"You're going to lose some crusty bits that aren't going to look all that pleasant after a week or two, but the rest of it is going to be a lot more tender," he said. "After a couple of weeks, the meat will lose about 20 to 25 percent of its weight, but what is left is good stuff. The dry-aging and hanging makes all the difference in the world."
Leysath also has a pet peeve about trying to mask the flavor of wild game. He has a friend in Alabama who claims snow goose is by far the best-eating goose. His friend cuts the goose breasts into little strips and marinates them in teriyaki for 48 hours. Then cream cheese and jalapeno are added before being wrapped in bacon.
"That's the universal recipe with wild game," he said. "You marinate in who knows what, add jalapeno, some kind of cheese and bacon. Then it doesn't taste like deer, duck or snow goose. What's the point of that?"
Leysath said during his travels he has noticed that cooks in some parts of the country are predisposed to overcooking and are convinced wild game must be done all the way through.
"The biggest challenge I have with a lot of folks is to get them to quit cooking their deer quite so long," he said.
Leysath gave a venison cooking demonstration at the Southeastern Outdoor Press Association conference last fall, and the venison didn't stay long in the frying pan before he was slicing it into bite-size pieces.
"I just sort of looked at it, didn't I," he said with a laugh. "Had I kept cooking it, it would have been less tender. And that was a muscle from the hind quarter. That wasn't a backstrap. The key is, before serving, cut it across the grain. If you see long lines running through it, you're cutting it the wrong way.
"And if the internal temperature is beyond 140 degrees, it starts to get tougher. Some folks can't get past eating medium-rare venison. If I'm doing a seminar, I'll cover it up with a dark sauce, and they talk about how tender it is."
Obviously, Leysath does not apply the medium-rare rule to all venison.
"Sometimes, you want to go low and slow," he said. "If you've got a venison shoulder, leave the bone in. Give it a good rub with olive oil and whatever seasoning you prefer. I'm going to brown it and then braise it in a roasting pan with a can of beer, celery, onion and carrots at a low temp. I'm going to let that moist heat do the work for me. After a few hours, the meat is falling off the bone. I wish deer had more than four legs, because those shanks are some of the best eating when you cook them low and slow."
When Leysath wants to change skeptics' minds about the taste of venison, he uses this trusty recipe.
Backstrap and Berries
3 tbsp olive or vegetable oil
1/4 cup red wine
3 tbsp chilled butter
1/2 cup whole berries
Trim all silverskin off the backstrap and either cut into thick medallions or in chunks that will fit in the frying pan. Sear all sides of the venison in the hot oil and set aside. Add red wine, balsamic vinegar, garlic and berry preserves to pan and reduce by one-third. Add chilled butter. Slice venison across the grain. Pour balsamic-berry sauce over venison and top with your choice of whole berries.
Leysath also suggested a very simple dish of four to five ingredients with an Asian flare.
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup chopped green onions
Optional: couple of shots of sriracha hot sauce
Take backstrap and cut into thick medallions or manageable chunks. Coat in mustard and then roll in sesame seeds (look in Asian section of the grocery store instead of spice aisle). Sear all sides of the venison in hot oil and set aside. Add soy sauce, vinegar and chopped green onions to pan. Reduce by one-third and then pour over sliced venison.
"The key is to not overcook it," Leysath said. "If all of your venison goes into a slow cooker with a can of cream of mushroom soup, you're really missing out on a whole lot of venison flavor."
Of course, many hunters will grind most of their deer, save the backstraps and tenderloins. Leysath has a proven shepherd's pie recipe that gives cooks an option other than burgers or venison chili.
Venison Shepherd's Pie
1 cup celery, diced
1 tsp kosher or other coarse salt (or 2/3 tsp table salt)
1 cup chicken, beef or game broth
3 large russet potatoes, peeled and quartered
1/4 cup half and half
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. To prepare filling, heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add celery, onion, carrot and garlic. Saute for 5 minutes. Add ground venison and cook, stirring often, until evenly browned. Sprinkle flour over and stir to mix evenly. Cook for 2 minutes. Add remaining filling ingredients, stirring to blend and cook for 2 minutes more.
Prepare topping. Place peeled and quartered potatoes in a pot. Cover with at least one inch of water. Add salt and bring to a boil. Cook, uncovered, until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain well, return to pot and whisk in butter and half and half until smooth.
Transfer filling to a lightly greased baking dish. Spread potatoes over the top and place in preheated oven until lightly browned on top and the filling is bubbly hot.
David Rainer is an award-winning writer who has covered Alabama's great outdoors for 25 years. The former outdoors editor at the Mobile Press-Register, he writes for Outdoor Alabama, the website of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. |
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This week marked the start of a second consecutive term of the Supreme Court without a full roster of nine justices. For months, Senate Republicans have refused to hold a confirmation hearing--and, in some cases, to even meet with--President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Judge Merrick Garland, despite being considered to be perhaps the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in modern history. Members of both parties have applauded his judicious temperament, deep legal knowledge and fair-minded approach to dealing with difficult cases.
To mark the record-breaking 202 days since Garland's nomination, PFAW and a cadre of allies assembled a crowd of more than 200 people to hold signs calling on Senate Republicans to do their job by holding a hearing and a vote. Speakers at the rally included organizational leaders, such as PFAW's own executive vice president Marge Baker, as well as the lead plaintiff in the landmark 2015 marriage equality decision, Jim Obergefell. The bipartisan event also featured Republican voters who are fed up with the relentless obstructionism of their leaders in the Senate.
Because of the Supreme Court vacancy, in recent months a number of critical issues have been left unresolved. Cases pertaining to immigration, affirmative action, and reproductive health have been left hamstrung by a deadlocked court, with cases being sent back down to lower courts because of the inability to break a tie. With the highest judicial body in the United States unable to resolve issues that affect millions of Americans, now more than ever people must tell Republican members of the Senate to #DoYourJob.
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This week marked the start of a second consecutive term of the Supreme Court without a full roster of nine justices |
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PATERSON, N.J. -- Peter Murphy is (officially) back, Save Jerseyans. The Totowa GOP chieftain, who ruled the county organization from 1991-2000 before being prosecuted by Chris Christie, was elected County Chairman on Wednesday evening by a unanimous vote at The Brownstone Read More
Published in News , Passaic County Tagged got , Passaic County , peter murphy , Republican
By The Staff _ After Steve Lonegan accused the Passaic County GOP of rigging its Thursday evening screening vote, the campaign of his victorious NJ-05 rival, John McCann, pushed back on Saturday with one of President Trump's favorite put-downs. "How Read More |
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Bedford police chief stresses crime prevention
By KATHY REMILLARD Union Leader Correspondent
BEDFORD - Despite high-profile crimes, the town of Bedford says it is continuing to make crime prevention a top priority, and the police department's Community Policing Program is at the heart of it. Chief John Bryfonski, who formalized the program about a year ago, said that while his department has to be good at solving crimes, it should also be able to thwart them whenever possible. "We should be focused on preventing crime," Bryfonski said, "and to do that, we have to engage the community in the process." The Community Policing Program is based on meeting the needs of residents in four groups, said Bryfonski - the elderly, children, businesses and neighborhood groups, with a crime prevention piece for each one. "It focuses on four groups that should really touch on every citizen in Bedford," he said. Town Manager Jessie Levine said the program provides an important connection between residents and the department. "In addition to crime prevention, I like the idea that our residents and businesses will get to know the men and women who work for our police department," she said. "I think it helps a community feel smaller when we can interact on a more personal level." For seniors, the Are You OK? program is one of the ways the elderly can have regular contact with the department. A computer-generated call is made to a registered residence, and if the phone is not answered, police pay a visit to the home. "This gives a sense of security not only to the participants, but also to their families," Bryfonski said. Bryfonski said the department also provides seminars on issues that may be important to Bedford's seniors, including scams that target the elderly. "We've done a lot of talks with seniors, they're really well-received and our officers love doing it," Bryfonski said. Children and youth can expect to see Bedford Police officers in their school communities as well. From reading stories to elementary students about strangers to joining older students at after-school sports programs, Bryfonski stressed the importance of kids having positive contact with his staff. "It allows them to interact on a different level," he said, adding that the casual atmosphere lends itself to more openness and engagement on the part of the students, and allows officers to be seen as role models. Police also work with businesses on issues such as shoplifting and robbery, as well as parking lot safety. An area that is seeing growth in terms of community policing is the Neighborhood Watch program, Bryfonski said. "The neighborhood watches have really taken off," he said. "It's been wonderful to see." Neighbors can meet with officers to get tips on safeguarding themselves and their properties. "We want them to 'harden their targets,' " Bryfonski said, by implementing safety measures such as deadbolts, motion sensor lights and securing window air conditioners. "A vast amount of the housing stock in Bedford is secluded," Bryfonski said, with many houses set back far from the road. "People don't always think of ways burglars can get into their houses," he said. With many residents working during the day, Bryfonski said most break-ins occur between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and residents should report anything that appears suspicious to the department immediately. Many people don't make a call when they see something suspicious because they don't want to bother the department, Bryfonski said. "But that is precisely what folks need to call us about," he said. Bryfonski said the department saw a slight spike in calls regarding suspicious activity after a home invasion on Proclamation Court in November that left an anesthesiologist and his wife seriously injured, but when the department rolled out its "See something, say something" campaign in early 2012, those calls tripled. "That's exactly what we want to see," he said. Levine said she appreciates the enthusiasm with which the patrol officers have embraced the neighborhood watch program and their eagerness to develop and embrace it. Bryfonski has also introduced a Meet the Chief program, which will be held the second Tuesday of each month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bedford Safety Complex. "I want folks to feel like they can contact any one of us any time," he said. "It's what we're here for - our first duty is to be public servants." kremillard@newstote.com |
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The Ngara Institute's annual Activist of the Year award was shared by the Knitting Nannas Against Gas, whose creative and persistent nonviolent strategies have been so important at blockades and protests, and Annie Kia, who developed the hugely successful "neighbour to neighbour" community engagement process for Lock the Gate.
The award was presented on June 30 at Ngara's annual lecture in Mullumbimby, presented by former Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs.
The Supreme Court in Brisbane on May 2 overturned the Land Court decision of May 31 last year that recommended rejection of the stage 3 expansion of the New Acland (NAC) coalmine on Queensland's Darling Downs.
On February 14, the Department of Environment and Science refused the application for an amended environmental authority to allow for Stage 3, however the minister deferred a decision pending the outcome of the judicial review.
For more than 20 years, locals on the NSW Central Coast have been fighting a proposed coalmine in the Dooralong and Yarramalong valleys near Wyong.
The area is an important part of the drinking water catchment for more than 300,000 people, and the proposed Wallarah 2 longwall coalmine threatens to take millions of litres of water each year out of the catchment and pollute local waterways.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the Northern Territory parliament in Darwin on April 18 to protest the Labor government's decision, announced the day before, to lift the ban on fracking. Another protest is planned for April 22.
Chief Minister Michael Gunner announced the onshore ban on fracking would be lifted following the tabling of an independent report which concluded that the risks associated with the hydraulic fracturing of gas could be "managed" and "regulated".
A packed meeting in Bairnsdale in eastern Victoria on March 21 was horrified as the implications of a planned mineral sands mine in the area were revealed.
The Kalbar Resources mine has been in the planning stage for several years and is due to start next year. The site is at Glenaladale, about 20 kilometres from Bairnsdale in grazing country, but only 350 metres from the $200 million a year vegetable growing industry in the Mitchell River Valley.
The Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) traditional owners of the land on which Adani has approval to build its Carmichael coalmine are concerned that the Queensland government will act to extinguish their native title rights prior to a Federal Court hearing scheduled for March 12-15.
This follows the decision by the Federal Court to not extend an interim injunction, which had been in place since December 18, restraining the Queensland government from extinguishing native title under the terms of the purported Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA). |
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Kathryn Moody : Investors, Are You Ready for the Next Global Crisis?
Manuel Schiffres Mutual Fund Rankings, 2014
Meghan Streit : Pitching In When Caregivers Need Help
Janet Bond Brill, Ph.D., R.D.N., F.A.N.D : How to prevent a second (and first) heart attack thru diet
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington : Caprese is a light, fresh salad; the perfect quick and easy accompaniment to any summer meal
Mark Steyn : You Want Nazis?
Jonathan Tobin : Care about the Jewish state's future? Obama, in interview, reveals even more reasons to worry
Alan M. Dershowitz : Confirmed: Needless death and destruction in Gaza
Katie Nielsen : As a mother, I'm all I need to be
Cameron Huddleston : 18 Retailers That Offer Price Adjustments
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Brierly Wright, M.S., R.D. : Try these 'secret-weapon' foods to boost your changes of losing weight
The Kosher Gourmet by Jessica Yadegaran : Take some relish in pickled goodies (5 recipes!)
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The Kosher Gourmet by Nick Malgieri : Chocolate molten delight with creme anglaise is a simple yet elegant make-ahead dessert
Once ideology overrules a sense of common destiny, the writing is on the wall
E pluribus unum -- Out of many, one.
Such a glorious sentiment, 240 years old this week, destined for the dustbin of history.
With the general election now reduced to a choice between the two most unpopular candidates in American history, the undeniable takeaway is that our population has splintered into four intractable camps, each unwillingly come to terms with any other. Here is a snapshot of who we now are.
Left-wing ideologues.
Reactionaries. Everyone understands that the popularity of Donald Trump has little to do with Donald Trump. It is a reaction to the Obama administration, to the Clinton dynasty, to the blatant partisanship of Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, to the fecklessness of John Boehner, to unchecked illegal immigration, to ISIS and the Taliban, to Putin and Assad, to the Iran deal, to Obamacare, to Ferguson, to Obergefell, and to bathroom legislation.
Pragmatists. I have omitted conservative ideologues by design, because there are so few of them left in existence. Indeed, Ted Cruz would certainly have fared better with more hardliners to rally around him. But thinking moderates rejected Cruz for his irascible reputation, preferring the lackluster John Kasich for the same reason they supported Mitt Romney: they want a leader able and willing to build consensus from a position of integrity.
So where does that leave America? The most obvious solution is to carve up the country up as was done with the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, demographic realities make such a plan unfeasible: Liberals occupy the big cities, Utopians live around college campuses, Reactionaries dwell in the rural precincts, while Pragmatists are scattered hither and yon. The necessary gerrymandering would make the partition of India a walk in the park.
And, as such, we will not stand much longer.
Comment by clicking here.
Rabbi Yonason Goldson , a talmudic scholar and former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, and newspaper columnist, lives with his wife in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches, writes, and lectures. His new book Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages is available on Amazon. |
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In defense of vernacular ways
The crises continue to accumulate: the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, the social crisis, crises upon crises. But as we try to create "solutions," we distressingly find ourselves up against a limit, discovering that the only alternatives we can imagine are merely modifications of the same. Proposed solutions to the economic crisis toss us back and forth between two immobile poles: free market or regulated market. When we face the ecological crisis, we decide between sustainable technology or unsustainable technology. Whatever our personal preference, a little to this side or a little to that side, we all unwittingly play according to the same rules, think with the same concepts, speak the same language. We have forgotten how to think the new - or the old.
Ivan Illich, priest, philosopher, and social critic, is not a figure that most would expect to read about in a Marxist magazine. But he identified this problem long ago, and argued that the only "way out" was a complete change in thinking. His suggestion, both as concept and historical fact, was the "vernacular." We will not escape from capitalism through the rationality of the scientist of history; nor will we get any help from the standpoint of the proletariat. The firm ground of Illich's critique was precapitalist and preindustrial life in common.
Even those who reject this position must meet its challenge. Those for whom politics is embedded in the proliferation of postmodern "lifestyles," inflected with pseudo-Marxist jargon, will have to recognize that the only model we have of forms of life based on direct access to the means of subsistence is precisely the "vernacular" that Illich proposes. Alternatively, those who locate emancipation in a Marx-inflected narrative of technological progress must to face Illich's deep criticisms of developmentalism, scientism, and progressivism. The following is a challenge not only to capitalism and the experts who defend it, but also to its critics.
Mind Trap 1: the economic crisis
Ignoring his own contributions to the festivities, George W. Bush recently scolded those on Wall Street for getting drunk on the profits from selling unpayable debts. 1 The resulting collapse of financial markets heralded the end of the party. The drunks seem to have sobered up without themselves suffering the consequent hangover. Instead, in the U.S. and elsewhere, a growing number of people are left stranded without homes, jobs, food, or medicines in the wake of that twenty-year long binge. In the opinion of some, the prospects of full employment or secure retirements for US citizens are a distant and unlikely dream. As recently as April 19th 2011, The McDonald Corporation conducted a national hiring day. Almost one million people applied for those jobs, known neither for their lavish pay nor for their agreeable working conditions. McDonald's hired a mere six percent of these applicants, as many workers in one day as the number of net new jobs in the US for all of 2009. 2
Unsurprisingly, diagnoses of what went wrong have proliferated fast and furiously. Of the many explanations offered, three stand out. 3 First, in a spirit of self-examination, economists have concluded that their scientific models of how people behave and asset prices are determined were wrong and contributed to their inability to anticipate the crisis. That is, economists confessed to their ignorance of how economies work. Since their earnest attempts to improve these models are unlikely to question the credulity that forms the shaky foundations of financial markets, it is likely that the future of financial and macroeconomics will resemble the epicycles and eccentricities of Ptolemaic astronomy in the time of its decline. 4
Second, journalists, policy makers, and economists who began to sing a different tune after the crisis erupted, find fault with the ideology of neo-liberalism. There is widespread recognition now that deregulated and unregulated markets allowed commercial and investment banks to invent and trade in financial instruments that carried systemic risks and contributed to the failure of credit and capital markets. This doctrine that unfettered markets produce the greatest economic benefit for the greatest number, while embarrassed, is not in full retreat, at least in the U.S. 5 That neo-liberal ideology is not vanquished by its evident failures is related to the third cause identified in these diagnostic exercises.
If ignorance excused economists and policy makers from anticipating the crisis and widely worn ideological blinkers exacerbated it, then it is badly designed incentives that are generally fingered as the most prominent and proximate cause of the crisis. Accordingly, much ink has been spilled on redesigning incentives to more effectively rein in the "animal spirits" that derail economies from their presumed path of orderly growth. As such, incentives are a flaw that recommends itself as remedy.
This conceit is perhaps best exposed in the report authored by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US government. 6 For instance, in indicting the process and methods for generating and marketing mortgage-backed securities, the commission emphasizes that incentives unwittingly encouraged failures at every link of the chain. Low-interest rates allowed borrowers to refinance their debts and use their homes as ATM cards; lucrative fees drove mortgage brokers to herd up subprime borrowers; the demand for mortgages from Wall Street induced bankers to lower lending standards; rating agencies stamped lead as gold because paid to do so by investment bankers; the latter distributed these toxic assets worldwide relying on mathematical models of risk; and the C-suite of the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors presided over the house of card because handsomely rewarded for short term profits. Unsurprisingly, changing these incentives through more stringent regulations and better-specified rewards and punishments to guide the behaviors of different market participants occupy most of its recommendations for the path forward 7
This peculiar combination of ignorance, ideology, and incentives used to explain the economic crisis, also illuminates the space of contemporary politico-economic thought. Most of the heated debates on how to ensure orderly growth, center on the quantum of regulation necessary to control economic motives without stifling them. Accordingly, thinking about economic matters vacillates on a fixed line anchored by two poles-free markets on the one end and markets fettered by legally enforced regulations at the other. Only a brief expose can be afforded here of the lineaments of this thought-space circumscribed almost two centuries ago. 8
Around 1700, Bernard Mandeville acerbically exposed the mechanism driving economic growth. Poetically, he pointed out that it was the vices--vanity, greed, and envy--that spurred the expansion of trade and commerce. In baring the viciousness that nourished the desire to accumulate riches, he also left to posterity the problem of providing a moral justification for market activity. 9 Adam Smith provided a seemingly lasting rhetorical solution to this moral paradox. First, he collapsed the vices into "self-interest" and so removed the sting of viciousness from the vices by renaming them. Second, he grounded "self-interest" in a natural desire to "better our condition" that began in the womb and ended in the tomb and so moralized it. 10 Third, he invoked an invisible hand to transmute the self-interest of individuals into socially desirable benefits. Not only was the passage from the individual to the social thereby obscured by providential means but the private pursuit of riches was also justified by its supposed public benefits.
Thus, Smith hid the paradox unveiled by Mandeville behind a rhetorically pleasing facade. The uncomfortable insight that private vice leads to public benefit was defanged by the notion that public benefits accrue from the unflinching pursuit of self-interest. Whereas the former revealed the vicious mechanism fueling commercially oriented societies, the latter made it palatable. Faith in the efficacy of the inscrutable invisible hand thereby underwrote the purported "natural harmony of interests," according to which the butcher and the baker in each pursuing his own ends unwittingly furthers the wealth of the nation at large.
Smith's rhetorical convolutions were necessary because he excised use-value from political economy and founded the latter entirely on exchange-value. In contrast to his predecessors for whom the economic could not be separated from ethics and politics, Smith carves out a space for the economic by defining its domain by the determinants of market prices. 11 He accepted Locke's arguments: that labor is the foundation of property rights; that applying labor transforms the commons into private property; that money ignites acquisitiveness; and that accumulation beyond use is just. 12 Smith deliberately ignores the commons and emboldens the market because it is the sphere in which acquisitiveness flourishes. He curtails his inquiry to exchange-value in full awareness of the contrasting "value-in-use." Even if not in these precise terms, the distinction between "exchange-value" and "use-value" was known to both Aristotle and Smith. Yet, Smith is perhaps the first who recognizes that traditional distinction and nevertheless rules out use-value as a legitimate subject of an inquiry on wealth. 13 For Aristotle, it was precisely the distinction between use and exchange that grounded the distinction between appropriate acquisition and inappropriate accumulation. More generally, it is when considerations of justice and the good constitute the starting point of thinking about man that profit-seeking becomes visible as a force that rends the political community into a commercial society. By encouraging self-interestedness, Smith allows the vainglorious pursuit of wealth to overshadow virtue as the natural end for man. 14 By focusing economic science on exchange values, Smith privileges the world of goods over that of the good. The price Smith pays for ignoring use-value is the need to invoke providential the mystery by which self-interest becomes socially beneficial. Since Smith, neo-classical economics has either disavowed the distinction between use and exchange value or confessed to being incapable of understanding use-value. 15 By insisting that the valuable must necessarily be useful, Marx, unlike Aristotle, could not rely on the latter to criticize the former. 16
Nevertheless, it was soon discovered that individual self-interest did not "naturally" produce social benefits. Vast disparities in wealth, endemic poverty, miserable living conditions, and persistent unemployment constituted some of the many socially maligned consequences of unfettered market activity. To account for these visible failures in the natural harmony of interests, a second formula, due to Jeremy Bentham, was therefore paired to it. An "artificial harmony of interests" forged through laws and regulations were deemed necessary to lessen the disjunction between private interests and public benefits. That is, state interventions in the form of incentives - whether coded in money or by law- were thought necessary to prod wayward market participants to better serve the public interest. 17
Accordingly, it is this dialectic between the natural and artificial harmony of interests that encodes the poles of the Market and the State and constitutes the thought-space for contemporary discussions on economic affairs. 18 Too little regulation and markets become socially destructive; too much regulation and the wealth-creating engines fueled by self-interest begin to sputter. And yet, the continuum constituted by these two poles is unified by a common presupposition: that use-value is of no use to commerce and that the egoism implied by self-interest is both necessary and natural to commercial expansion.
Though the economic crisis has, once again, exposed the Mandevillian foundations of commercial society, thinking about it continues to function in the space marked out by Smith, Bentham and the founders of that philosophical radicalism, which erected the morality of a society oriented by exchange value on the foundation of egoism. When confined to this thought-space, one is condemned to relying, in alternating steps, on the interrelated logics of free and regulated markets. The question remains whether there is an alternative to the thought-space constituted by the State and the Market. Perhaps the answer to this question lies in taking a distance to what these logics presume: that exchange-value is of preeminent worth and that possessive individuals are to be harnessed to that cause.
Mind Trap 2: the environmental crisis
Boarded up homes and idle hands are to the ongoing crisis in economic affairs, what disappearing fish and poisoned airs are to the oncoming environmental crisis. A generation after Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, scientists are now of almost one mind: humankind's activities on the earth have so changed it, that the species is now threatened by disaster on a planetary scale. 19 What poets and prophets once warned in verse, scientists now tell us through statistics and models. Lurking beneath those dry numbers is a growing catalog of horrors - rising seas, raging rivers, melting glaciers, dead zones in the oceans, unbearable hot spots on land - that foretell an unlivable future.
Were the picture they paint not so dire, it would be laughably ironic that scientists and technocrats now disavow the fruits of the very techno-scientific machine they once served to midwife. But it is certainly tragic that in thinking about what can be done to avert the impending crisis, scientists and engineers no less than politicians and corporate bosses insist on more of the same. Attention is now directed at inventing methods to not only mitigate the physical effects of runaway industrialization, but also to re-engineer the human psyche to better adapt to such effects. Thus, from recycling plastic and increasing fuel mileage in cars to devising towers to sequester carbon undersea and engineering carbon eating plants, the proposed solutions range from the mundane to the bizarre. More generally, the debate on what to do about the conflict between economic growth and ecological integrity is anchored by two poles: at the one end, "eco-friendly" or "sustainable" technologies, and at the other, presumably "unsustainable" or environmentally destructive ones.
Thus man's survival appears as a choice between the Prius, solar panels, biodegradable paper bags, local foods, and high density urban lofts on the one hand, and the Hummer, oil tanks, plastic bags, industrialized foods, and suburbia on the other. Eco-friendly technologies may change the fuel that powers our energy slaves but does nothing to change our dependence on them. That the fruits of techno-science have turned poisonous is seen as a problem calling for more and improved technical solutions implying that the domain of technology forms the horizon of ecological thought. 20 That more and different technology is the dominant response to its failure suggests that the made ( techne ) has replaced the given ( physis ). Ecological thought is confined to the space framed by technology partly because of the unstated assumption that knowledge is certain only when it is made.
It was Vico who announced the specifically modern claim that knowledge is made, that verum et factum convertuntur (the true and the made are convertible; have identical denotation). It is true that the schoolmen, in thinking through the question of the Christian God's omnipotence and omniscience, argued his knowledge was identical to his creations. They argued this by insisting that through his creative act (making something from nothing) he expressed elements already contained within Himself. God knows everything because he made it all from his own being. However, the schoolmen humbly held that the identity of making and knowing applied only to God. Man, being created, could not know himself or other natural kinds in the manner akin to God. Since scientia or indubitable knowledge was the most perfect kind of knowledge, and nature or physis was already given to man, it implied that man could not scientifically know the sublunary world. It took a Galileo and a Descartes to turn this understanding on its head. 21
These early moderns were "secular theologians" who tried to marry heaven and earth. They argued that geometrical objects or forms - such as triangles and squares - were unearthly. At best, such mathematical objects were "ideas" formed by the creative act of the imagination. The imagination as a site of creative activity entailed that it be unhinged from what is given. Exemplified by mathematical objects, whose perfection owes little, if anything, to the imperfect beings of the world, the secular theologians thus argued that the truth of ideas is guaranteed by the very fact that they are made. 22
The perfect and timeless shapes of geometry were once thought to be applicable only to the unmoving heavens. The sublunary sphere of generation, change, and decay was not susceptible to immobile mathematical forms. But according to the secular theologians, what was good for the heavens was good enough for the earth. By insisting that the book of nature was written in "measure, weight and number," these early moderns raised the earth to the stars.
For them, beneath the blooming, buzzing, phenomenal world lurked the laws of nature inscribed in mathematically formulated regularities. Thus the made lay beneath the given, it required arduous experimentation - the vexing of nature - to unveil these insensible but imagined laws. Accordingly, mathematical forms and laboratory experiments constituted the preeminent methods for constructing knowledge of the world. Unhinged from the given because committed to the cause of the made, techno-science shook off its Aristotelian roots, where experience was the memorable formed from long immersion in the regularities of the world, genesis and movement were impossible to know with certainty but only for the most part, and beings in the world were possessed of substantive natures. 23
Prideful immodesty was not the only reason that early modern philosophers brought the heavens to the earth. They also did so for charitable reasons. Moved by concern for the poor this-worldly condition of man, they sought to improve man's estate by escaping what is given - food technologies to erase hunger, cars and planes to overcome the limits of time and space, medicines to eliminate disease, and now genetic manipulations to perhaps even cheat death. Thus, pride and charity infuse that potent and world-making brew we call techno-science. 24
Modern techno-science grew, a bit topsy-turvy, but always cleaving close to these founding impulses. The pride that compels to know-by-construction continues to be wedded to the charity fueling the production of artifacts that better our condition by transmogrifying it. Whether TV's or theorems, the modern techno-scientific endeavor is one by which, Entis rationis , creations or constructions of the mind, are projected and given form as entis realis , things realized. Caught in this closed loop between mind and its projections, everywhere he looks, man now sees only what he has made. Instead of recovering the garden of his original innocence, modern man is now faced with the growing desert of his own making. Yet, trapped by the premise of the identity between knowing and making, contemporary thought remains unable to think of anything other than remaking what has been badly made. 25
Perhaps it is this commitment to the proposition that we can know only what we make, to knowledge by construction, that forces us to be trapped within the techno-scientific frame. The environmental crisis has exposed the Achilles heel of unrestrained techno-scientific progress. Yet, faith in Progress and in Knowledge as the currency of Freedom remains unshaken. Shuttling between the poles of "sustainable" and "unsustainable" technologies, the former is proffered as the new and improved cure for the diseases caused by the latter. And once more, disinterested curiosity and solicitous concern for the welfare of others justify and reaffirm faith in salvation through technology. To escape this debilitating confine perhaps requires being disabused of the prejudicial identity between knowing and making, which animates techno-science.
Planely speaking, but not entirely
The space constituted by the dialectic between a natural and artificial "harmony of interests" enfolds the relation between free and regulated markets. The politics of a commercial republic is oriented to the satisfaction of human needs through commodities. To continually increase the satisfaction of needs, market societies must expand the sphere of commodity dependence, that is, the relentless pursuit economic growth. The production and consumption of commodities presupposes the worker and the consumer , and regardless of who owns the means of production or how profits are distributed, economic growth requires workers/consumers. Even if workers are no more likely to find well-paying jobs than are debt saturated consumers likely to buy more stuff, the social imaginary formed of workers and consumers persists. Accordingly, any effort to see beneath or beyond this confining thought-space must take its distance to this industrial mind-set formed by the thoroughgoing dependence on commodities.
Similarly, the debate on the necessity of "eco-friendly" technologies that carry a lower "ecological footprint" presupposes man as operator instead of as user. 26 The user is transformed into an operator when the power of a tool overwhelms that of its user. Thus, whether it is a Prius or a Hummer, both aim to improve man's condition by frustrating his natural ability and capacity to walk. Both demand skilled operators to steer, and neither permits the degrees of freedom necessary for autonomous use. Whether promoted by the technocrat or ecocrat, men are disabled by and become dependent on their artifacts when the latter are designed for operators instead of enabling users.
The ordinary and everyday meaning of usefulness embeds it within both human purposes and human actions. A thing is useful insofar as it unleashes and extends the capacities of the user; as long as it can be shaped, adapted, and modified to fit the purposes of its users. Therefore, the capacity of a thing to be useful is limited by the innate powers or natural thresholds of the user. For example, a bicycle calls for users because it only extends the innate capacity for self-mobility. In contrast, the automobile requires immobile if adept machine operators. In this sense, the former is a convivial technology where the latter is manipulative. A hand-pump or a well can be used to raise water for drinking or bathing. In contrast, a flush-toilet or a dam must be operated to pipe or store a liquid resource. Thus, to bring to light was has been cast into the shadows requires exposing the disabling features of some technologies.
Accordingly, whatever lies beyond the thought-space marked by the dialectic of the State-Market on the one hand and that of the sustainable-unsustainable technology on the other, it must be heterogeneous to both the worker/consumer and the operator. In this search, two caveats are to be kept in mind. First, even if the question is addressed to the present, the answer must be sought for in the past. One is obliged to rummage in the dustbin of history to recover what was once muscled into it. Otherwise, imagined futures would give wing to utopian dreams just like those that have now turned nightmarish. Second, there is no going back to the past and there is no choice between the (post)industrial and the traditional immured in habit and transmitted by memory. The dependence on commodities and manipulative technologies has been and continues to be established on the destruction of alternative modes of being and thinking. There is little of the latter around, even as millions of peasants and aboriginal peoples are daily uprooted and displaced in China, India, and Latin America. But it would be sentimental and dangerous to think that one can or should bring back the past. Instead, the task for thought is to find conceptual criteria to help think through the present. 27
The Vernacular Domain
Ivan Illich proposed to revivify the word "vernacular" to name a domain that excludes both the consumer and the operator. The appropriate word to speak of the domain beyond dependence on commodities and disabling technologies is fundamental to avoiding one or both of two confusions. First, the presuppositions of economics and techno-science are likely to be anachronistically projected into forms-of-life that lie outside or beyond the thought space constituted by them. This is obvious when economists retro-project fables of the diamond and water "paradox," "utility-maximization" and "scarcity" into pre-modern texts. So does the historian of technology who indifferently sees the monkey, Neanderthal man, and the university student as tool users. In a related vein, forms-of-life orthogonal to techno-scientifically fueled economies are likely to be misunderstood. Thus, those who today refuse modern conveniences are labeled Luddites or just cussed, while those who get by outside the techno-scientific and commodity bubbles are classified as backward or poor.
A second, more potent, confusion flourishes in the absence of a word adequate to the domain outside technologically intensive market societies. Disabling technologies no less than wage work can produce or generate unpaid toil. That the spinning jenny and the computer have put people out of work is well-known. But it is less familiar that waged work necessitates a shadowy unpaid complement. Indeed, wage work is a perhaps diminishing tip of the total toil exacted in market-intensive societies. Housework, schoolwork, commuting, monitoring the intake of medicines or the outflows from a bank account are only a few examples of the time and toil devoted to the necessary shadow work compelled by commodity-intensive social arrangements. To confuse the shadow work necessitated by the separation of production and consumption with the unpaid labor in settings where production is not separated from consumption is to misunderstand shadow work as either autonomous action or the threatened and shrinking spaces outside the market. 28
Indicative of this confusion is the use of such terms as "subsistence economy," "informal economies," or "peasant economy" to refer to what has been cast into the shadows. By adding an adjective to the "economy," historians and anthropologists unwittingly reinforce the grip of what they intend to weaken. By merely modifying the "economy" they are nevertheless beholden to its presuppositions. A similar weakness attends the term "subsistence." While its etymology is noble and invokes that which is self-sufficient and stands in place, its modern connotations are irredeemably narrow and uncouth. In primarily invoking the modes by which people provided for their material needs - food and shelter - "subsistence" reinforces the economic by negation. With its connotations of "basic necessities" or "bare survival," subsistence desiccates the varied and multifarious forms-of-life once and still conducted beyond the space circumscribed by the machine and the market. One cannot speak of "subsistence architecture" as one can of vernacular architectures. "Peasant" or "informal" does not modify dance and song, prayer and language, food and play. And yet, these are integral to a life well-lived, and at least historically, were neither commodified nor the products of techno-science. It is to avoid such blinding confusions that Illich argued for rehabilitating the word "vernacular." 29
Though from the Latin vernaculum , which named all that was homebred, homemade, and homespun, it was through Varro's restricted sense of vernacular speech that the word "vernacular" enters English. The history of how vernacular speech was transmuted into a "taught mother tongue," is an exemplar of not only what lies beyond the contemporary thought-space but also for what may be worthy of recuperation in modern forms. 30
Elio Antonio de Nebrija was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he petitioned Queen Isabella to sponsor a tool to quell the unruly everyday speech of her subjects. In the Spain of Isabella, her subjects spoke in a multitude of tongues. To discipline the anarchic speech of people in the interest of her power Nebrija noted, "Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate." To unify the sword and the book through language, Nebrija offered both a rulebook for Spanish grammar and a dictionary. In a kind of alchemical exercise, Nebrija reduced lived speech to a constructed grammar. Accordingly, this conversion of the speech of people into a national language stands as a prototype of the forays in that long war to create a world fit for workers/ consumers and operators.
Nebrija fabricated a Spanish grammar as a tool to rule enlivened speech. Because standardized and produced by an expert, his grammar had to be taught to be effective. Moreover, following grammatical rules for speech conveys the belief that people cannot speak without learning the rules of grammar. By this dispensation, the tongue is trained to repeat the grammatical forms it is taught; the tongue is made to operate on language. Hence, the natural ability to speak that can be exercised by each and all is transformed into an alienable product requiring producers and consumers. The conversion of everyday speech into a teachable mother tongue thus renders what is abundant into the regime of scarcity - to the realm of exchange-value. Instruction in language not only disables the natural powers of the speaker but also makes her dependent on certified service providers. Thus, Nebrija's proposal at once discloses and foreshadows the world populated by workers and operators, by the market and the machine.
The war against the vernacular has been prosecuted for some 500 years. 31 Once the commodity and market occupied the interstices of everyday life. Today, it is everywhere. For most of human history, tools were shaped by the purposes and limited by the natural abilities of its users. Today, their machines enslave the majority of people, particularly in advanced industrial societies. Though this transformation has and is occurring in different places at different times and rates, it nevertheless duplicates the diagram of how standardized Spanish grammar disembedded the speech of people. For instance, the rapacious "primitive accumulation" that enclosed the commons in the 17th century, uprooted English peasants from the land to make them fully dependent on wages. A similar dispossession now occurs in China and India, where hundreds of millions move from farms to factories and slums. Aboriginal tribes of the Amazon are being dispossessed and killed now with the same impunity as those in Australia and the Americas once were. For entertainment, children now operate PlayStations where they once kicked around a ball on the street. Mega-churches in the US indoctrinate the flock with power point slides and music, much as teachers, trainers, and coaches do in classrooms around the country. Food scientists, nutritionists, and plant pathologists provide just some of the inputs that consumers depend on for their daily calorie intake. Whether in single-family homes or boxes piled on top of each other, people live in houses seemingly cut from an architect's template. Women in India now demand valentine cards with as much enthusiasm as Turkish men purchase hair, calf, and chest implants. The historical record is rife with examples that stand as witnesses to the continuing destruction of the vernacular -whether of food, shelter, song, love, or pleasures.
It is by attending to the historical specificity of our present predicament in the mirror of the past that Illich thus reveals a third axis that lies orthogonal to the plane circumscribed by the axes of commodity intensity and disabling technologies. On this z-axis are located forms of social organization anchored by two heterogeneous forms. At the point of origin of this three-dimensional space, are social arrangements that plug people into markets and machines and thereby prevent them from exercising their freely given powers. At the other end of this z-axis is found a profusion of social forms, each different from the other, but all marked by suspicion towards the claims for techno-science and the commodity.
For these modes of social organization, the difference between "sustainable" and "unsustainable" technologies is a chimera. Instead, what matters is the real distinction between convivial and disabling technologies. Similarly, the purported difference between regulated and free markets, between public and private property does little to shape these social forms. Instead, they are animated by the distinction between the household and the commons. Thus, the Amish of Pennsylvania curtail their use of such power tools as tractors. The Bhutanese limit the number of tourists to whom they play host. Some cities in Germany and Denmark have banned the car to make way for the bicycle and walking. Whether on a rooftop in Chicago or by the rail track in Mumbai, diverse groups rely on their vegetable patches for some their daily sustenance. While community supported agriculture build bonds of personal dependence, ceramic dry toilets and related forms of vernacular architectures allow people to dwell. In a fine essay by Peter Linebaugh on the Luddites and the Romantics, one is persuaded by the implicit claim that communism for the 21st century may need to mimic in a new key, the courageous Luddite defense of the vernacular. 32 Even Marx, in his last years, was less of a Marxist than many of those who spoke in his name. He was far more open to the peasant communes of Russia and Western Europe than usually assumed. 33
These modes and manners of living in the present are informed by the past. Those engaged in the attempt to unplug from the market and the machine know that the reign of property - whether private or public-was erected on the ruins of the commons and that the ubiquity of disabling technologies-whether sustainable or not-was achieved by denigrating convivial tools. Yet, crucially, knowing what is past has gone, they are not dogmatic in their fight. They practice a form of bricolage, opportunistically taking back whatever they can get. A shared lawnmower here, an overgrown and weed infested garden there, a political struggle to retain artisanal fishing in Kerala, a move to the barricades in the Chiapas, the willingness to peddle cocaine derived home remedies in Peru and building illegal tenements on public lands in Sao Paulo, each effort is aimed at reducing the radical monopoly of commodities and disabling technologies. Such ways - of fishing, farming, cooking, eating, dwelling, playing, praying or study - are as diverse and varied today as the people who engage in them. However, what they have in common is being oriented by the same genus , the vernacular.
Epistemic Prudence
The effort to fight against the continuing war on the vernacular also extends to the activity of thinking. 34 What is confused for knowledge today is largely R&D funded and deployed by government and industry. Scientists, whether in the employ of universities, governments, or corporations, produce objective knowledge for use by others. The pertinent question for those affected by these circuits of knowledge production and sale is to ask if there are vernacular styles of thinking. Is there a kind of thought justified by neither pride nor charity? What is the nature of rigorous thought that is nevertheless conducted among friends and aimed at shaping one's own modes of life in more beautiful ways? Are some styles of thinking better suited to comprehending the vernacular?
It is likely that the intellectual effort appropriate to bringing vernacular ways out of the shadows might itself be self-limiting. I suggest the now discarded notion of common sense as a criterion to both comprehend the vernacular domain and to recognize the styles of thought appropriate to it. Though the history of common sense is too tangled a story to be told here, it is sufficient to note its primary meaning, at least in English. The first meaning of common sense is the Aristotelian " sensus communis ": "The common bond or center of the five senses; the endowment of natural intelligence possessed by rational beings." 35 This understanding of the common sense stretches from at least Plato to Descartes and, in this primordial sense, refers to the faculty necessary for the exercise of reasonable judgments. Contrary to popular prejudice today, common sense does not refer to the content of what is known but rather how knowledge is achieved. Common sense is not reducible to a body of propositions or of knowledge-claims: instead, it is the ground from which judgments are reached, particularly, the judgment of what is appropriate, fitting, or adequate. 36
Briefly, common sense is that faculty which synthesizes sense impressions into perceptions of the world. In turn, the active intelligence abstracts concepts from these sensible perceptions. An echo of this activity of the intellect still resonates in the word "concept," etymologically related to grasping or touching. That concepts are tethered to percepts, which are rooted in the sensual, underwrites that Aristotelian commonplace, "nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses." Concepts are abstractions. But precisely because they are abstractions from the real, they maintain an accord between the world and the mind. Stated simply, both perception and the concepts that flow from them are dependent on what is given to the senses; conceptions of the world depend on grasping the world as it is.
Yet, techno-science is based on precisely turning this understanding on its head. Indeed, the announcement of Vico may be taken as the slogan behind which a common sense understanding of the world was slowly suffocated. From the very beginning of modern science, knowing is understood to be the same as making: the Cartesian plane is as constructed as an airplane; the Poisson distribution is as fabricated as a pipette in the laboratory. Modern scientific ideas are not concepts tethered to the senses; instead they are constructs. Constructs, as the word suggests, are made and not given. As Einstein famously said, "Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and not...uniquely determined by the external world." Though wrong to use the word "concepts," his acknowledgement that scientific theories are created underscores how scientific constructs fractures the common sense tie between perception and reality.
The sharp distinction between concepts and constructs recalls that the modern world is constructed and that people and things are often resized to fit in. Concepts are forms of thought engendered by the common sense, which itself expresses the union between the world and the senses. Concepts reflect a way of knowing things from the outside in - from the world to the mind. In contrast, constructs are forms of reflexive thought expressing a way of knowing from the inside out - from the mind to the world.In modern times, what is made up does not ideally conform to what is given. Instead, what is given is slowly buried under the made-up world.
Scientific constructs are therefore not rooted by a sense for the world. Indeed, given the contrast between concepts and constructs, it follows that scientific ideas are non-sense. They are not abstracted from experience but can often be used to reshape it. They can be experimentally verified or falsified. But experiments are not the stuff of ordinary experience. No experiment is necessary to verify if people breathe, but one is required to prove the properties of a vacuum. Experiments are necessary precisely to test what is not ordinarily evident, which is why they are conducted in controlled settings and also used to propagandize the unusual as ordinarily comprehensible. Experimental results are neither necessarily continuous with nor comprehensible to everyday experience; they do not clarify experience but usually obfuscate it.
Unlike R&D, vernacular styles of thought are neither institutionally funded nor directed at the purported happiness and ease of others. Moreover, vernacular thinking also cleaves closely to the common sense understood as the seat of reasonable judgments. Thus, it avoids the monstrous heights to which thought can rise on the wings of the unfettered imagination. Accordingly, the ability to grasp the vernacular demands not only the courage needed to buck academic pressures but also to avoid those flights of theoretical madness powered through the multiplication of constructs. 37
To draw out some features of the form of thought adequate to the vernacular domain, consider Illich's essay titled Energy and Equity , where he distinguishes between transport , transit , and traffic . Whereas transit bespeaks the motion afforded to man the self-moving animal, transport refers to his being moved by heteronomous means, whether car, train, or plane. There, a bullock cart transports villagers headed to the market. Here cars transport commuters to the workplace. By common sense perception, transport - whether by cart or car - perverts transit, which is embodied in the freely given capacity to walk. To those who cannot perceive the sensual and carnal difference between walking and being moved as a Fedex package, the distinction between transport and transit is unpersuasive. It is equally unpersuasive to those mired in that constructed universe where all motion is identified with the displacement of any body in space. The ritualized exposure to passenger-miles - whether in cars or classrooms - is the likely reason for the inability to perceive the felt distinction between transport and transit. Thus, the elaboration of concepts to properly grasp the vernacular domain cannot but begin by placing the constructions of the economy and techno-science within epistemic brackets.
Yet, if it is to be reasonable, such an exercise in epistemic hygiene cannot be immoderate. 38 The contrast between transport and transit is clear and distinct, rooted as it is in phenomenologically distinct perceptions. Yet, traffic is a theoretical construct, proposed to comprehend any combination of transport and transit. This necessity for constructs is nevertheless undermined by their being tethered to and by concepts. Accordingly, the conceptual grasp of the world hobbles the free construction of it. The distinction between concepts and constructs does not imply refusing the latter at all costs but rather entails seeing the hierarchical relation between them. That is, vernacular styles of thinking do not exclude theoretical constructs but only seek to keep them in their place.
A second and related feature of vernacular thought-styles confirms its moderate and indeed, modest nature. In accord with vernacular ways, vernacular thought does not demand the exclusion or excision of that which is antithetical and foreign to its domain - the market or the machine. For instance, vernacular thought does not demand the erasure of transport so that transit can flourish. Instead, because rooted in the perceived accord or just proportion between the transit and transport, vernacular thought insists only that the capacity for auto-mobility impose a binding constraint on transport. The suggestion that the speed limit for cars be roughly the same as that reached by a bicycle is rooted in the argument that traffic be calibrated by the lexicographic preference for transit over transport.
Thus, vernacular ways of thinking in consonance with doing and being do not deny constructs - whether imagined or realized. It merely refuses the characteristically modern identification of knowing and making, of reducing thinking to calculating, of displacing the relation between subjects and their predicates by quantitative comparisons. In seeing beyond the prejudice that compares beings in terms of "measure, number, and weight," vernacular thought reanimates a second form of quantitative measurement that, with it, was also cast into the shadows. Recall, as Einstein admitted, scientific constructs are free creations of the mind, exemplified by mathematical constructs - equations, calculations, and the like. But such mathematical measurement is only the inferior of two kinds of quantitative measurement.
In The Statesman , Plato argues for the distinction between arithmetical and "geometric" measures. 39 While both are forms of quantitative measurements, arithmetical or numerical measure is independent of the purposes of the calculator and either correct or incorrect. In contrast, "geometric" measurements of too much or too little are inextricably bound to intentionality and therefore never simply correct or incorrect but always measured with respect to what is just right or fitting. To clarify the distinction, consider the following two points. Given a conventional measure - gallons or liters - a quantity of water can be precisely and universally measured as 4. However, whether 4 is too much or too little depends on whether one intends to fill a 3 or 5 gallon pail; or to put out a blazing fire or to water a horse. The frame of intentionality or purpose thus defines the quantitative measurement of greater or lesser, of more or less. Accordingly, the numerical measure of plus or minus 1 gains its meaning from and is therefore subordinate to the non-numerically measure of too much or too little. Moreover, it is also relative to purpose that 3 or 5 is considered fitting, appropriate or just right.
But there is a second point to be emphasized about the relation between so-called arithmetical and "geometrical" measurements. Arithmetical measures are utterly sterile when it comes to answering the question of purpose, of what is to be done. That is, the question of whether a given end is appropriate or fitting cannot be debated in mathematical symbols. In fact, the opposite is true. It is always possible to ask if applying arithmetical measures to a particular situation is appropriate. Thus, whether one should fill a 5-gallon pail, or construct a mathematical model of human behavior or fabricate a measure called ecological footprint are unanswerable in numerical terms. 40
That arithmetical measurements cannot adjudicate its own appropriateness shows they are inferior in rank or hierarchically subordinate to "geometric" measurement. The question concerning purpose is preeminently a question of ethics, of justice among persons. Moreover, since personal relationship cannot but be grounded in the embodied sense of and for another, it follows that ethical judgments must be rooted in common sense. Thus, geometric measures of what is just and right, of what is appropriate and fitting, are judgments formed of the common sense. Accordingly it follows that concepts should regulate and serve as norms for constructs and, analogously, that vernacular ways should regulate techno-scientific constructions.
Past or Future?
Illich's plea to resuscitate the vernacular must be taken seriously - especially now, when the ongoing economic and ecological crises reveal the restricted thought-space within which contemporary debates continue to be conducted. Just as the demand for more regulated markets expose exchange-value as the presupposition of economic thought, so also the call for sustainable or eco-friendly technologies expose the grip of techno-science on the modern imaginary. The vernacular, we could say, lies orthogonal to these axes of markets and machines, offering us a unique standpoint from which to interrogate the present. While the object of an almost 500 year long war, it nevertheless persists within the interstices and byways of modern life, ready for reactivation.
Sajay Samuel is a Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. He has spoken on science, economic thought, and the vernacular for Canadian radio. His academic publications aim to undermine the current fascination with accounting and related numbers as a modality of management. 1. BBC, "' Wall Street got drunk ' says Bush." 2. Andy Kroll, " How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker, " TomDispatch . While advanced industrialized economies cannot find enough jobs for its unemployed populations, so called emerging economies are actively creating employment. By inverse symmetry, to satisfy the demand of economic growth through industrialization, notably in China and India, peasants are converted into factory workers in the hundreds of millions. 3. Of the raft of books on the causes and consequences of the current economic situation, there are those who argue, rightly in many particulars, that this was only the most severe of the crisis prone dynamics of capitalism. In this vein, see for example most recently, Paul Mattick, Business As Usual (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). I ignore these accounts since they are and were largely ignored in policy circles and mainstream economic thinking. 4. Notably, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). But see also Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market (New York: Harper Business Books, 2009); and Paul Krugman, "How did economists get it so wrong?" New York Times , September 9, 2009. 5. Joseph Stiglitz in Freefall (New York: Norton Books, 2010) is perhaps the most trenchant of the well-known economists to finger free market ideology as an important cause of the crisis. Also see, N. Roubini & S. Mihm, Crisis Economics (New York, Penguin Press, 2010); and S. Johnson & J. Kwak, 13 Bankers (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). Worthy of special mention in this regard, is Richard Posner's, A Failure of Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), which stands as a model for retrospective hand-wringing by a booster of neo-liberalism. 6. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). Most if not all of the writings on the financial crisis cite incentives as both cause and remedy. The U.S. Congressional report published after two years of study and investigation is exemplary since failed or inadequate incentives--whether in the form of regulation or compensation- comprise the sum of causal factors driving the crisis. But also consult among any of the above-mentioned books, Laurence Koltikoff's, Jimmy Stewart is Dead (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2010) for a sensible proposal to limit financially induced boom-bust cycles through limited purpose banking. The latter is designed to dampen the ill-effects of debt financing. 7. The paradox of designing incentives to determine future behavior seems not to have been fully comprehended. Indeed, in a forthcoming work, I intend to argue that incentive mechanisms assure only one consequence: they will certainly fail. 8. For a fuller account, see Sajay Samuel & Jean Roberts, "Water can and ought to run freely: reflections on the notion of "scarcity" in economics" in The Limits to Scarcity , ed. Lyla Mehta(London: Earthscan, 2010), 109-126. 9. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924). 10. "It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty...Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty. For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them... If we examined his oeconomy with rigour, we should find that he spends a great part of them upon conveniencies, which may be regarded as superfluities, and that, upon extraordinary occasions, he can give something even to vanity and distinction...From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition ? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages, which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation." Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A Millar, 1759/1858), pt. 1, sec. 1, ch. 3, emphasis added. Consult Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977) whose close textual analysis of classical authors shows that it is the idea of a natural harmony between individual self-interest and the general interest, that allows, in principle, acquisitiveness to be free of ethico-political restraints. Though he includes William Petty and John Locke among "economists," William Letwin's judgment is instructive: "...there can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men...were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil"; Origins of Scientific Economics (London, 1963), 147-48. See CB Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) for supporting arguments that root economic liberalism in 17th century political thought. 11. "...money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another. What are the rules which men naturally observe in exchanging them either for money or one another, I shall now proceed to examine"; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations , book 1, ch. 4. 12. The importance of Locke to Smith is evident in his paean to property. "The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable" ( Wealth of Nations , book 1, ch. 10, part 2). For reasons of space, I cannot do full justice to Locke's arguments. However, the following statements sufficiently support the four points I emphasize. "Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men"; "And as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them"; "...the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it"; John Locke, Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay , ch. 5. 13. "...These rules determine what may be called the relative or exchangeable value of goods. The word value, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called 'value in use'; the other, 'value in exchange.'" ( Wealth of Nations , book 1, ch. 4). 14. Smith argues that "virtue consists not in any one affection but in the proper degree of all the affections." For him, Agreeableness or utility is not a measure of virtue. Instead, it is 'sympathy' or the "correspondent affection of the spectator" that "is the natural and original measure of the proper degree (of virtue)." ***TMS, Part 8, Sec. 2, Ch.3. But such sympathy is not a virtue. At best it is a mirror of social prejudices. 15. The blindness to subsistence in contemporary economics is evident in the judgment of George Stigler in his review of late 19th century efforts to grasp use-value: "...and there were some mystical references to the infinite utility of subsistence." See his "Development of Utility Theory II," Journal of Political Economy , 58 (1950), 373. Stigler is only capable of equating the useful, which is price-less, with the mystical. 16. "A thing can be a use-value without being a value. A thing can be useful and a product of human labor, without being a commodity. ...Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility.." Marx, K.(1976) Capital , vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books), 131. 17. The fundamental, though largely overlooked, essay on the elaboration of the twinned yet polemically related "natural" and "artificial" harmony of interests remains, Elie Halevy The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 18. It would take a longer essay to show the function of law in commercial society. Summarily, Commercial society transforms Law into an instrument of social engineering; and thus of regulation. It began to be used to engineer society towards more or less market-intensive relations. Classical liberalism predicated on the "natural harmony of interests" requires economizing on law. In contrast, to mitigate the destructiveness of rampant market society requires shackling commercialism without destroying it, forging an "artificial harmony of interests" through punitive regulations. Hence both the minimal state of liberalism (whether classical or neo-liberalism) and the expanded state of welfare liberalism implies the instrumentalization of Law. See Michel Foucault, "On Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect , eds. Colin Gordon, G. Burchell and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The newest crinkle to this old tale is that markets are no longer thought natural. Instead, markets can be designed, often by market participants themselves. Thus moderating markets through incentives becomes a matter of auto-engineering of and by markets around the late 20th century. 19. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1962) and Barry Commoner Science and Survival (New York: Viking Books, 1967) are perhaps the two most prominent scientists to have jump-started the environmental movement with the blessings of science. By now, despite a few if noisy detractors, widespread anthropogenic environmental destruction is, as it is said, "scientific fact." Over 2000 scientists worldwide contribute to the reports and recommendations produced by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the environmental effects of industrialization at perhaps the most general environmental register. See Climate Change 2007 for its most recent report. 20. A pair of recent books authored by French philosophers suggests the philosophical ambit within with the environmental crisis is comprehended. On the one hand, Michel Serres's The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) insists on the necessity of a contract with the Earth now that Humanity presses against it as does any mammoth natural force. Such a natural contract, presupposes a new metaphysics, according to which humanity cannot be reduced to individuals and Earth is not underfoot but whirling in empty space; both so comprehended by Science and Law. In some contrast, Luc Ferry's The New Ecological Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) fears the new metaphysics. Cleaving to modern ways, he believes "it will ultimately be by means of advancements in science and technology that we manage one day to resolve the questions raised by environmental ethics" (127). Nevertheless, neither doubt the path forward to be illuminated by a suitably reformulated techno-science. 21. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science Magazine , 155:3767, argued for anthropocentric singularity of Christianity and its attendant bequest of nature to man for fueling techno-science that has caused the ecological crisis. In this section I focus on the metaphysics of modern science. For a recent statement on how historians of science who raise their heads from the dusty archives deal with the metaphysics of modern science, see Lindberg, The Beginning of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch.14. He agrees with E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Doubleday, 1932), whose judgment of the presuppositions and implications of Newtonian mechanics has not been fundamentally challenged. Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" in Between Past and Future (New York: Random Books, 1993) offers a succinct sketch of the groundlessness presumed by techno-science. 22. For a fuller account of the theological and philosophical debates that prepared this view from nowhere, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). It is he who names as secular theologians, "Galileo and Descartes, Liebniz and Newton, Hobbes and Vico" among others. I rely heavily on him (particularly part 5) and on Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) to grasp the central lines in the mathematization of physis. Also consult Peter Dear's textbook, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) cast as a pithy summary of the seismic changes between 1500 and 1800 in what was worth knowing and how it was known. 23. See A. Mark Smith's "Knowing things inside out: the scientific revolution from a Medieval Perspective," The American Historical Review , 95:3 (1990) for an excellent summary on the reversal of the hierarchy between sense and reason in modern scientific thought. Also, consult Eamon Duffy, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) for a persuasive account of scientific experiments as vexing nature in order to extract her secrets. 24. To appreciate the brew of pride and charity that constitutes modern techno-science we need only to attend to Descartes. "...It is possible to reach knowledge that will be of much utility in this life... instead of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can find a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us, as well as we now understand the different skills of our artisans, we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature. This would not only be desirable in bringing about the invention of an infinity of devices to enable us to enjoy the fruits of agriculture and all the wealth of the earth without labor, but even more so in conserving health, the principal good and the basis of all other goods in life." Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1960), part six. 25. The term construction refers to things - whether physical or symbolic - made. The mathematical roots of construction and constructivism are thoroughly explored with special note of Descartes in David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometr (London: Routledge 1989). Funkenstein, Theology , especially chapter 5, describes well the philosophical shift from the contemplative ideal of knowing to the ideal of knowing-by-doing or made knowledge. A cursory glance at any scientific book should convince that "theoretical constructs" are a staple of the modern scientific enterprise. Those (so-called postmodern philosophers, historians and sociologists of science) who think they challenge techno-science by emphasizing that scientific knowledge is constructed only repeat in prose what Bacon, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton said in verse. Those who think they defend scientific knowledge by invoking, as the last trump card, its technical productions merely reconfirm the founding conceit of modern techno-science: that knowing and making are interchangeable. 26. In this section I rely on the most extensive statement of Illich on critical technology, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 1973). Note especially the Chapter 4, "Recovery" (84-99) calling for the demythologization of science, the rediscovery of language and the recovery of legal procedure. He supersedes this statement only in some respects with his later thinking: on systems; on the historicity of the instrument as a category; and the emphasis on the symbolic power of technology. 27. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), shows precisely the consequences of attempts to recover the past, whose signal dimension has been the relative embeddedness of the individual within the social whole. To insist on recovering that past today is thus to court a species of inhumanity the Western world has once already encountered in the mid 20th century. 28. The chilling conclusion of this confusion is the dishonest sentimentalism fostered in industrial societies, to wit "that the values which industrial society destroys are precisely those which it cherishes" Ivan Illich, "Shadow Work" in Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), 99. Thus, the radical dependence on work promotes the cherished value of Freedom. 29. " Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies 'rootedness' and 'abode.' Vernaculum as a Latin word was used for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was obtained in formal exchange. The child of one's slave and of one's wife, the donkey born of one's own beast, were vernacular beings, as was the staple that came from the garden or the commons. If Karl Polanyi had adverted to this fact, he might have used the term in the meaning accepted by the ancient Romans: sustenance derived from reciprocity patterns imbedded in every aspect of life, as distinguished from sustenance that comes from exchange or from vertical distribution... We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars. The term must be broad enough to fit the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation, without implying either a privatized activity akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and primitive procedure. Such an adjective is not at hand. But 'vernacular' might serve. By speaking about vernacular language and the possibility of its recuperation, I am trying to bring into awareness and discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of being, doing, and making that in a desirable future society might again expand in all aspects of life." Ivan Illich, "The War against Subsistence" in Shadow Work , 57-58. The argument of this essay belies its title. 30. For the following section, I gloss "Vernacular Values" and The War on Subsistence," both in Illich, Shadow Work . 31. A more comprehensive analysis of the themes in this section would include a selective survey on the historical and anthropological literature on vernacular ways and its destruction. As a first orientation to the extensive literature on the war on the vernacular, consult Ivan Illich, Gender , (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1982). The works of Karl Polanyi, preeminently, The Great Transformation , (NY: Reinhart, 1944); but also the essays collected in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies , ed. George Dalton, (NY: Anchor Books, 1968) and those in Trade and Markets in Early Empires ,eds. K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg, and H. Pearson (NY: The Free Press, 1957) clarify the historicity of commodity-intensive societies, made visible when nature and human action become widely priced as land and labor respectively. Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics , (NY: Adline, 1972) and M.I. Finley in The Ancient Economy , (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985) confirm that pre- modern societies, whether Aboriginal Australia or Western Antiquity, got on quite well without it. Jacques Le Goff, in Medieval Civilization , 400-1500 emphasizes the aim of the medieval "economy" as that of subsistence, of providing for necessities (London: Blackwell, 1988). The continuing modern war on subsistence and the resistance to it is well documented. Consult for example, E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the Crowd," reprinted in The Essential E.P. Thompson , ed. Dorothy Thompson (NY: The New Press, 2000), and the essays collected in Customs in Common (New York: New York Press, 1993); Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the 20th Century (NY: Harper & Row 1969), Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class (London: Cambridge, 1977) and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Our Word is our Weapon (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2001). James Scott, in Seeing Like a State (Princeton: Yale University, 1999) argues that visionary plans to modernize society invariably fail and usually leave their beneficiaries worse off for the attention. Study the key terms collected in The Development Dictionary , ed. Wolfgang Sachs (NY: Zed Books, 1992) as commands that rally the troops to the war against subsistence. 32. Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd, Queen Mab: Machine Breaking, Romanticism, and Several Commons 1811-12 (Oakland: PM Press/Retort, 2012). 33. Consult the well-documented essay by Teodor Shanin, "Late Marx: Gods and Craftsmen" in Late Marx and the Russian Road , ed. T. Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), for a persuasive case that "...to Marx, a timely revolutionary victory could turn the Russian commune into a major 'vehicle of social regeneration.'" 34. This section is derived from Ivan Illich, "Research by People" in Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), and his unpublished manuscript titled The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr which makes reference to the common sense. 35. This sentence from the OED weakly summarizes the following: "The senses perceive each other's special objects incidentally; not because percipient sense is this or that special sense, but because all form a unity: this incidental perception takes place whenever sense is directed at one and the same moment to two disparate qualities in one and the same object, e.g., to the bitterness and the yellowness of bile..." De Anima , III, 425a 30-425b 1. And: "Further, there cannot be a special sense-organ for the common sensibles either, i.e, the objects which we perceive incidentally through this or that special sense, e.g, movement, rest, figure, magnitude, number & unity.... In the case of the common sensibles, there is already in us a common sensibility (or common sense ) which enables us to perceive them non-incidentally; there is therefore no special sense required for their perception," De Anima , III 425a 15-26. 36. I do not fully explore here the transformation from a faculty into the "innate capacity" of any person to reason and judge correctly after Descartes. The judgment of Funkenstein in Theology , especially page 359, is instructive. He suggests that the "militant, missionary ideal" of education over the 17th and 18th centuries is related to "the shift in the connotation of the term 'common sense.'" The connotations of the terms "le bon sens," "gemeiner Menschenverstand," and "common sense" after the 17th century imply the capacity to be educated; for all men to become philosophers. Indeed, the propagation of a method for thinking presupposes the commonsense as that which is in need of education. More recently, Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) traces the twinned logics generated by the degradation of common sense from a faculty. On the one hand, it serves as a touchstone for the wisdom of people against elites; on the other, the mulishness of the masses needed re-education. For a conspectus of writers on the common sense consult, AN Foxe, The Common Sense from Heraclitus to Pierce (Turnbridge Press, 1962). It is however frustrating for the lack of a bibliography and a historically insensitive reading of the authors surveyed. In contrast, JL Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcemaeon to Aristotle (Clarendon Press, 1926); WR Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (University of Illinois Press, 1927); David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge University Press, 1987) are excellent treatments of the history of the common sense as faculty from Aristotle to the late Renaissance when read serially. See also E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1975); and HA Wolfson, "The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophical Texts," Harvard Theological Review , 25 (1935). 37. Stanley Rosen, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) argues spiritedly for the commonsense foundations of thought. Such foundations support but cannot rise to heights reached by extraordinary thought, which by necessity, exceed its grasp. In the so-called "science wars" of recent decades, the issue was framed as that between the social constructivists and the realists. In the light of the foregoing distinction between concepts and constructs, it is clear that both parties to the debate agree that scientific knowledge is made, that is to say, constructed. 38. In much of his writings, Illich insists on elaborating conceptual distinctions built on the perception of autonomous human actions. Between Deschooling Society and The History of Homo Educandus he contrasts learning to education and schooling; in Medical Nemesis , between autonomous coping and healthcare; between Research by People and R&D. In some cases, he invents or gives new shades of meaning to terms to recover perceptions buried by constructs - for example, disvalue, shadow work, gender and vernacular. Let the triple, housing, dwelling, and habitation stand as a parallel example to transport, transit, and traffic used in the text above. A general case for the commonsensical Illich still awaits a careful exegesis of his texts. 39. I take some liberties with interpreting The Statesman , 283d-284e in Plato, Complete Works , ed. John M. Cooper (Hackett Publishing, 1997).The relevant distinction as described by the visitor reads as follows: "It is clear that we would divide the art of measurement, cutting it in two in just the way we said, posting as one part of it all sorts of expertise that measure the number, lengths, depths, breaths, and speeds of things in relation to what is opposed to them, and as the other, all those that measure in relation to what is in due measure, what is fitting, the right moment, what is as it ought to be-everything that removes itself from the extremes to the middle" (384e). 40. It is a weak recognition of this hierarchy that is reiterated in the widely accepted disjunction or discontinuity between "science" and "values."
Towards a socialist art of government: Michel Foucault's "The mesh of power"
How surprising the events of May 1968 must have seemed to Michel Foucault is suggested by a remark made to his life-long partner Daniel Defert in January of that year, following his nomination for a faculty position at the University of Paris Nanterre. "Strange how these students speak of their relations with profs in terms of class war." 1 Interpretations of this remark will reveal a lot about one's received image of the late philosopher. Among figures of the New Left he had earned a reputation as an anti-Marxist for disparaging public comments about Jean-Paul Sartre, and the apparent heresies of Les mots et les choses (1966).2 A younger generation of left-leaning intellectuals, activists, and agitators, exposed only to later portraits of the radical philosopher - the author of Discipline and Punish (1974), megaphone in hand, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and other ultra-gauchistes at protests in the streets of Paris - will probably find the confession disconcerting. Is it possible that he was taken off guard by the political sparks that would set alight le mouvement du 22 mars? He did, after all, arrive in Paris post festum, participating in some of the final rallies at the Sorbonne in late June.
I prefer to read the remark as a knowing reflection on the peculiarity of privileged Nanterre students, representing themselves as some revolutionary proletarian subject, locked in a battle with their professors as though the latter owned the means of production. As if to draw out the consequences of this contradiction, by 1969 Foucault began using the language of class struggle in political discussions, and publicly declaring the "retour a Marx" as the spirit of his age.3 Foucault's political makeover occurred among a group of Trotskyist students at the University of Tunis where he was teaching philosophy in 1968. The young Tunisians inspired him to brush up on the classics of historical materialism from Marx's own work to Rosa Luxemburg, in addition to popular figures of the New Left, including Che Guevara and the Black Panthers.4 Reflecting back on this year of strikes, course suspensions, occupations, arrests, imprisonments and torture in Tunisia, Foucault admired the moral energy and existential charge of his students' Marxist identification more than its rigor or precision. Reversing his earlier position on the historical obsolescence of Marx, he had been convinced "that myth was necessary. A political ideology or a political perception of the world, of human relations and situations was absolutely necessary to begin the struggle."5
These remarks immediately recall Sorel, rather than Marx; however, is it going too far to suggest that Foucault sought to capture the political imaginary of his day by spinning a new myth, an alternate "political perception of the world" with his conceptual unfolding of the term "power?"6 After all, Foucault's key insight in this regard - power is productive rather than repressive; individuality is itself the product of a historical organization of power - is not some world-weary warning about the ruse of history. It is not to say that "power always wins." In fact, it is a research agenda: try to historically validate the hypothesis according to which everywhere power has crushed someone in its gears, or menaced people with guns and overseers, it has done so precisely because that individual or group presented some essential threat to the exercise of that power. The oppressed, Foucault argues, also make use of an immense "network of power." They are not passive victims of a historical process; in fact, power is historically contingent. The resistance of the oppressed has shaped the present organization of power. Revolution, according to this view, is a rare bird indeed.7
Such political reflections may be cynical, but they are not altogether foreign from the Marxist political tradition of thought. For instance, some of the above formulations are remarkably similar to the lessons Benjamin gleans from the history of the oppressed, including his idea of the "weak messianic power" of revolutionary possibility. 2 Throughout Foucault's career, he was attentive to the voices of the oppressed. His written work and its bibliographic sources are scandalous precisely to the extent that he gives less space to master thinkers - Bentham, Marx, Freud, Decartes, Smith, Machiavelli, Rousseau - than to long-forgotten voices unearthed from voluminous time spent in libraries. These were also Marx and Benjamin's preferred methods. Foucault fondly referred to it as the "warm freemasonry of useless erudition." Although he immersed himself in the heights of Western thought, he was far more likely to write a book about a late-19th century hermaphrodite like Herculine Barbin, than some more explicit exposition or commentary on the thought which constituted his ground. Detecting his intellectual influences demands careful reading.
Given that Foucault's particularstar rose at the start of the mass media age, during France's trente glorieuses, it is possible that he crafted ambivalent concepts and catchphrases with precisely this vastly expanded power of media outlets in mind. It would be a mistake to assume that he did not foresee the difficulties of philosophizing with a word that invokes the stuff of superstition. In stark contrast to the Frankfurt School and Situationist International, Foucault refrained from criticizing mass media technologies and considered them as mostly neutral instruments, which broadened the field of discursive possibilities. This was probably due to the fact that he was able to navigate and manipulate this media apparatus so deftly as a public intellectual, foreshadowing the rise of the much-loathed, television-ready nouveau philosophe. However, this too is a principled stance. Foucault's methodology resists divisions between "high" and "low" cultural forms: Bentham is just as likely to betray his era's paradigm of punishment as the plan for a Quaker prison in Pennsylvania or the mundane daily routine from a prison in the French provinces. With Machiavelli in mind, Foucault calls this "the local cynicism of power."9
Foucault's thought about power must first be situated within his conjuncture and our own if we want to articulate his conceptual problems and grasp their stakes. These contextual moves will help us unlearn the way his thought was received and reconstructed. To uncover the rational kernel of his sweeping historical argument will require de-emphasizing his descriptive language, which was often quite beautiful but has a tendency to distract. He often rhetorically distanced himself from his own neologisms, treating them as indexical placeholders for a thought rather than as rigorous theorizations. As a cipher for unlocking this admittedly particular reading of Foucault, I offer a translation of "Les mailles de pouvoir" - "The Mesh of Power" - which for reasons that still remain obscure is absent from all English-language editions of Foucault's "collected works."
Originally delivered in two installments at the Federal University of Bahia in 1976, Foucault's words were recorded on cassette tapes, transcribed and published as a text, first appearing in Portugese, and translated back into French for publication in Dits et ecrits- now delivered to you in English, via the Internet. The "mesh" of a net of power, the size or gauge of its holes, is a particularly apt metaphor in the Internet age, resonating with these new kinds of capture and slippage.10 The transmission of this purloined letter to you is itself the result of the development of technologies that have made it easier to circulate what Foucault once termed discours veridique, parrhesia, or truthful speech. Indeed, Foucault's work from the late 1970s reaches us like a ticking time bomb from some forgotten past, threatening to explode a whole set of assumptions about the unity and disunity of his thought, revealing new insights and limitations.
Situating Foucault's Intellectual Crisis and "The Mesh of Power"
The "political turn" of 1969 and the late "ethical turn" towards the "care of the self" are widely cited episodes in the intellectual history of Foucault. This periodization provides a neat tripartite division of his work into early, middle and late. In the secondary literature, these turns are noted, but their causes remain obscure. Few have attempted a reasoned and well-argued reconstruction of their significance, and most studies of the subject compensate for such lacunae with gossip and speculation.
These difficulties have only been compounded by problems of reception. French historian Francois Cusset considers the "American adventure with French Theory" to be a paradox of comparative intellectual history; although "Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze & co." were embraced on this side of the Atlantic and packaged together "for what was seen as their anti-Marxism... they were banned from their home country under the charges of a perverse collusion with the worst of leftist Marxism."11
For various reasons, the American reception of Foucault emerged as the hegemonic one, and his concepts have crystallized into so many political ontologies - "normativity" in queer theory, "biopolitics" and war in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - but none of these ontologies responds to our political-economic horizon of low or no-growth capitalism and its implications for state power, social institutions, and resistance struggles. Indeed, the period characterized by bubblenomics, ostensible erosions of state sovereignty and the diffuse resistance offered by alter-globo and anti-war multitudes, which once gave these Foucauldian assessments of the conjuncture a certain bite in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has now capsized into a situation of economic meltdown, consolidations of old-fashioned class power, sovereign debt crises, uneven reassertions of Euro-American military might and emergent struggles over austerity measures in the US and Europe alongside popular rebellions against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
The American heyday of French Theory now appears like a blip on the radar between the economic downturn, debt crisis, youth unemployment and Mideast uprisings of the 1970s, which was Foucault's conjuncture, and the economic chain reaction set off by the American banks in 2008, political upheavals,youth unemployment and Arab Spring which constitutes our own. His political thought from this earlier period of economic crisis - especially his thought concerning neoliberalism as an emergent art of government for managing the crisis tendencies of capital - merit a careful reappraisal in light of the present conjuncture.
Most crucially for a reassessment of Foucault's thought, all of his public lectures at the College de France have now been published.These lessons, which had previously circulated on bootleg cassettes within a limited milieu of connoisseurs, have now become a public record of Foucault's intellectual trajectory from 1971 to his death in 1984. Although his will stipulated that there were to be "no posthumous publications" and Foucault admitted to being "allergic" to the recording devices cluttering his lectern, he understood their importance: "word always gets out," he affirms in a lecture from 1976.12 Indeed, with these publications, his lessons are no longer subject to the demagoguery and occultation that so frequently accompanies arcana. The candid form of the lectures reveals a remarkable transitional period from 1976 to 1979 in which Foucault experienced a profound intellectual crisis and began a project of self-criticism, before turning to the more ethical concerns that would characterize his late period.
We may now be in the position to evaluate the intellectual significance of this moment, and venture a guess as to why the ever-prolific Foucault stopped publishing from 1976 to 1983.13 Does the thought that emerges from this period of intellectual crisis and self-criticism bring into focus the insights and limitations of Foucault's earlier attempts to theorize power?Does his emphasis upon problems of statecraft, historical consciousness, and political economy during this period represent a departure from or a culmination of his earlier studies of the internal physiognomy of institutions such as the military, prisons, medicine and psychiatry?
No matter how many college freshmen have their minds blown by a virginal voyage through Foucault's work, his problematic and its familiar constellation of sexy neologisms, "biopolitics," "panopticism," and "governmentality," not to mention the dark atmospherics of a finely-meshed "network of power" in which "there is no outside," have been in circulation for nearly thirty-five years.These terms have accreted a meaning that cannot be found in the original copy. This language and its many political valances - liberal, anarchist, radical - has gone in and out of fashion. The vintage of most "Theory people" can be ascertained from their preferred (or loathed) Foucauldian jargon. Perhaps with some distance from this period, we are now in a position to evaluate his remarkable and oscillating attempts to think politics without recourse to bourgeois conceptualizations of the state, law or rights.His old enemies - psychiatry, universities, prisons, humanism, rights discourse, and the remorseless compulsion to give an account of one's sexuality - have continued to proliferate and expand alongside the growing popularity of his analyses of them.This paradoxical situation arouses the suspicion that these institutions of power are not threatened by the attempt to reawaken the historical memory of their entry into the world, dripping with blood and dirt.In the absence of the social movements that once contested these institutions, Foucault's historical presentation up through the mid 1970s risks becoming a confessed critique, an advanced kind of agitation and propaganda for a struggle that experienced defeat and pyrrhic victories.
This conclusion may be premature, but Foucault admitted as much around the time that he delivered "Mesh of Power" to radical students in Brazil. While editing the final proofs of History of Sexuality, volume 1, Foucault publicly professed to his auditors, as students are called at the College de France, that he was suffering something of an intellectual crisis. In his first lecture of 1976, Foucault begins the course by questioning both the relevance and coherence of his intellectual project. He worries that his research agenda "had no continuity" and was "always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts," ultimately fearing that "it's all leading us nowhere." Characterizing his genealogical method as an "insurrection of knowledges" against "scientific discourse embodied in the University" - and here the attack on his old mentor, Louis Althusser, is barely concealed - Foucault confronts the historicity of his own thought and the shifting cultural status of both the University and Marxism in France. He states that his work "was quite in keeping with a certain period; with the very limited period we have been living through for the last ten or fifteen years." A certain number of "changes in the conjuncture" suggest to him that "perhaps the battle no longer looks quite the same."14
Such sober assessments give one pause. Discipline and Punish had just been published the previous year to great acclaim following an intense period of activism around prisons in France. The activities of the Prison Information Group (Groupe d'information sur les prisons, GIP) brought about successful reforms of France's sentencing practices and penal system by fomenting an unprecedented wave of prison strikes, forcing the apparatus to become more open and transparent. In autumn of 1971, twenty prisons across France simultaneously exploded into open revolt against their cages and masters.
The success of the GIP was due in large part to the fact that many of its agitators had themselves been imprisoned for political activities - thus the criminalization of revolutionary activity by the French state wound up politicizing crime.15 In a curiously Maoist adaptation of the tradition of worker's inquiries, the GIP smuggled surveys to prisoners to discover weak points in the system and find out what demands they would make for their reform or abolition. Prisoners forced analogous reforms in the US, due to the resistance and litigation of members of the Nation of Islam who established an unprecedented jurisprudence pertaining to prisoner's rights in the 1970s.16 During this era, French prisons permitted no visitors, unlike American prisons, and remained something of an information black hole. Foucault first visited a prison while in the US; he toured the Attica Correctional Facility following its uprising and repression.
Due to his growing popularity, Foucault's public lectures had become so uncomfortable and over-crowded as to permit little exchange or contact with students.Politically, the heady days of post-68 French ultra-gauchisme and "new social movements" had begun to wane. The milieu with whom Foucault had organized and demonstrated in the early seventies began to dissolve. Some of these Maoist comrades became the nouveaux philosophes, celebrity academics preoccupied with totalitarianism or theological concerns, citing Foucault himself as their inspiration. The Stalinized Marxism of the French Communist Party (Partie communiste francaise, PCF) had also begun to decompose. The PCF had entered an alliance with Francois Mitterand's new Socialist Party, (Partie socialiste, PS), signing a common programme in 1973. The PCF abandoned all references to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and was forced to reevaluate the legacy of Lenin during the 1976 firestorm surrounding the French publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which detailed the abuses of the Soviet Union's forced labor system.The alliance between the PCF and PS would propel Mitterrand into the presidency in 1981.All of this amounted to a tectonic shift in the intellectual and political terrain of the post-68 Left in France.
The conjuncture coming to a close in the mid-1970s had opened with the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, which did more to negate than construct a field of politics and intellectual activity in France - Sartre, de Beauvoir and Les temps modernes were exceptions in this regard. Reports of the brutality and torture of the gendarmes were a major blow to the tradition of la Republique and its supposedly universal values.17 Following the 1957 Battle of Algiers, 1958 coup d'etat and military junta in Algeria, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and Charles de Gaulle's return to the head of a much strengthened executive power, the non-Communist left was arguing that the Communist and Socialist parties had failed to use their moral and political high ground following the resistance to Nazi occupation to establish a clear direction and program. According to this view, they no longer represented the historical interests or consciousness of the French working class. Citing the astonishingly low union membership in France and the wildcat strikes of '53 and '55, Andre Giacometti writes that "[t]he bulk of the workers is unorganized, and the real life of the working-class takes place outside of their scope."18 Spontaneity was, in keeping with long-standing political legacy of French radicalism, still the nation's only revolutionary hope. Sartre and other members of the non-Communist left saw the party's support of the Soviet Union's intervention in Hungary and the party's tacit endorsement of the Algerian War as evidence of either a conservative turn in the traditional French working class or a reformist and integrationist turn of its official political organs, or both. Many intellectuals of the non-Communist left no longer considered "the Party" to be a revolutionary subject. In this regard, Althusser was the exception.
The rapid expansion of the university system during the postwar economic and demographic boom, along with opposition to the Vietnam War, had established a new political actor that would become essential to the struggle in 1968: youth in general, and students in particular. An increasingly educated population created an historically unprecedented market for cultural journalism, which lent non-party intellectuals greater power and influence.The non-party Marxist tradition in France, as represented by the work of Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International, had reached the conclusion that revolutionary agitation would have to outflank established unions and parties if it was to galvanize the population.
Decolonization struggles and political breakthroughs in the Third World, above all China and Cuba, led to significant revisions of the theory of revolution.Regis Debray published Revolution in the Revolution in 1967, proposing foquismo- a viral theory of how an armed revolutionary vanguard could distribute hotbeds of discontent throughout a population, fomenting a general fever of insurrection - based on the Che Guevara's experience of guerrilla warfare during the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Beneath the banner of a "revolution in everyday life" and a renewed emphasis upon the concept of alienation, Marxism became a theoretical home for new social movements. The events of May 1968 dovetailed these already existing political currents.
After May-June 1968, the revolution was no longer considered a matter of contesting the ownership of the means of production alone. State-managed capitalism was not a solution to the social problems identified by the new revolutionaries. The division of labor, and especially the authority structure of managers, union bosses, inspectors, and functionaries in place to keep workers in line had to be contested.
In the pages of Les temps modernes, Andre Gorz interpreted May '68 as demonstrating the revolutionary horizon in Western Europe, and blamed its failure on the PCF and CGT. Les temps modernes undertook an explicit critique of Leninism from 1969 to 1971 and attacked institutions from a radical democratic perspective, exhorting its readers to "destroy the University" as part of the struggle against the division of labor. Not only the abode of production, but also those superstructural apparatuses that reproduce racial and class divisions, create divisions of labor, support traditional roles for women, and prop up citizen/non-citizen distinctions had to be assaulted.19
The extra-parliamentary politics of the extreme Left of this period were announced by the 1969 text Vers la guerre civile (Towards Civil War), by individuals who would later found the Gauche proletarienne. May '68 had, according to this view, "placed revolution and class struggle at the center of every strategy. Without playing the role of prophet: Revolution is France's horizon from '70 to '72"; the conditions of possibility for such a struggle were identified as the "the proletarianization of the mass movement."20 Vers la guerre civile emphasizes the exemplary use of illegal direct action, the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, and the strategic importance of the division of labor for the maintenance of discipline and hierarchy. Armed struggle is invoked as the radical legacy of the French working class's resistance to Nazi occupation.21
The text provided a programme for the Gauche proletarienne (Proletarian Left, 1968-1973) which was considered "a greater threat to state security than any other left-wing group" by the head of the renseignements generaux (General Intelligence).22 With groupuscules scattered throughout France, theirs was a politics that combined voluntarism, radical democracy and spontaneity. The new figures of this revolution were the immigrant worker, ouvrier specialise, and prison inmate. Imprisonment, state repression, and union bureaucracies were the forces that had, in the terminology of this grouping, "proletarianized" the mass movement. The French state banned the sale of Gauche proletarienne's broadsheets in public spaces, which led to an engagement with intellectuals of the non-communist left. Daniel Defert joined and invited Foucault to participate in this group's activities. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Foucault and other public intellectuals were asked to continue distribution of the broadsheets on the assumption that the Republic would not arrest its lumieres. Indeed, distribution continued unmolested. Foucault's collaboration with Gauche proletarienne eventually resulted in the founding of the Prison Information Group.
As history would have it, the warm afterglow of May '68 in France turned out to be "a stillborn revolution - what should have been the turning point of its modern history that, as in 1848, failed to turn."23 Reflecting on this period with his characteristic wit, Foucault's 1976 course hinges on an inversion of Clauswitz's famous aphorism that war is politics continued through other means, by tracing the genealogy of the view that "politics is a continuation of war by other means."Although the theme immediately recalls the prevailing political language of a period of extreme left militancy, Foucault has deeper philosophical and historical problems in mind. In the discourses of the 17th and 18th century aristocracy and revolutionary bourgeoisie, he attempts to track the entry of race and class war into historical reflection, articulating the central paradox of the "theory of right" within which modern political struggles from the French Revolution to contemporary human rights discourse become intelligible. Rights talk always appeals to an imaginary history of ancient privileges which, Foucault suggests, erect a whole series of distinctively modern political oppositions between the individual and society.
Historical thought is thus politically useful to struggles over governmental priorities and reciprocal obligations only to the extent that it emphasizes one of two discursive paradigms. On the one hand, the conceptualization of politics as war privileges the moment of struggle, the moment of domination: "what is being put forward as a principle for the interpretation of society and its visible order is the confusion of violence, passions, hatreds, rages, resentments, and bitterness."24 On the other hand, one may privilege the moment of universality and peace, the founding of cities and laws, according to which all history would be nothing other than praise of Rome. Foucault considers these to be the reactionary and liberal discourses of history - here "reactionary" in the strict sense of reaction to an ascendant bourgeois liberalism - reaching their highest philosophical articulations in Hegel and Kant respectively, a struggle for recognition or perpetual peace.25 This dilemma and its bloody 20th century history of national conflict and state racism is, according to Foucault, the reef upon which the concept of power as domination, repression, and war comes to grief.
Thus, Foucault returns to pre-Marxist theorists of class struggle - the Diggers, Henri de Boullainvilliers and Abbe Siyes - to show that the rhetoric of class war has certain genealogical affinities with pre-scientific and aristocratic theories of race. The later crystallization of scientific theories of race also have, as their immediate antecedent, certain 19th century pseudo-scientific racializations of lower classes.26 Instead of a "war-repression schema" Foucault calls for a theory of political power as essentially "productive," that is as a set of techniques for regulating human populations and making bodily comportment more efficient. The lectures from 1976 culminate in an analysis of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the forced labor system of the USSR as productive deployments of the power to manage populations. It is an attempt to demonstrate the continuity of these politics with those of the Enlightenment project: what establishes their common ground and provides a grid of intelligibility for this history is not, as in the Frankfurt School, the "rational irrationality" of capitalism; it is rather the phenomenon of population, as the living substratum of capital accumulation and modern political power.
After a year-long sabbatical in 1977, during which time Bernard-HenriLevy and Andre Glucksmann take to the airwaves and television screens promoting their books La barbarie a visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face, 1977) and Les maitres penseurs (The Master Thinkers, 1977) with totalitarianism-mongering, Foucault's lectures change course. This is also the year of Foucault's reportage on the Iranian Revolution. He becomes increasingly circumspect regarding his earlier descriptive language. He explicitly abandons his claim that ours is a "disciplinary society" in 1978, arguing that power now operates through more subtle liberal techniques promoting freedom of various kinds.27 He abandons the words "biopolitics" and "biopower" after the 1979 course, and concludes that they were nothing other than an attempt to grasp "'liberalism'... as a principle and method of the rationalization of the exercise of government, a rationalization which obeys - and this is what is specific about it - the internal rule of maximum economy."28 Perhaps after cultural revolution and de-industrialization, the factory discipline no longer provided the blueprint for power in advanced capitalist societies.
Future French editions of Discipline and Punish will quietly remove the phrase "carceral archipelago," no doubt because Foucault wished to distance himself from the gulagism of Glucksmann and Levy. His lectures turn to an account of the historical emergence of the concept of raison d'etat and political economic thought as practical and reflective schemas for the "art of government" in the 17th and 18th centuries. He returns to the classics of political economy in order to make a remarkable analysis of Quesnay's Tableau economique, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the birth of neoliberalism. At times he seems to address himself directly to the nouveaux philosophes, confronting a caricature of his own thought on "security": he criticizes right- and left-wing "state phobia" as eliding, "thanks to some play on words," the difference between social security and concentration camps; "the requisite specificity of analysis is diluted."29 The lectures then veer into an analysis of the various regimes of truth-telling among the early Christian desert fathers and conclude with an analysis of the practice of Parrhesia among the ancient Greeks, before Foucault's project and life are suddenly cut short by AIDS in 1984. The above intellectual history suggests that, following his intellectual crisis and the closure of certain political horizons in France, Foucault refused to provide a unified political philosophy and turned to more explicitly "Marxist" themes when Marxism was being equated with barbarism and had became unfashionable for public intellectuals.
Foucault's Concept of Power and its Relation to Marx
In the wake of the May '68 uprising, the French ultra-left attempted to circumvent the Communist Party as the vehicle for the transformation of society, and sought to displace the state-capital nexus of classical political theory by proposing a radically expansive revolutionary subject. Foucault's thought from the early 1970s attempts to capture these disparate and contradictory political currents with a concept of pouvoir, or "power," which he claims to have developed out of the work of Bentham and Marx. This "power" posits the biological and social phenomenon of population and the physical movements of the human body not only as the economic substrate of production, but also the political ground of contention and neutralization. These kinds of knowledge, or general intellect - interventions in the collective social and biological metabolism, a Newtonian analytics of bodily comportment, movement and habitus - make possible wholly unprecedented kinds of political intervention, new forms of social engineering and control, that create a productive machine out of human multiplicity, a multiplicity previously wasted by political power.30 Foucault is trying to think about how a modern political field, different from absolutism, forms, takes shape, and allows for capital accumulation to take place, while undercutting worker militancy by providing the proletariat with "security" (Polizewissenschaft) - i.e., modest reforms that increase life expectancy, encourage family life, and so on. This thought implies that Marx abandoned the classical political economists' formulations of the problem of population, only to rediscover the phenomenon of population as class struggle and labor-power.Although this political-economic conceptualization of "power" responds to Foucault's particular conjuncture of renewed interest in Marx, and the demand made by new social movements for a more expansive model of the revolutionary subject, it is not reducible to such.
By conceiving of a properly capitalist political modernity in terms of the productive management of human populations and bodies, Foucault strategically returns to Marx in order to short circuit the tendency of bourgeois thought - and of many Marxists, for that matter! - to reify the "state apparatus" by conceiving of power in vulgar terms of property ownership, seizure of property and alienation.This is, according to Foucault, a profoundly anthropomorphic conceptualization of the political field. Political power ultimately appears as a conspiracy of interests which receive representation in the state apparatus; whereas power actually resides in the coordination, circulation, and productive employment of a multiplicity of forces without any "master plan" or inventor.The government of these forces is not provided by some central committee of the ruling class; it is provided by a non-subjective intentionality or abstract compulsion - the principle of "maximum economy," the compulsion to work for someone else to reproduce your life - which provides the political field with a formal unity and principal of intelligibility.
Foucault also returns to Marx in order to neutralize the tendency of many fellow travelers on the Left to conceive of power in terms of suppression, which Foucault considered the political paradigm of an early modern transition to capitalism. He held that both tendencies of thought - power as ownership, power as suppression - ultimately affirmed the liberal model of society according to which "society is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects." To claim such positions for Marx is to abandon his critique of classical political economy and merely "re-subscribes us to the bourgeois theory of power." In the polemical judgement pronounced in "Mesh of Power," these alternate conceptions of power "Rousseauify Marx," as if the social form of capitalism were some contract-based free-association of individuals air-dropped from the heavens, forever abolishing man's more perfect natural state.According to Foucault: "The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an 'ideological' representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called 'discipline.'"31
The above passage immediately recalls Marx's language from the introduction to Grundrisse.32 Foucault is attempting to trace the genealogy of a social form in which commodity relations predominate by grasping the historical specificity of the isolated individuals of exchange. This transformation is not the inevitable outcome of the technological development of the forces of production. Instead, the moment of transition has to be understood as a contingent outcome of a new form of politics, which Foucault calls, again following Marx, "discipline." The relevant passages in Discipline and Punish explicitly cite Marx's discussion of "cooperation" in Capital, volume 1, and his exchanges with Engels about the origins of factory discipline in military discipline. Foucault asks how a tributary sovereign power to levy a tax - on produce, blood, trade, etc. - transitions to a productive economic power generative of surplus. The thread of this thought about the origins of capitalism proper - rather than the origins of mere market exchange - and its careful play on Marxist language can be followed through all of Foucault's published works, though his citations and insinuations are rarely as obvious as they appear in "Mesh of Power" or Discipline and Punish.
Presented very schematically, consider:
1. His analyses of the confinement of paupers and the mad in the same workhouses inMadness and Civilization (1961).
2.His concern for the passage from an analysis of wealth to political economy in The Order of Things.
3. His analysis of the importance of discipline in the development of the forces of production in Discipline and Punish.33
4. His assertion that human life is the real material substrate of an expanding and productive deployment of political power in The History of Sexuality(1976).
5. His very explicit analyses of Physiocratic thought and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Security, Territory, Population (1978).
6. Finally, his presentation of the problem of the political subject of neoliberalism, versus that of classical political economy in The Birth of Biopolitics (1979).
These are not merely incidental passages or asides. They are in fact quite crucial to understanding Foucault's central historical claims; each of them returns us to Marx.
Perhaps generous minds will grant that Foucault was a careful reader of Marx, a scholar who appreciated the latter's enormously significant historical account of the capitalist mode of production. But what would it mean to argue that Foucault's thought expresses some essential underlying political and intellectual affinity for Marx's project - one possibly even deserving of the moniker "Marxist"? There are many dangers to this kind of interpretation. It must be attentive to Foucault's strong political cynicism. It requires a full reconstruction of Marx's thought as well as Foucault's, and there is no space for that discussion here. But this reading strategy faces other objections as well, considering his well known critique of the author-function. Wouldn't calling his thought "Marxist," even granting a bit of ironical distance from such a claim, be to engage in what Jacques Lacan termed "University Discourse," the use of proper nouns, a chain of signifiers in place of actual thought or truth?34
Such an operation may be justifiable in Foucault's own terms. Foucault makes the case in "What is an Author?" that certain founders of discourse, such as Marx and Freud, open up entirely new fields of inquiry, exploding the limits of what is sayable. Foucault considers their thought to be infinitely productive. New applications and transformations of such thought have the quality of "reactivations," for the philosopher avails himself of a new zeitgeist only in order to clear the cobwebs away from old problems.35 Such claims are close to Sartre's argument in the introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason that Marx is the untranscendable horizon of our thought.
The wager of the following is that it is precisely in the spirit of a reactivation of Marx - rather than a faithful recitation of a dead letter, or some more thorough critical reconstruction - that Foucault pursued his historical analyses of power. Foucault's resulting body of work is a testament to just how fruitful or fruitless such an approach may be. Ultimately, we must admit the possibility that his glib dismissals of Marx were facetious. To admit this possibility is to suggest that, by misunderstanding or rejecting Foucault, self-professed Marxists are taking the bait. They risk demonstrating that they haven't understood something essential in their master's discourse.
Although Foucault was under no illusion that he had supplanted Marx, he may have considered himself an inheritor of Marx's project. I quote his words on the subject from a 1978 interview with a Japanese Marxist at length and without comment:
So long as we consider Marxism to be a unity [ensemble] of the forms of appearance of power connected, in one way or another, to the words of Marx [la parole de Marx], then to systematically examine each and every one of these forms of appearance is the least that a man living in the second half of the 20th century could do. Even today we are passively, scornfully, fearfully and interestedly submitting to this power, whereas it's necessary to completely liberate ourselves from it. This must be systematically examined with the genuine sentiment that we are completely free in relation to Marx. Of course, to be free with regards to Marxism does not imply returning again to the source to show what Marx actually said, grasping his words [sa parole] in their purest state, and treating them like the one and only law. It certainly doesn't mean demonstrating, for example, with the Althusserian method, how the gospel [la veritable parole] of the prophet Marx has been misinterpreted. These formal questions are unimportant. However, reconfirming the functional unity of the forms of appearance of power, which are connected to Marx's own statements [la parole de Marx lui-meme], strikes me as a worthy endeavor.36
Political Questions
Three crucial questions are raised by "Mesh of Power." The first concerns Foucault's curious claim that he derives his theory of power, at least in part, from the second volume of Capital. The second concerns "the problem of population" as the concept which gives Foucault's disparate historical studies a thematic unity, despite his protests to the contrary;the problem of population returns us to the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and that of any uncertain contemporary transition out of capitalism.The third concerns his response to the question raised at the very end of the lecture by a female auditor, which will return us to the themes of Foucault's historical conjuncture and the problem of his reception.
1. The question of Capital. Marx's theory of the expanded reproduction of capital is important because he is attempting to describe the unity of disparate social processes. Although market society has anarchic qualities, there is a unity to the social form of production. Marx avoided the deadlocks of classical political economy with the concept of labor-power. Labour, as such, does not circulate on the market. The potential for labor -la force de travail, Arbeitskraft - is what circulates. Labor as force, as potential, as power is exchangeable according to abstract equivalence regardless of its particular uses because the market establishes a concrete minimum standard for its value: the labor necessary to reproduce labor as human life. Hence, "living labour."
Although it is important to maintain a distinction between the two, Foucault unfolds "power," as a category of thought, in a way analogous to Marx's unfolding of the category of "capital" in his theory of expanded reproduction."Capital" is invested in means of production, infrastructure, and the built environment just as "capital" is invested in living labour. Without either circuit, or department, "capital" cannot realize the value crystalized in commodities. This double movement is what differentiates capitalism from mere rent extraction; it is what historically and categorically distinguishes "relative" from "absolute" surplus value extraction. It is the source of capital's periodic, and perhaps terminal, crisis tendencies.
For Foucault, "power" is a unity of both power and resistance. "Power" sustains and guarantees the life of human populations just as "power" is invested in the organization of a factory, the plan for a prison, or the organization of city streets according to a grid.The productive organization of human bodies and populations is a technology, he argues, just as important to the mode of production as the machines whose smooth operation it allows. He gave this term "power" a political significance outside the abode of production, as an alternative to representational theories of political power, but locates the origins of this "power" in the abode of production and in certain early modern military innovations. Accordingly, the divisions set up by the "power" Foucault describes are not reducible to those of class. In the lectures from '78 he argues that political technology of security distinguishes between "essential" and "non-essential" levels of the population in order to determine acceptable levels of risk. That is, Physiocratic reforms pertaining to grain shortages were not attempts to eliminate starvation. They were attempts to use market mechanisms to distribute scarcity within isolated pockets of the population, attempts to protect against mass hunger and scarcity which threatened political instability. The political transformations he isolates - pertaining to sanitation, housing, epidemic disease, insurance, mass immigration, welfare, and so on - emerge quite late in the 19th century, as a result of political reforms and exigencies that had only just begun in Marx's time.
2. The question of population. Genealogy's ability to juxtapose radically different conjunctures enables a thought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism which sheds light on the present moment in a way that other histories cannot. Theorizing the problem of population caused Foucault to revise his earlier claims about power; the concept of "security" represents a return to political economy and a more careful periodization of "discipline" as internal to a transition to a capitalist mode of production, after which discipline is in the service of more liberal arts of government. Foucault locates the epistemic and political break of modernity in the thought of the Physiocrats and their historical role within the French absolutist state. In an attempt to think the radically incommensurable, Foucault poses the following problem: within a largely backwards and populous region of Europe, in which a set of class relations particular to the French absolutist state forestalled the full transition to capitalism until the 19th century, a properly modern political economic theory of agricultural productivity emerges in the 18th century due to a succession of demographic crises which directly threatened monarchical power and created a remarkably polarized political field. However, this new art of economic government 'remained imprisoned...within the forms of the administrative monarchy.'37 The population, according to Foucault, provides a unifying - if not entirely unified - field of practice for the transition from an analysis of wealth to political economy, from natural history to biology, from general grammar to philology.38
I would like to suggest that Foucault calls this new organization of power "security" because he is historically situated at the moment in which the rising post-war demand for housing credit in the United States required the structured financing of mortgage pools in the 1970s: the securitization of debt. Such developments enabled Foucault to venture the hypothesis that the utopian programme of neo-liberalism is not "a super market society, but an enterprise society. "Thus, he conceived of this new phase of capitalist development, inaugurating our own late capitalist era, in terms of a transformation in the management of political danger and market risk.39 In Foucault's final analysis, neo-liberalism is not a reactivation of the practice of laissez faire, for the state must "intervene on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulative role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible... a general regulation of society by the market."40
However, what does Foucault allow us to see about the birth of neoliberalism that prevailing accounts of the crisis of the 1970s in terms of financialization, deindustrialization, and the consolidation of class power fail to bring into view?In unequivocal terms, Foucault asserts: "Neo-liberalism is not Adam Smith; neo-liberalism is not market society; neo-liberalism is not the Gulag on the insidious scale of capitalism."41 For the Marxist tradition, it was the discussion of "commodity fetishism" in Book I of Capital, volume 1,and the infamous "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" from volume 3, which prevented them from grasping the significance of this new form of governmental power. In an analysis of the Frankfurt School, which could be mobilized to criticize contemporary theorists of the grim arcana of "biopower" today, Foucault argues that it was Max Weber's influence that displaced Marx's problematic of the contradictory logic of capital in 20th century Germany. The problem of "the irrational rationality of capitalist society" would - in the wake of Nazism, political exile and the destruction unleashed by the second world war - motivate the Marxists of the Frankfurt School and the ordoliberals of the Freiburg School to criticize the irrational excesses of capitalism, rather than analyzing its forward march through internal contradictions and crises. Foucault concludes that, for both schools, Nazism represented "the epistemological and political 'Road to Damascus'... the field of adversity that they would have to define and cross in order to reach their objective." As for the political outcome: "history had it that in 1968 the last disciples of the Frankfurt School clashed with the police of a government inspired by the Freiburg School, thus finding themselves on opposite sides of the barricades."42 Neo-liberalism and its proponents seem to have emerged - from the barricades and occupations in Berkeley, Paris or Frankfurt - the victor of this historic clash of forces.
In Foucault's view, actually existing socialism represented a hypertrophied rationalization of existing arts of government.It had proposed strong economic and historical paradigms but failed to provide a "reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes and objectives of governmental action."In the absence of a governmental art of its own, Foucault argues, socialism was forced by its historical struggles to connect up with liberalism, on the one hand - as a "corrective and a palliative to internal dangers" - or to a large administrative apparatus and police state, as in the Soviet Union, on the other.43
3. The question of hysterical discourse. Foucault refused hysterical discourse.He said it was simplistic, used by reactionaries, demagogues, and racists, and obscured the important historical questions. In confronting a caricature of his own thought, Foucault had to appeal to Marx. This moment in "Mesh of Power" epitomizes Foucault's intellectual trajectory after the crisis of 1976. Returning to Marx was far more crucial during a reactionary period than during one of revolutionary upheaval.
Like Engels at the close of the 19th century, Foucault spent his final years contemplating early Christian movements and their practices of free love.44 Foucault's response to talk of bathhouse closures in New York, San Francisco, and Montreal was a principled stance rather than the hysterics that characterized the mainstream gay movement's responses. In an interview with Gai pied (Gay Foot) from 1982, Foucault did not require a theory of "heteronormativity" to oppose gay bathhouse closures. It was simply a matter of opposing this extension of police power on principle:
it is necessary to be intransigent, we cannot make a compromise between tolerance and intolerance, we cannot but be on the side of tolerance. It isn't a matter of searching for an equilibrium between the persecutor and persecuted. We cannot give ourselves the objective of winning millimeter by millimeter. On this issue of the relation between police and sexual pleasure, it's necessary to go the distance and take principled positions.45
A Socialist Art of Government
Foucault appropriately considered the "utopian dream" of neoliberalism to be an "enterprise society," a society which treats human life and its risks as income streams. It encourages ownership and guarantees a minimum social safety net in order to prevent the formation of a class in open rebellion against their technocratic masters. Where these soft touches do not work, police power is deployed. Foucault identifies the ideological basis of this political economic system as a "culture of danger," a dark glamor in which the risks of this system provide occasion for a moralizing discourse. This is the stuff of the 24-hour news cycle and Andy Warhol's "superstars." We are now observing this utopian dream come to grief on its own conditions of possibility: the defeat of class struggles of the 1970s and deindustrialization of the West have created a population problem internal to advanced capitalist states analogous to that of the surplus humanity in developing countries.46 This is the political horizon of the Occupy movement, and its professed solidarity with events in Tunis and Egypt is not merely hubris. The Left is once again caught in a tactical stranglehold, forced to defend the most modest of social safety nets - public universities, welfare, pensions etc. - against neoliberal shock therapy.
By returning to Marx's problematic of the population as a central contradiction of capital, Foucault provides insights into our political moment. What happens to power when human life becomes superfluous to the mode of production? The lessons Foucault derives from the experience of the 1970s suggest that such questions will be decided by a struggle, but we need more than just struggle to challenge neoliberalism. We need a new art of government. The conclusion to the above mentioned lecture from 1979 is a challenge to the historical materialist tradition: "the importance of the text in socialism is commensurate with the lacuna constituted by the absence of a socialist art of government."Foucault then asks, "What governmentality is possible as a strictly, intrinsically, and autonomously socialist governmentality?" Doubting that a socialist art of government can be found in the history of socialism or its texts, Foucault concludes: "It must be invented."47 1. Michel Foucault, "Chronology," Dits et ecrits I, 1954-1975, eds. Daniel Defert, Francois Ewald (Paris: Jacques Lagrange, 2001), 42. Translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Walter Benjamin, " On the Concept of History ," (1940). |
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"I'm talking, b***h," comedian George Lopez said to a fan during a recent stand-up show after she rudely expressed opposition to one of his jokes.
Things got heated and disrespectful during a George Lopez stand-up comedy show in Phoenix over the weekend.
Apparently, a woman in the audience was offended by one of Lopez's racially-charged jokes, which sparked a confrontation that led to Lopez calling the woman a "b***h," The Huffington Post reports.
Read More
"There are only two rules in the Latino family. Don't marry somebody black, and don't park in front of our house," Lopez said during his set, to which the woman responded by raising her middle finger to him.
Video footage shows Lopez lost his cool as he began shouting, "Sit your f***ing a** down!"
"I'm talking, b***h," Lopez said during his profanity-laced rant. "Sit your f***ing a** down. You paid to see a show. Sit your a** down. You can't take a joke, you're in the wrong motherf***ing place... So, sit your f***ing a** down or get the f**k out of here."
"You got two choices," he continued. "Shut the f**k up, or get the f**k out. I'll tell you what: I'll make the choice for you. Get the f**k out of here. I'll make the choice for you. Bye. Bye. Bye."
Eventually, the woman and her friends vacated their seats and exited the show.
"Four seats just opened up front," Lopez said upon their departure.
While comedians are often known for making explicit and offensive jokes, racial tensions are extremely high right now. It becomes increasingly difficult to find that type of humor funny when the president of your country is literally signing racist executive orders to keep certain ethnicities out.
Lopez clearly struck a nerve with the woman in the audience, which is understandable given the sensitive subject matter; however, his tirade went way too far.
The woman probably should have just walked out of the show once she got offended instead of using a disrespectful gesture to illustrate her disapproval, but Lopez calling her such a derogatory term for women while continuing to heckle and embarrass her was uncalled for.
His lack of composure actually resembles behavior often shown by President Donald Trump , which is ironic considering that the comedian has previously expressed strong opposition our new POTUS , and even turned down an invitation to perform at his inauguration.
A photo posted by George ???? Lopez (@georgelopez) on Jan 2, 2017 at 2:13pm PST |
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comedian George Lopez said to a fan during a recent stand-up show after she rudely expressed opposition to one of his jokes. |
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Yoriko Gillard in a photo titled Hopes at Steveston. | Photo by Adela Chau
N ikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre is offering KIZUNA: Japanese Culture in English , a program that spans from May to July with varying themes, from language to culture, for everyone to participate in.
L eading the conversation of Japanese culture course at Nikkei's cultural centre, instructor Yoriko Gillard shares what will happen during the workshops and talk about her cultural background. The course starts on May 9 and will focus on creativity. Various activities will be present to encourage participants to discuss cultural aspects of daily life activities in Japan. Everyone is invited, with or without any prior knowledge of Japanese culture or language.
"The May sessions are focused on creativity and I will use many Japanese creative practices, both traditional and contemporary, such as origami , paper making, painting, flower arranging and others to discuss what could be Japanese culture and look at it from different perspectives, environments, experiences, knowledge and heritage," Gillard says.
Gillard is currently a Ph.D student in Language and Literacy Education at UBC and a faculty member at Capilano University and International House Vancouver teaching Japanese language. She is also an artist and poet researching Japanese culture, language pedagogy and human relationships based on a Japanese concept of kizuna , which translates to an affectionate and respectful, reciprocal relationship connecting everyone during times of hardship.
A passion for sharing
G illard has been organizing community events to support earthquake survivors, social activists, educators and cultural professionals in B.C. communities for the past seven years.
"Each time I met with enthusiastic and warm-hearted community leaders and I wanted to learn more about these people who have been working so hard to serve our society outside academy," says Gillard.
On coming to Vancouver to coordinate events, Gillard says that she is grateful to people of B.C. in regards to their help when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.
"I was not directly affected by the disaster but my heart was broken and B.C. communities showed great support for Japan. This moved me and brought up my spirit so I want to share how Japanese people in Japan also feel appreciative about the support they received from the world," she says. "There are many amazing stories that reminded us to respect one another in Japan and showed the world how our kizuna brought us together."
Although Gillard has offered many events including Japanese cultural context to collaborate with Japanese local Taiko groups, various artists, educators, community leaders, and students, this is her first time offering KIZUNA : Japanese Culture in English for anyone who wants to learn about Japanese culture.
"My reason for offering KIZUNA: Japanese Culture is to not only inform my knowledge, but also learn from my attendees," explains Gillard.
Her past experiences in events brings Gillard pleasant memories.
"My experience of organizing events is always a memorable one. I love working with honest and hardworking people," she says.
Interaction at the heart of workshops
G illard often invites artists, poets, community leaders and academic scholars to her events and asks them to let participants interact with them.
"I believe poetry can touch many of our hearts in gentle and sincere ways and this tradition has been an important one in Japan," she says.
Gillard's main philosophy for coordinating events is promoting active interactions with her participants.
"There are so many ways I tried to interact with my participants, as that is my core reason to organize anything in community," says Gillard.
F or more information, please visit www.centre.nikkeiplace.org . |
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Senator Ron Johnson sends a letter to current FBI Director Christopher Wray questioning the surrounding investigative details about how the James Comey (July 5th, 2016) exoneration manuscript was changed and sculpted. ( Full pdf below )
Within the letter Senator Johnson shares the changes that were made to the manuscript, and asks Wray if FBI officials are aware of who made the changes and why. Prior revelations from within an ongoing IG report showed FBI Counterintelligence Agent Peter Strzok participating in both the investigation of Hillary Clinton, and changing some of the manuscript to shape the narrative away from criminal conduct and toward Clinton's favor.
Earlier information showed, via text messages with FBI lawyer Lisa Page , the scope of FBI Agent Strzok's partisan efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election due to his personal political bias. Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe appeared to be coordinating together on the Clinton investigation toward a united outcome. Director James Comey delivered that outcome to the American electorate.
Essentially today Senator Johnson is asking current FBI Director Wray if he is aware of any further FBI officials that would have also participated in this coordinated effort; and what measures Director Wray is taking to look into the 'matter':
WASHINGTON - Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal that then-FBI Director James Comey's draft statement on the Hillary Clinton email probe was edited numerous times before his public announcement, in ways that seemed to water down the bureau's findings considerably.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the FBI on Thursday that shows the multiple edits to Comey's highly scrutinized statement.
In an early draft, Comey said it was "reasonably likely" that "hostile actors" gained access to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account. That was changed later to say the scenario was merely "possible."
Another edit showed language was changed to describe the actions of Clinton and her colleagues as "extremely careless" as opposed to "grossly negligent." This is a key legal distinction.
Johnson, writing about his concerns in a letter Thursday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, said the original "could be read as a finding of criminality in Secretary Clinton's handling of classified material." ( read more )
Recent alarming information surrounding the politicization of the FBI and DOJ:
Release #1 was the Agent Strzok and Attorney Lisa Page story ; and the repercussions from discovering their politically motivated bias in the 2015/2016 Clinton email investigation and 2016/2017 Russian Election investigation.
Release #2 outlined the depth of FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page's specific history in the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton to include the changing of the wording ["grossly negligent" to "extremely careless"] of the probe outcome delivered by FBI Director James Comey.
Release #3 was the information about DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr being in contact with Fusion GPS at the same time as the FISA application was submitted and granted by the FISA court; which authorized surveillance and wiretapping of candidate Donald Trump; that release also attached Bruce Ohr and Agent Strzok directly to the Steele Dossier .
Release #4 was information that Deputy Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was an actual contract employee of Fusion GPS , and was hired by F-GPS specifically to work on opposition research against candidate Donald Trump. Both Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr are attached to the origin of the Christopher Steele Russian Dossier.
Release #5 was the specific communication between FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page. The 10,000 text messages that included evidence of them both meeting with Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to discuss the "insurance policy" against candidate Donald Trump in August of 2016.
August 15, 2016 , FBI Agent Strzok tells FBI Lawyer Lisa Page:
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office that there's no way he gets elected - but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
What do you think the odds are that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will not show up next week in front of the House Judiciary Committee?
If he does indeed show up, that's probably the one congressional hearing this year that will be well worth watching live. |
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Will Oremus finds the prospects of geoengineering " terrifying " and supports "taking some more reasonable steps while we still have the chance." That chance is long past. It is far too late to worry only about reducing carbon emissions. If we care about defending fertile, densely populated low-lying lands and cities, we must turn immediately to geoengineering as well. Whether through solar reflectivity, for example cloud seeding and amplification, or through permanent and stable carbon sequestration (solids, not gases), or through other means, we have to do something . Some geoengineering ideas are indeed terrifying, but others are not. Just like the accelerated Manhattan and Apollo Projects, we will necessarily risk billions in dead ends along the way, but the financial savings and the defense of our lands are well worth it. |
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October 20, 2015 ( UnmaskingChoice ) -- Many people are looking for some encouragement after the election last night of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada. But for those who care about the moral fabric of our country, there's not much to be had. In all likelihood, the next four years are going to bring many setbacks to the pro-life and pro-family movement in Canada, and hopefully the huge numbers of Canadians who didn't show up to the polls, and even larger number of Canadians who have checked out of the culture wars, will realize what happens when we decline to fight for the country we believe in. In short: that country gets remade by those with radically different views. Here are just four things we can expect from Trudeau's tenure:
1. It's hard to make things worse when it comes to abortion in Canada--we haven't had a law restricting abortion since 1988. But Justin Trudeau will certainly try. He's already indicated that he would fund abortion overseas , and push to make sure abortion is more easily accessible in places like Prince Edward Island. Add to that the majority of Members of Parliament being either hardline pro-abortion or being forced to vote that way by Mr. Trudeau, and it won't be an easy four years for the pro-life movement.
2. A Trudeau Administration will usher in the legality of euthanasia--with the Supreme Court of Canada having overturned our laws against it in the Carter Case, the House of Commons, now dominated by Trudeau's Liberals, will have the chance to pass their own laws on euthanasia. The Liberal Party endorsed the decriminalization of euthanasia almost unanimously in 2014, only wanting some oversight of how doctors kill their patients. The motion was sponsored by Liberal delegate Wendy Robins, who has managed to create a version of the facts in which the Belgium euthanasia model-- already being used by perfectly healthy people --is not a dangerous one. For the record, Belgium allows the euthanizing--read "killing"-- of children , and there are already Belgian doctors pushing for the widespread acceptance of "involuntary euthanasia --read "killing of people who don't want to be killed." Canadian hospitals--especially with a rapidly aging population and a very strained and over-crowded healthcare system--are about to get very dangerous for the elderly and the vulnerable.
3. There is a very real danger that the brilliant legislation the Conservative Party passed against prostitution, based on the Nordic model of targeting pimps and johns, may get repealed by Justin Trudeau's new Liberal majority. Legalized prostitution has been a disaster wherever it has become established, with the victimization of women and girls and the flourishing of organized crime and human trafficking always figuring prominently in the equation. In Amsterdam's infamous Red Light District, for example, over 60% of sex workers report getting sexually assaulted, and even the brothels strenuously outfitted to avoid such events place panic buttons where the girls and women can immediately reach them. Amsterdam has been forced to shut down their prostitution district several times because they can't control the organized crime that legal prostitution inevitably attracts. This could very well come to Canada--with a majority, nothing is stopping Justin Trudeau.
Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE !
4. Trudeau will pull Canada out of the ongoing bombing mission against ISIS, as he's been promising for months. It boggles the mind that a leader could look at the blood-soaked orgy of crucifixion, torture, rape, and murder going on in Iraq and conclude that Canadian forces should do nothing to stop them. Trudeau musters more outrage about the meaningless niqab debate than he does about the ISIS butchers. He won't do anything to stop Christians and Yazidis in Iraq from filling body-bags, but he'll support your right to wear one in Canada. And while Trudeau is fully confident in his ability to face Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, that idea literally made the audience at the Munk debates roar with laughter. Now, it seems, the joke is on us.
There are solutions to many of these problems, although they will be much more difficult under a Liberal government. The vast majority of Canadians, at the end of the day, have never been exposed to a pro-life perspective, or shown what the reality of abortion is. The vast majority of Canadians have been slowly-but-surely backing euthanasia for years, without any widespread attempt at educating them on the results of this. The case against legal prostitution is air-tight, but it will have to be made, again and again, by those who fight tirelessly against human trafficking. The Canadian people proved last night that we have an enormous amount of work to do. Today is a good time to start.
And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.--Galatians 6:9
Reprinted with permission from CCBR . |
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Many people are looking for some encouragement after the election last night of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada |
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By J. White and R. White Chicago
Lamont Lilly
A Workers World forum celebrating Black History Month was held at Malcolm X College in Chicago on Feb. 7. The forum called for an end to the war on youth, including racist police terror and low-wage slavery.
Lamont Lilly from the Workers World Party branch in Durham, N.C., made opening remarks that engaged students in a lively discussion of what circumstances currently exist for youth of color, and all youth in poor and working-class communities. He tied together the current lack of jobs and support for students with the violence perpetrated by the police.
One student spoke at length about a recent incident with police involving a profiled stop and search of her car. This has resulted in felony charges against her, seizure of her car and costly legal expenses. She is a daycare worker who had not been paid in a month because Illinois ran out of Daycare Action funds. This was a perfect example of how police harassment of young people of color, trying to work low-wage jobs and go to school, have their lives thrown into financial and legal chaos.
Abayomi Azikiwe
Tommy Cavanaugh from "Fight Imperialism, Stand Together" (FIST) in nearby Rockford, Ill., spoke about the struggle of low-wage youth workers and the need for a livable minimum wage. He documented the current plight of young workers of color and the undocumented. The extremely low pay of this workforce lowers wages for workers in general, so solidarity and unionization of all workers is most important.
Abayomi Azikiwe from Detroit, the editor of Pan African News Wire and a contributing editor to Workers World newspaper, couched the current struggle against police terror within the history of the Black Liberation Movement. He traced the teaching of Malcolm X from his departure from the Nation of Islam to the formation of the Organization for Afro-American Unity and his goal to build a movement that included recognition of internationalism.
Kye K from Malcolm X College encouraged students to get involved in the current "Black Lives Matter" activities. She talked about the inspiration that becoming politically active has brought to her life. The meeting was followed by a lively discussion with many comments from the audience.
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A Workers World forum celebrating Black History Month was held at Malcolm X College in Chicago on Feb. 7. |
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Donald Trump is desperately trying to distract from the Trump-Russia bombshell he knows is about to land
January 13, 2018
Donald Trump was handed a gimme today. He dropped the ball, fell down, and passed out.
January 13, 2018
The real reason Trey Gowdy just resigned from a key House committee
January 13, 2018
Donald Trump goes off deep end about stupid nonsense while ignoring Hawaii crisis
January 13, 2018
The latest blatant sign that Donald Trump is senile
January 13, 2018
Mike Pence just gave away his strategy to try to save himself in the Trump-Russia scandal
January 13, 2018
Donald Trump faked a letter from a doctor and a porn star on the same day
January 13, 2018
Donald Trump liked visiting Russia because "the girls have no morals"
January 13, 2018
Robert Mueller takes possession of even more Donald Trump team laptops and cellphones
January 12, 2018
Donald Trump tried to hire a convicted criminal in newly unearthed plot against President Obama
January 12, 2018
Yet another Donald Trump administration official has been fired and escorted from the building
Donald Trump propositioned three different porn actresses for extramarital sex in the same weekend
Chuck Grassley is full of crap
Donald Trump has faked the results of his physical
Donald Trump's canceled visit to United Kingdom gets even uglier
January 12, 2018
Donald Trump sexually assaulted another porn actress at same event where he had sex with Stormy Daniels
January 12, 2018
Donald Trump's affair with Stormy Daniels provides huge new clue about the Trump-Russia scandal
January 12, 2018
Lindsey Graham, already knee deep in Donald Trump's Russia scandal, pushed to center of Trump's Haiti scandal
January 12, 2018
Dianne Feinstein says Donald Trump's gotta go
Haitian government has accused Donald Trump of money laundering
January 12, 2018
Steve Bannon is now a cooperating witness against Donald Trump
January 12, 2018
Donald Trump gives away that he thinks he's been nailed on Russia
Haiti government unloads on Donald Trump
Donald Trump has late night Twitter meltdown after "shithole" incident
January 12, 2018
Don Lemon rips into racist Donald Trump, then throws Trump apologist off the air
January 11, 2018
Donald Trump, deep in panic mode, forced to cancel overseas trip
January 11, 2018
Donald Trump's new Wall Street Journal interview reveals he's even further gone than we thought
January 11, 2018
The marathon effort to take down Donald Trump finally turned a corner today
January 11, 2018
Mike Pence tries an end-around with Robert Mueller
January 11, 2018
Donald Trump slips up and makes bizarre admission about his antics with Kim Jong-Un
January 11, 2018
Donald Trump's "shithole countries" remark and the big Trump-Russia bombshell
Donald Trump's most deranged day yet
Donald Trump has profane racist meltdown about immigrants
Donald Trump hits the panic button
Vladimir Putin publicly humiliates Donald Trump
Donald Trump goes off the deep end yet again
Steve Bannon is cutting a deal with Robert Mueller
Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions are suddenly obsessed with prison |
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Revolution #518 November 20, 2017
November 18 Protests Around the Country: Breaking the Silence and Bringing the Noise to Say: "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!"
November 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Saturday, November 18, people in cities across the country answered the call from Refuse Fascism to "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise!" With rallies and marches, they brought out the message: This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
As the call for the day said:
RefuseFascism.org is calling on everyone who can be united to sound the alarm and break the silence. What is the silence we are breaking? The silence of normalization and accommodation, of people going along with their lives as Trump escalates war threats, as immigrants are detained and deported, as everyday fascism is advanced.
What is the noise we are bringing? We'll be waking up and calling forward all those who burn with outrage at this regime but don't yet know of this movement. We will march to a beat with a determination that this regime will not destroy humanity and the planet. Pots and pans, drums and buckets, whistles and our voices.
On this page are photos and video clips from November 18, giving a picture of some of what happened that day. Stay tuned this week for more in-depth coverage of November 18 actions.
Boston, MA
Counter-protest against white supremacists at the Boston Commons, Boston, Nov 18, 2017
"Nazi scum you can't hide, you support genocide" #BostonProtest pic.twitter.com/1bGfYohWQH -- Bay State Herald (@BayStateHerald) November 18, 2017
"Nazi scum you can't hide, you support genocide"
New York City
"Trump is coming for everyone... group after group." #TrumpPenceMustGo pic.twitter.com/giGlsCM6nf -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Washington Square Park, New York City-- "Trump is coming for everyone... group after group."
NYC: Get in the streets with us! March with us. Bring pots, pans, drums, whistles anything noisey! #TrumpPenceMustGo pic.twitter.com/rqzy4SKzMd -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Marching through the streets of New York City-- "NYC: Get in the streets with us! March with us. Bring pots, pans, drums, whistles anything noisey!"
Out in front of the New York Times "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity." https://t.co/y8URUbAVLi pic.twitter.com/w3Di1g5oOS -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Out in front of the New York Times-- "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity."
Chicago, IL
The weather won't stop us from bringing the noise #TrumpPenceMustGo #Chicago pic.twitter.com/J4lNnQwP6Q -- RefuseFascismCh (@RefuseFascismCH) November 18, 2017
"The weather won't stop us from bringing the noise." The crowd defiantly jumped and danced in the deep puddles on the plaza of the State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago.
Los Angeles, CA
In the streets of Downtown Los Angeles. People came with their own noisemakers--pots, pans, drums, kazoos, a trumpet, and more. (Above and below)
San Francisco, CA
We got a drum Corps with a xylophone and were starting the rally at SF Civic Center. #BreaktheSilence #BringTheNoise #trumppencemustgo pic.twitter.com/bfH301iFzN -- RefuseFascismSF (@SFRefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
In San Francisco, people rallied in front of City Hall and then marched through the Castro and Mission districts to Dolores Park. (Above and below)
Austin, TX
Among the chants in Austin: "If you hate Trump, if you hate Pence, get your ass up off the fence! Join us, join us, join us, NOW!"
No Ban No Wall The Trump Regime has got to go! #TrumpPenceMustGo #IndivisibleResistance @eyes2future pic.twitter.com/bHvE6kh9ud -- TheGrandDaddyPurple (@The_GDP_) November 19, 2017
A new chant that developed on the spot: "Wake Up America/Get Out of Bed/Dump Donald Trump/Before We're All Dead!"
Tucson, AZ
Cleveland, OH
In the cold and heavy rain, people broke the silence and brought out the noise with bucket drums and amplifier that was heard for blocks!
Honolulu, HI
Boston: A Day of Bringing the Noise Against Fascism and White Supremacy
From a reader:
On November 18, 30 activists rallied at Copley Square as part of actions taking place around the country to "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise! This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!" They heard speakers from Refuse Fascism; Academics Against Fascism; and others, including Carl Dix, an initiator of Refuse Fascism and a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party; Joel Feingold from Refuse Fascism; and a statement from the Reverend Rob Mark of the Church of the Covenant. Dozens of passersby stopped and a number signed up with Refuse Fascism on the spot. Afterwards the rally was led in a boisterous march through downtown Boston by a contingent of the Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians accompanied by homemade drums, cowbells, and whistles.
Chanting "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA," the march joined with a rally at the Boston Commons called by Fight Supremacy 2.0. This rally of 1,000 people was countering a white supremacist, neo-fascist "Rally for the Republic" called by Resist Marxism that drew 40-50 people with massive protection by hundreds of police. The fascists have tried various tactics after Charlottesville to re-brand themselves--as a free speech movement, as against Marxism, and claiming that they are not white supremacists--but fascist groups that are openly so came in from around the country to make a showing, as they have in liberal cities like Berkeley and Boston. People were not bamboozled and came out in strength to expose and firmly oppose them.
A very diverse turnout of mostly young people, including students from area colleges, made up the bulk of the very defiant crowd at this counter-protest. MCs from the Black Lives Matter movement led people to chant and bring on the motherfucking noise that drowned out the fascists' sound system. People heard from speakers who urged them to come out in opposition to white supremacist attacks in Boston and elsewhere. Bands of white supremacists roamed through the crowd of protesters looking to provoke, and the scene was marked by the revulsion and defiance of those who came out to overwhelm them, and disciplined monitoring by Veterans for Peace, anti-fa and others.
Carl Dix was invited by Fight Supremacy 2.0 onto the makeshift stage, a park bench, and he drew a rousing response when he called out those at the Rally for the Republic as shock troops being unleashed by the Trump/Pence regime to hammer fascist rule into place in this country. And again when he called on the young people at the counter-protest to bring their spirit of defiance into the movement to drive the Trump/Pence regime from power, before it's too late. People at the rally grabbed up flyers being distributed by those who marched in the Refuse Fascism contingent and got connected with the movement to drive the Trump/Pence regime from office.
The day as a whole met a test that Boston will not tire and will not allow these fascists to take hold of the public square--and of people broadly uniting and putting petty sectarian agendas aside to accomplish this.
New York City
Refuse Fascism started the day in Washington Square Park. The entire time people were chanting and banging on pots and pans creating a ruckus that broke the silence. About half the crowd was young people. People from different parts of the country that happened to be in NYC were attracted by the energy of the march and the message of breaking the silence of normalization. Two high school students from Las Vegas that we met in the park, and their family, joined the march and carried the banner for most of the march. They were inspired by the high school student walkout in LA and were excited about organizing some things in their school. A student from Albany came all the way just to join the march. He came despite the fact that his friends didn't.
Among those who joined in were a young Australian dancer who was VERY energized and a young college student from out of town, who marched with us all the way to the New York Times . Throughout the march, we chanted, "March with us, march with us, march with us, cuz Trump and Pence must go!" The Times Square area along 42nd Street was very congested with tourists and Black people from NYC. Many gave a thumbs up or the fist and took copies of the Refuse Fascism call, "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!"
A high point of the march was at the end. We marched to the New York Times offices to deliver a letter requesting that they cover the Refuse Fascism protests that they have consistently whited out. Instead of taking the letter, they called the police that had been with the march the entire time to come inside. Afterwards, JW Walker of the Steering Committee of Refuse Fascism-NYC spoke to the crowd outside about why we were there to request they cover the Refuse Fascism protests: "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity."
People gathered making lots of raucous and wonderful noise with drums, buckets, pots and pans, bells, and a variety of handheld instruments. "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise!" rang out in a cacophony of sound, all this in the midst of a wind, rain, and temperatures dipping into the 30s. The crowd seemed unfazed by the weather as they defiantly jumped and danced in the deep puddles on the plaza of the State of Illinois Building (the Thompson Center) in downtown Chicago.
Among them were a high school student, a young woman in her 20s, a Native American LGBTQ activist, blues harmonica player Matthew Skoller, another Refuse Fascism activist, and a member of the Revolution Club. As we marched through the Loop, our numbers began to grow. People who came late joined us, as did many people from the downtown streets, especially young people. Bystanders clapped and cheered and filmed as we passed. At intersections the march would stop and people were called to join in.
A suburban high school teacher came with several students. Three young Latinos who had been at the march on November 11 returned this week. One had gotten a copy of Revolution newspaper last week and asked if she could volunteer with the paper and is now doing that. Three Latino high school students, with joyous looks on their faces, joined as we approached Trump Tower. When someone asked if one of them wanted a sign, she responded YES!, took it, and started jumping up and down with it. When asked why they joined one responded, "Because we feel like Trump should be gone." Another said, "I joined because we need to protest for our rights."
A Columbia College student said, "I am tired of the way things are going and this is the best way to do it now. You know we can't let fascism take over America. I had been normalized, you know what I mean, but now I am waking up." Students from suburban Elmhurst College joined the march--several belonged to the Queer Straight Alliance. A young woman scientist said she got involved with Refuse Fascism through social media and the internet. She said she had gone to the Women's March and Science March and, "I just felt like I had to make a presence and Refuse Fascism is one of the most consistent and persistent of these organizations."
We wound up at the entrance to the Trump hotel. A short final rally was held there. At that rally jazz drummer and composer Ted Sirota said, "Everybody, you have an assignment. You joined the march, you gotta take a task, whether it is getting out flyers, mobilizing at your school, spreading on social media, we have a specific role for you to play. Everybody and their little brother and sister and their grandmother and cousins, when you go home for Thanksgiving, talk to your family, speak the truth to them, don't back down. We know what the truth is and they are attacking it every day. We are going to stand with objective truth and we are going to fight for the future of humanity."
Los Angeles
People rallied and then marched through the streets, bringing the noise that the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! People came with their own noisemakers--pots, pans, drums, kazoos, a trumpet, and more. Speakers at the rally included Luna and Erica from the Refuse Fascism Student Network who gave a shout-out to the Mendez High School students who have walked out twice in their attempt to get rid of the Trump/Pence regime.
Brooke from Indivisible spoke about going on a road trip to Washington, DC, with Refuse Fascism and fighting to end this fascist regime. Magician Mueller and Madame Metoo took to the stage saying, "No more misogyny," and telling people that the way to make Trump disappear was to "hit the streets." Bo, an Iraq war vet, spoke for Refuse Fascism. Powerful music was provided by the band Hero Injection. People on the sidewalk were called on to join the march, which several UCLA students did as they were making their way to the LA Coliseum for their rivalry football game against USC. After the march, people took over the street at Pershing Square, where the rally was held for a block party with music and dancing.
San Francisco
People rallied in front of City Hall and then marched through the Castro and Mission districts to Dolores Park. The crowd included students from Cal State, San Luis Obispo, an SF high school drum group, families with their kids in strollers, educators, activists, and revolutionaries. The mood was serious about the urgent need to drive out the regime and enthusiastic about making noise and music. A large, loud sound system helped unleash the spirited rally and march.
Refuse Fascism speakers at the start challenged everyone to step forward to build this movement, and led the crowd to chant, whistle and break the silence! This regime must be driven from power, and we have to bring forward the millions to do it. One RF speaker drew a powerful parallel between the movement that's needed today and the civil rights movement and movement to end the war in Vietnam. People put their lives on hold and on the line to change the world. And that is what we must do now.
In addition to speakers from Refuse Fascism, an immigrant from the Mission organization La Colectiva de Mujeres spoke, along with another activist from the Mission. A representative from SF Indivisible said, "We have a moral imperative to stand up now and say that this man must be impeached. We can't just stand by and let him trample the Constitution and the rule of law." He also read a poem about impeachment. A San Francisco State student who also works with Human Rights Campaign in the Castro told of how the LGBTQ community is fearful: "I can't express how important this is for our community in particular, to get the Trump administration out of the White House so we don't have to fear any more or as much."
And an older man with his homemade sign describing fascism passionately put his thinking this way: "We can't let the people in Washington do to the Muslims what the Germans did to my people 85 years ago. If we don't get the word out there, it's going to be too late."
The group of students from San Luis Obispo came with their own banner--"No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA." One of them said he was there because "we're at over 12 months since Trump was elected and there's a sense of complicity arising among some people and a community of resistance is growing among others.... The media is the ultimate in complicity. The people's complicity is regulated by the media. The Democrats are not the solution. They are just as quiet on so many things. And before Trump they were just as quiet on so many things. We need to be strategic to use the Democratic Party to create the world we want to see but really recognizing the limitations of it. We're here to resist the Trump/Pence regime, to refuse fascism, standing up to the Trump/Pence regime, against fascism." He spoke of how important Refuse Fascism is and how it must grow.
The march took off from City Hall and made its way through the streets to the Mission District. Along the way, many people took up flyers, some joined the march and signed up with Refuse Fascism. Some contributed money on the spot. In the Mission District, the march made it to Dolores Park, packed with people picnicking and socializing. The march went inside the park, chanting and bringing the message of Refuse Fascism to many hundreds of new people right there. The march ended with a short rally in the middle of the park, where a Pence pinata was destroyed by kids.
Austin, Texas
People rallied in front of the Texas state capitol, banging pots and pans, demanding that the Trump/Pence regime must go. Several people who had come out on November 4 came, as well as a couple of students from the University of Texas, Austin. One of them said that she came because she saw the posters up on campus. A number of flyers got out to passersby and tourists. At the capitol, seven zombie reactionaries from Infowars disrupted the rally and provoked confrontations with protesters and one protester was unjustly arrested. Refuse Fascism regrouped, focused on our message and marched towards UT Austin. Infowars seemed to give up trying to provoke us and left. As we marched up the streets, people were mainly positive--cars honking in support, and a few people joining in on the call and response. Outside UT Austin, among our chants was, "If you hate Trump, if you hate Pence, get your ass up off the fence! Join us, join us, join us, NOW!"
People gathered in Thomas Paine Plaza with a banner reading "Drive out the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime--RefuseFascism.org," and with bucket drums, a cowbell, corrugated metal trashcan lids, whistles, dozens of helium balloons with NO! written on them, and other little noisemakers.
Folks spoke from the megaphone. Two spoke very poignantly about the threat of nuclear war and the wars that are being waged, and one spoke mainly to the need for people to start taking action. After initially planning to march on the sidewalk, we took the streets and partially circled City Hall, then went up 15th street and turned onto Walnut, one of the busiest and poshest shopping areas in Philadelphia. Drumming and chanting and stopping to agitate the crowds outside the Apple store, outside a Taylor Girlz concert, and at busy intersections, inviting people to join us in the streets and leading people in taking the pledge. A lot of people joined us in the pledge--we did it three times and each time we had bystanders put their hands in the air and say it with us, while many more stopped and mumbled along under their breath or were silently supportive.
People broke the silence and brought the noise, meeting for a rally at City Hall and marching through the downtown shopping core. One speaker was an elementary school teacher who found Refuse Fascism and felt compelled to speak out because five of her ESL students have fathers who were detained or deported in the last year. She said she felt helpless to stop it as an individual and led everyone in a primal scream of NO! at the end of her words. Another speaker, a Refuse Fascism organizer who is a longtime activist in many important causes and who is now dedicating time and resources to the overarching RF mission, ran down Umberto Eco's 14 features of fascism and examples of each under this regime. Weldon Nisly, retired Mennonite minister and member of a Christian Peacemaker Team to Iraq and Palestine, spoke about how wars are truly a war on children and the power of nonviolent movements to effect change.
Marchers wore rainbow capes, wigs, and umbrella hats and created a cacophony of sound with pots and pans, wooden spoons, native drums, decorated buckets, sound horns, tambourines, and more. Four protesters carried a giant inflated Earth globe while a couple of others traded off wearing a big bobble-head Trump. We stopped at intersections to agitate, get out flyers and collect donations--and make as much noise as possible! New chants that developed on the spot or were brought by new organizers were: "Wake Up America/Get Out of Bed/Dump Donald Trump/Before We're All Dead!" and "This is NOT Normal/Trump Must Go! This is NOT Normal/Pence Must Go!" The marchers took up the orientation and fought to grow the march as we went, but although there were people along the route who clapped, said thank you, and took photos and video, not one person stepped off the curb into the street. This beginning core of people who HAVE decided to actively oppose the Trump regime and the consolidation of fascism are trying to understand what is holding others back from taking that step.
There was a short speak-out after the march. A young man brought to the protest by his stepfather said that after the elections, his and other high schools were at first shocked and silent but then started walking out in protest. He said this needs to be happening every day now and that it's a disgrace that things have gone on this long. A woman from Australia said the people of the world are depending on us, that even though there aren't as many people as we need, we're doing the right thing and need to continue.
In the cold and heavy rain, people broke the silence and brought out the noise with bucket drums and amplifier that was heard for blocks! We were active members of Refuse Fascism, a youth who got involved on November 4, a gay activist and college student, a woman who had first-hand experience with fascism in Germany.
A young Black man watching said to his two friends and us that he voted for Trump. He then said he was joking to try to get a rise out of us! They spoke with deep feeling on what Trump means for Black people and signed up. They took flyers and passed them out, and started chanting, "Fuck Trump, Fuck Trump!" then brought their chant and dance into the rally, uniting it with the rhythm on drum and buckets. With everyone dancing to the beats. Then we took the march into a downtown mall--drumming and shouting to let the shoppers know we will, and they must, break the silence of normalization and conciliation. We went in with a banner and lots of noise. Though we got kicked out by the police, the point was made that "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!" and some people took note. A youth who signed up many people for Refuse Fascism today in the rain said, "I am excited about finally standing up. Other groups sit around and talk. Refuse Fascism is doing something."
People in restaurants put down their forks; people in hotels came to their lanais, and people on the sidewalks stopped to take photos and leaflets. We were so loud that our chants and drumming echoed back to us from the walls of high-rises. All because some of us stepped into the streets to make some noise! The energy was contagious and a few onlookers even started their own chants. On Saturday night we proved that even a small number can make a real difference! Thousands heard us; many thanked us.
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Revolution #518 November 20, 2017
Michael Slate Interviews History Professor Bruce Cumings
What "Everybody Knows" about North Korea--and the Real History of U.S. Aggression
July 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Friday, June 30, after meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Donald Trump once again threatened North Korea with military aggression: "The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed and frankly, that patience is over."
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is an oppressive regime--not a revolutionary socialist state--a reactionary force in the world. For months now, t he fascist Trump/Pence regime has threatened it, saying "all options" are on the table if Kim Jong-un does not end the country's nuclear weapons program. Trump says he wants North Korea to be "dealt with rapidly" and his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says that every option being prepared involves a U.S. military attack. So now there is a real danger of a U.S. military attack, possibly including nuclear weapons, which could lead to the deaths of millions in the region.
The following is from a June 9, 2017 interview with author and professor Bruce Cumings on The Michael Slate Show on KPFK Pacifica radio. The U.S. rulers and media paint North Korea as the aggressor. But as Bruce Cumings reveals, there is a long history of U.S. war, threats and intervention against North Korea.
Revolution /revcom.us features interviews from The Michael Slate Show to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports, and politics. The views expressed by those interviewed are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere by Revolution /revcom.us.
Michael Slate: In your book, Inventing the Axis of Evil, the truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria, you make a point I thought was important for people to understand, which is that the United States terrorized North Korea with nuclear weapons during and after the Korean War, and was the only power to introduce nuclear weapons to Korean soil. So there's a lot that's just unknown by people even as the U.S. puts out all this stuff about how the North Koreans are crazy and they're playing with nukes.
Bruce Cumings: It's a little bit like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where most people, including a lot of liberals, accepted the fact that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator who had WMDs, and there was no real background given; for example, our support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s in the war with Iran.
Then we have a war, and the war goes very badly. It's still a complete catastrophe. And all this history comes out. And if we were to go to war with North Korea, which has seemed closer under the Trump administration than it has been in some time, all of this would come out about the U.S. running an operation called Hudson Harbor in 1951, where B29s dropped dummy atomic bombs on North Korea to see whether they might be useful against troop concentrations and cities. President Eisenhower, toward the end of the war in May 1953, tested one of the largest atomic bombs ever tested, and also shot the first atomic cannon. And this was all put on the front pages of newspapers, and was intended to bring an end to the war and intimidate North Korea and China. And then as you said, in 1958, we installed hundreds of nuclear weapons, battlefield tactical weapons and short-range warheads on missiles, into South Korea. So we're the first ones to introduce nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, and kept them there until 1991, when they were withdrawn on a world scale because the Pentagon felt that precision-guided high explosives, but non-nuclear weapons, would cause fewer problems. You wouldn't have radiation and collateral damage [as you would] from nuclear weapons. So we drew them back.
We drew them back. But you can leave it to Donald Trump to tell you what the North Koreans still face, which is, for example, a Trident submarine, sometimes called Armageddon in one sausage tube. He mentioned that two of our nuclear submarines were off of North Korea last week. This is of course classified information. He's not supposed to say that. He doesn't know that. But the fact is that one of our nuclear submarines, or all of them, could run right up to the North Korean coast and obliterate North Korea in a matter of hours.
Colin Powell back in 1995, which should give your listeners an idea of how long this problem has been going on--it's really 25 years we've been dealing with the North Korean nuclear problem--Colin Powell said if they ever used a nuclear weapon in anger, the U.S. would turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette.
I just want to say one more thing about that. If you imagine North Korea as the Green Team against the Blue Team, rather than the Evil Kim Jong-un with his crazy haircut against the always-perfect United States, you can see what they're up against. It's a small country, and the largest power in the world is constantly threatening it with nuclear annihilation. President Obama did this too. He routinely sent nuclear-capable B1 and B2 bombers over South Korea for exercises. So it's a very dangerous situation, and I think it's incumbent on Americans to put themselves in the shoes of the North Koreans and look at the world that they face, quite apart from all of our media stereotypes about how crazy they are, and how dangerous they are.
Michael Slate: When you want to talk about crazy and dangerous, you say that North Korea would not have had nukes if the U.S. had actually kept its word in the past.
Bruce Cumings: People who follow the situation closely, and high officials in the Clinton administration like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Wendy Sherman, her very close aide on North Korea, have written about this--Bill Clinton nearly struck North Korea with a preemptive attack against their nuclear facility in June 1994. It was only later that people realized, or came to understand, how close we were to a war with North Korea at that time. But Jimmy Carter intervened when he heard about all of this. He flew to Pyongyang and talked directly with Kim Il-sung and got a freeze on all of North Korea's plutonium.
It's very important to underline that that freeze was completely monitored and checked for eight years, 24/7. You had UN inspectors on the ground, closed-circuit cameras watching it at all times. The reactors were sealed. And of course we know with our intelligence when a reactor starts up. So there's no question. The North Koreans didn't have an ounce of plutonium from 1994 to 2002. However, George W. Bush had already put North Korea in his Axis of Evil in 2002. Then in September he announced his preemptive doctrine, for which the euphemism was "anticipatory self defense." And North Korea, along with Iran and especially Iraq, were listed as the countries for which this policy was developed. He then went ahead, of course, to invade Iraq in March of 2003, which was really a preventive war rather than anticipatory self-defense. We don't need to get into this, but Saddam Hussein was actually writing a novel at the time and trying to do everything he could not to provoke the U.S.
After that happened, North Korea just said as openly and loudly as it could, Saddam Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons. If he had had them, he wouldn't have been overthrown. That's not going to happen to us. They got back their plutonium, kicked out the inspectors, and systematically began building atomic weapons, and tested the first one just three years later, in 2006.
I don't think it's a partisan judgment, but a factual statement to say that George W. Bush had two enormous catastrophes on his hands. One is the invasion of Iraq, which basically wrecked the Middle East since 2003. And second, he is the primary person responsible for North Korea getting nuclear weapons. And I think many experts believe that. Madeleine Albright has written about that. But it doesn't get out in the media at all, in part because so many of our people want to say, well, that's six of one, half a dozen of the other. We're not to sound partisan.
Michael Slate: One of the things you talk about is that most recently, the use of agreements, etc., have been kicked to the curb, that there's an assumption that no one has been able to rein in the nuts in North Korea and their nuke program, and it's time to fight or topple. Let's talk about that.
Bruce Cumings: People routinely say that North Korea has always cheated and never has kept to its agreements. And I don't know where they're coming from because it's simply not true. In addition to the plutonium agreement, the freeze and the missile deal, North Korea in 2000 also opened relations with many of our allies. So they have diplomatic relations with Canada and Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy. We're one of the last countries not to have relations with North Korea, still trying to isolate it. But the fact is, North Korea was really reaching out, and then they faced the wall of hostility from Bush.
It is true, that if we continue to intimidate North Korea with nuclear weapons, and bring them into the theater by submarines and air power, anybody in North Korea would get a deterrent. In that sense, the critics of North Korea are right that North Korea, when it felt intimidated over many, many years, eventually developed nuclear weapons. It might have happened anyway. But the fact is we did have agreements with them that kept them from moving to nuclear weapons.
Finally, I would say in response to your question, that the discourse about North Korea under Trump has just been absurd, in that Trump, as I said, talked about our nuclear submarines off the coast. He has threatened North Korea. He's also said he'd like to talk to Kim Jung-un over a hamburger. That might be the better way to go. But he's so erratic, and the one thing the North Koreans notice is the submarines, the two aircraft carrier task forces that are in Northeast Asian waters right now. What Trump has done privately or secretly, or what the Pentagon has done, is just jam a bunch of hardware up against North Korea.
Meanwhile, our press, and that includes not just Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC, are constantly running scare stories about North Korea. I saw on CNN that Ana Navarro, one of their frequent commentators, even referred to Kim by his first name, saying, "Little boy Un is a maniac." She probably thought that was his last name. But that's the level of discourse that we've had about North Korea under Trump.
Michael Slate: You've also made a point, and I think this is really important, that there's a whole different perception of the problem, the source of danger, in relation to nukes in Korea. There's an epistemology that is always bad no matter when it's used, which is based on "everybody knows." And that is a very dangerous thing in relation to this. In reality there's a long history, as you've been saying, of nuclear threats against North Korea itself. In fact, the U.S. has recently installed the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea. Let's talk about those two things.
Bruce Cumings: Well, that was one of the more cynical ploys on the part of the United States in recent years. This Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system was jammed into South Korea while the current president, at the time President Park Geun-hye was being impeached, and before the election that was held earlier this month, which brought a progressive to power.
The U.S. fears that Moon Jae-in, the new president, will be an engager of North Korea like his mentor, Roh Moo-hyun, who was president from 2002 to 2007. So they wanted to get that system in and installed before the new president came into office. And he just complained last week that four launchers were brought in without his permission, or without his office being notified about that. In other words, we are continuing to add to the system even after he's president without telling him.
There's just an outrageous situation in our relationship with South Korea. We never have problems with the ruling party that goes back to the dictators, but we always have problems with liberals and progressives who want to try a different approach toward North Korea. The only time that has not been true was when Bill Clinton and William Perry brought American policy around to engagement for two years, 1998-2000. That's the only time we've had direct talks with the North Koreans that have really yielded so much.
But I would expect that President Trump is not going to like President Moon very well, and we'll see a lot of tension in their relationship, just as there was between George W. Bush and Roh Moo-hyun in the early 2000s.
I want to say one more thing about the THAAD system. It's really designed not to knock down North Korean missiles. North Korea has short- to medium-range missiles that it can launch by the dozens, and there's no way this THAAD system can knock them down. It's really there to monitor North Korean long-range missiles and Chinese missile tests and long-range missiles. The Chinese have complained mightily about this.
I think the THAAD system's installation in South Korea was primarily political, in that it was trying to get it in there before a progressive president was elected, and to do what the U.S. has been trying to do for many, many years, which is to weld South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. together in an alignment, or an alliance, to contain China. It doesn't really have much to do at all with the so-called North Korean threat. But it has a lot to do with pissing off China and making sure the system's in there before a president comes to power who might not like it.
Michael Slate: Just how dangerous is this situation, both in terms of war and even the impact of war on human survival?
Bruce Cumings: I'm in touch with 30 or 40 people who work on North Korea, former government officials, scholars. Somehow North Korea's become the big deal. We have 15 or 20 websites dealing with it now that we never had 10 or 15 years ago. But in the last couple of months, I've seen time and again, very well-informed experts worrying about the U.S. and North Korea coming to blows. It could come from an incident that ratchets up into a war, or it could come from a preemptive attack. There was a great deal of talk back in March and April about Trump people favoring a preemptive attack on North Korea, on its missiles. You can't really attack their nuclear facilities preemptively without letting loose a whole lot of radiation around the region.
There was almost a consensus inside the Beltway in the fall and winter that if North Korea keeps moving toward an ability to hit the United States with a long-range missile and a nuclear weapon, well we just have to think about preempting that. And it's very, very dangerous, because along the DMZ, there have been cycles of preemption and counter-preemption both happening and envisioned by the respective militaries, North Korea, South Korea and the U.S., going back decades, going back to the Korean War. So to add the threat of a preemptive attack on North Korea's missiles is to just come close to bringing forth the general war in the region that we talked about.
Dr. Bruce Cumings is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago, and author of many books, including The Korean War, and Inventing the Axis of Evil, the Truth about North Korea, Iran and Syria (contributor).
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SALAMA, Guatemala -- Just before departing for the rural town here where he performed charity eye surgeries over several days, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) caused a stir with an op-ed in Time about the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, calling for the police to be "demilitarized" and saying race skews the application of criminal justice in the U.S.
In an interview, he elaborated on his article and responded to critics on the right whom he said had misconstrued what he wrote.
"If you look at crime statistics, many people look at the crime statistics and say that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately incarcerated with regard to what percentage of time they're in for," Paul said. "With drug statistics, they say blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, but the prisons are three out of four people are black or brown. So it's not on purpose. It's not a purposeful racism. It's an inadvertent racial sort of outcome is what it is."
In the op-ed, Paul wrote that "Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them." Another sentence said, "Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention."
The remarks prompted a pushback from critics who said Paul had attributed racial motives to the police officer who shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown after a confrontation about which details remain murky, even after nearly two weeks of national debate on the incident.
For example, the Missouri GOP's executive director said Paul's comments were "unhelpful," and black conservative radio figure Larry Elder said that Paul's op-ed "lend[s] fuel to this notion that 'cops are out to get us,'" something Elder argued on Laura Ingraham's radio show hurts GOP efforts to reach potential black voters.
Paul said he wasn't accusing the Ferguson police of racism:
No, the point I'm making is that, let's say you're African American and you live in our country and see the statistics and see three out of four people in prison are black or brown, and you see whites are using drugs at the same rate, you'd say: 'Gosh it seems unfair.' Your perception would be that 'I'm unfairly being targeted' when in reality maybe it's poverty, maybe it's the police tend to patrol more in one area than another. What I was saying is that it's impossible for them not to feel [that way], and I think we put the word 'feel' for them to feel like they're not being targeted. But I wasn't saying that about this particular instance-I have no idea about the specifics of this. But you see how if a black community has a lot of their community in jail for drugs or whatever, that when a young black man is shot while unarmed, you could see how this is something that is just a big example of what is going on.
Regardless of the facts of the case, Paul says, "that's the perception."
Paul noted that, while President Obama "has recently started commuting some sentences of people in jail for crack cocaine," several people "who have 15 and 20-year sentences for crack cocaine are still in jail from even before we" changed the system to lessen the disparities between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.
"The disparity used to be 100:1 crack to powder, and five to 10 years ago we changed it to 18:1-they didn't grandfather in the people from before we changed it," Paul said. "There are many instances where a white kid goes to jail using powder cocaine and getting out in six months with a good attorney or never going to jail, and then someone with a similar weight of crack cocaine going to jail for 15 years."
Paul said that when young people go away for such long sentences for nonviolent crimes, they get sucked into the criminal justice system, something that's nearly impossible to break free from. "How do you get a job when you get out? It's almost impossible to get a job," he said. "It all adds together. There are statistics that back up that the criminal justice system and the war on drugs has disproportionately incarcerated Hispanics and African Americans, and that if you are an African American, and you see something happen, you think it's just one more thing piling on top."
"I have no idea about the intent about any of the people involved in this, and that ought to be judged by the people," Paul added. "But I can see why people would be unhappy." |
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Protesters demonstrate on Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, in New York, in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory. AP Photo/Julie Jacobson
Sen. Chuck Schumer has penned an open letter to the LGBTQ community, encouraging resistance and hope during difficult times now that we have a president-elect Donald Trump.
While Trump attempted to gain the favor of the LGBTQ voting bloc numerous times in his campaign, including giving us a nod in his Republican National Convention speech and holding up an upside down Pride flag at a rally, he also pledged to sign anti-LGBTQ legislation , appointed a homophobe for vice president , and said he would appoint judges like Justice Antonin Scalia.
Since then he has appointed a man who believes people can choose to stop being gay, and another who is an apparent white nationalist who has called progressive women "dykes." These are not encouraging times for the community, Schumer admits in his Advocate op-ed.
Reed Saxon, Associated Press
Students from several high schools rally after walking out of classes to protest the election of Donald Trump at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
"There are many fellow citizens -- the LGBT community, immigrants, communities of color, women, our young people, Democrats and progressives of all stripes -- who are profoundly worried about what the future holds," he writes. "And following everything that was said during this campaign by our now president-elect, it is entirely reasonable to be nervous and even angry. I am not sure what will come next after so many fought so hard for so long to gain the right to say 'love is love' no matter what. I am worried about what tomorrow holds and what this new administration may attempt to roll back."
Joshua Guerra / The Daily Texan via Associated Press
Students at the University of Texas at Austin lead an anti-Trump protest down to Congress Bridge the day after the presidential election.
As hard as it was to imagine witnessing a White House lit up with rainbow colors, it is just as hard now to imagine that we seem to have moved backwards so quickly.
"I will not forget what happened at Stonewall or what happened at Pulse -- or any of the countless physical assaults, emotional taunts, and bullying endured by homosexual fellow citizens over the generations. I will not forget North Carolina's passage of House Bill 2 or the trickle-down of hateful rhetoric inspired by these laws that causes children to take their own lives rather than continue to face the torment of bullies at school. I will not forget the 24 transgender Americans murdered this year alone.
"But I also won't forget when West Point opened the doors of its historic chapel for its first same-sex wedding after President Obama repealed 'don't ask, don't tell.' I won't forget Edie Windsor's boundless joy when the Supreme Court handed down its decision to make marriage equality the law of the land. And I won't forget my family, my friends, my colleagues, or the New Yorkers who depend on me to protect their constitutional rights."
Losing hope and giving in cannot be the answer, because it is only that which ensures failure. He continues:
"Keep fighting; keep working; keep pushing for all LGBT Americans, all Muslim Americans, all Americans with disabilities, all Latino Americans, all African-Americans, all white-black-brown working-class Americans struggling to have a fair shot at the American dream. And keep in the back of your head the words preached by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.'"
Schumer also promises to "all in my power to prevent any backsliding on hard-won rights and to push back against a national discourse that allows for anything less than a full measure of respect for all Americans and would-be Americans."
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, has condemned protesters as "professionals" and said they should not be in the streets and instead stick to the sidewalks. Giuliani is being talked about for an appointment to Trump's cabinet, either as secretary of state or attorney general. Trump aides say Giuliani is the leading contender for secretary of state, The New York Times reports.
On 3rd St & Congress: "We are here & we are queer" pic.twitter.com/J4zRmjHo8j
-- Briana Santiago (@BrianaSantiago) November 9, 2016
Schumer is in line to take over as leader of the Senate Democrats from Harry Reid, who is retiring. U.S. Capitol police arrested 17 protesters on Monday who oppose Schumer taking over as minority leader, arguing he is too closely tied to the banking and finance industries.
Schumer voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996 and was previously in favor of civil unions instead of same-sex marriage. He came out in support of same-sex marriage in 2009 and helped work for its passage in New York. |
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Protesters demonstrate on Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower |
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Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
In 2016, the story of a juvenile sex crime in an Idaho town swept through the national right-wing media ecosystem, picking up fabricated and lurid details along the way; several months later, the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump falsely suggested that a terrorist attack had recently taken place in Sweden, baffling the country. The two incidents, though seemingly unrelated, were spurred by the same sentiment: rabid anti-immigrant bias fueled by a sensationalistic, right-wing fake news ecosystem.
In the global culture wars being waged online and in real life -- from Twin Falls, Idaho, to Malmo, Sweden -- influencers successfully mobilize anti-Muslim extremists, far-right media, and fake news websites in coordinated campaigns to promote misinformation. Their motivation may stem from an ideological agenda, the desire to create chaos, the intention to profit from emotionally resonant website content, or a combination of all three. And though misinformation is usually later debunked, the truth generally fails to travel as far or penetrate as deep as the original story, allowing a steady drumbeat of misinformation to continue. In the cases of Twin Falls and Sweden, this misinformation was fueled by xenophobia and sought to manipulate people into associating immigration and violent crime.
The Twin Falls, Idaho, case was the perfect story for anti-immigrant activists and far-right media. For the rest of us, it was the perfect example of how these anti-immigrant (and, specifically, anti-Muslim) activists and media seize on a story, elevating it, and twisting the facts to push their agenda.
In June 2016, two refugee boys, ages 7 and 10, and a white 5-year-old girl were discovered partly clothed in the laundry room of an apartment complex. The incident was filmed on a cell phone borrowed from one of the boys' older brother. A year later, the two boys and the older brother whose phone they used, were charged, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced .
The incident had all the hallmarks of a crime story fit for the far-right echo chamber: sex crimes committed by refugees against white children in a historically white town with a growing Muslim population; a lack of sustained national media attention , creating an opening for accusations of a media cover-up; local politicians unable to get ahead of the narrative; and the backdrop of a highly politicized presidential election.
Misinformation about the case was initially spurred by anti-Muslim activist groups, such as ACT for America and Refugee Resettlement Watch , as well as anti-Muslim media figures and various white nationalists who had been seemingly preparing for an incident to exploit in Twin Falls since a local paper reported in early 2015 that the city would soon be accepting Syrian refugees. After the incident, far-right websites including Breitbart , Infowars , The Drudge Report , The Rebel Media , WorldNetDaily , and fake news website MadWorldNews ran with the story, fabricating new details for which there was no evidence, including that the young boys were Syrian (they weren't), held the girl at knifepoint (they didn't), and their families celebrated afterward (they didn't).
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Breitbart produced daily content on the story and sent its lead investigative reporter, Lee Stranahan, to investigate the "Muslim takeover" of the town. Infowars attempted to link the assault to Chobani, an immigrant-owned yogurt company that employs several hundred refugees, in a report headlined "Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists." Chobani sued Jones over the claim, and eventually settled; Jones issued an apology and a retraction. The story also bled into mainstream conservative news. Former Fox host Bill O'Reilly claimed the national media chose to not cover the local crime story because they "want[ed] to protect the refugee community." O'Reilly pushed the narrative that sexual assault is committed frequently by Muslim refugees, saying, "the cultural aspect of the story is valid" in response to a Fox News contributor claiming that "we're seeing sexual assaults happen across the world from refugee populations" in Germany and Norway.
The story showed how a local crime story can become a breeding ground for right-wing fabulation in service of pushing an anti-Muslim agenda. And, when repeated frequently enough, these narratives become coded, so that a single word or phrase can conjure a version of reality that may not exist at all.
In the case of Twin Falls, many commenters explicitly extrapolated the mythical migrant crime wave of Europe to the American heartland. The Times quoted one American woman writing, "My girl is blond and blue-eyed. ... I am extremely worried about her safety." It is therefore not surprising that the vast majority of Trump voters think illegal immigration is a very serious problem for the country, particularly in the context of crime. And thanks to "alt-right" outlets like Breitbart, which consistently use crime in Europe to fearmonger about immigration into the U.S., local crime can have policy implications across continents. As the so-called "alt-right" attempts to expand its reach internationally, these high-profile crime stories are powerful fodder.
In February, Trump told rally attendees in Florida to "look at what's happening last night in Sweden" while talking about cities where terror attacks have occurred. The statement baffled most Americans, as no terror attack had occurred in Sweden the night before; Trump later clarified that his comment was in reference to a Fox News segment about "immigrants & Sweden." The segment, according to The Washington Post , was likely an interview with an American filmmaker who "has blamed refugees for what he says is a crime wave in Sweden." His "documentary," part of which was aired during the Fox segment, was deceptively edited and pushed debunked claims of a surge of refugee violence.
If you gleaned your news about Sweden from far-right or conspiratorial websites, as many Americans do, Trump's dog-whistle would have resonated clearly. The far-right sites have created a narrative that Sweden is the " rape capital of the world," is in the throes of a cultural civil war , and that there are areas of the country so dangerous that even police don't dare enter. As Media Matters and others have documented , influential far - right websites, white nationalists, right-leaning tabloids , fake news websites, and even more mainstream conservative outlets have cultivated an obsession with the mythical migrant crime wave in Sweden, publishing nearly daily content on the subject.
What is happening in Sweden is, actually, nothing close to the hellscape far-right media attempts to portray. The country's crime rate pales in comparison to the United States', and while high levels of immigration have created social and economic anxieties for native Swedes and immigrants alike (anxieties driven in no small part by anti-Muslim activists), no data shows that immigration is causing such problems in the country.
But these anti-immigrant narratives have created space for fabricated claims to fester. And in this ecosystem, as in the Twin Falls case, real stories can take on a life of their own. In December 2016, for example, Swedish local news outlet Kristianstadbladet reported that "new clientele" had been frequenting a church often visited by those experiencing homelessness and some people had desecrated the church pews. Despite a lack of information about who the new clientele were, Swedish hate site Fria Tider leapt to claim that it was a reference to refugees and they were the ones urinating, defecating, and masturbating in the church's pews. MadWorld News , an American fake news website known for its anti-Muslim content, amplified the story in the United States, adding claims that "migrants scream Islamic chants and smash liquor bottles on the floor in an attempt to silence Christian worshippers from praying to God" and that "a migrant even tried to kidnap a child from a baptism ceremony." The article was shared over 4,700 times. The story was also published on Focus News, a fake news website run by a 25-year-old Macedonian, and from there shared thousands of times in Macedonia, Georgia, and Kosovo. The story was fact-checked and debunked but by then the claim had already spread.
Stories like these, driven by far-right media and anti-Muslim activists, helped lay the narrative foundation for Trump's Sweden reference. After his statement, right-wing media, fake news websites, and at least one neo-Nazi website clamored to defend him , using his comment to amplify a crime narrative that, up until then, had sparked limited interest outside the far-right media landscape. And while online attention to the country peaked after Trump's claim, his amplification of the contrived and bigoted narrative took it from the fringe to the mainstream and effectively primed a larger audience to believe that, even if nothing has happened in Sweden, it could.
Sweden's commitment to an open, democratic society is also a vulnerability. According to a late 2015 internal memo , Swedish police were instructed not to report externally the ethnic or national origin of suspected criminals. The decision, while an admirable attempt not to stoke racial tensions, has raised suspicion. Many far-right outlets perceived the move as an attempt to cover up what they deemed a migrant crime wave, and the controversy became so salient that the Swedish government had to respond . Now these same websites are targeting the Swedish government over its proposal to restrict the accessibility and distribution of personal sensitive data related to criminal offenses. Sweden's open and progressive crime reporting practices that discourage unnecessary emphasis on people's ethnicity or religion allow fake news purveyors to speculate on a suspected criminal's ethnic background with impunity, as well as manufacture an inflated perception of criminality.
These examples illustrate that in a politically and culturally charged media environment, completely fabricated stories packaged to look as if they were published by a reputable news agency and partially true stories sensationalized by ideological or bad-faith actors alike can spread with such a degree of virality that by the time the truth is reported and the fake news fact-checked, the damage is already done. The articles themselves are left uncorrected and continue to be shared and referred back to as cautionary tales of the supposed crime wave and general societal degradation spurred by Muslim immigration and refugee resettlement. They are exceedingly easy to manufacture and disseminate, but difficult to disprove until all facts are available, which can be months or years later.
There is also evidence that Russian actors are attempting to sow political discord offline. In March, in the wake of Trump's comments about alleged crime in Sweden, a Russian TV crew reportedly tried to pay young people in Sweden to riot on camera with the intention of portraying a nation roiled by violence. And a Facebook event called "Citizens before refugees," which was created by what is now known to be a Russian actor, attempted to organize an anti-refugee rally in the town of Twin Falls , Idaho.
It's easy for mainstream news consumers to dismiss these reports as misinformation-filled rants by white supremacists and various far-right ideologues (which they are), but in the aggregate, they act as a powerful rallying cry for an entire swath of Americans who yearn to see their deep-seated cultural and economic anxieties rationalized, their biases validated.
What's happening in Sweden is what's happening in sleepy towns in the United States. The ideologies, tactics, and goals are all the same. There will be another case like the Twin Falls assault and another story like that of the Swedish church, and in the context of a media landscape eager to exploit these situations and a presidential administration that encourages xenophobia and has deep ties to the far-right and a burgeoning fake news ecosystem, the impact of the next viral story could be much worse.
In order to confront the problem of anti-immigrant sentiment flamed by misinformation and fake news, mainstream media and governments alike need to be realistic about the challenges and possible solutions. In a recent report released by the Swedish government, the authors noted, "One important question is where the limit is for which expressions are harmful to society in large and its citizens." It's a question that may never have a perfect answer, but seeking to understand the ecosystem and its players, ideologies, relationships, and methods is a good start.
In that report, which focused on "white hatred," experts outlined several far-right commentators and websites (many of which are American), suggesting that these groups be researched further in an effort to counter their racist, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist ideology. The report also detailed the role of tech companies like Facebook and Google in limiting distribution of their content online. Sweden has also ramped up its efforts to fight fake news through elementary school media literacy programs, news outlet initiatives, and bilateral law enforcement partnerships , including with the country's Scandinavian neighbors .
In the United States, the commitment to identifying and solving the problem has been far less sustained. Trump himself has regularly pushed anti-Muslim sentiment and misinformation , and he's known to get his information from the types of outlets that push bigoted misinformation . The administration has also decided that fake news is actually news that is unfavorable to it, and it's officials have on multiple occasions pushed fabricated stories, and Trump himself has told over 100 lies in less than one year in office.
The antagonistic attitude that this administration has taken means the burden for combating anti-immigrant sentiment and fake news largely falls on media, local authorities, and other institutions. For example, fake news in Twin Falls may have been better combatted had the local authorities been more engaged in getting out accurate information. A local Twin Falls newspaper editor told The New York Times ' Caitlin Dickerson that, while local reporters attempted to correct falsehoods about the story, city officials refused to write guest editorials doing the same out of fear of political backlash:
"Behind closed doors, they would all tell you they were pro-refugee, and we wanted them to step forward and make that declaration in a public arena, and it just never really happened," he told me. "That was frustrating to us especially at the beginning because it really felt like the newspaper was out there all alone." He continued: "There were days where we felt like, Godammit, what are we doing here? We write a story and it's going to reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it's going to reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of a voice do we have in this debate?"
In the era of "alternative facts," American news outlets and their fact-checking arms have stepped up their game, but the U.S. would be smart to develop interdisciplinary domestic and international partnerships, as Sweden has. This year, four states passed bills mandating media literacy be integrated into school curricula, and others are considering following suit. It would be worth considering Sweden's dedicated media literacy program , taught to teens and young adults, as a model.
A translation in this post has been updated for accuracy. |
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Saturday 8:05 am: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken to Beth Israel Medical Center and is listed in "serious" condition.
He is said to have head and neck injuries, as well as some abdominal injuries.
Saturday 7:13 am: BizPac Review has the latest.
Friday 8:48 pm: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Suspect 2 in Monday's Boston Marathon bombing is in police custody after a massive manhunt Friday, April 19, 2013.
Friday 8:46 pm: Boston Police CONFIRM SUSPECT 2 IS IN CUSTODY.
Friday 8:44 pm : Ambulance leaving the scene, applause heard from law enforcement, Fox BOSTON confirming SUSPECT 2 is IN CUSTODY.
Friday 8:43pm: Fox Boston SUSPECT IN CUSTODY
Friday 8:40 pm: Via Weasel Zippers:
Friday 8:34 pm : The Boston Globe reported earlier:
Police have seen the suspect sit up and are using "flash bang" stun grenades to disorient and distract him. Officers are acting with caution because they remain concerned that the suspect might be wearing a suicide bomb vest, the source said.
The source said police had seen the suspect moving from a State Police helicopter.
Friday 8:32 pm: Guest to Bill O'Reilly: Mother of suspects arrested for shoplifting at the Lord and Taylor in 2012.
Friday 8:30 pm: press conference soon with Gov. and Mayor.
Friday 8:28 pm : Fox Boston report:
Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston Friday 8:24 pm: Three people in custody being questioned by authorities. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:16pm: Geraldo Rivera reported the older brother was questioned by the FBI in 2010 at the "request of a foreign government." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:11 pm: Bill O'Reilly talking about the older brother Tamerlan: "Hell probably has a new resident tonight." ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:08 pm: shots fired in Watertown, Mass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3UT5lEQvh8 _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:00 pm: Fox News is reporting the suspect is believed to be injured from the shootout Thursday evening. It is unclear if the suspect is refusing to come out of the boat, or if his injuries are preventing it. Friday 7:53 pm : The suspect is surrounded. He is believed to be under the boat tarp.
Photo Credit: Fox News via FBI
___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:52 pm: 8 to 10 explosions heard possibly in the backyard where the boat is. Possibly flash bangs used by law enforcement. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:46 pm: More shots fired. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:42 pm: Fox News reported the FBI had questioned the older brother about ties to terrorism approximately two years ago. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:32 pm: The suspect IS IN THE BOAT REFUSING TO COME OUT ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:30 pm: Bomb squad is en route to the scene. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:19 pm: Minutes after the press conference was finished, law enforcement rushed to the home where the supect may have been hiding in a boat in a backyard. 30-40 gunshots were fired. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:17 pm : Police responding to shots fired on Franklin St, in Watertown, Mass. Belief by law enforcement is that suspect 2 is down. The city is back on lockdown. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:14 pm: Woman called police around 7pm to report that though her boat had been checked earlier by police, the door to the boat shed was now open and she saw blood. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:13 pm: A robotic device is being brought in to search a boat on a trailer in a backyard for explosives. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:12 pm: Police responding to Franklin Street in Watertown. Shelter in place is back in effect. _________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:11 pm : 30-40 shots fired in Watertown. "A" suspect is reported DOWN by Fox News _________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:10 pm: A SUSPECT IS DOWN __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:24 pm: BizPac Review: " Mom's interview: My sons were setup, FBI followed them for years. " "Boston bomber could have been deported after 2009 conviction." "Boston bomber an Obama supporter!" ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:21 pm : No more press conferences scheduled for Friday, April 19, 2013. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:19 pm: Police Col. Alden: Suspect escaped the shootout on "foot." __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:18pm : Col. Alden: Suspect is "violent and dangerous." People must be vigilent. "We did everything we could to ensure he was not in this neighborhood." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:14 pm: Police: Suspects were not involved in an armed robbery at the 7-Eleven Thursday evening. There had been a robbery earlier, but the suspects were in the store afterwards. Police Col. Timothy Alben: I believe suspect to still be in Massachusetts. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:11 pm: Police: "We searched a 20-block radius" to ensure public safety. "Shelter-in-place" orders are lifted. People are allowed back out, authorities ask they stay "vigilent." ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:40pm: Girl "Jess" who filmed the shootout on the phone with Fox News. Was about 4 homes away from where the gunshots were. She said it lasted about 30 minutes. "I was terrified, I wanted to go run and hide." "Someone was wrapped in a white sheet on a gunnery carried out after the shootout." Jess's YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Cqo1Ad6spkY Friday 5:31 pm: Tweets on the bombing from the suspect via The Daily Caller. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:28 pm: Upcoming news conference. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:27 pm : Two tweets from #bostonbombing: __________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:17 pm: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a marine biology student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:01 pm: Wolf Blitzer will be speaking very shortly to the father of the suspects. Press conference scheduled for 5:30pm. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:54 pm: Mother of suspects spoke to Russia Today . "I am 100 percent sure this is a setup." https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ARE9rclZCqw
Mother of bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. Photo Credit: Business Insider
____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:52: 15 police officers injured in the shootout. Police recovered a "pressure cooker bomb" like the one used in the marathon bombing, CNN reported. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:48 pm: Press conference with authorities scheduled for 5:30pm. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:45pm: Mother of suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told reporters she does not believe the charges against her sons: "If anyone would know, it would be me. He never told me he would be controlled by Islamic jihad." We didn't talk about terrorism in this house." "My youngest son was raised in America." "Dzhokhar got involved in religion about years ago." _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:38 pm: BizPac Review: Victim in iconic wheelchair photo helped FBI zero in on suspects Boston Bomber Could Have Been Deported After 2009 Conviction GOP lawmaker: 'How many Boston libs spent the night cowering...wishing they had AR-15' ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:17 pm : Friday 4:10 pm: Dzhokhar' former high school wrestling coach told CNN Dzhokhar was a regular "American kid." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:09 pm: The "door-to-door, street-by-street" sweep by law enforcement continues in the Boston area. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:06 pm : Some background information on the life of Tamerlan Tsarnaev from CBS Boston. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:02 : Sources told CNN explosives and an explosive trigger were on the body of Tamerlan when recovered by police. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 3:50 pm: Some tweets from #manhunt: Friday 3:40 pm: CBS Boston audio-video of interview with suspects' father from Russia:
Friday 3:25 pm: Police in an armored vehicle pulled up to a Boylston Street intersection near the Arlington T-station. Police have been issued armor and weapons, Fox News reported. People have been told to get off the street.
Friday 3:03 pm: CNN posted a timeline and map of the events leading to the massive manhunt for Suspect 2 in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Photo Credit: CNN
Friday 2:42 pm: High school acquaintance of Dzhokhar told reporters Dzhokhar seemed to be "a good, normal guy."
Friday 2:39 pm: Dzhokhar came to the U.S. in 2002 on a tourist visa seeking asylum. He received citizenship on Sept. 11, 2012. The older brother Tamerlan came in 2006 and had not received U.S. citizenship.
Authorities are looking at how Dzhokhar "became radicalized" while living in the U.S., Fox News' Bret Baier reported.
Friday 2:36 pm: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth was evacuated Friday after police received reports Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on the campus this past week, after the marathon bombing Monday.
Friday 2:22 pm: The suspect's aunt, Maret Tsarnaev of Toronto, does not believe her nephews committed this act of terrorism. She told reporters she wants proof from the FBI they did this.
Sun News Network posted the video interview with the aunt:
Friday 2:14 pm: Authorities have just removed a computer from the home of Dzhokhar's sister in New York (the name of the city), New Jersey.
Friday 2:00 pm: Police have 70 percent of their search perimeter completed. SWAT, FBI, bomb squads, helicopters, K-9 Units, etc are searching a 20-block area looking for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Manhunt continues for Boston Marathon Suspect 2 - in the white hat, 19-year old, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released Thursday evening, the suspects were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape inside a gas station and authorities were contacted.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists were heavily armed and threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Tamerlan died in the hospital after a shootout with police. Doctors reported he had "too many gunshot wounds to count," as well as shrapnel from explosives in his torso. Some reports said Tamerlan also had a "trigger device" on his body.
Dzhokhar escaped police and is on the run.
MIT police officer Sean Collier, 26, was killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus Thursday night. A 33-year old Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents under "shelter-in-place" orders to stay indoors. Police are calling the massive manhunt an extremely "grave and dangerous" situation.
Friday 1:55 pm: Connecticut police are searching for a 1999 Green Honda Civic, Massachusetts license plate number: 116 GC7 in connection with the manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing Suspect 2, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Fox News reported.
Friday 1:51 pm: BizPac Review related stories:
Friday 1:36 pm : Steve Emerson, terrorist expert, told Fox News authorities are pouring through the English and Russian YouTube accounts of both brothers. Tamerlan supposedly had 22 videos posted and Dzhokhar had four.
Friday 1:31 pm: Mass. Emergency Services asking people in the Boston area to leave "places of business." Asking people to "shelter in place" at home, not at work.
Friday 1:09 pm: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who was killed by the bombing suspects while he sat in his car on the MIT campus late Thursday night was identified as Sean Collier, 26.
MIT officer Sean Collier was killed late Thursday night by the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Friday 12:35 pm: Col. Timothy Alben Superintendent of Mass. State Police: "going door-to-door, street-by-street." No apprehension at this point. "There will be a controlled explosion later this afternoon near Cambridge, out of an abundance of caution."
Friday 12:08 pm: Awaiting Boston Police news conference.
Friday 11:43 am: Uncle Ruslan Tsarni: "Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in, ask forgiveness from these people. You brought shame on our family, the entire Chechnya people. You put this shame on our entire ethnicity."
Friday 11:42 am : "If I had the slightest idea they were involved, I would have been the first one to turn them on." The brothers were NOT born in Chechnya. "Chechens are peaceful." "This has nothing to do with Chechnya."
Friday 11:41 am : Uncle: "my family had nothing to do with them for a long, long time. "We respect this country, we love this country. This country gives chance to everyone." "We are ashamed they are my brother's children."
Friday 11:40 am: Ruslan Tsarni: "they are LOSERS."
Friday 11:38 am : Uncle Ruslan Tsarni: "we are Muslims, we are ethnic Chechens." "My brother spent his life bringing bread to the table." Very angry and disgusted at his nephews. "My family has nothing to do with THAT." "We are ashamed."
Friday 11:37 am : He is "shocked." Very angry. Says he didn't know those kids until 2005. Calls bombings an "atrocity."
Friday 11:36 am : Uncle of suspects, Ruslan Tsarni, speaking live to reporters on behalf of his family. Condolences to all those "murdered" "injured," names all three who died.
Friday 11:31 am: Fox News' Bret Baier reported the suspects threw "pipe bombs, homemade grenades and pressure cooker bombs" at police during the car chase.
Friday 11:29 am : University Massachusetts Dartmouth campus is being evacuated.
Friday 11:26 am: Upcoming Mass. State Police press conference.
Friday 11:25 am: Video sounds of the shootout with the bombing suspects early Friday morning:
Friday 11:15 am: Manhunt continues for Boston Marathon Suspect 2 - in the white hat, 19-year old, Chechen Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
The older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died from his injuries after a shootout with police early Friday morning. Doctors said they lost count of how many gun shots riddled Tamerlan's body.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, the suspects were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape inside a gas station and authorities were contacted.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists were heavily armed and threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Tamerlan died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso. Some reports said Tamerlan also had a "trigger device" on his body.
Dzhokhar escaped police and is on the run.
A MIT police officer was killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus. A 33-year old Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents under "shelter-in-place" orders to stay indoors. Police are calling the massive manhunt an extremely "grave and dangerous" situation.
Friday 11:12 am: Anzor Tsarnaev, father of the suspected bombers, spoke to the Associated Press from Makhachkala, Russia.
Friday 11:01 am: CNN reported a source said police have asked for a "Russian interpreter."
Friday 10:51 am: Motorcycle police and fire trucks just raced down the street in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 10:49 am: The police perimeter has been extended to now include the coffee shop location.
Friday 10:48 am: Police cars are leaving the scene after shots were heard from a location farther away.
Friday 10:47 am : Shots fired at the coffee shop location. Police are yelling for residents to get back inside their homes.
Friday 10:46 am: Police are moving in on a Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks coffee shop in Watertown, Mass. Police are seen donning bullet proof vests
Friday 10:41 am : Police preparing for a press conference.
Friday 10:36 am: The "shelter-in-place" order issued by police to area residents to stay inside their homes has been extended.
Friday 10:25 am: Police perimeter in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 10:01 am : The Associated Press spoke to the father of the 2 suspected terrorists. He called his son, Dzhokhar "an intelligent boy and a true angel."
Friday 10:00 am:
Friday 9:53 am : Fox reported deceased Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had an explosive trigger on his body.
Friday 9:50 am: Police are moving reporters and people farther away from the home they have surrounded.
Friday 9:48 am: Police say Suspect 2 may have bombs or other explosives with him.
Friday 9:42 am: BizPac Review:
Friday 9:40 am: The Boston Police live scanner so many people were listening to has apparently been taken offline.
Friday 9:31 am:
The FBI released this picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Suspect 2 in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Map of area police have surrounded in Watertown, Mass. Photo Credit: Google Maps
Friday 9:27 am: The FAA has shut down airspace over Watertown, Mass. Logan International Airport is still open.
Friday 9:06 am: Boston Police live scanner: Police are watching a man on a back porch of a home on Boylston Street wearing a gray hoodie sweatshirt and holding a laptop.
Friday 9:02 am: BizPac Review: "Self ID'd Muslim: Terrorist reveals hatred on Facebook page"
Friday 8:59 am: Several vehicles are being taken away by tow truck from the area police have surrounded in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 8:52 am: Fox reporter on the scene said the stolen Mercedes SUV was just taken out of the area by a tow truck. She said it was heavily damaged by bullets.
Friday 8:42 am: Fox reported authorities have a list of names, possibly relatives of the suspects, living in the area where police have converged. A helicopter is overhead in the area. SWAT and K-9 units, 3-4 bomb trucks on the scene, reports of 9 city buses of cops have converged on this particular area of Watertown, Mass.
Friday 8:41 am: CNN reported a "heavy smell of smoke" from the area where police have converged.
Friday 8:38 am : Police just brought a woman out of a home in the area where police are standing with weapons drawn.
Friday 8:36 am: Police are telling reporters to "back up, back up" Guns drawn, rifles out. Definite explosion or gunfire sounds.
Friday 8:35 am: explosive sounds heard, gun fire perhaps...the FBI has the area surrounded.
Friday 8:33am Police are running into a building. All police officers are converging on a building with guns drawn in Watertown, Mass..
Friday 8:29 am : Homeland Security is keeping President Obama up to date, minute by minute, Fox reported.
Friday 8:17 am : CNN reported the suspects are Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.
Friday 8:16 am: Bunker Hill Community College, where the older brother attended, is the college seen in the movie, "Good Will Hunting."
Friday 8:14 am:
Fox News report:
Friday 7:58 am : Governor Deval Patrick to address Boston area residents any moment
Friday, April 19, 2013: Law enforcement said the dead terrorist Suspect 1 had explosives on his body.
Friday 7:53 am: One minute from press conference. Governor said it will be very brief, mostly a message to area residents.
Friday 7:51 am: Press conference with police coming soon.
Friday 7:45 am: Chechen brothers, aged 26 (dead) and 19 (with the white hat, called Suspect 2, is on the loose). The older brother reportedly attended Bunker Hill Community college pursuing engineering. The Associated Press reported the 19-year old is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11, possibly there to rob the store.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape, possibly at a gas station.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso.
Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 7:39 am: CNN reported the terrorists are originally from Chechnya, fled to Kazakhstan during the conflict, and then moved to the Boston area of the United States.
Friday 7:36: CNN reported the dead suspect, black hat, aged 20 attended Bunker Hill Community college to become an engineer. Took a year off school to become a boxer. He supposedly posted on his Facebook that he had not a "single American friend." He said "I do not understand them [Americans]."
Friday 7:355 am: The National Guard is patrolling the streets of Watertown, Mass. A press conference with police is scheduled for later this morning.
Friday 7:12 am: Some reports say the brothers are from Chechnya, now some reports say they are possibly from Turkey. Fox News is reporting the brothers have been in the US for "several years."
Friday 7:28 am: brothers aged 20 and 19
Photo Credit: Twitter
Friday 7:19 am: Boston area is locked down.
AP report: Men are brothers from the Russian Chechnya region who have legally been in the US for about a year.
"We believe these are the same individuals that were responsible for the bombing Monday at the Marathon,'' State Police Colonel Timothy Alben said today. "We believe that they are responsible for the death of an MIT police officer and the shooting of an MBTA police officer. This is a very serious situation that we are dealing with.''
Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis this morning said the man now known as Marathon bombing Suspect #2 -- seen in photos released Thursday wearing a white baseball cap -- is the person being sought by a massive collection of federal, state, and municipal police. He is believed to be the suspect who actually dropped the bombs at the race finish line.
"We believe this to be a terrorist,'' Davis told reporters about 4:30 a.m. today. "We believe this to be a man here to kill people."
Friday 7:15 am: A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer was shot and killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus. A Transit Police officer is said to be in critical condition after the shootout with the terrorists.
Friday 7:04 am : SWAT officers are tightening the perimeter where they say Suspect terrorist 2 is holed up. Police are going door to door Friday in the Watertown, Mass. area.
The Associated Press is reporting the suspects/terrorists are brothers from Chechnya.
Friday 7:03 am: Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape, possibly at a gas station.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso.
Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 6:56 am: Brothers are said to be Chechens who have been in the United States for a little over one year, legally, the Associated Press reported.
Friday 6:54 am: Brothers are Russian from Chechnya. Possibly students at a Boston area university.
Friday April 19, 2013 6:52 am: The suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing are reported to be brothers from Chechnya.
Friday 6:50 am:
Friday 6:41 am:
Friday 6:33 am: SWAT officers, police, FBI have established a perimeter of about 20-blocks in Watertown, Mass. where they must believe terrorist Suspect 2 is hiding.
Friday 6:26 am : All photos from Breitbart.com
Suspect 1 (Black hat) is dead after a shootout with police early Friday morning. Suspect 2 (White hat)is on the run and considered armed, dangerous and a terrorist sent to the US to kill Americans.
Suspect 2 still on the run. Video footage from a Boston area 7-11
Friday 6:22 am: Doctor Wolf from Beth Israel Medical Center said Dr. David Shoenfield, who lives in the Watertown area, heard gunshots last night after about 12:45 am. He notified his ER, who prepared for an event.
The suspect was in traumatic arrest with CPR ongoing as he was brought in. Terrorist Suspect 2 was pronounced dead shortly after 1 am.
Friday 6:12 am: Fox News' Jennifer Griffin reported the dead terrorist Suspect 1 not only had gunshots as part of his injuries, he had explosive residue on his clothing and pieces of shrapnel in his torso, doctors said.
Friday 6:08 am: Police say Suspect 2 is "determined to kill."
Friday 6:03 am: Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown 7-11.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase. All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 6:00 am:
Friday 5:57 am: Mass. Governor: "We believe this to be a terrorist," Patrick said in a press conference. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."
The city has been shut down as a massive manhunt continues Friday morning.
Friday 5:54 am: 5 hours after the photos of the men were released to the public, the suspects were spotted at a 7-11.
An MIT police officer was shot and killed in his car.
The suspects hijacked a Mercedes SUV and while at a gas station, the driver was able to escape.
A car chase with police ensued. Explosives were thrown out the window by the supsects.
One of the suspects died in the hospital after a shootout with police.
Somehow, Suspect 2 in the white hat is still on the loose.
Friday 5:52 am: The suspects are now being called "terrorists," Mass. Governor Patrick said the men were sent from another country to kill Americans.
Friday 5:50 am : "Military grade" explosives are still on the street, Fox reported. Residents in the Watertown area are told the situation is "grave and dangerous" and to stay indoors.
Friday 5:46 am : In an overnight, breaking news story out of Watertown, Mass., one suspect in the Boston Marathon is dead after a shootout with police and Suspect 2 (with the white hat) is on the run.
The men killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who was sitting in his car. A car chase ensued with the suspects throwing explosives out the window at police.
We know first-hand that censorship against conservative news is real. Please share stories and encourage your friends to sign up for our daily email blast so they are not getting shut out of seeing conservative news.
"And though she be but little, she is fierce." And fun! This conservative-minded political junkie, mom of three, dancer and one-time NFL cheerleader holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science. [email protected] Twitter: @JaneenBPR
Latest posts by Janeen Capizola ( see all ) |
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Before America was free of the chains of unrepresented, overtaxed tyranny, we had to best the greatest army in the world. In a make or break moment for the Revolutionary War, General George Washington concocted a plan to cross the Delaware River and lead a surprise attack on the Hessians camped around...
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The government of Guatemala is going to follow the U.S. lead, and move its Embassy to Jerusalem, in recognition that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Ynet News reports: Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales announced in a Facebook post Sunday night his country will be transferring its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerus...
Cray Turmon, a homeless man living in Columbia, SC, rushed to the aid of a police woman who had been shoved to the ground by a suspect. With his assistance, the officer made the arrest, and Turman received a certificate recognizing his "extraordinary actions to preserve life and aid public safety." https://twitter.com/KTVU/status/943907801130090496 WLTX...
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Of course they didn't mean it to be public, it was terrible. We covered the memo in question in an earlier post. Now the school is back-tracking. The College Fix reports: University of Minnesota says its anti-Christmas memo wasn't supposed to leak to the public The University of Minnesota has limited options in responding...
All of us in the Legal Insurrection family (and it is truly a family) wish you and yours the Happiest of Christmases and a wonderful holiday season. For you: our holiday memories, wishes, reflections, and thoughts. William Jacobson Today is a very special day for me. It's the day I get to cover for...
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It was hailed as the reunion of friends when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came calling on a historic visit to Israel in July--the first ever by a sitting Indian head of government. Media pundits in both Israel and India talked of genuine bond of friendship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
It'll be interesting to see if their efforts are successful. If so, maybe other schools will adopt the policy. Campus Reform reports: UNC cracks down on disruptions with new free speech policy The University of North Carolina Board of Governors passed a systemwide free speech policy Friday in response to demands from lawmakers that... |
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Naipaul, whose death was announced on Saturday, experienced a remarkable journey from the periphery of empire to the center of the literary canon. Yet as impressive as his rise was, his tormented relationship with his first wife and his abused of his longtime mistress make Naipaul a prime example of the perennial and unsolvable aesthetic conundrum: how do we separate the bad actions of an artist from his or her achievements?
He was born in 1932 in Trinidad, the grandson of indentured servants who had been moved from one imperial hinterland, India, to another, the Caribbean. The family were the flotsam of colonialism, cultural castaways, the very type of people that Naipaul would make the subject of his fiction and reporting. The Naipauls were poor in money but, as Brahmins, rich in caste-pride. Seepersad Naipaul, the author's father, was a newspaper man of literary ambition bogged down by over-bearing in-laws, the model for the main character in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Naipaul's best novel.
The energy that drove V.S. Naipaul's own ambitions came from the desire to both live his father's unfulfilled dreams of literary greatness and avoid his father's fate of being badgered and hemmed in by family. Naipaul moved to England in the early 1950s after he received a scholarship to attend Oxford. It was a painful migration: he was friendless and adrift in the culture, as well as marginalized by racism.
He was saved by his friendship with an Englishwoman named Patricia Hale, which blossomed into a romance. They married in 1955. "Pat became his indispensable literary helper, his maid and cook, his mother, the object of his irritations, the traveling companion who never appears in any of his nonfiction," George Packer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. "Over the years, as Naipaul's fame grew along with his irascibility, the marriage desiccated. If Pat overcooked the fish, he berated her and she berated herself. The couple wanted children but Pat was apparently infertile; in her passivity and shame she never pursued the possible remedies. Naipaul frequented prostitutes, which brought no satisfaction."
It was during these years of marital unhappiness that Naipaul wrote the novels and travel books that form the basis of his literary fame. Aside from A House for Mr. Biswas , highlights of his career included An Area of Darkness (1962), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and A Bend in the River (1979). His global travels and keen powers of observation informed all these books, fiction and non-fiction like. In them he became the heir of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, a truly global writer who had the rare gift for capturing the texture of many societies.
Naipaul's best books are animated by his deeply conservative social vision. Civilization, he felt, was a small clearing in a forest, a fragile haven that was always on the verge of reverting to the wild. It was Naipaul's gift to be able to convey this fear in wire-taut prose.
Yet as his literary career blossomed, his personal life remain troubled. In 1972 he entered into a long-term romantic affair with Margaret Gooding, an Anglo-Argentine woman he met in Buenos Aires. If Naipaul had the habit of psychologically tormenting his wife Patricia Naipaul, he took to physically assaulting his mistress. "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt," Naipaul once told is biographer Patrick French. "She didn't mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn't appear really in public."
In 1994 when Patricia Naipaul was struggling with breast cancer, her husband gave an interview with The New Yorker where he said that he had been a "great prostitute man" and it only found sexual pleasure with his mistress, Gooding. Patricia Naipaul was devastated by the interview. She died two years later.
"It could be said that I had killed her," Naipaul admitted to his biographer. "It could be said. I feel a little bit that way."
After Patricia Naipaul's death, the novelist broke off relations with Gooding. He married the Pakistani journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi in 1998. She survives him. |
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Since news broke Monday that the Obama Administration's National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the "unmasking" of NSA intercepts of Trump associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster report. CNN Tonight's Don Lemon [...]
Former President Barack Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce "detailed spreadsheets" of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney [...]
NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I. (AP) -- Should U.S. high school students know at least as much about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist papers as immigrants passing an American citizenship test? In a [...]
President Xi Jinping will limit his US visit next month to Palm Beach, Florida, and local US media are reporting that he won't stay at Mar-a-Lago, US President Donald Trump's exclusive Palm Beach residence. A [...]
CDs? What are they? Digital downloads? So 2010. For the first time ever, streaming music has eclipsed both of those ways to get music. Streaming from Spotify, Apple, Pandora, even Tidal now accounts for 51% [...]
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Three illegal alien MS-13 gang members are in a Virginia jail, charged with the murder of a teenager in Virginia. Prosecutors charged the three Salvadoran men that belong to the notoriously violent MS-13 street gang with [...]
President Trump's new budget proposal creates a new cabinet level agency with billions in initial funding for gun training, individual gun purchase grants, and support for groups like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of [...]
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A Friday breaking Fox News report on surveillance of President Trump's team that began before he became the Republican presidential nominee claimed a very senior intelligence official was responsible--as well as for the unmasking of the [...]
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Moments after North Carolina's thrilling 77-76 win over Oregon, the Tar Heels opened as 2-point favorites over Gonzaga in Monday's national championship game. The Westgate LV SuperBook, BookMaker.eu and BetOnline.ag all opened the final at [...]
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NBC, like all dishonest mainstream media outlets, are pushing fake news, designed to showcase and drive home their liberal narrative. The TRUTH is, America wants Gorsuch. Are you listening, Democrats? From News Busters Providing cover for [...] |
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Syfy's newest space opera Dark Matter is loading up with kick-ass women, so you can sign us right up, thanks.
Based on a 2012 Dark Horse limited comic series of the same name, Dark Matter is about the six-member crew of a starship that wakes up from stasis with no idea of who they are or where they're going. Both the show and the comic are written and created by Stargate ( SG-1, Atlantis, and SGU ) veterans Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie--and they're bringing some of the best Gate ladies along for the ride.
Higginson, who played the no-nonsense civilian leader of Atlantis, will guest star in an early episode of Dark Matter as Commander Delaney Truffault, but Mallozzi says he has "a feeling we'll be seeing her again in the not too distant future."
image via Mallozzi's blog .
Tapping, who played astrophysicist and Air Force Colonel Sam Carter on SG-1 and later replaced Higginson on Atlantis, will be joining Dark Matter behind the camera. Directing the fourth episode of the season, it seems like Tapping will take the crew off-ship to "S-CYGNI-4, a remote way station renown for its sketchy entertainment district and signature cosmic croissants." Tapping has previously directed several episodes of Syfy's Sanctuary, Continuum , and Primeval: New World , as well as Arctic Air and Strange Empire for the CBC. She's also an incredible role model for women in Hollywood.
Dark Matter already includes Lost Girl 's Zoie Palmer , Broadway actress Melissa O'Neil, and Twilight 's Jodelle Ferland, as well as some dudes, I guess. The show will premiere next summer, adding to Syfy's roster of lady-led shows like Lost Girl, Bitten, Haven, and Continuum .
We haven't had a really solid space show on Syfy since the BSG days, but I have high hopes for Dark Matter . As I've said before , Mallozzi and Mullie wrote some of my favorite Stargate episodes of all time, but are at their best when they're able to inject a certain relatable humor into their episodes. I know Syfy wants to move away from their "light" programming, but these guys are essentially Lost in Space. Not taking yourself too seriously can't steer you wrong.
(via Blastr ) |
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Even if we don't know for certain whether Roy Moore had sexual contact (of a sort) with 14-year-old Leigh Corfman, we now know that Moore has made a conscious decision to lie about his onetime relationships with teenage girls.
We know this from a combination of his own words and of new evidence that would be accepted as probative in any American court of law. (More on the evidence, shortly.)
The odd thing is that Moore's initial reaction was to tell at least a simulacrum of the truth, only later to change to a flat-out lie. Often, a liar works in the other direction, at first denying everything and then admitting little dribs and drabs as new evidence warrants. Who knows: Maybe this strange evolution from partial truth to full prevarication gives an indication that, somehow, Moore's conscience is warring with itself.
Either way, his willingness to move to full-fledged dishonesty helps undermine his onetime semi-believable denials of the worst of the charges against him. One fib does not prove that his other statements are lies, of course, but it does establish that he is not entirely trustworthy.
Here is the obvious lie (the part before the "and"), repeated twice in recent days, from church pulpits: "Let me state once again: I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone."
If he said it just once, it could be attributable to a mere lack of clarity: Maybe he meant he did not know the women he had not already admitted to knowing. But when he said it twice, and insisted he neither knew nor dated "any" of them, he was committing a bald-faced lie.
How do we know?
We know, first, because he himself told us so.
Here was Roy Moore talking to Fox's Sean Hannity a few days after the disturbing allegations came out [emphases added]: " I do recognize however the names of two these young ladies, Debbie Wesson and Gloria Thacker , which they have a maiden, that's their maiden name.... I seem to know or remember knowing [Wesson's] parents...that they were friends. I can't recall the specific dates because that's been 40 years but I remember her as a good girl ."
Then:
HANNITY: But do you remember ever going on a date with her? She said that you asked around out on the first of several dates but nothing progressed beyond kissing.
MOORE : I don't remember specific dates. I do not and I don't remember if it was that time or later . But I do not remember that.
HANNITY: But you know hard but you never dated her ever? Is that what you're saying?
MOORE: No but I don't remember going out on dates. I knew her as a friend. If we did go on dates then we did. But I do not remember that.
HANNITY: What about Gloria Thacker Deason says she was an 18 year old cheerleader when you began taking her on dates that included bottles bottles rose wine. She's 18 at the time. The Alabama drinking age at the time is 19. Did that ever happen?
MOORE: No. Because in this county is a dry county. We would never would have had liquor. I would never... I believe this she said that she believed she was under age and as I recall she was 19 or older and that just never happened. I never provided alcohol, beer or intoxicating liquor to a minor. That'd be against the law and against anything I would have ever done. And I seem to remember her as a good girl or I seem to remember I had some sort of knowledge of her parents, her mother in particular. HANNITY: At that time in your life...Let me ask you this you do remember these girls would it be unusual for you as a 32 year old guy to have dated a woman as young as 17? That would be a 15 year difference or a girl 18. Do you remember dating girls that young at that time?
MOORE: Not generally, no. If did, you know, I'm not going to dispute anything but I don't remember anything like that.
HANNITY: But you don't specifically remember having any girlfriend that was in her late teens even at that time?
MOORE: I don't remember that and I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother. And I think in her statement she said that her mother actually encouraged her to go out with me.
So Moore remembers them both as good girls, remembers the parents of both, recalls that one was 19 or older (she says she was 18), knew one of them "as a friend," and can't deny having actually dated them (but said there was no sexual activity).
Yet now, just weeks later, he insists he neither knew nor dated "any" of these women, not even the ones whose parents' permission for dating he acknowledged requesting (and whose surviving parents confirm that he asked).
This isn't splitting hairs. This is an unequivocal contradiction not only of the stories of multiple young women, but of his own earlier account.
And now one of those women, Debbie Wesson Gibson, has produced absolutely compelling evidence that she and Moore were indeed friendly. A scrapbook from her high school days, easily verifiable as dating from then and as having not been altered, contains references to her having gone on dates with Moore and features a note he wrote her congratulating her for graduating high school.
This personal scrapbook is far more compelling than the somewhat dubious, single-entry note allegedly written by Moore in another girl's yearbook (although a hand-writing expert confirms what untrained eyes also see, which is that the bulk of the yearbook message is written in a hand remarkably similar to the writing featured in the note to Wesson/Gibson). A court of law would accept the scrapbook as evidence of some sort of friendly association between Moore and Wesson.
But now Moore says he not only never went on a date with her (she had described him fondly as playing the guitar and reading poetry for her), but never even knew her.
It would have been so easy to say what he started to say to Hannity: Yes, he did on some occasions date older teenage girls, with their parents' knowledge, and he acted like a gentleman and never did anything inappropriate with them. He could distinguish those instances from the worse allegations against him, and trust the public to adjudge the stories and his believability for themselves.
Instead, he is falsely denying even the most innocent of all the "accusations" against him. He is lying after having had weeks to think about it. He is not miss-speaking out of the haze of memory newly jarred, but rather putting forth a falsehood with deliberate intent.
These new untruths are counterproductive. They hurt, not help, his case that he didn't bring to his house, partially disrobe, and fondle then-14-year-old Leigh Corfman. By usual standards, remember, Corfman's claims are at least credible. Her mother confirms their meeting of Moore at the courthouse. Court records confirm the mother and daughter were there at the time. The mother confirms that their home phone cord was long enough to stretch into Leigh's room and that Leigh took private calls there. Public records (despite Moore's team's claims to the contrary) confirm they lived where they said they did.
And, to quote the original summation by the Washington Post , "Two of Corfman's childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge." One of those two friends actually recalled specific details of the second Moore encounter that Corfman told her, which match Corfman's current account.
Meanwhile, other contemporaneous witnesses support several of the other (non-Corfman) stories, including one mother who quite explicitly says Moore asked permission to date her daughter when the daughter was just 16 (the mother refused).
Instead of asserting a sort of gray area among different types of interactions with teens of various ages, Roy Moore is now insisting against all evidence and common sense that all of it, every bit, is a false smear born of a grand conspiracy.
This column has gone to great lengths to credit some of Moore's stories, to give him some benefit of the doubt , and to defend him from unfair charges ; and in other forums I have defended him as well against some of the accusations against him of financial improprieties.
But if the man wants us to believe him, he darn well should stop telling lies.
Roy Moore's Senate campaign is running a TV commercial featuring a cheap lie that harms public faith in our constitutional system.
On a personal level, the lie isn't as vicious as the smear-by-out-of-context-innuendo to which a recent Doug Jones ad has subjected Moore. In terms of systemic damage, though, Moore's commercial is somewhat worse, as it adds to a long series of claims, events and trends that wrongly convince many voters our system is "rigged" by shadowy, powerful forces.
When Richard Hofstadter wrote his infamous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in 1964, it surrounded the germ of truth with a bunch of highfalutin' claptrap used as a way to take cheap shots at conservatives. Unfortunately, though, today's political world truly does exhibit a vast amount of outlandish paranoia all across the political spectrum; Moore's TV spot cynically plays on , and exacerbates, that paranoia .
The Moore ad references the now-famous sexual-impropriety accusations against Moore by calling them "false allegations" (maybe) resulting from "a scheme by liberal elites and the Republican establishment to protect their big-government trough."
That second part, about the alleged scheme, is a lie. (If it's not, the Moore campaign should prove its contention. Put up, or shut up.) It features photos of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (with a crown on his head) along with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, while big-dollar bills erupt out of the U.S. Capitol dome.
Before examining this further, let us be clear: The word "lie" is used here very carefully. Not every falsehood is a lie; some are just mistakes. A falsehood is a lie only if the one telling it either knows it not to be true or if he spreads the information with willful disregard for whether it is true or not - for self-serving purposes, with no real attempt to ascertain if it is indeed accurate.
The allegation that the Republican establishment and liberal elites are colluding to invent false accusations against Moore is the latter kind of lie. Not only is it untrue, but it relies on absurdist logic and/or a serious ignorance about how our government and politics actually work.
To be clear, McConnell has much for which to answer in this race . He and his team screwed things up at every step. But not only is there no evidence that McConnell or his team had anything to do with scheming to bring down Moore with these allegations, there also is not a shred of reason for them to have done so. The idea doesn't just lack sense; it runs directly counter to all logic and all political reality.
As soon as the primary was over, Moore was the Republican candidate - and McConnell desperately needs a Republican to win. With only a two-vote Republican majority in a Senate full of GOP lone wolves, McConnell clearly was looking past his doubts about Roy Moore and starting to help Moore. That's why the National Republican Senatorial Committee was helping support Moore's campaign, financially and organizationally - because in a choice between Moore and the liberal Jones, of course the Republican establishment wanted Moore to be the senator.
And the very last thing they would want is an official Republican nominee to suddenly be credibly charged with teen abuse, and for the party to be faced with a damned-either-way dilemma in which a huge swath of the country would believe Republicans willingly overlook ephebophilia .
Meanwhile, here's some news for conspiracy mongers: Roy Moore, in his self-appointed role as principled Christian conservative, represented not a single threat to the supposed "big government trough." The DC ethos surely is flawed, but the system - especially the financial side of it - wasn't threatened by a single junior senator in his 70s, especially one whose actual record and public advocacy on non-cultural-hot-button issues actually is rather moderate.
(Remember, too: The McConnell henchmen spent far more money and effort attacking Mo Brooks in the first primary than it did attacking Moore. Brooks, not Moore, was the one they really feared.)
There was no reason and no motive for McConnell's minions, after Moore was the nominee, to have concocted false allegations of such a nature against Moore. Zero, zilch, nada. And there is no evidence they did so. (Indeed, through the journalistic grapevine, the story I've heard of how the Washington Post stumbled onto these allegations is a classic of a shoe-leather reporter being in the right place at the right time, with utterly apolitical sources.)
Mitch McConnell wants a vote for conservative judges, and a vote to replace Obamacare, and a vote to undo regulations. The last thing he wants is to be stuck with no choice other than one between a Republican colleague who is thought by many to be a sexual abuser and a liberal Democrat who will vote with Schumer 90 percent of the time.
Indeed, what's truly insane in the Moore ad is the idea that somehow McConnell and Schumer are on the same side of anything , or that they are self-consciously protecting a system whose insider privileges are more important to them than are their vast policy, political, and personal differences.
But there is a cottage industry of political hacks, or of tactical Leninists such as the blowhard Steve Bannon, who see either money or political power to be snatched if they somehow convince the public to believe the lie that the conspiracy exists.
Yellowhammer Contributing Editor Quin Hillyer, of Mobile, also is a Contributing Editor for National Review Online, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic , a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
Yes, there are good reasons to believe Roy Moore misbehaved with teenage girls 40 years ago.
On the other hand, some of the emotional, reflexive, and conspiracy-minded assertions put forth by many of Moore's backers - not to mention absurd comparisons to Saints Mary and Joseph , or calls to criminally charge Moore's accusers - are examples of extreme ignorance, sheer stupidity, or both.
As my earlier column handled the arguments in list fashion, let me use a parallel format here.
First, many Moore defenders say that just because the story ran in the "liberal" Washington Post , it therefore cannot be believed. This is nonsense on steroids and amphetamines at the same time. Many news outlets may have a liberal bias, but ones as prestigious as the Post also have very high professional standards, and many stages of review. Post reporters and editors may (or may not, and often don't) have biases that subtly affect their stories, and they may make errors on details, as humans often do. But they don't just make things up, nor do they publish things they don't fully believe are true.
In this case, by professional journalistic standards, the original story on Moore was quite well sourced and very tightly reported. While anybody can pick nits with just about any significant news story, this one is far more likely to land in college journalism classes as a legitimate example of a story done right than of one done sloppily (or worse).
Second, the idea that this is a "last minute" smear is absurd. Publishing a story like this a full five weeks before an election is hardly a last-minute bombshell. Instead, it allows plenty of time for follow-up investigation, for Moore to defend himself, and for the voters to weigh it all accordingly. Indeed, the Post has acted with relative dispatch, publishing the story as soon as it considered the article to be airtight, rather than when it would politically do the most damage to Moore.
Third, it is fallacious to assume that these allegations cannot be true just because they didn't surface during more than 30 years of Moore's prior political activity. Not only do true sex abuse allegations quite often arise only decades later, even for the most public of men - see former House Speaker Dennis Hastert - but there is copious evidence, historical and psychological, with peer-reviewed studies, to the effect that real victims of such abuse often do take years and even decades to come forward.
But in this case, there are two parts to the "why didn't it come up earlier" question. Moore's defenders say they are suspicious of the charges not just because it took so long for the victims to speak up, but also because they think journalists or opposing campaigns surely would have dug up these charges before now due to the longtime, controversial notoriety of Moore. This might seem a reasonable premise, but it's not. The fact is that Moore's career did not lend itself to thorough, research-heavy vetting until now.
First, Moore hasn't been a nominee for a federal office before. National news orgs may not have liked him, but they didn't really care because he was Alabama's problem. Now that he may go national, though, the Washington Post has a lot more resources to put into research than do the local papers, and the state Democratic Party for years has been so denuded that it may as well not exist. (For that matter, state newspapers began cutting way back on "investigative" work as early as about 2005.)
Moore's trajectory as a statewide candidate did not begin until 2000, when he ran for state Supreme Court. That was the year of the hotly contested Bush-Gore race; a state court race wasn't receiving many resources then. I think I'm right that I was the only journalist to do a major-research feature story on his race - and I focused entirely on judicial/legal background and philosophy, not on personal (non-professional) history.
Then, Moore was ejected from office in 2003 and thought to be politically dead. Then he ran a very weak primary campaign for governor in 2006. No need for anybody to expend major resources investigating him; he was no real threat to win. Then he ran another weak campaign for governor in 2010. Of four major candidates, he came in fourth. Again, no need to expend resources against him. His comeback in 2012 caught everybody by surprise. And in the general election, it was a presidential year, so nobody paid much attention, again, to Alabama's state Supreme Court race.
Fourth, at least in the Post story (this excludes Monday's charges from the client of drama-queen-lawyer Gloria Allred), all the descriptions of the alleged incidents, from all 30 sources - all told independently without the sources being able to compare notes with each other - were remarkably similar in their descriptions of Moore's behavior. And for an alleged sexual deviant, Moore showed quite idiosyncratic tendencies (according to the sources). Yes, they said, he was interested in teenagers, but he did not (unlike most sex abusers) use force; he did take "no" for an answer, and he drove the girls home, almost in gentlemanly fashion, when they asked him to do so. These idiosyncrasies fit into Moore's public persona of old-fashioned courtliness, which makes them even more believable. Yes, they make the allegations at least somewhat less serious than forcible assault (although any sexual contact with a 14-year-old, with or without physical force, is inexcusable and rightly called "assault"), but the consistency of the stories also lends credence to the idea that these were, indeed, Moore's habits.
In courts of law, such apparent patterns of behavior are often admissible evidence for the jury to consider.
In sum, then, it is perfectly logical for objective observers, at this point, to tend to believe the allegations against Moore - as long as they don't yet say their conclusions are hard and fast. To recap, it is logical because the Post story met good journalistic standards, because it does not have the attributes of a last-minute smear, because it is a fallacy that Moore's background has been thoroughly vetted by press and opponents before now, and because of the commonality of the sources' reports about the idiosyncrasies of Moore's alleged behavior four decades ago.
As my previous column explained why there are good reasons not to assume that Moore is guilty, these considerations show why it is eminently reasonable to take the allegations very seriously indeed.
A man in his 30s should never even be alone with a girl 16 or younger (other than a relative, or with the possible exception of a man driving home a babysitter in a pinch and in tightly controlled circumstances), much less in any remotely sexual atmosphere. If the 14 year-old's story about Moore is true, then, yes, even 38 years later, it makes him unfit for public office.
Yellowhammer Contributing Editor Quin Hillyer, of Mobile, also is a Contributing Editor for National Review Online, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic , a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
Without taking a position on whether to believe Roy Moore or to believe his accusers, a fair-minded observer can see a rational basis for the beliefs of each.
This column will explain to Moore haters why many (not all, but many) Moore defenders aren't foolish, ignorant, or hypocritical for believing the allegations false.
My next column will explain to Moore defenders why it's not illogical, dishonest or anti-Christian to believe that the case against Moore looks strong.
Honest people can see the same set of facts and analyze them differently. This doesn't mean that every half-baked reaction, pro or con, is intellectually or morally defensible; it does mean that the automatic assumption that the other side has bad motives (or is plagued with utter stupidity) is unfair and unwise.
This defense of Moore supporters is not to say, for example, that over-emotionalized, choose-your-side-and- then -choose-the-facts-that-support-it outlooks are intellectually acceptable. For example, while my editor Pepper Bryars is absolutely right that Alabamians have reason to believe the Washington Post and other establishment-media outlets are biased against the state and against conservatives, that absolutely, positively does not excuse the truly asinine assumption that nothing the Post prints is true, or that objectively well-reported stories should automatically be dismissed as "fake news."
That's the sort of willful, obstinate ignorance that leads to the national media's bad stereotypes of Alabama in the first place.
With those caveats out of the way, though, here's why a rational, non-hyped-up Alabaman could legitimately doubt that the Post's story relates events that truly happened.
First , while it is ignorance personified to believe that professional reporters just make things up or encourage accusers to make things up, it is an incontrovertible fact that the vast majority of national reporters hold cultural and political beliefs different from the majority of Alabamans. Is the Post putting resources into digging for dirt on Doug Jones the way it is dirt-digging against Roy Moore? I seriously doubt it. What can happen, then, is that reporters using reasonable journalistic standards might still, in subtle ways, be inclined to accept as legitimate some "corroborating" accounts that in other circumstances they would dismiss as hearsay. Or they might subconsciously refuse to credit some pro-Moore evidence they would otherwise find exculpatory.
In other words, when the trail of institutional bias is strong, it might be logical to demand a little higher burden of proof from a particular journalistic outlet. In sum, it would be wrong to immediately categorize reports as "fake news," but not unreasonable to be skeptical of subtle, non-deliberate biases.
Second, while the timing of all these allegations may not be as suspicious as many in Alabama are instinctively claiming, it is indeed a bit hard to believe. If nothing like these stories has arisen in some 30 years of Moore running for public office, then people can reasonably theorize that dirty tricks are involved when a story finally comes out only after the man is the party nominee for federal office. As reported at Yellowhammer on Sunday, Alabamans have witnessed spectacularly false allegations before, including the reprehensibly dishonest claim in 1998 that Republican candidate Steve Windom raped a prostitute. And, nationally, the outrageously mendacious rape allegations at both Duke and the University of Virginia in the past decade remind us that one reason some stories are hard to believe is because they are, indeed, not true.
Third, even as strange as Moore may seem to national media, everything known about his character is that he behaves, personally, in a gentlemanly manner. Despite his intensity on some matters, there is a courtliness about him that has usually extended to his campaigns, too, where he usually refrains from mud-slinging. And while some students of human nature may see aspects of some of these new stories to show a pattern of Moore's questionable behavior around teens, others can just as easily find just the opposite.
The man they have watched for 20 or 30 years act in a courtly manner is, they think, the same man who didn't even pursue a (perfectly legal) 18-year-old without asking her mother's permission, and then who did nothing more than kiss the girl. This is hardly the sort of man, they think, who would go so far as to illicitly take a 14-year-old alone to his house and then do the things of which he is accused.
Little more than a century ago, a 32-year-old asking parents if he could "court" their 18-year-old daughter would have been almost ordinary. Even 40 years ago, when the events happened, it would have been seen as maybe a bit strange, but not borderline criminal - and hardly the mark of the sort of predator who would ask a 14-year-old to disrobe.
In short, Moore fans already suspicious of the 14-year-old's story for the first two reasons above could look at the details of two of the three other "allegations" and see them as making the 14-year-old's story less, not more, believable.
Fourth, if (and only if) the story about the 14-year-old was false, but the stories involving the older teens are true, then voters could reasonably conclude that nearly 40 years of subsequently upstanding behavior overrides any "weirdness" about the allegations involving the older, non-illegal teens.
The cultural Left has been hyper-sexualizing young people for 50 years, they say, and nobody yelled bloody murder about plenty of other age-gap romances involving late teens - including when then-late-30s Jerry Seinfeld started dating then-17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein in 1993. So why should Moore going on a "date" and "kissing" an 18-year-old disqualify him 38 years later?
Fifth, some people believe (mistakenly) the myth that if somebody ever misbehaves sexually around a minor, that means the person will do it again and again because the person "can't help himself" - and that, therefore, the absolute lack of any stories of such behavior from Moore in the past 30 years makes the earlier stories not believable. So widespread is this misunderstanding, indeed, that it is therefore not illogical for somebody to think the lack of such subsequent activity by Moore makes it unlikely he ever behaved in such fashion.
Put all these five factors together, and one can honestly believe, even with no emotional attachment to Roy Moore's cause, that the most serious allegation against Moore is likely untrue.
This is why nobody should rush to judgment against Roy Moore. In the next column, we'll see why it's equally wrong to rush to defend him. If he deliberately, sexually disrobed a 14-year-old when he was 32, of course he should never hold office. What's needed, therefore, is the patience to see what other evidence emerges, and then a sober and unemotional weighing thereof.
Yellowhammer Contributing Editor Quin Hillyer, of Mobile, also is a Contributing Editor for National Review Online, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic , a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017. |
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It is expected that on October 10 CUB will be bought by AB...
The 60-year-old refinery, previously operated by Shell, was bought by Viva Energy Australia in August 2014, and it immediately pledged $...
Then, on October 3, an Indigenous man was shot by West...
The scheme, which has been comprehensively rorted by private for-profit providers, will be replaced with a new more tightly...
The 60-year-old refinery, previously operated by Shell has been operated by Viva Energy Australia since August 2014, with $150...
But that was contested by about 200 lively protesters and the Ecopella choir who stationed themselves outside the company's...
This action is one in a series of protests against the military-industrial complex that supplies the...
The appeal was lodged in October last year. Hancock Coal Pty Ltd and the Queensland Minister for Environment...
The letter states: "The purpose of this centre is for refugee status processing. All processing will end...
AGL claims to be "green" but it is Australia's Number 1 fossil fuel polluter, owning three of Australia's most polluting coal fired power stations. It also runs NSW's major unconventional gas plant in Camden,...
Guardian Australia columnist Jeff Sparrow spoke at the forum. He said: "Billions of dollars have been spent on fighting...
Indigenous and environmental activists say the pipeline will ruin sacred burial grounds and pollute local...
The Charlotte murder and demonstrations have received the most coverage....
Jaroslaw Gowin, the minister of science and higher education, said that large protests and strikes on October 3...
Wearing black as a symbol of mourning for lost reproductive rights, tens of thousands of women in Poland and beyond took to the streets on October 3 to protest...
Bolton has received broad support across the North-East Ward, where she is standing, including from the Muslim community based in Fawkner. "We have more...
At a September 16 meeting called by the peak labour movement body, SA...
Obeid had claimed he had suffered financial and reputational harm as a result of ICAC's inquiry into a...
The NSW Industrial Relations Commission dismissed NatRoad's application, which was opposed by the Transport Workers...
In these days of growing media concentration, Green Left Weekly is a proudly independent voice committed to human and civil rights, global peace and environmental sustainability, democracy and equality. By printing the news and ideas the mainstream media won't, Green Left Weekly exposes the lies and distortions of the power brokers and helps us to better understand the world around us. |
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Who is she to say whether a serially disrespectful, extramarital sexter who repeatedly lied to voters and whose campaign staff reflects his own deep respect for women by referring to its former female employees as "c*nt," "slutbag," "tw*ts" should or should not get out of the race for mayor of the country's biggest city, representing the party of which she's head?
She's not here to make judgments:
It's not like she'd make sweeping judgments about her opponents based on any figure using derogatory language about women, right? She did make a judgment call on Bob Filner, however, who she thinks should resign. Wasserman Schultz served alongside Filner for several years in the U.S. House. One wonders if it might be that time in his professional circle that allows her to make a more definitive call on his status. A follow-up on the subject would have been nice, but kudos to this MSNBC anchor for even bringing up Weiner and Filner:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy
And, while I'm giving credit where it's due, liberal women's group Ultraviolet went after both Weiner and his staff Wednesday:
A feminist group is taking a stand following mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner's spokeswoman's angry tirade against a former intern.
"The circus that is the Weiner campaign has crossed the final line: Sexist name-calling and slut shaming is outrageous, unacceptable, and has no place in any campaign," UltraViolet co-founder Nita Chaudhary said in a statement Wednesday.
Tuesday, Weiner spokeswoman Barbara Morgan offered a profanity-laced interview with Talking Points Memo about Olivia Nuzzi, a former campaign intern who wrote an unflattering article about the Weiner campaign for the New York Daily News, in which she claimed people only joined the campaign to curry favor with his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton...
"Barbara Morgan should be fired immediately. Adding fuel to the flames, the disturbing revelations that Anthony Weiner thinks it's somehow hilarious to refer to female interns as 'Monica' leads us to believe that his days in therapy are far from over," Chaudry said. "New York can do better than this, and quite frankly women everywhere deserve better than this."
Enjoy the always adorable Kristen Chenoweth's adaptation of "Popular" from "Wicked" from Jay Leno last night. Click to watch. "They'll think you've become a monk even though they've seen your junk!" |
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On July 20, 2005 Canada legalized same-sex marriage. At the time, it was one of only four countries in the world to do so. Already legalized in eight out of the ten provinces and one of the three territories by 2003, same-sex marriage had been a long time coming.
Most of the provincial legalization were due to high level court cases, arguing that to deny queer couples marriage would be discrimination in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many of the legal benefits that accompany marriage had applied to queer couples since 1999 for similar reasons.
Same-sex marriage was a huge victory for queer activists though some activists opposed marriage on the principle that it would convert queer people to a more heteronormative lifestyle.
Even now that it's in effect, the legislation has massive gaps , creating controversy over whether queer couples who come to Canada to marry can legally divorce . |
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On July 20, 2005 Canada legalized same-sex marriage. |
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AMY GOODMAN : We are joined now in our studio by sportswriter David Zirin. His new book is called What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . We welcome you to Democracy Now!
DAVID ZIRIN : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : Let's talk about that history of Olympics past.
DAVID ZIRIN : Well, the starting point is understanding that sports is a trillion dollar business worldwide, and the Olympics is like the ultimate prize. I mean, for the people who run a city, when they make their Olympic bids, getting the Olympics is like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa all rolled up into one for these guys. And when London got the Olympics for 2012, when they won that bid in a huge surprise over Paris, they were celebrating in the streets of London, particularly in the board rooms and the banks.
Also people in London wept when that occurred, because people in London had already started organizing about what they understand the Olympics coming to mean. Now, part of the reason why people have this idea about what it means for the Olympics to come to a given town is because of the history that does exist. I mean, when the Olympics come to an area, it may mean a corporate feeding frenzy, but what it also means is it means, as you put it, the utter emiseration of civil liberties, as well as attacks on working people and the poor. And history really does prove this out.
I mean, I'll just give some of the lowlights here. In 1936, this was probably one of the most infamous ones, when the Olympics were awarded to Berlin, even though it was known at the time the extent of Hitler's crimes and the crimes of the Nazis, there was a cleansing of the streets of Berlin, as it was put, to make the city look hospitable, as if Germany had emerged from the Depression. And that, of course, meant locking up dissidents, sending people to concentration camps. In 1968 in Mexico City there was the infamous massacre of 500 workers and students by Mexican security forces as they attempted to make their city, quote/unquote, "hospitable" for an international audience.
In 1984 in this country -- it's not just other countries by any stretch of the imagination -- in 1984 there were the infamous gang sweeps in Los Angeles, which involved people in the L.A. City Council reviving the 1916 Anti-Syndicalism Act, which was used in 1916 to go after the Industrial Workers of the World, which was a radical union at the time. And part of what this law said was that it outlawed certain hand signals and modes of dress that sort of denoted somebody as being in the I.W.W., and they just applied that to young black men in L.A. So if you were wearing certain colors or gave people a certain kind of high five, it was grounds to arrest people in 1984 in L.A. And those gang sweeps were immortalized in the NWA video "Straight Outta Compton," which was like a reenactment of the '84 gang sweeps, which people, you know, should check out. It's interesting.
In 1996 in Atlanta, keep it in this country. You had, according to the ACLU , 10,000 black homeless men arrested without cause, and you had a scandalous situation that they swept under the rug where police were found to fill out arrest slips in advance of arresting people, of, you know, black male -- you know, they had those filled out going into the streets to make Atlanta, you know, ironically this image of the new South that President Clinton attempted to project at the 1996 Olympics.
But in 2004 in Athens, I think we all saw it go to another level. Athens was the first post-9/11 Olympics. And what we saw there was something that you even hadn't seen in years past, and that was the presence of 50,000 paramilitary forces, not from Greece, but from the United States, Great Britain and Israel. And their presence was actually in violation of the Greek constitution, but it was welcomed by the Greek prime minister at the time because of that pressure to make Greece, quote/unquote, "hospitable" for an international audience. And that meant the mass arrest of thousands of ordinary people in Greece.
And so I think there is an awareness about what the Olympics bring, not to mention about the fact that they tend to suck municipalities dry of funds, which is why, interestingly, New York City, as you may know, was in the finals to get the Olympics. And something that ESPN radio reported with surprise and shock was that ESPN was being flooded with emails by people from New York, New Jersey area saying, "Please don't send the Olympics here. We don't want them in New York City. We don't want this stadium." And ESPN , you know, which is, of course, about promoting all things sports -- you know, working people be damned -- was absolutely flummoxed by this, like, 'Wow! People don't want the Olympics in New York City.' And they were just scratching their heads. But if they looked at history, they would see why.
AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to David Zirin. He's a sportswriter, and his book is called What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States Why the title?
DAVID ZIRIN : What's My Name, Fool? , first to be very clear, it's not a tribute to Mr. T. That was asked to me at one book reading. That would be "Pity the Fool." No, What's My Name, Fool? , it's a reference to really what the heart of the book is about. The book is about the intersection of radical politics and pro sports, about times when movements off the field found expression on the playing field, and to me the high point of that history was the time when the heavyweight champion of the world had one foot in the Black Freedom struggle and one foot in anti-war movement. And, of course, I'm talking about Muhammad Ali.
Now, when Ali changed his name, first from Cassius Clay and then to Cassius X, which a lot of people don't know -- he was shortly known as Cassius X -- and then to Muhammad Ali, when he did this, there was just no word for the firestorm that this caused, because, you know, the heavyweight champion of the world, that's supposed to be a symbol of all that's Americana, a symbol of, you know, masculinity and standing for the flag, and you had the heavyweight champion of the world join the organization of Malcolm X, join an organization in the Nation of Islam that believed in self-defense against racist attacks.
And I was -- you know, I'm trying to relay to an audience today about the firestorm that this caused, and the only thing I could think of is you have to imagine if, say, Jenna Bush joined the Iraqi resistance. I mean, that would be the only way that you could make a comparison to when Ali joined the Nation of Islam and forced people to confront that name change.
Now, overnight, whether you called the champion Clay or Ali, it said everything about you in the 1960s. It said what side you were on in the Black Freedom struggle, what side you were on in the Free Speech fights on college campuses, soon the war in Vietnam. And therefore, Ali's fights, they had this incredible morality plays, they became. You know, if the champion won, it wasn't just about an individual winning a sporting event, it was about the confidence of a new and rising movement in a way that people took very personally and very seriously.
Now, you go to the title, What's My Name, Fool?" , goes to when this name change controversy really was at its apex, and that's in November 1965, when Ali fought a former two-time champion named Floyd Patterson. And in the lead up to the fight, this is what Patterson said. He said, "I am fighting Clay, and, yes, his name is Clay," as a crusade to return the title to America and take it from the Black Muslims.
Now, Ali's response to this was really interesting, because he had no response. This is one of the most loquacious athletes ever. You know, the press called him the "Louisville Lip" and "Gaseous Cassius," because he liked to talk so much. But he didn't say anything in the lead up to the fight and actually in the fight itself he let his fighting do the talking. Observers say he could have knocked out Patterson in one round, but actually, he drew it out over nine rounds. Sportswriter Robert Lipsite described it as watching someone pick the wings off a butterfly. And as Ali peppered Patterson with jabs, what he said, and he said it in a loud clear voice so all of press row could hear, he said, "Come on, America, come on, white America, say my name. What's my name, fool?" And that's where I got the title of the book. And that's just the title. So, we got a lot in this book.
AMY GOODMAN : This is an excerpt of the remarkable film When We Were Kings , the documentary about Muhammad Ali's 1974 championship bout with George Foreman in Kinshasa that came to be known as "the Rumble in the Jungle."
MUHAMMAD ALI : Yeah, I'm in Africa. Yeah, Africa is my home. Damn America and what America thinks. Yeah, I live in America, but Africa is the home of the black man, and I was a slave 400 years ago, and I'm going back home to fight among my brothers.
AMY GOODMAN : That, a clip from When We Were Kings , Muhammad Ali. You talk about Muhammad Ali being at that time extremely political, outspoken, yet today young people might not know that at all, though Muhammad Ali is the most famous name in the world.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes, I mean, today, Muhammad Ali's image is used to sell everything from Sprite to Microsoft with the benefit of computer C.G.I. And there's no question that what's happened to Muhammad Ali, you know, is not dissimilar to what's happened to people like Malcolm X, who is now on a postage stamp, or Martin Luther King, whose image you can now get on a commemorative cup when you go into McDonald's on his birthday, in that Muhammad Ali's political teeth have largely been extracted.
And that's something that, with this book, I want to hope to return to the arena, is like the context of Ali's politics, because the tradition of Ali and that tradition of resistance is something that's, I think, very important for people to know. I mean, Ali was just named the number two most important athlete in history in ESPN's Top 100 Athletes of All Time. But when you saw their tribute to him, I mean, you would have left wondering, "Okay, well, what's so special about this guy?" And that's why it's so important to return to the arena, as we understand sports, that dynamic relationship between struggles on the streets, how it affected athletes, but then also how athletes then, in turn, affected those struggles.
AMY GOODMAN : Let's go back to another clip of When We Were Kings . Muhammad Ali was known as an anti-war symbol to some. This is a news clip from that film.
NEWS CLIP Cassius Clay, at a federal court in Houston, is found guilty of violating the U.S. Selective Service laws by refusing to be inducted. He is sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000.
AMY GOODMAN : What happened to Muhammad Ali then?
DAVID ZIRIN : Well, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title, and he was forced to report to a draft board in El Paso, Texas. Now, this was very interesting, because, you know, Ali was offered the same deal that many past heavyweight champions had been offered, which was, you know, that he could just -- you know, it's not like he was going to be sent to, you know, to Saigon or anything. He could have worn red, white, and blue trunks, boxed at some U.S.O. shows and kept the title.
But instead, what Ali said was -- he was quite clear -- he said, "The enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my people, my religion, or myself by fighting against other people" -- speaking about the National Liberation Front in Vietnam -- "who are fighting for their own freedom, justice and liberty." And so he came out very -- there was no mistaking where he stood on this.
So they stripped him of his title for his anti-war views, and he was sent down to the draft office there. And as he went down there, it wasn't known exactly what Ali was going to do when he got there, because he was facing a prison sentence of five years, you know, in a federal prison. So there was actually a rally outside the El Paso area that was organized by H. Rap Brown and the students at Texas Western, now Texas El Paso. And they were out there, a couple hundred of them, with a huge banner, and what it said was "Draft Beer, Not Ali." And when Ali went in there and when they called his name to take the step forward, I don't -- I mean, I don't know if this made a difference, but they made quite a mistake when they called his name in that they called for Cassius Clay to take a step forward, and he absolutely refused. Then they asked for Muhammad Ali to take a step forward, and he absolutely refused.
And there's a tremendous quote by a writer named Gerald Early who said that "when Ali refused to take that step forward, I felt more than pride in him, I felt as if my honor as a young black boy had been defended. He was the dragon slayer, and I went home into my room that night and I cried. I cried for myself and I cried for our black possibilities." I mean, that's just the power that that moment had for people was incalculable, but not something that's talked about when ESPN Classic does a look at Muhammad Ali.
AMY GOODMAN : Wasn't there a tradition of Black Muslim resistance to war, Elijah Muhammad being a war resister in World War II?
DAVID ZIRIN : Absolutely. I mean, the thing about Ali, though, was that nexus of him also being the heavyweight champion of the world. I mean, the tradition of athletes going to war is its own book in and of itself. And while there are some famous athletes -- you know, Ted Williams comes to mind -- who actually flew missions in the theater of war, more often than not, it was a ceremonial role. It was something that you did before the cameras to be on the newsreels before, you know, the film started. It was a way for you to show, you know, your patriotic duty or what not. And Ali just gave the stiff-arm to all of that stuff. He wanted no part of it. And there is this great clip of him in another documentary where he's just walking down the hall, and he's saying like 'I will not compromise myself for the white man's money,' and he's screaming this at the camera. And that's really where Ali stood.
And it's worth saying that now it's like we talk about this and, you know, obviously I'm greatly taken with his political stance in the 1960s, but at the time he was an absolutely reviled figure in the mainstream press. I mean, he was torn apart. He was popular on the left and on college campuses, in the black community, but in terms of, like, the media culture at the time -- sometimes we speak about the media today as if it's this corporate monolith, as if in the past it was somehow this arena of debate and discussion. But back then, oh, my goodness, there was no Democracy Now! back then. You know, he was absolutely destroyed.
And if I could, I would like to read a brief section of what sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, who was by far the most famous sportswriter of the era, what he wrote about Ali. And you gotta think that Jimmy Cannon is like Mike Lupica on steroids. I mean, he was huge. This is what he wrote about Ali. He wrote "Clay" -- of course, he calls him Clay -- "Clay fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles and Batman" -- I don't understand the Batman part -- "and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms and the revolt of students who get a check from dad and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered cult of the bored young." I mean, my goodness, if I read that you would think the Unabomber wrote that. It's this insane rant. But this was the most famous sportswriter in the United States, basically laying it down that Muhammad Ali was somehow less than a human being because he stood up to this war.
AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to David Zirin. What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States is the title of his book. When we come back, I want to ask you about Jackie Robinson, about the Williams sisters. I also want to ask you about Pat Tillman. I want to talk also about resistance today of sports athletes. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to Dave Zirin, sportswriter, author of What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . Pat Tillman?
DAVID ZIRIN : Pat Tillman. Pat Tillman was a man who was an overachiever as a football player. He went out of college undrafted. He went on to become an all-pro playing for the Arizona Cardinals. And as is well known, he left after 9/11, turned down a multimillion dollar contract to join the army rangers with his brother to fight in Afghanistan and eventually in Iraq, although at the time he thought he was just fighting in Afghanistan.
Now, the Tillman story is a tragic one for many reasons, and I would like to go through it a little bit. First and foremost, Pat Tillman was asked hundreds, thousands of times, according to his parents, to be a recruiter for the army, to go on commercials about join the army, army of one, Pat Tillman. They wanted to put his name on posters everywhere. And Tillman refused. Why did Tillman refuse? We don't know, because, I mean, he was very iconoclastic. He was known to have hair down to his behind. He did cliff diving, all kinds of stuff. He never came out and said, 'I'm going to go over there and occupy and kill,' and all this stuff. He kept his reasons to himself about why he was doing what he was doing. And that actually frustrated people in the Justice Department, in the Pentagon. They wanted to use this guy, and they weren't able to do it. And there are quotes about that, about their sort of frustration about that.
Pat Tillman, of course, died. He died in Afghanistan. He was shot and killed. At the time we were told that he died in the process of attempting to find bin Laden and to take a hill in the caves of Afghanistan. Now, there is a tragic element to this, of course. When Tillman died there was a nationally televised funeral that John McCain spoke at, as well as other politicians from Arizona. George W. Bush during the election campaign actually addressed the fans at the Arizona Cardinals game through the jumbotron to tell them about the heroism of Pat Tillman in attempting to take this hill.
There was only one problem with this scenario, and that's that it was a total, absolute lie. What happened to Pat Tillman was that he was killed by his own troops. I mean, you read reports of the incident. I mean, it's almost like a metaphor for the whole war. It is just so -- it's insane. I mean, their Humvee broke down. A section of them broke off to circle around and look for, you know, for help or what not, and they ended up circling around and firing at each other, and Pat Tillman died.
Now, what is so disgusting about this is that the Pentagon knew immediately that this had occurred. But they kept that information secret not only from the media, not only from Pat Tillman's parents, but also from his brother who was in the same battalion as him and was somewhere else at that time. They even kept the information from him. And, I mean, it's just -- it boggles the mind.
Now, what's important about this to say is that there is a lot of -- I mean, these are not conspiracy theories, but Pat Tillman's death happened at the same time that the photos around Abu Ghraib were released. And it's definitely thought now by Pat Tillman's parents that the reason why they hid the information was because they needed a P.R. boost in the wake of Abu Ghraib. And Pat and Mary Tillman -- Pat, Sr., his father -- have come out since then strongly and publicly against the Bush administration and against the lies that led, you know, to the lying about their son. They rightly are calling this an obscenity. They were used as props at their own son's funeral. And so it's like, what did Pat Tillman die for? He died for P.R. for this war. And that, I mean, I can't imagine being Pat or Mary Tillman. But they very private people, and they're coming forward and speaking out. And to that they deserve all of our support in that process.
AMY GOODMAN : David Zirin, I wanted to end by asking you about Jackie Robinson, another very well-known sports figure.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes. I would like to read a quote about Jackie Robinson, if I could, by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jackie Robinson was a political person. First of all, let's go with myth and reality about Jackie Robinson very briefly. Jackie Robinson the myth was that he was sort of like the quiet person who suffered in silence. Jackie Robinson once said, 'People see me as sort of the suffering freak black saint.' You know, the person who never talks, has nothing to say, but in reality Jackie Robinson was a very political person. He had a sports column in the New York Post , which was then a liberal publication. He wrote about issues like civil rights a great deal.
His politics were very complicated. He was a Republican, but that was because his family was chased out of Georgia by the Democrat Dixiecrats at a young age, and in his mind his whole life he saw the Democrats as being connected with segregation and Dixie.
But just -- when I'll read this quote -- like, a lot of people criticize Robinson for being political. And this is Dr. Martin Luther King in defense of him. He said, "Jackie Robinson has the right to be political, because back in the days when integration wasn't fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim that walks in the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides." And I think that nails it very well.
Jackie Robinson and this Brooklyn Dodgers team -- and I write about this in the book -- were in some respects a stalking horse for the whole civil rights movement. In the late 40s and early 50s, before Brown v. Board of Ed. , before Montgomery, they're going around and playing games in stadiums that are segregated throughout the South. You know, the Klan is threatening, you know, that they're gonna shoot all of the players if Jackie Robinson takes the field. And the players largely who were from the South stood with Jackie Robinson in this process.
And in the book, I interview a person who was at a lot of these games who is still alive, a sportswriter named Lester "Red" Rodney. And Lester Rodney, he has the most amazing stories about fans, white fans in the South starting to cheer for Robinson at the end of games, and this idea of seeing black and white play together on the field. That's why Roy Campanella once said, he said, "Hey, Brown v. Board of Ed. " -- Roy Campanella was the African American catcher of the Brooklyn Dodgers -- Roy Campanella said, Brown v. Board of Ed. gets all the credit, but we were doing Brown v. Board of Ed. on the playing field before the Supreme Court ever heard about it." You know, and that's what he said, and someone laughed, and he said, "What, you think I'm joking?"
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about Jackie Robinson's history. You talk about how he was a Republican, that he thought the Democrats represented segregation. What it meant for him to be a player, how he was seen, the McCarthy era, and then his relationship with Nixon and with Martin Luther King.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes. Well, it's complicated, definitely. I mean, Jackie Robinson was somebody who was never shy about expressing his political views. He was deeply political, deeply articulate. But he also was somebody who was a bit of a political cipher. He bounced around a lot between different views and opinions.
In the late 1940s during McCarthyism, Jackie Robinson had been so successful in integrating Major League Baseball that he was listed as the number two respected American in the United States behind Harry Truman in the late 1940s, despite the fact that he received thousands of death threats throughout the season.
Now, in 1949 Robinson was asked to actually speak at the House of Un-American Activities Committee in condemnation of the great activist, singer, actor and actually former great athlete, Paul Robeson. And it was very -- Robeson, just before Robinson came out there, had famously just taken the heads off of the House of the Un-American Activities Committee, I mean, the most blistering speech, where they basically told Robeson to go back to Russia, and Robeson said, you know, 'my family built this country from the bottom up, and no fascist-minded individuals like you are going to tell me what I can or can't do.' And this was really the first time that HUAC was punctured, you know, because before that there was a lot of, you know, 'I take the Fifth,' and people were remaining mum in the face of their intimidation and their might.
So they called up Branch Ricky, who was a staunch anti-communist. Branch Ricky was the general manager and part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and they said 'We need Robinson in here to condemn Robeson.' And Robinson -- Ricky actually wasn't wild about doing it. The NAACP offered to defend Robinson to say, 'You don't have to go in there and speak against Robeson.' But it has to be said that Robinson wanted to do it.
And once again, you get into a lot of conflicting views about why. And, I mean, the fact that Robinson did it, I would say, is unforgivable. It's a reason why a lot of activists in the 1960s, like Malcolm X, they pretty much tore Robinson up. Like Malcolm X once said, he said, "Cassius Clay" -- this was before the name change -- Malcolm X said, "Cassius Clay is our hero. He's the first real black sports hero. Jackie Robinson is a white man's hero." And he said that because of the Robeson incident.
But what Robinson did, if you read the whole transcript, I mean, he came there and he -- I mean, the speech is incredible, like he spoke out against HUAC , too. He basically said, 'Don't tell me about communism, don't tell me about any of this stuff, because communism isn't the reason that dogs are being sicked on us in the South. Communism isn't what's burning black churches.' You know, so he has this speech where basically he lays out to HUAC that racism is about America, not about agitators stirring people up. But then, at the same time, he did take a shot at Robeson, saying that -- that his people -- that he -- basically speaking for all African Americans said, are not going to give up our dreams of equality, as he put it, for a siren song sung in bass. And that's a famous quote, you know, because Paul Robeson had that famous basso profundo voice.
And, I mean, the tragedy of that was that the HUAC people and the media, as well, did not, could not care less about Robinson's eloquence about racism. They could not care less. What they did was they took the slap at Robeson and ran with it, and that was the headline in the papers the next day: "Robinson smacks down Robeson" was basically the headline. And that led to Robeson's -- it was a factor in Robeson's political isolation, and it's worth saying that Robeson was approached for a response to Robinson, and he refused to do it. And he said, 'I refuse to be part of this kind of internecine feud with Jackie Robinson.'
AMY GOODMAN : And yet, Robinson wrote in his memoir that he was sorry he spoke out.
DAVID ZIRIN : Deeply, deeply sorry. His greatest regret
AMY GOODMAN : When Martin Luther King went to jail?
DAVID ZIRIN : Ooh, when Martin Luther King went to jail --
AMY GOODMAN : Jackie Robinson's response?
DAVID ZIRIN : Yeah, Jackie Robinson came out strongly against it. I mean, Jackie Robinson had a very interesting relationship with Martin Luther King, that's very interesting, because Jackie Robinson, you read his writings on the time, he is always in support of Martin Luther King, always in support of everything King does, except on two questions that are very interesting. One question where he differs with Martin Luther King is on the question of violence and nonviolence. I mean, after one of the church burnings where four young African American girls were killed, Jackie Robinson wrote a column once again in the New York Post . And you always have to shake your head when you think of this stuff actually in the New York Post , because of the rag that it is today. But Robinson wrote that -- he said, "Martin Luther King has officially lost me due to his credo of nonviolence," he said, "because we cannot respond nonviolently when our children are being killed." The other instance where they differed -- and this is to me very fascinating -- is, you know, Jackie Robinson was a veteran, so when Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the war in Vietnam, Jackie Robinson wrote that it was a tragic mistake on behalf of King. And King actually called him up on the phone, and they had like a two-hour conversation on the phone. And when it was done, what Robinson said was he said 'Look, I may not agree with Dr. King on this question, but I will never speak out against him again on this issue.'
AMY GOODMAN : And he appealed to Nixon and asked him to -- we only have 30 seconds -- but asked him to release Martin Luther King.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes, he did. Yes, he did. I mean, the Nixon relationship is a complicated one. At the end of his life Jackie Robinson was not a Nixon fan, as when he saw Nixon pursue the Southern strategy in 1968. But the important thing to remember about Jackie Robinson -- I'll end with this point -- is not to look at him for sort of a political lead, because he's all over the place politically. The point is that he represents part of a very real tradition of athletes having more than just bodies and brawn and sweat, but them having minds, as well. Athletes are part of our world. They have a relationship with our world, and it is important for us to engage with them, as we would engage with anybody, as people with thoughts, ideas, dreams and maybe even fighters alongside with us in the move towards a more just society.
AMY GOODMAN : David Zirin, I want to thank you for being with us. This is just part one of our conversation What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . |
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Sun Oct 8, 2017, 08:30 PM
Sunlei (21,957 posts)
ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse
Source: NYT DIBIS, Iraq The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs. More than a thousand prisoners determined to be Islamic State fighters passed through that room last week after they fled their crumbling Iraqi stronghold of Hawija. Instead of the martyrdom they had boasted was their only acceptable fate, they had voluntarily ended up here in the interrogation center of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq. The Iraqi military ousted the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, from Hawija in 15 days, saying it had taken its forces only three days of actual heavy fighting before most of the extremists grabbed their families and ran. According to Kurdish officials, they put up no fight at all, other than planting bombs and booby traps. During the interview, he grew nervous. He said he was from Hawija and had joined the Islamic State because he believed in its cause, because his elder brother had, and because the $100 a month pay was better than anything else around. Mr. Mohemin shook his head. This is the end of this state, he said. He had wet his trousers, adding to the smell, but did not ask to use a toilet. I believe if the governors are telling us to surrender, it really means that this is the end. He swore to God that he was telling the truth. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/world/middleeast/isis-iraq-surrender.html
ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse (Original post) Sunlei Oct 2017 OP
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Dear Nick Xenophon Team,
I would like to inform you of my grave concerns regarding the Welfare Reform Bill 2017 .
As the President of the Australian Unemployed Workers' Union , I believe I can offer you an insight into the reality of unemployment that no advisor can. I hope this letter will give you an opportunity to pause and reflect on how these Bills will negatively effect the lives of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Australians. It's the least you can do.
I wish to point out in the strongest possible terms that this Bill is a cruel and dangerous attack on the dignity and wellbeing of the unemployed - people who have been shut out of the labour market due to no fault of their own. If passed, this Bill will achieve what successive governments have been trying to accomplish for decades - the breakdown and privatisation of our social security system.
In particular, I wish to highlight my concerns over the government's plan to impose harsh and punitive requirements on Newstart recipients such as myself, which will: subject all unemployed workers to the punitive demerit point compliance system, which in the majority of cases will remove government oversight and deny unemployed Australians their right to appeal decisions; extend the waiting period for Newstart, forcing new applicants to miss out on their first payment (up to $770); require unemployed workers over 30 to attend significantly more hours at a Work for the Dole activity, despite this program being revealed to be dangerous and ineffective by two separate government-commissioned reports;
I believe these changes represent some of the most significant attacks ever launched against the unemployed since the introduction of the welfare state.
These are changes that will force hundreds of thousands of Australians over the age of 30 to attend 50% more hours at Work for the Dole. This is in spite of the fact that Work for the Dole is widely known to be dangerous and pointless.
Between 2014 and 2016, Work for the Dole injuries increased five times . Josh Park-Fing tragically died at his Work for the Dole site in 2016. Before his death, Josh had suffered an injury at the site yet was forced to continue or face being penalised . Even the government's own reports admit that 64% of sites do not meet basic safety standards and that the program increases the chances of the unemployed finding work by only 2%.
These are changes, which, for the first time ever, will hand the $10 billion mostly for-profit employment services industry the power to make compliance decisions. This industry is already failing to enforce the compliance system fairly. As noted recently by the National Welfare Rights Network, almost half of job agency compliance reports are rejected by Centrelink because they were unfair. This widespread illegality has to be one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated a Federal government. And yet the government is responding by giving them more power.
Denying unemployed workers the power to appeal against these penalties in such a dysfunctional system is opening up unemployed workers to a world of abuse. In light of the increased Work for the Dole requirements, this change will not only lead to more unemployed people being penalised unfairly, but will also make it almost impossible for unemployed workers to raise safety concerns at their Work for the Dole site. This is a disaster waiting to happen. Already the compliance system is out of control - in 2015-16, the number of penalties imposed by the $10 billion employment services industry exceeded two million for the first time - a seven-fold since 2011 . Why is the government removing the checks and balances in an already dysfunctional and punitive system?
And finally, these are changes that will make it harder for the unemployed to survive on Newstart - a payment that is already $390 per fortnight below the poverty line . This attempt to to push Newstart applicants deeper into poverty is nothing short of an act of violence.
As a party claiming to be the "common sense alternative", why are you willing to put your name to such cruel and punitive policies?
Unemployed people are already struggling enough as it is. This Bill will kick them while they are down. Is this what the Nick Xenophon Team stand for? The unemployed are struggling to find work when, going by government figures, there are around 17 other people competing for that job.
They are struggling to survive in an overly punitive and completely dysfunctional employment services industry.
They are struggling to live on the starvation rate of Newstart. This payment was initially designed to support people for short periods between jobs. Politicians need to wake up to the reality that being unemployed is far from temporary in Australia. The average time people spend on Newstart is over four years. Does the Nick Xenophon Team think its fair for hundreds of thousands of Australians to be attacked in this way simply because they find themselves in a society which has locked them out of the labour market?
Will the Nick Xenophon Team stand by this Bill if there is another Work for the Dole death?
As you hold the balance of power in the Senate, your party has the power to vote down this Bill. On behalf of the 880,000 Australians on Newstart and Youth Allowance attending job agencies - and the 1.2 million Australians in insecure employment and at constant risk of unemployment - I ask you, vote down this Bill. The lives of the unemployed depend on it.
Look forwarding to hearing from you.
Owen Bennett President Australian Unemployed Workers Union |
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Rock the Vote is hosting " Truth to Power ," a platform of artists and activists, outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week.
In addition to panel discussions, it has a massive pop-up art gallery, featuring works by Shepard Fairey, Banksy and Keith Haring.
The works are all political and address an array of issues facing the United States, from discrimination against women to police killings of black men.
Luis Calderin, Vice President of Marketing and Creative for Rock the Vote, told Elite Daily the pieces are meant to inspire dialogue about tough issues. I hope it's uncomfortable.
Calderin said, It's no longer enough to have a painting of a candidate as a superhero, and that person's going to solve all our problems. That has not proven to be true. In the end, the art that we have here is talking about issues and we as Americans are the only ones that can solve our own issues through our power in voting.
Check out some of the powerful pieces.
Recalling Emma Sulkowicz's mattress performance.
Alexandra Svokos
"Patrol Guard Pinatas" and "Mounted Guard Pinata" by David Freeman.
This incredible hanging installation is seen differently when you look at it from another side.
"Identity Crisis" by Michael Murphy.
"Police Flag" by Blake Fall-Conroy.
A series of paintings on black American life and the police.
A painting of Eric Garner's death at the hands of police.
Alexandra Svokos
"I Can't Breathe / The Death of Eric Garner" by Bill Dunlap.
Black Lives Matter.
"Can I Get A Witness" by Nafis White.
Alexandra Svokos
"...and counting" by Ann Lewis features body bag tags with the names and information of all the people who have been killed by police so far this year.
But as more people are killed, Lewis adds more tags and more information.
The piece was installed on Friday and Saturday. On Monday, the artist added seven more names and is waiting for information on other people who died at the hands of police.
Lewis said that less than 10 percent of the people killed were women. Most were white, but that's mostly because there is a high population of white people in America, she said. In terms of percentage when compared to the general population, black people are highest on the list, followed by Native Americans and Hispanics.
Lewis told Elite Daily that a high proportion of people killed were armed. Many were suicides by police and many involved mental health issues. She hopes the piece will make people think differently of how we deal with mental health and gun control.
Alexandra Svokos
Lewis (pictured above) was wearing a doctored version of a National Rifle Association shirt, which she had fixed to read "National Rile Association."
The piece will next be shown on New York's Governors Island in August. She is planning on letting visitors add more names as more people are killed. |
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"A nimal rights" is often conflated "animal welfare." But they are not the same--not even close.
Animal welfare accepts that we have the right to own and benefit from the use of animals. At the same time, it posits a positive duty upon us to conduct animal husbandry properly, meeting standards of care that have improved as we have learned more about the nature and capacities of animals. Animal welfare encompasses important issues, such as establishing legal standards for using animals in research, defining the parameters of what constitutes proper and improper care for animals, and establishing shelters for abandoned animals. In short, animal welfare does not ascribe "rights" to animals, but instead places on us--as an aspect of human exceptionalism--moral and legal duties to engage in proper husbandry practices.
In contrast, "animal rights" is an ideology that explicitly equates the moral value of animals with that of human beings. In animal-rights ideology, the ability to suffer , sometimes called "painience," is the attribute that accords any being--human or animal--value. Since human beings feel pain and cattle feel pain, the theory holds, we are equals; our differences are as insignificant as racial distinctions. Thus, in rightist ideology, cattle ranching is morally equivalent to slavery, which explains this bald assertion of PETA's odious " Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign ": "The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."
The ultimate goal of animal rights is not to improve our treatment of animals, but to end all animal domestication . PETA tends to obfuscate the pet issue because "animal liberation" is understood to be a multi-generational project and targeting pet ownership would compromise the organization's ability to get donations from loving dog and cat owners who think they believe in animal rights.
But this ultimate goal of animal rights is easy to see, if you know where to look. Gary Francione, a Rutgers University Law School professor, is one of the most vigorous and well-known animal-rights advocates in the world. He may also be the most candid. Francione leads the "abolitionist" movement --yes, the allusion to the anti-slavery movement is intentional--which holds that all "sentient" beings possess the fundamental "right not to be property."
This includes our beloved cats, dogs, birds, and other pets. Francione states this clearly--even though he adopts shelter dogs. (This isn't hypocritical: Francione wants no more dogs brought into the world but believes we have a duty to care for the ones already here, which is why he considers them "nonhuman refugees.")
Francione's most recent advocacy article tackles the "pet question" head-on. Typical of animal rightists, Francione assumes a misanthropic moral equivalence between human slavery and animal husbandry: Think about this matter in the human context. We are all generally agreed that all humans, irrespective of their particular characteristics, have the fundamental, pre-legal right not to be treated as chattel property. We all reject human chattel slavery. That is not to say that it doesn't still exist. It does. But no one defends it. The reason we reject chattel slavery is because a human who is a chattel slave is no longer treated as a person, by which we mean that the slave is no longer a being who matters morally. ... The same problem exists where non-humans are concerned. If animals are property, they can have no inherent or intrinsic value. They have only extrinsic or external value. They are things that we value. They have no rights; we have rights, as property owners, to value them . And we might choose to value them at zero.
No. Slavery is evil because it involves treating one's inherent equals --that is, other human beings--as objects. All human beings are subjects. That is not the case with animals, which (not who), contrary to Francione, are not "persons." Since animals are not our equals, owning an animal does not make one the moral equivalent of Simon Legree.
Usually, animal rightists avoid focusing on the "end all pets" part of their agenda, sticking with advocacy around making it more difficult to raise food animals, ruining the fur industry, or impeding medical research. Not Francione: With respect to domesticated animals, that means that we stop bringing them into existence altogether. We have a moral obligation to care for those right-holders we have here presently. But we have an obligation not to bring any more into existence. And this includes dogs, cats and other non-humans who serve as our "companions." ... We love our dogs, but recognize that, if the world were more just and fair, there would be no pets at all.
So, there you have it. Beneath the emotionalism and appeals to our empathy, animal rights is a hard ideology with a well-defined goal. It seeks an end to the ownership of animals, including pets. Remember that the next time you are tempted to support an animal-rights organization when you actually favor--as I do--the animal-welfare paradigm.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism and author of A Rat, is a Pig, is a Dog, is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. His latest book is Culture of Death: The Age of "Do Harm" Medicine.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter . |
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The Washington Post has a long article on President Obama's attitude toward military action. This issue is especially important because "the president faces mounting pressure to send more troops to Iraq to help in the battle against Islamic State extremists," as reporter Greg Jaffe puts it. The administration officials that Jaffe spoke to have an interesting explanation for the president's reluctance to intervene further in Iraq. It's all about the troops.
Jaffe's piece begins with a dramatic tale from 2012 regarding the president's meeting with a mortuary affairs team in Afghanistan, an experience, we are told, that was part of his growing reluctance to sacrifice American lives abroad:
Air Force One, its windows blacked out to guard against attack, touched down in Afghanistan well after dark.
President Obama's war-zone visits are usually short and ceremonial. In his six hours on the ground, he appeared alongside Afghanistan's leader, pinned Purple Hearts on the wounded and spoke to a hangar full of U.S. troops.
But Obama also made time for something else, something personal. Just after 2 a.m., the president slipped away for a meeting that he had deliberately kept off his public schedule.
In a small, private room, 15 mortuary affairs soldiers waited to greet him. These were the soldiers who prepared the bodies of troops killed in battle for their trip home. To blunt the overpowering stench of death, they wore masks when they worked, burned their uniforms regularly and dabbed Vicks VapoRub under their noses.
Now that they were about to meet Obama, members of a unit used to working in the isolation of war's grim aftermath all had the same question: Of all the soldiers in Afghanistan, why had the president asked to see them?
The inescapable Ben Rhodes, the White House's deputy national security adviser (and the only current administration official to speak on the record for the article) notes, "We believe it is a national security objective not to be losing service members in wars." In addition to being bad in and of themselves, he goes on, casualties provoke the American people into wanting more military action:
Obama set the limits on American military involvement [against the Islamic State] to prevent rash or unnecessary escalations that might result from U.S. casualties, said White House officials. "Whenever an American is harmed, it creates pressures to do something in response," Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said. "You saw that -- even though they were not service members -- with the hostages that were killed by [the Islamic State]."
The White House pushes the narrative in this piece that a thoughtful Obama--who once "asked his speechwriters pull together a packet of writings about war by people he admired: King, Gandhi, Churchill, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr"--has been sufficiently moved by his exposure to America's war dead as to now hesitate to send troops into battle. Thus, his reluctance to do much against the Islamic State, let alone to provoke Iran or Russia.
Whatever the truth of this, the troops don't seem to be returning the affection: a recent poll showed that Obama commands a truly miserable 15% approval rating among servicemen. Why?
Perhaps the troops don't appreciate the obvious cynicism of White House aides who paint Obama's dovish foreign policy as primarily a consequence of his dealings with America's war dead--a cynicism that includes the neat trick of telling Jaffe, the reporter, that these moments were "private" for Obama, while helping Jaffe obtain all of the details of what happened so they can be published in the Washington Post .
Obama's attitude toward casualties may or may not have evolved since 2009, but the narrative spun here certainly does track with another evolution that is much easier to verify: the ascendancy of the Ben Rhodes-Denis McDonough-Susan Rice foreign-policy wing over a more serious tendency led, at various times, by Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus. Obama's 2009 decision to surge troops to Afghanistan while imposing a deadline for their return represented an unstable compromise between the two wings.
As of 2015, there are no more compromises. From the total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 to the utterly token efforts against the Islamic State today, the doves are in charge. Because we aren't really doing anything serious to fight our enemies, the various fights are going terribly.
It may seem like the White House is delusional or deeply cynical or both--but there is an internal logic to all of these dovish policies, and it is more complicated than the concern for the troops that White House advisers peddle to the Washington Post . People on the right like to joke that Obama sees American conservatives as his true enemies, that he is less willing to negotiate with Congress than he is with Iran. Remarks like these are intended as a humorous overstatement, but there is more truth to them than is at first obvious--and it goes to the heart of the issue of why Obama will never be a popular commander in chief.
For Obama, the world is not divided, as it was for Bush, between nations that support a democratic and liberal world order and nations that oppose such a world, preferring jihad or dictatorship or exploitative hegemony. This president believes that the world is divided between those that support peace and those who, motivated by their irrational fears, will not give peace a chance. All nations are basically the same, and most people want basically the same thing. The United States is not morally better or worse than a regional hegemon like Iran. Most Americans, like most Iranians, just want to live in peace.
The true enemies are the hawks in both countries. If reasonable men like Obama and Rouhani and Putin could simply shut out the distractions, peace could be achieved.
As a consequence of such thinking, we get the bizarro-world breakdown of friends and enemies for the Obama administration. Enemies include Israel, eastern European nations, Gulf Arabs, conservatives in Taiwan and Japan, and of course the American right. All of these parties provoke countries like Russia and Iran and China into belligerent action. If instead of provoking these countries we offered them a hand, peace could be achieved. Sure, this peace wouldn't be very 'democratic,'--but an American-led democratic order is a bit of a sham, isn't it? After all, how can we criticize Iran when a Ferguson can happen right here in the USA?
The Obama administration is careful about making public too much of this worldview, because most Americans, and their representatives in Congress, think it is crazy. But the evidence that this is how the White House understands itself is abundant.
All of this brings to mind nothing so much as the breakdown of people in the movie American Sniper into sheep, sheep-dogs, and wolves--a division criticized by some of the left, and with recent origins in the writings of military scholar Dave Grossman (and with classical origins in Plato.) The idea is that most people are sheep, minding their own business and leading their lives, hoping to thrive without interference. A small minority are predatory wolves, who thrive on dominating others. Thus, for a free society to exist, another minority must be encouraged to defend the sheep--sheep dogs.
Americans love their soldiers--they have turned out in droves to see American Sniper --because they are grateful to them for, in a sense, playing their dangerous role as sheepdogs: taking great risks to defend those at home who are not directly in harm's way. I would wager that most in the military enjoy seeing themselves this way, too.
For Obama and the doves in the White House, this very way of understanding the world is the problem . There are no real wolves out there. Iran and Russia don't really want domination for its own sake. They want peace, and the only reason they act out is because those who insist on seeing themselves as sheepdogs insist on behaving provocatively.
There are many factors that contribute to Obama's unpopularity as commander-in-chief--but high up on the list must be the fact that those who have chosen the defense of America as their profession sense that they are being led by a man who sees the very instinct to defend the interests of a nation such as ours as problematic.
No number of stories in the Washington Post will fix that. Read Less |
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Californians against school vaccine bill SB 277, led by former State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, are heading from southern California up to Sacramento in a brigade of buses to take a stand against the pending legislation.
SB 277, which mandates vaccination for public and private school children, is set for debate in the State Assembly's Health Committee Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.
Donnelly told Breitbart News, "I'm proud to ride on one of the "Freedom Buses" headed to Sacramento-that was funded by grassroots activists both Republican and Democrat-to demonstrate effective opposition to a Government determined to take away the freedom of parents to choose what's best for their kids."
Legislators and speakers are scheduled to address the public at 10 a.m. on the west steps of the Capitol building, according to Californians for Health Choice. The group of bus travelers, and others opposing the legislation, have been encouraged to wear red.
SB 277 would abolish parents' ability to opt their children out of one or more state required vaccinations on the basis of "personal belief." The bill has seen heated and heavy debate in committees of the Democrat-dominated legislature.
Yourfamilyyourchoice.org states , "The question isn't whether or not you think vaccination is the right thing to do. The question is whether or not you think you should maintain the ability to make that decision for your children, or if you are going to let the government take it from you." (Original emphasis)
The bill's authors, State Senators Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), argue that the new restriction would still allow for educational options for those choosing to opt out of one or more mandated vaccines.
"This measure will ensure that students whose parents choose to not vaccinate them have several educational options that don't put other children at risk of contracting vaccine-preventable diseases," Pan said after the bill passed through the Senate Education Committee. It has since passed through the Senate, and moved on to the State Assembly for consideration.
Parents choosing to not administer even one of the required vaccinations will be relegated to the options of home school or independent study, should the bill pass the Assembly and proceed to Governor Jerry Brown's desk to be signed into law. If it is enacted, California would become only the third state to deny vaccine opt-outs on either a personal or religious belief basis.
Outside the recent California Democrat Convention, Californians gathered by the hundreds to protest the bill. Actress and Director Jenna Elfman spoke on camera with Breitbart News to share why she joined the group opposing the legislation, even though she vaccinates her children.
A crop of vaccine bills, including SB 277, showed up in the California legislature following an outbreak of measles that began in Anaheim's Disneyland theme park last December. The outbreak was declared officially over April 17.
Three buses will leave Monday night for Sacramento from Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and San Diego. The group is also working on funding another L.A. bus, as the current bus has already been filled.
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With views that lean more libertarian than textbook conservative, Ron Paul swept the youth vote in the 2012 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, placing third in both contests. And despite his conservative platform and the existence of newsletters containing racist statements that went out under his name decades ago, the Texas congressman's stands against the war in Afghanistan and the war on drugs have attracted some liberals who see him as a progressive diamond in the rough. Here's a closer look at his positions.
Anti-War Message
If elected, Paul vows to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan (and Germany, Japan and South Korea). In his book Liberty Defined , he argues that the war on terrorism is based on manufactured fear: "This fear is required to get the people's support for fighting unnecessary wars and supporting the military industrial complex. The fear is concocted. The war is very clearly not necessary. The results are devastating to our security and our prosperity."
Education Department? End It
Paul believes that there should be no federal control over education and has called for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. "I think that the smallest level of government possible best performs education," Paul said in a 2008 interview . "Teachers, parents and local community leaders should be making decisions about exactly how our children should be taught, not Washington bureaucrats." Paul also proposes annual $5,000 tax credits for parents who want to home-school.
Student-Loan Program? Abolish It
Rep. Paul holds that the federal student-loan program is unconstitutional, raises the costs of higher education and ought to be abolished. When asked in a CNBC Republican presidential debate last November how students should pay for college, Paul answered simply: "[You should pay for college] the way you pay for cellphones and computers. You have the marketplace there. There's competition. Quality goes up. The price goes down."
About Those Newsletters ...
Racially charged articles in newsletters published in Paul's name in the 1980s and 1990s remain a red flag to many. Sample passages include predictions of racial violence because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves' " and claims that black girls are spreading AIDS to white people. Today Paul's explanation is that he didn't write the newsletters. Yet in the past he has admitted to writing some of them , defending the content.
Racism in Criminal Justice
Paul is a fervent critic of the war on drugs and capital punishment. During Monday's GOP debate , he said: "Blacks and minorities who are involved with drugs are arrested disproportionately. They are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately." Paul has thus called for repeals of most federal drug laws and the federal death penalty, saying the policies should be left to the states.
Deregulate the Financial Sector
Rep. Paul is against oversight of the banking and finance sector, believing that too much regulation, not too little, caused the financial crisis. "I don't think we need regulators. We need law and order," Paul said in a 2010 C-SPAN interview advocating trust in the free market as the solution. "The market is a great regulator, and we've lost understanding and confidence that the market is probably a much stricter regulator."
Health Care Is Not a Right
An infamous campaign moment occurred during the Tea Party Express debate , when Paul argued against government intervention for an uninsured man in a coma. "We've given up on this concept that we might take care of ourselves," Paul said, explaining that churches and communities can voluntarily foot medical bills for the uninsured. While he views health care as a good and not a right , he wants payroll tax exemptions for the terminally ill and to make private health savings accounts available to all Americans.
So Long, Entitlements
Paul maintains that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional and wants to cut them all. Asked about this view in a March 2011 Fox News appearance, he said: " Article I, Section 8, doesn't say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause." Paul proposes keeping the programs available to people already receiving benefits, but phasing them away as other workers opt out.
Welfare Is Unconstitutional
Paul also views federal welfare as unconstitutional and thinks it should be cut. "This whole idea that there's something wrong with people who don't lavish out free stuff from the federal government, somehow [they] aren't compassionate enough. I resist those accusations," he said during September's GOP debate at the Reagan Library . In his book End the Fed , he writes: "The whole notion of the safety net permeates a socialist or welfare state, encouraging carelessness and dependency on the government."
Paul has called to audit and end the Federal Reserve , blaming its manipulation of interest rates and ability to print money for inflation as well as for booms and busts in the economy. "The Fed aims for even lower interest rates by creating trillions of dollars of new money, all while increasing spending and debt," he writes in Liberty Defined . "Economic growth must be based on real factors, not phony stimulus provided by the central bank."
The Gold Standard
Paul says that according to the Constitution, money must be backed by the nation's gold or silver reserves. Finding paper money unconstitutional, he advocates a return to the gold standard. In a 2010 Forbes interview , he explained: "If we were stranded on an island and one of us decided, 'Well, we need some money. So we're going to take these pieces of paper and I'll write numbers on them and it'll be money,' it would be preposterous. Money comes out with real value."
An Anti-Abortion Champion
Paul, who is an obstetrician , is anti-abortion. If elected president, he vows to repeal Roe v. Wade and define life as beginning at conception . He also thinks abortion should be handled at the state level (though it's unclear how that would work if federal law declares embryos to be legally protected people). In Liberty Defined , he writes: "I've never understood how killing a human being, albeit a small one in a special place, is portrayed as a precious right."
The Freedom to Discriminate?
Paul famously voted against a 2004 resolution commemorating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , which outlawed racial segregation in voting, schools, the workplace and public accommodations. Taking to the House floor, he called it an attack on individual liberty: "[It] gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations and customer-service practices of every business in the country," he said. "The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society."
Issuing Green Cards*
Paul opposes both amnesty for undocumented immigrants and birthright citizenship. He also opposes mass deportation, writing it off as impractical. In Liberty Defined , he proposes: "Maybe a 'green card' with an asterisk could be issued. This in-between status, keeping illegal immigrants in limbo, will be said [to] create a class of second-class citizens. Yet it could be argued that it may well allow some immigrants who come here illegally a beneficial status without automatic citizenship -- a much better option than deportation." |
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Brussels terror attacks: A continent-wide crisis that threatens core European ideals
By Fiona de Londras | March 24, 2016, 8:32 EDT
Printed from: http://newbostonpost.com/2016/03/24/brussels-terror-attacks-a-continent-wide-crisis-that-threatens-core-european-ideals/
German police officers guard a terminal of the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
The attacks of March 22 in Brussels were shocking, but not surprising. They reinforced what many have known for years: Belgium has a serious problem with terrorism.
For a long time, security analysts have expressed anxiety about the depth and extent of radicalization and fundamentalism in the country. It is thought that Belgium has the highest per capita rate of foreign terrorist fighters of any EU country. A February 2016 "high-end estimate" puts that number at 562 out of a population of just over 11 million.
Last November it was revealed that some of the Paris attackers had Belgian connections and were known to the security forces there , and Brussels was virtually locked down for almost a week.
Over recent years there have been attacks on Belgian museums, supermarkets and trains, raising questions about why the country cannot seem to effectively tackle the challenges of insecurity.
As ever, the answer is not a simple one. Rather, as observed by Tim King , Belgium's "failures are perhaps one part politics and government; one part police and justice; one part fiscal and economic. In combination they created the vacuum that is being exploited by jihadi terrorists".
A country divided
So-called Islamist extremism in Belgium can be traced back at least to the 1990s, when Algeria-related militant activity in France spilled over into the country. The failure to properly tackle extremism in the 1990s and early 2000s, and to effectively integrate the minority Muslim community, are important factors in understanding how Belgium became fertile ground for radicalization.
It seems increasingly likely that poorly resourced and fragmented policing at least partly explains the crystallization of this trend into fatal attacks in and beyond the country. And that is linked to the country's relative political instability.
Belgium has a sharply fragmented system of policing and justice. In Brussels alone there are six police forces covering 19 communes; an extraordinary system for a city of just under 1.5 million people. While the federal police system includes a counter-terrorism unit of around 500 officers, this seems simply insufficient when compared to the estimated scale of the problem.
Intelligence sharing with non-Belgian forces is also challenging, and remains so in spite of an agreement for enhanced cooperation with the French announced in early 2016 . That agreement followed a period of tension related to the role of Belgian and French security failures in respect of the Paris attacks.
Questions for the European Union
However, while the particularities of Belgian politics and policing are relevant to explaining the challenge there, the country is not entirely idiosyncratic. Its challenges are a sharpened manifestation of similar difficulties experienced across the EU.
Europe has an increasing amount of shared counter-terrorism law and institutions such as the European Counter Terrorism Centre within Europol, that are designed to help coordinate counter-terrorism. Yet it still struggles to share and process information across police and security forces. That is true within states, between member states, and between member states and EU institutions. Many individual European countries have long struggled to integrate marginalized populations and to counter radicalization, and their internal failures are becoming transnational problems.
It is also becoming clear that the ease with which people can travel across Europe, and the desire to maintain freedom of movement as a feature of European citizenship, must be addressed. There are real questions about security, but just as many about what imposing more onerous barriers to travel means for the values and freedoms that underpin the European Union as a political entity.
This points to the fundamental challenge that must, ultimately, be addressed by European leaders. Serious threats to European security are no longer merely external, nor are they confined to states. They are internal, they are serious, and they are difficult to detect. Tackling them effectively while retaining the core of the European political identity may require a fundamental reassessment of what Europe is, what it wants to be, and how that can be achieved.
Passing new counter-terrorism laws is a limited response in the face of this challenge. Domestic police and security forces urgently need effective resources to make it possible for them to enforce the powers they already hold. There needs to be significantly better intelligence sharing with and through institutions such as Europol. There needs to be deeper trust between EU member states. There needs to be a serious consideration of the extent to which movement within Europe can be both free and less risk-laden.
Figuring out ways of creating effective expectations that member states will ensure their domestic security challenges do not create Europe-wide vulnerabilities, while maintaining our identity as a law-based, rights-oriented Europe of freedoms must be the goal, but it is a difficult one to achieve.
The question now is whether Europe can resist compromising its commitment to freedom as it strives to improve its ability to deal with terrorism.
Fiona de Londras
Fiona de Londras , Professor of Global Legal Studies, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham |
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Open letter to Stephen Harper from AFN: Canada has not upheld its responsibilities to First Nations Assembly of First Nations | On behalf of the National Executive of the Assembly of First Nations, we write today regarding an urgent matter requiring immediate attention. press release December 14
First Nations to Harper government: Honour constitutional duty to consult on Canada-China FIPPA rabble staff | "Any further effort to ratify this agreement will adversely impact our inherent rights and territories forcing First Nations to take immediate legal action." politics December 14
Organize together to defeat the corporate agenda: The Port Elgin Coalition Proposal various | This November, 80 activists and representatives from across Canada met in Port Elgin, Ontario to discuss and strategize how progressive forces can organize more effectively. rabble news December 14
'Wall of opposition' to tar sands pipelines in B.C. grows stronger rabble staff | Mayor Gregor Robertson announced that December 13th had been officially designated as "Save the Fraser Declaration Day" by the City of Vancouver. rabble news December 14
The crisis in funding legal support for refugees Edward C. Corrigan | It is better to let a few questionable refugee claims through than to return refugees where they face a serious risk of persecution because of their race, nationality, religion or political opinion. politics December 14
Ghosts of Indigenous activism past, present, future: The transformative potential of #IdleNoMore Hayden King | Canada expects (and hopes) this movement will melt away. Making it sustainable and meaningful requires reflecting on past and current trends in activism. briefly December 13
Don't let Harper get away with this: Take action on the F-35s Steven Staples | Now, exposed as lying outright about the F-35, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be making more empty promises to review the F-35 program. rabble news December 13
Students across Ontario walk out against Bill 115 Mick Sweetman | Thousands of students across Ontario protested this week against the Liberals' Bill 115, also known as the "Putting Students First Act." rabble news December 13
Conservative government rams through anti-union Bill C-377 Lori Theresa Waller | So the Conservatives have a nice Christmas present to bring home for the holidays: a law that selectively tilts the playing field in the favour of employers over unions. rabble news December 12
New acts of repression target land defenders in Guatemala Grahame Russell | On December 7 and 8, 2012, there was yet another act of mining-related aggression against community members of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, 45 minutes outside of Guatemala City. briefly December 12
'Twas a Night in December: Dedicated to all who are standing Idle No More Robert Animikii Horton | Harper and his cronies were nestled all snug in their beds / As stolen lands and resources danced in their heads. arts/media December 12
Tolkien in the tar sands Keith Stewart | In this drama, Stephen Harper has taken on the role of Saruman-in-a-sweater-vest. But when it comes to the tar sands, we need to follow Bilbo's example and leave them in the ground. in their own words December 11
Standing up to Big Oil: How Coastal First Nations built tar sands pipeline resistance Art Sterritt | Along comes Enbridge and Northern Gateway and says, "We're going to put a pipeline here and we're going to run ships through your territory." And we said, "Well we're not so sure about that." briefly December 11
Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence begins hunger strike: 'I am willing to die for my people' rabble staff | Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence was in Ottawa today to announce the beginning of an indefinite hunger strike demanding justice and respect for her people and for all First Nations in Canada. profile December 11
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti: Canada's unconditional support for Israeli policy is 'astonishing' Steven Zhou | In a visit to Canada last weekend, Palestinian legislator and activist Dr. Mustafa Barghouti expressed his pessimism at the prospects of a future Palestinian state. in their own words December 10
Violence against women human rights defenders on the rise Laura Carlsen | Women human rights defenders are not only targeted by the interests they confront. They are also abandoned -- or worse, attacked -- by governments and sometimes by their own communities and families. opinion December 10
Kinder Morgan's pipeline project: Just as bad as Enbridge Ben West | Kinder Morgan is going to try to use a "divide and conquer" strategy by making the case that they are a better choice for B.C. than Enbridge. We can't let this happen. in their own words December 10
Devastation in wake of latest Israeli assault: Report back from Gaza Medea Benjamin | The fight was totally disproportionate. Israeli F-16s, drones and Apache helicopters unleashed their fury over this tiny strip of land, leaving 174 dead. opinion December 10
Trade agreements and the hypocrisy of 'free' market advocates Dave Coles | Many critics and most apologists focus on how "free" trade agreements are opening the economy up to the competitive market. rabble news December 10
Canada's secret trials, immigration policy under fire on Human Rights Day David P. Ball | Activists across the country are fighting back against security certificates, racial profiling, and other abuses. briefly December 7
F-35 fiasco: Harper needs to release the full KPMG report Steven Staples | The F-35 is an offensive weapon system, to be used for "shock-and-awe" bombing missions. Canada has no need for it! rabble news December 7
Bill C-377 update: MPs debate newly amended union disclosure bill Lori Theresa Waller | MPs fired their opening shots this week in the first hour of the final House of Commons debate on Bill C-377. rabble news December 7
Opposition, civil society groups condemn government approval of CNOOC Nexen takeover rabble staff | Today, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the approval of the controversial takeover of Nexen by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company. in their own words December 7
Civil society breaks the silence, confronts governments at climate negotiations Alana Westwood | This year's relatively quiet climate negotiations turned up the volume yesterday when two members of the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM) were arrested for holding up a banner. in their own words December 7
Queer visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine John Greyson | The Queer Visions group included sixteen activists from seven cities internationally. We gathered in Porto Alegre prior to the World Social Forum. rabble news December 6
What will the Conservatives' omnibus Bill C-45 mean for workers in Canada? Lori Theresa Waller | Bill C-45's changes to laws relating to workers are worth noting, especially within the context of the government's broader strategy on labour and employment. press release December 6
Canada the petrostate: The shocking numbers behind Big Oil's hold on Ottawa Polaris Institute | Six main oil industry players, including Enbridge and TransCanada, met with federal cabinet ministers 53 times between September 2011 and September 2012. in their own words December 6
Bolivia's address to UN climate talks: Defend Mother Earth against wasteful and greedy system JOSE ANTONIO ZAMORA GUTIERREZ | This beautiful human community inhabiting our Mother Earth is in danger due to the climate crisis. arts/media December 6
Film review: 'Last chance' looks at refugee claimants fleeing homophobia Humberto DaSilva | "Last Chance," an NFB film directed by Paul Emile d'Entremont, views the Canadian immigration refugee process through the eyes of four LGBT refugee status claimants. |
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A Sky News presenter just tried to mock Diane Abbott to her face. She tore him apart. Labour MP and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott was Britain's first black woman in the House of Commons. 31 years later, she remains the single most abused member of parliament. So when a Sky News presenter tried to mock her to her face live on air, she made sure he regretted it. The right side of history Diane Abbott is not a...
A centrist Labour MP just won the competition for the most ludicrous defence of Amber Rudd Amber Rudd has resigned. Her resignation follows a national scandal affecting the lives of many Britons. It also follows what appears to be a series of blatant deceptions on Rudd's part. Yet members of the political class have defended Rudd. A defence which includes this bizarre tweet from Labour's Lisa Nandy: "Inhumanity" Nandy...
The Sun's political editor slips up and tells the BBC his true feelings about the Windrush scandal In the wake of home secretary Amber Rudd's resignation, BBC Daily Politics ran a segment on next steps today. The BBC invited on Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee and Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn as the experts. But an aside from Newton Dunn gave an accidental insight into just how much he cares about the Windrush crisis. Spoiler...
A must-hear song is calling on Theresa May to resign over the Windrush scandal The band behind last summer's top five hit Liar Liar has released a protest song over the Windrush scandal. Keeping pace with the news, the video says "one down, one to go" and calls on Theresa May to follow in Amber Rudd's footsteps and resign. The Windrush A group of musicians formed Captain SKA in 2010. These included the band's...
As Amber Rudd leaves, the next 'human shield' minister steps up to cover Theresa May's back Amber Rudd has resigned, leaving the previous home secretary, Theresa May, in the firing line over the Windrush scandal. But now, questions are being asked about whether May knew of the immigration removal targets which Rudd claimed not to have seen. Wouldn't Theresa May have known? Transport secretary Chris Grayling appeared on the...
A Conservative minster called Rudd's resignation over Windrush 'unwanted noise' live on the BBC During an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, a senior Conservative minister called Amber Rudd's resignation over the Windrush scandal "unwanted noise" for the government. It was not just Rudd's departure over Windrush he was referring to, though, but scandals involving other cabinet resignations too. Sorry. What did you just...
People are gobsmacked at a BBC newsreader's reaction to Amber Rudd's resignation Amber Rudd has resigned. After weeks of pressure over the Windrush scandal and her misleading parliament on deportation targets, she has finally gone. But the response from the BBC was gobsmacking. Speaking about the resignation on BBC Weekend News, anchor Clive Myrie stated: This, obviously a devastating tragedy for Amber Rudd...
Amber Rudd is told she 'must resign' as new evidence is revealed about removal targets Amber Rudd is facing calls to "resign immediately" after new evidence shows she was given a memo about immigration removals targets in June 2017. This undermines her claim that there were no such targets, and her second claim that she was unaware of them. It also raises the question of whether she misled parliament over the issue. No...
Diane Abbott calls on Amber Rudd to resign as home secretary after revelations about removal targets Diane Abbott is the latest MP to call for home secretary Amber Rudd to resign over the Windrush scandal. "A matter of honour" During urgent questions in parliament on 26 April, the shadow home secretary called on Rudd to resign, saying: When Lord Carrington resigned over the Falklands, he said it was a matter of honour. Isn't it time...
Amber Rudd has just added to the growing list of Tory whoppers On 25 April, Amber Rudd told parliament that she was "not familiar" with any Home Office targets for removing migrants from the UK. But on 26 April, Rudd changed her tune and said "I accept the criticism on the issue". But this is just the latest incident in a long series of whoppers from the Conservative government and its...
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A Planned Parenthood abortion business where a woman died after apparently being left, bleeding, for five hours or more had been told on a separate issue to call 911 for help in an emergency the same day Tonya Reaves died, according to a new report.
The result is a renewed call for an criminal investigation of Reaves' death, according to officials with Operation Rescue.
The organization's officials said they obtained a copy of a telephone call placed at 12:43 p.m. on July 20 from the Loop Health Center Planned Parenthood in Chicago regarding a fracas that developed with a mother and daughter who were at the abortion business.
That situation was unrelated to that of Reaves, who had her fatal abortion at about 11 a.m. at that location on that day, Operation Rescue said.
But the 911 dispatcher in the call is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, a number used primarily to provide information regarding city events and programs, during an emergency.
The mother-and-daughter issue developed when a 16-year-old patient was "physically assaulted" by her mother, and Operation Rescue said the caller indicated abortion business staff members pulled the two apart after they saw the mother kick and hair-pull her daughter.
Part of the conversation, which can be heard at the Operation Rescue website, is as followed:
Dispatcher: Okay, and once you called - you see, next time you need a police car to come out for any reason whatsoever, you need to call 911.
Caller: Right. Okay. I just -
Dispatcher: That way you don't waste time with 311.
Caller: I know, I know, I just (laugh) I just hate to use services to make, you know -
Dispatcher: I know. Well, they don't dispatch police cars. All they do is transfer you to 911.
Caller: Gotcha.
Dispatcher: So you're waiting in that queue and then they flip you over to our office.
Caller: Right.
Dispatcher: Now I don't have any of your information. So, what is your telephone number?
OR reported the dispatcher "is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, which caused a delay in dispatching aid to the scene." That means the facility "ignored instructions from an emergency dispatcher to directly call 911 in the event of an emergency in order to prevent wasting precious time," OR said.
OR said it got the transcript through a Freedom of Information Act request with the Chicago office of Emergency Management and Communications.
"This new information confirms that Planned Parenthood intentionally ignored instructions given to them earlier in the day by an emergency dispatcher and refused to employ the fastest means of getting help for their dying patient," said Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue. "In addition to waiting five and a half hours to get Reaves to the hospital, the further delay caused by refusing to call 911 as instructed could have been the difference between life and death."
She continued, "This information shows gross negligence in the way Planned Parenthood managed Reaves' medical emergency. Delays in getting her the care she needed were intentional. It crosses the line into what is likely criminal conduct.
"We renew our call for a criminal investigation into Reaves death. If those responsible are not brought to justice, it is only a matter of time before another woman suffers Tonya's tragic fate," Sullenger said.
WND reported earlier when pro-life leader Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics called on State's Attorney Anita Alvarez of Cook County, Ill., for an immediate investigation of Planned Parenthood for what he alleged was the murder of Reaves, 24.
Crutcher cites the Illinois "depraved indifference murder" statute as being more than enough to warrant a thorough inspection of the death of the African American woman - to determine if criminal charges can be pressed against Planned Parenthood.
"If it can be shown that this young woman might have survived if emergency treatment had not been withheld from her for more than five hours, then this was not an accident and it was not medical malpractice," Crutcher contends. "It was a homicide, and those responsible should be on the evening news wearing handcuffs and leg irons."
On July 20, Reaves was left for several hours at the abortion giant's Chicago facility after a staff abortionist ripped a hole in her uterus. An ambulance eventually was summoned, but she died from extensive hemorrhaging.
She left behind a 1-year-old son.
"It is clear that Tonya's life was less important to these people than the public relations hit they might take from her being hauled out of their facility on a stretcher," Crutcher said. "And so they just watched her bleed out."
The National Black Pro-life Coalition also is seeking to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for Reave's death.
"At a minimum, Planned Parenthood was criminally negligent when they left Tonya bleeding in their facility for more than five hours," said Walter B. Hoye, who serves as president and founder of the Issues4Life Foundation. " Planned Parenthood's lack of action demonstrates a depraved indifference for the life of this young woman. Planned Parenthood must be held accountable for the death of Tonya Reaves."
And NBPC members also recognize that the unnecessary death of Reaves represents not only an attack on women and their unborn children, but on African Americans in general, who account for 37 percent of abortion deaths each year, even though they represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population, pro-life advocates said.
"Surely the African-American community will wake up and stop giving Planned Parenthood a pass," said Rev. Arnold Culbreath, the director of Urban Outreach for Protecting Black Life. "Too many of our women and children have been butchered at their hands."
The organization notes that the No. 1 cause of death for black Americans in the U.S. is abortion.
King for America founder Alveda King. "We demand the unjust targeting of the black community by abortionists be investigated and immediately ended."
"The tragedy in Chicago should never have happened," said Restoration Project founder and President Catherine Davis. "That facility was not medically equipped to handle a surgical late term abortion. This is about the failure of an organization that holds itself out as a champion of women, and women's issues to champion reasonable medical standards." |
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A Planned Parenthood abortion business where a woman died after apparently being left, bleeding, for five hours or more had been told on a separate issue to call 911 for help in an emergency the same day Tonya Reaves died, according to a new report.
The result is a renewed call for an criminal investigation of Reaves' death, according to officials with Operation Rescue.
The organization's officials said they obtained a copy of a telephone call placed at 12:43 p.m. on July 20 from the Loop Health Center Planned Parenthood in Chicago regarding a fracas that developed with a mother and daughter who were at the abortion business.
That situation was unrelated to that of Reaves, who had her fatal abortion at about 11 a.m. at that location on that day, Operation Rescue said.
But the 911 dispatcher in the call is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, a number used primarily to provide information regarding city events and programs, during an emergency.
The mother-and-daughter issue developed when a 16-year-old patient was "physically assaulted" by her mother, and Operation Rescue said the caller indicated abortion business staff members pulled the two apart after they saw the mother kick and hair-pull her daughter.
Part of the conversation, which can be heard at the Operation Rescue website, is as followed:
Dispatcher: Okay, and once you called - you see, next time you need a police car to come out for any reason whatsoever, you need to call 911.
Caller: Right. Okay. I just -
Dispatcher: That way you don't waste time with 311.
Caller: I know, I know, I just (laugh) I just hate to use services to make, you know -
Dispatcher: I know. Well, they don't dispatch police cars. All they do is transfer you to 911.
Caller: Gotcha.
Dispatcher: So you're waiting in that queue and then they flip you over to our office.
Caller: Right.
Dispatcher: Now I don't have any of your information. So, what is your telephone number?
OR reported the dispatcher "is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, which caused a delay in dispatching aid to the scene." That means the facility "ignored instructions from an emergency dispatcher to directly call 911 in the event of an emergency in order to prevent wasting precious time," OR said.
OR said it got the transcript through a Freedom of Information Act request with the Chicago office of Emergency Management and Communications.
"This new information confirms that Planned Parenthood intentionally ignored instructions given to them earlier in the day by an emergency dispatcher and refused to employ the fastest means of getting help for their dying patient," said Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue. "In addition to waiting five and a half hours to get Reaves to the hospital, the further delay caused by refusing to call 911 as instructed could have been the difference between life and death."
She continued, "This information shows gross negligence in the way Planned Parenthood managed Reaves' medical emergency. Delays in getting her the care she needed were intentional. It crosses the line into what is likely criminal conduct.
"We renew our call for a criminal investigation into Reaves death. If those responsible are not brought to justice, it is only a matter of time before another woman suffers Tonya's tragic fate," Sullenger said.
WND reported earlier when pro-life leader Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics called on State's Attorney Anita Alvarez of Cook County, Ill., for an immediate investigation of Planned Parenthood for what he alleged was the murder of Reaves, 24.
Crutcher cites the Illinois "depraved indifference murder" statute as being more than enough to warrant a thorough inspection of the death of the African American woman - to determine if criminal charges can be pressed against Planned Parenthood.
"If it can be shown that this young woman might have survived if emergency treatment had not been withheld from her for more than five hours, then this was not an accident and it was not medical malpractice," Crutcher contends. "It was a homicide, and those responsible should be on the evening news wearing handcuffs and leg irons."
On July 20, Reaves was left for several hours at the abortion giant's Chicago facility after a staff abortionist ripped a hole in her uterus. An ambulance eventually was summoned, but she died from extensive hemorrhaging.
She left behind a 1-year-old son.
"It is clear that Tonya's life was less important to these people than the public relations hit they might take from her being hauled out of their facility on a stretcher," Crutcher said. "And so they just watched her bleed out."
The National Black Pro-life Coalition also is seeking to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for Reave's death.
"At a minimum, Planned Parenthood was criminally negligent when they left Tonya bleeding in their facility for more than five hours," said Walter B. Hoye, who serves as president and founder of the Issues4Life Foundation. " Planned Parenthood's lack of action demonstrates a depraved indifference for the life of this young woman. Planned Parenthood must be held accountable for the death of Tonya Reaves."
And NBPC members also recognize that the unnecessary death of Reaves represents not only an attack on women and their unborn children, but on African Americans in general, who account for 37 percent of abortion deaths each year, even though they represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population, pro-life advocates said.
"Surely the African-American community will wake up and stop giving Planned Parenthood a pass," said Rev. Arnold Culbreath, the director of Urban Outreach for Protecting Black Life. "Too many of our women and children have been butchered at their hands."
The organization notes that the No. 1 cause of death for black Americans in the U.S. is abortion.
King for America founder Alveda King. "We demand the unjust targeting of the black community by abortionists be investigated and immediately ended."
"The tragedy in Chicago should never have happened," said Restoration Project founder and President Catherine Davis. "That facility was not medically equipped to handle a surgical late term abortion. This is about the failure of an organization that holds itself out as a champion of women, and women's issues to champion reasonable medical standards. |
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I woke up this morning, like I do most mornings, quickly scrolling through Twitter to get an overview of the occurrences of the night before and those I've missed earlier in the day. Initially, this morning was like every other -- I saw tweets from news personalities, passionate conservative activists, and the usual pundits I follow and engage with on a daily basis. I even saw tweets from Donald Trump as usual, not really giving much thought to them until I came across one of his tweets that had been re-tweeted by one of my close friends.
. @drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016
Now, I may be one at fault here for not being sensitive enough to the previous tirades of Mr. Trump, and the other people against whom he has spewed similar rhetoric, but this tweet particularly struck me. It's incredibly sad that a man of such wisdom and stature has been truly misrepresented on a national stage.
I don't intend this to be another "anti-Trump" tirade, as he already receives tolerable media coverage as it is, but rather I want to communicate the vast inaccuracy of this statement and give a small glimpse of the impact that Dr. Moore has on our world.
If Dr. Moore is not representative of Evangelicals, I don't know who is.
In six days, I start a nine-month internship with Dr. Moore and other executive leaders from The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission , the organization of which Dr. Moore is president.
For over a year, I have been anxiously awaiting the day that I would have the opportunity to intern with this organization that has had such an incredible impact on my life, equipping me with tools and resources needed to be a voice in sharing the Gospel with my generation and those in my circle of influence.
The ERLC is an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention , dedicated to engaging the public square with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Their vision -- kingdom, culture, and mission.
Dr. Moore has faithfully led the moral and public policy agency representing the 16 million members of America's largest Protestant denomination, the SBC, over the past three years.
He not only is widely sought after as a cultural commentator, but Dr. Moore is a God-fearing man who, despite his flaws and imperfections, strives to live a life that exhibits the light and love of Jesus Christ in everything he does.
Dr. Moore, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, effectively engages our culture without loosing the message of the Gospel -- a feat that, in this day in age, is becoming increasingly trying.
He is the author of several books including Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel , blogs on his personal website , and pens articles for some of the largest news publications in the country.
This clearly demonstrates the positive influence Dr. Moore has on people across the globe, of all ages and walks of life.
When I was in Washington D.C. several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the ERLC's policy office, and when I walked into Dr. Moore's personal office, the first things I noticed were the pictures of beautiful wife and five sons.
One of the most remarkable attributes of Dr. Moore is not the way he writes or speaks, although I deeply admire and even model my work after his, but the way he leads his own family. As a fierce advocate for families, Dr. Moore speaks to issues about marriage and families, and leads his family in the same way he encourages other men to as well.
He serves his wife and examples to his sons the grace and love that God demonstrates to us as His children.
David Closson, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary student, shares "I am incredibly thankful for Dr. Moore and his commitment to the Gospel and for speaking truth to power. Dr. Moore's theologically robust, kingdom first approach to political and cultural engagement has challenged me to make sure my priorities are in line."
"As a loyal Republican, it's tempting to think that American political parties are ultimate. But they aren't. The kingdom of God is ultimate and will outlast every political party in the world. Dr. Moore has helped me to see this," said Closson.
Dr. Moore is committed, passionate, faithful, and joyful.
He leads, chiefly, knowing where his value is found -- in our Father and the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed for him and all of us on the Cross.
C.J. Johnson, a member of one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist churches, articulates, "Christians should be proud of Dr. Russell Moore -- an individual who consistently defends Christian values in public forums. He continually stands for conservative ideals, and is a trusted and dependable voice representing faith voters."
"As a Southern Baptist, it's encouraging to have Dr. Moore defending not only the values of my denomination, but also the values held by people of faith nationwide," said Johnson.
If anything, Dr. Moore is one of the most qualified to represent Evangelicals on the national stage.
Conrad Close, a passionate supporter of Dr. Moore, writes "Far from being a "A nasty guy with no heart," Russell Moore is a deeply caring individual who has worked tirelessly to reach minorities and bring attention to the plight of persecuted Christians worldwide."
"And far from being "a terrible representative of Evangelicals," Moore is leading the church in the exact direction it needs to go -- away from the empty civil religion of the past. In a rapidly changing world, Moore is a voice of strength and encouragement inspiring the church to follow Christ onward to the future," shares Close.
Dr. Moore, thank you for your commitment to the spread of the Gospel. Thank you for continually encouraging my generation to engage our peers in Christ-centered conversations. Thank you for leading your family and for setting an example on how to love, sacrifice, and forgive like Christ. |
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People wait in line to attend a technology job fair in Los Angeles / Reuters
BY: Reuters August 3, 2018 9:13 am
By Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in July likely due to companies' struggles to find qualified workers and the unemployment rate declined, pointing to tightening labor market conditions.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 157,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. The economy created 59,000 more jobs in May and June than previously reported. The economy needs to create about 120,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.
The unemployment rate fell one-tenth of a percentage point to 3.9 percent in July, even as more people entered the labor force in a sign of confidence in their job prospects. It rose in June from an 18-year low of 3.8 percent in May.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast nonfarm payrolls increasing by 190,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.
The slowdown in hiring last month likely is not the result of trade tensions, which have escalated in recent days, but rather because of a shortage of workers. There are about 6.6 million unfilled jobs in the nation. A survey of small businesses published on Thursday showed a record number in July of establishments reporting that they could not find workers.
According to the NFIB, the vacancies were concentrated in construction, manufacturing and wholesale trade industries. Small businesses said they were also struggling to fill positions that did not require skilled labor.
The Federal Reserve's Beige Book report last month showed a scarcity of labor across a wide range of occupations, including highly skilled engineers, specialized construction and manufacturing workers, information technology professionals and truck drivers.
The shortage of workers is steadily pushing up wages.
Average hourly earnings increased seven cents, or 0.3 percent, in July after gaining 0.1 percent in June. That kept the annual increase in wages at 2.7 percent in July.
President Donald Trump's administration has imposed duties on steel and aluminum imports, provoking retaliation by the United States' trade partners, including China, Canada, Mexico and the European Union. It has also slapped 25 percent tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports.
Beijing fought back with matching tariffs on the same amount of U.S. exports to China. On Wednesday, Trump proposed a higher 25 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. (Full Story)
Economists have warned that the tit-for-tat import duties, which have unsettled financial markets, could undercut manufacturing through disruptions to the supply chain and put a brake on the strong economic growth.
There have also been concerns that the trade tensions could dampen business confidence and lead companies to shelve spending and hiring plans. But a $1.5 trillion fiscal stimulus, which helped to power the economy to a 4.1 percent annualized growth pace in the second quarter, is assisting the United States in navigating the stormy trade waters.
The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged on Wednesday while painting an upbeat portrait of both the labor market and economy. The U.S. central bank said "the labor market has continued to strengthen and economic activity has been rising at a strong rate." The Fed increased borrowing costs in June for the second time this year. (Full Story)
The Fed's preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index excluding the volatile food and energy components, increased 1.9 percent in June. The core PCE hit the central bank's 2 percent inflation target in March for the first time since December 2011.
Manufacturing payrolls rose by 37,000 jobs last month after increasing by 33,000 in June. Construction companies hired 19,000 more workers after increasing payrolls by 13,000 jobs in June. Retail payrolls rebounded by 7,100 jobs last month after losing 20,200 in June.
Government employment fell by 13,000 jobs in July. There were declines in transportation, utilities and financial payrolls last month.
(Refiles to drop extraneous zero in July nonfarm payrolls figure in second paragraph)
This entry was posted in Issues and tagged Economy , Jobs . Bookmark the permalink . |
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J Mase III Facebook
Janet Mock's advocacy and activism. Laverne Cox's rise to fame in Orange Is the New Black . Even Caitlyn Jenner's recent Vanity Fair cover . All eyes are on these trailblazing transgender women who have helped to highlight the people and issues surrounding the trans community. But what about the often less visible faces of transgender men of color?
Here are just nine of the many trans men of color who are advocates, writers, ministers, scholars and entertainers making a lasting impact in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer space.
1. Kye Allums
The Minnesota native made headlines when he came out in 2010 while playing on the women's basketball team at George Washington University. Allums became the first openly transgender Division I athlete in NCAA history. After graduation, he decided to focus on LGBT activism and has spoken at more than 32 colleges and universities about the trans* athlete experience. He has also written his first book, Who Am I? Allums identifies as a queer, fluid trans* and prefers the pronouns "he" or "him" and "they" or "them."
2. The Rev. Lawrence T. Richardson
Richardson grew up in St. Paul, Minn., and felt compelled to serve in the ministry from the time he was a youth. After spending years trying to fit in at churches, he saw a commercial featuring a community of diverse people being rejected from the church. The commercial ended with "God doesn't reject people and neither do we." Richardson became an ordained minister and joined the United Church of Christ community. In 2010 he medically transitioned from female to male and now identifies as a transgender, queer-identified person. He says , "I used to be a miserable person ... physically sick and depressed all the time; and if I can be transformed and made whole by the love of God, anyone can be!"
Broadus , who transitioned more than 20 years ago, is an attorney who focuses on LGBT law and transgender rights. He is the founder and director of the Trans People of Color Coalition , the only national organization dedicated to the civil rights of transgender people of color. The former Lincoln University of Missouri professor is also co-founder of the think tank the Transgender Law and Policy Institute . The Missouri native is the first transgender American to testify before the U.S. Senate in favor of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. During his 2012 speech he said, "For me, the physical transition was about letting the outer world know my internal sense of self, of who really was inside this body. ... My transition was a matter of living the truth and sharing that truth for the first time in my life."
Green is a writer, poet, scholar and filmmaker born in Oakland, Calif., who is dedicated to raising consciousness around self-care, self-love, sexual and emotional health, sexual and state violence, healthy masculinities, and black feminism. Green's short film It Gets Messy in Here examines the lives of transgender men and masculine-identified women of color and their bathroom experiences. Green is a professor and postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in sexuality studies and African-American studies.
5. Victor J. Mukasa
Mukasa is a human rights defender from Uganda who now lives in the U.S. Co-founder of Sexual Minorities Uganda and executive director of Kuchu Diaspora Alliance-USA , he was forced to seek asylum in the U.S. after fighting for LGBT rights. He was the first activist to address the United Nations about transgender issues in Africa. As part of the " Proudly African & Transgender: Self-Portraits in Writing " exhibition, he wrote, "For most Ugandans, any person that expresses 'him/herself' as the opposite sex is a homosexual and so this exposes transgender people to all the mistreatment that they would love to give a homosexual. All transgender people are seen as the obvious homosexuals. Therefore, on top of all the transphobia, there is homophobia even if you are not gay."
Originally from Illinois, Sampson is a public defender in Philadelphia. The attorney has sat on the board of directors of the Mazzoni Center and the Attic Youth Center and is secretary of the board of directors of Gender Reel , a national film and performing-arts festival highlighting the experiences and identities of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals. Sampson also helps organize the annual Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference , which focuses on educating and empowering trans* individuals, allies and health care providers on issues of health and well-being.
An award-winning filmmaker and blogger and the first person to hold a Ph.D. in African-American studies from Northwestern University, Ziegler wrote and directed the 2008 feature-length documentary Still Black : A Portrait of Black Transmen, exploring the transgender man-of-color experience. Ziegler, who was named to The Root 100 in 2013, told the Huffington Post , "I've realized that the plight of being a black man in America is not what I understood it to be when I was not living as a black man in America. What I mean by that is just it's really sad the way people fear me. I'm very hyper-visible."
Mitchell was the first "out" transgender-identified board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Raised in a black Baptist church in Los Angeles, he now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and young daughter and serves as the engagement coordinator for the Transfaith/Interfaith Working Group . Mitchell is also featured in the documentary Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen .
9. J Mase III
Based in the Bronx, N.Y., the trans-queer author, performer and teaching poet is the creator of the national performance event Cupid Ain't @#$%!: An Anti-Valentine's Day Poetry Movement . J Mase is also the founder of awQward , a first-of-its-kind talent agency run by trans people that uplifts the work of trans and queer people of color. He began coming out as trans at the age of 19. He told the New York Times , "Back then, I believed in this very romantic myth of a cohesive LGBTQ community. ... What I discovered was that the reality of being a trans person of color is often talked about within the LGBTQ community, but not actually addressed." With the creation of awQward, he hopes that "[trans people of color] artists are able to preserve our history, culture and make a livable wage while doing what we love."
Nicole L. Cvetnic is The Root' s multimedia editor and producer. |
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Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has given strong hints a Somali refugee who says she was raped on Nauru and wants an abortion will be brought to Australia for the specialist treatment but has hit out at the public campaign supporting her request, saying it is of no help to her case.
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White privilege and sexism divides us
Olivia Chow ran a fantastic campaign (NOW, October 27). If she were a white man in a suit and didn't have an accent, she would have gotten a lot more votes. White privilege and sexism are alive and well and what divides us.
Ours is a city with too many people who do not have a voice. A child poverty rate of 29 per cent is a clear marker that we need progressive leadership.
Chow put real dollar amounts on what she would do as mayor. That's what made her campaign so great. All politicians should have to do that.
John Tory is not accountable because he didn't make any real commitment to improve social housing or enhance after school programs. As Chow said at one debate, "That is what makes us cynical about politicians."
Big props to NOW for endorsing Chow. She gave so much of herself to help improve this city. I am inspired by her to give a little more of my time and energy to do the same.
NOW's endorsement full of suspense
NOW finally endorses a mayoral candidate and it's Olivia Chow (NOW, October 23-29). Talk about shock and leaving it to the last possible moment. The suspense was killing me!
If not Denzil Minnan-Wong, then whom?
I am curious. You said in your council endorsements that Denzil Minnan-Wong must go in Don Valley East (NOW, October 23-29). I am the only other candidate who is campaigning but I wasn't endorsed. Who do you think people should have voted for?
Mary Hynes
U.S. war resisters PM's inconvenient truth
As noted by the U.S. war resister who authored "Is this the war you truly want for Canadians?" (NOW, October 16-22), the Harper government is poised to send several war resisters back to the U.S., where they will face prison time and a dishonourable discharge.
These resisters are an inconvenient truth for Harper as he takes Canada into the quagmire with origins in the 2003 invasion Canadians refused to support. We need to tell Harper to let U.S. war resisters stay in Canada. They're taking the position our country did in 2003. Even Harper ultimately admitted that the 2003 invasion was a mistake.
Valerie Lannon
ISIS: from "useful rebels" to "terrorists"
Stephen Harper is so ideologically driven to force Canada into a war in Iraq that we are now bombing the same militants we supported in Libya in 2011. They were useful "rebels" against Gaddafi then. Today many of these same fighters are part of ISIL in Syria and Iraq.
Canada is helping arm Saudi Arabia. Saudis support the extremist Salafism that shares its ideological roots with ISIL. However, the Harper government celebrated a $10 billion deal to supply armoured vehicles, equipment and training over 14 years to this regressive Gulf monarchy.
Harper has sided with sectarian regimes, human rights violators and state terrorism. There will be no peace at all in the region for decades to come with these terrible actions.
David C. Fox
Medpot Mountie's freedom lesson
Re RCMP's Reefer Madness (NOW, October 23-29). I didn't think it was possible that I could feel more deeply about RCMP Cpl. Ron Francis's suicide, but Matt Mernagh's article made it so. My hope at this moment, as I once again wipe away tears for one of Canada's best in red, is that all Canadians feel that same sense of regret that I feel. I now see that Cpl. Francis had a plan like millions of others: the universal freedom to decide how to live our own lives and all that includes.
WoodGreen surprise
Re WoodGreen Workers Walk (NOW, October 23-29). My uncle lives in an assisted-living unit for seniors diagnosed with mental health challenges at WoodGreen. It provides residents with their own bachelor units and staff assistance, and is much better than the programs offered at privately run for-profit homes.
Over a year ago, management announced to residents that they planned to implement a 60 per cent service fee increase over five years. My partner and I have met with management three times to find out why this decision was made. (residents live on very low fixed incomes, many as low as $12,000 per year). Management said they wanted the service fees to be aligned with fees charged in WoodGreen's other residential seniors' programs.
Imagine our surprise, then, when we read in NOW that Woodgreen management's total salaries and benefits have increased 177 per cent between 2010 and 2013!
Paying Lip Service to William H. Macy
You refer to the new film Rudderless as the "directing debut" of actor William H. Macy (NOW, October 16-22). While this is his first theatrically released film as director, he did direct the excellent 1988 HBO TV movie Lip Service, with Griffin Dunne, Paul Dooley, Felicity Huffman, Clark Gregg and Macy himself, which was executive-produced by David Mamet.
Few seem to be aware of this film's existence. It was released on VHS in 1989 but apparently hasn't resurfaced since on any format and is rarely televised. Hopefully this early but assured directorial effort from Macy will soon be rediscovered.
Hamilton mayor taken for ride on LRT?
I would have expected a call from Paul Weinberg about his story In Steeltown, A Familiar Refrain On Light Rail Transit (NOW, October 20), since you apparently had a chat with the un-credentialled Ryan McGreal on the subject of LRT. My position on LRT was made clear on my blog (mayorbratina.com). I did not campaign on a lower-city LRT. My preference was the A-line, which connected upper and lower neighbourhoods, which as you will see I advocated for over several years.
Bob Bratina |
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A survey entitled "Religious Life in Turkey" was conducted by the Presidency of Religious Affairs or Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi on religion and religious habits in Turkey. Surveys had previously been conducted on faith and religious life in the past but most of them were confined to one city or to a limited number of interviewees. For Diyanet's survey, 21,632 people were interviewed across the country which has a population over 76 million and 50.9 percent of them were women. All interviewees were aged 18 and above. Almost all interviewees identified as Muslim while only 0.4 percent said they were of other faiths or do not believe in any religion at all. The majority of them, at 77.5 percent, followed the Hanafi madhhab or school of law interpreting religious rules while 11.1 percent were Shafi and 0.1 percent followed the Hanbali school. One percent responded that they followed the Jafari sect of Shia Islam and 6.3 percent described themselves as followers of none of these sects while 2.4 were not aware of his or her sect. "Turkey is a country whose population is 99 percent Muslim" has long been at the center of arguments related to country's religion but was often downplayed as an unofficial figure. When asked whether they believe in God, 98.7 percent of participants responded that they believe God's existence and oneness while 0.8 percent replied either that they doubted his existence but still believed, or were doubtful of his existence and did not believe in God at all. The results were not unexpected according to experts in the country where the atheist population is a small minority. A majority of participants said they accepted all revelations in Quran as accurate and valid for people of all ages while only 1 percent expressed doubt. A large majority of the interviewees expressed their faith in the Day of Resurrection and Judgment and only 0.9 did not believe in resurrection and being held accountable for their sins and good deeds. Over 95 percent of the participants believe in the existence of angels, Satan and djinns. Though an overwhelming majority are followers of Islam, figures of those observing the religion strictly remain low according to the survey. Piety among Muslims is high in rural parts of the country and among the elderly. Less than half of interviewees perform daily prayers while 16.9 percent do not. More than half of those performing prayers five times a day live in rural areas while 39.4 percent live in cities. The survey shows women perform daily prayers more than men and there is a correlation between the age and frequency of performing prayers. People observe obligatory prayers more as they age according to the survey. Turkey's Muslims above 65 are most likely to perform daily prayers regularly while only 26.2 percent of Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24 regularly perform obligatory prayers. Another interesting finding in the survey is that the higher the level of education Muslim individuals have, the more they are inclined to skip daily prayers. The frequency of performing daily prayers is the highest among illiterate Muslims. The highest rate of attendance to prayers is for Friday prayers, a prayer that needs to be performed with a congregation and is obligatory exclusively for men. Over 57 percent of interviewees said they always attend Friday prayers and only 7.2 percent said they had never attended the Friday prayers. The highest attendance rate for Friday prayers was in central Turkey known for a concentration of country's conservative population while those in the western Marmara region in the northwest, where conservative lifestyle is relatively less common, attend the prayers least according to the survey. The survey also examined Muslims' observance of fasting and giving zakat, a type of almsgiving obligatory for all Muslims considered wealthy enough. Over 83 percent fast as long as they are healthy while 2.5 percent said they never fast. The rate of women was higher among those regularly fasting. Those giving zakat annually are in majority while only 1.1 percent said they did not give zakat although they could afford to. On the matter of going on a religious pilgrimage, a pillar of Islam compulsory for every able-bodied follower who can afford it, only 6.6 percent of interviewees performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina known as Hajj. A large number of interviewees plan to perform it as soon as they can afford while a very small percent said they preferred to help the poor instead of spending money on a pilgrimage. As with all other religious duties examined in the survey, Hajj is popular among Turkey's Muslims aged 65 and above. Less than half of interviewees said they were able to read Islam's holy book Quran in its original Arabic while others said they could not. A considerable majority of interviewees said they recite prayers at any time of day without any reason while more than half recite prayers to show their gratitude to God. The rest of interviewees recite prayers only when they face a problem, an ordeal, when they lose loved ones or are seeking an increase in wealth or happiness. More than 71 percent of women interviewed said they covered their head while going out though they were not asked whether they regularly wear a headscarf or other forms of covering and 27.2 percent said they did not cover. Wearing headscarves or other items to cover the head is more common in rural parts of Turkey according to the survey. The main reason women cited for wearing a headscarf was that they believed it is an obligation of Islam. This reason was followed by family's pressure, adherence to customs and societal pressure respectively. Less than 2 percent of interviewees said family and societal pressure were primary motives for wearing a headscarf while over 91 percent said they covered because they believe it is an Islamic obligation. Amid other interesting findings of the survey is the high rate of Muslims believing that halal and haram, things and actions permissible and forbidden by Islam should be revised as their context has changed over the time and a contemporary approach is required. |
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A survey entitled "Religious Life in Turkey" was conducted by the Presidency of Religious Affairs |
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On Monday, at the California Climate Change Symposium in Sacramento, the usual academic suspects from California's universities argued that global warming represents an imminent threat to Man.
Unsatisfied with simply stating their positions, scientists were determined to prepare for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Paris by asserting that those opposed to the climate change agenda must be convinced to join the global warming chorus, according to The Daily News.
Elizabeth Hadly, a professor of biology and geological and environmental sciences at Stanford University, warned, "Dialog is more important than advocacy. You've got to learn how to communicate outside the Ivory Tower," and asserted that the Scientific Consensus Statement, which pontificates , "Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet ... The evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming," should be pressed on developing countries, as well skeptics among religious leaders and military officials.
The symposium was organized by the infamous International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as the California Natural Resources Agency.
Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission, exhorted the rest of the world to imitate California, which requires greenhouse gases to be cut to 1990 levels by 2020, with a further cut of 80% by 2050. UC San Diego Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan warned that sea levels could rise between 2 meters to 5 meters threaten Los Angeles International Airport and San Diego International Airport.
Professors from UC Berkeley dominated the conference, with five speakers, including Nancy Thomas, Shruti Mukhtyar, David Ackerly, John Radke and Whendee Silver; two professors from UCLA spoke: Alex Hall and Glen MacDonald.
The IPCC's misrepresentations of data involving climate change have been noted for years, including here , here , and here . |
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With Alabama poised to become the 37th state with marriage equality on Feb. 9, an association of probate judges announced Wednesday it will no longer stand in the way. The Alabama Probate Judges Association -- whose 67 members issue marriage li... Read
With Alabama poised to become the 37th state with marriage equality on Feb. 9, an association of probate judges announced Wednesday it will no longer stand in the way. The Alabama Probate Judges Association -- whose 67 members issue marriage li... Read
After nearly 11 months of searching, the Malaysian government has officially declared the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 an accident and has said that there were no survivors, CNN reports: The formal declaration, read Thursday by ci... Read
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore really, really dislikes gay marriage. We reported this week on how he's calling for the governor of Alabama to resist "judicial tyranny" and refuse to comply with a federal judge's ruling overtu... Read
Rachel Maddow is reporting tonight that Bryan Fischer, virulently anti-gay Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, has been fired from his position. Maddow reports that the firing was due to Israeli press reporting that Reinc... Read
NASA Astronaut Terry Virts, currently aboard the International Space Station as part of the Expedition 42 crew, shot some incredible images of the U.S. east coast last night including a time-lapse video from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the wint... Read
Domino's 50 Shades of Grey-themed Superbowl commercial is turning some heads. Tom Daley goes for a shirtless run on the treadmill. Michelle Obama's decision not to wear a head scarf on trip to Saudi Arabia for King Abdullah's funeral draw... Read
Domino's 50 Shades of Grey-themed Superbowl commercial is turning some heads. Tom Daley goes for a shirtless run on the treadmill. Michelle Obama's decision not to wear a head scarf on trip to Saudi Arabia for King Abdullah's funeral draw... Read
Lance Bass and now husband Michael Turchin appeared on Entertainment Tonight to chat with Nancy O'Dell about their wedding ahead of an E! special airing next month about it. The two married on Dec. 20 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Downtown Los Angel... Read
Madonna's 13th studio album Rebel Heart is not due until March 10 but an undoubtedly well-coordinated media blitz got underway this week in Australia, with an interview with Richard Wilkins on the Today show. At the beginning of the interview, Ma... Read |
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W. Eugene Smith/Magnum Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Eve Arnold/Magnum Black and white The Ku Klux Klan holds a rally in North Carolina in 1951; in Hue, Vietnam, a chaplain ministers to a casualty of the war in 1968; protesters carry anti-segregation signs in Virginia in 1960.
O n June 12, 1962, fifty-nine Americans--well-groomed young men in slim ties, and young women wearing tailored skirts or pantsuits, hair in bouffants, poodle cuts, or ponytails--gathered at the United Automobile Workers hall in Port Huron, Michigan, to hammer out a radical new politics. Among the group were a smattering of "red diaper babies," veterans of the nascent civil rights movement, older trade union activists, and several delegates from the Socialist Party. The majority, however, were university students from middle-class homes in Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The planning committee hailed from a fledgling New York-based movement, Students for a Democratic Society, which operated as a wing of the League for Industrial Democracy. lid was founded in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society by the novelist Upton Sinclair (Jack London was its first president), and counted among its early members such notable figures as Clarence Darrow, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed. (The philosopher Sidney Hook and union president Walter Reuther, best known for leading the United Auto Workers out of the afl-cio , would sign up after iss changed its name in 1921.)
The United States was by no means the first country to experience student unrest. On January 16, 1960, a thousand students occupied Tokyo airport to protest Japanese prime minister Nobusuke Kishi's decision to sign a security treaty with the US. Three days later in India, forty students protesting the closure of the University of Lucknow were arrested in Delhi. Following the Sharpville massacre in South Africa on March 21, thousands of students around the world rose up against apartheid. In late July, police shot and killed twelve nationalists in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. On October 17, 1961, students in France joined a demonstration against the country's continued occupation of Algiers, in which an estimated 200 people were killed.
By comparison, the uprising in America was unimpressive. On February 1, 1960, four African American students staged a sit-in at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Only a handful of white students joined sit-ins in the South, making modest appeals for human rights and desegregation. Few responded to the roll call on March 15, 1960, when the police arrested 350 African Americans for participating in peaceful demonstrations in Orangeburg, South Carolina. At no time did anything even vaguely resembling a nationwide student movement materialize in response to blacks rising up. On the contrary, like the American public and the national media, the white student population for the most part remained on the sidelines.
Frustrated and appalled by what they had begun to think of as pandemic apathy, a few white students joined black activists to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ), which attempted to remedy the situation by organizing random acts of resistance and creating new forms of civil disobedience. " SNCC later told me...they wanted me to get beat up, because that would get national attention in the media," recalls Tom Hayden, then an SDS field secretary, but Americans, including university students, would not be moved.
Yet it was not a Japanese, Indian, South African, or French student but twenty-four-year-old Robert Alan Haber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, who sought to own the spontaneous, restive, sometimes violent expressions of international student unrest. To him and his peers who made the pilgrimage to Port Huron, the opportunity to give the protests an inner coherence and a thematic consistency was too good to miss. At a meeting in Ann Arbor, Haber, who had been elected president of SDS , began downplaying old-world ideologies, treating Saint-Simon's sentimental socialism, French syndicalism, hardline Marxism, George Bernard Shaw's Fabianism, Eduard Bernstein's social democracy, the Jesuit belief that Christ resided in all of us as so much grist for the mill. To the exalted position of the mill itself, Haber raised the New Colossus: " Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! "
Courtesy of C. Clark Kissinger Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Rights from wrongs The Students for a Democratic Society meet in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1963; images from Saigon helped to foment anti-war protests; John F. Kennedy in 1961, two years before he sent the civil rights bill to Congress.
There was something true, if mean spirited, in the criticism of Haber that he saw every student complaint, even if it was only about dormitory food, as fodder for the movement. His hyper-inclusiveness--his indifference to the difference between fire-breathing Communists and soft socialists, between the steely righteousness of Christian soldiers and the pragmatism of mushy liberals, between thoughtful intellectuals and spoiled dorm dwellers--was mind boggling. Yet it was Haber who finally persuaded LID to sponsor the Port Huron gathering, which he immodestly pitched as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to set the "agenda for a generation."
Haber was hardly a nationalist. His most deeply held values hewed to the concept of humanity and hardly at all to the idea of the nation-state. His commitment to America stemmed mostly from his conviction that for the world to survive, one nation had to take up the torch, experiment, and create new social, political, and economic institutions. His idea that America should step up to the plate had less to do with the vainglory that is American exceptionalism than it did with America's wealth and power--and with the fact that America was at least half responsible for the Cold War.
Delegates from SNCC responded to Haber's high-mindedness, as did representatives from Young Christian Students, the National Student Christian Federation, and the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee. But they were a mulish bunch, and the three days and four largely sleepless nights they spent debating questions that singed the wings of Icarus left them hungry, intoxicated, and gasping for air. At the end of the third day, as a new sun dawned over Lake Huron, none of them were prepared to bury their differences. Indeed, they were so incapable of consensus that they decided not to vote on the sixty-three-page draft they had produced, choosing instead to endorse something they called a "living document"--meaning infinitely revisable, not at all conclusive, maybe even rescindable--which came to be known as the "Port Huron Statement." Mimeographed copies were run over to the Oval Office. Thousands more were sold at campuses across America for twenty-five cents apiece. Two years later, President Lyndon Johnson's speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, borrowed heavily from the statement's Values section when he crafted the Great Society speech many Americans still consider Johnson's finest hour. Twenty-five years later, James Miller, now chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, wrote that the "Port Huron Statement" remains "one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history."
W e are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. " So the statement began. It could just as well have begun more breathlessly, by citing a spectre, not of Communism but of nuclear Armageddon, which loomed over the earth like the shadow of a giant boot. Indeed, the statement did refer to the invidious cloud--" Our work ," it said, " is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living "--but it did so in astonishingly subdued tones, very different from the insane modalities expressed by the beat generation. What Port Huron took from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal Cassady was not the madness that overwhelmed the postwar beats. To those who gathered in Port Huron, "Rockland," Ginsberg's metaphor for the insane asylum, existed only as the option they abjured. To escape to the asylum seemed even more insane than a world that tolerated the bomb. Worse, it was to refuse responsibility for Little Boy and Fat Man (the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan), which were, after all, "made in America."
To the Port Huron gathering, it was America that had lifted the lid, loosed the demons, raised the roof beams, and it was therefore the duty of Americans to restore order. " Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal....Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted as part of the total disarming process....The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international co-operation....America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary....Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged....A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken...No Federal co-operation with racism is tolerable...Laws [hastening] school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats..."
Courtesy of the Peace and Justice Resource Center Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Bruce Davidson/Magnum Soldier on SDS member Tom Hayden, top right, would go on to craft the "Port Huron Statement"; activists burn their draft cards in New York in 1965; Martin Luther King Jr. marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 9, 1965.
T he statement's idealism found favour with the knights of Camelot, the name enchanted Americans gave to President John F. Kennedy's round table. Recognizing kindred spirits, Kennedy had already established the Peace Corps, in which hundreds of students happily enlisted. Four months after Port Huron, he dispatched hundreds of federal troops to ensure that James Meredith, an African American, gained admission to the University of Mississippi. In May of the following year, he issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 239, ordering a nuclear test ban treaty. In June, he made his famous speech at American University in which, chastened by the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis, he described his vision for world peace in an age of nuclear threats. In October, he issued Memorandum No. 263, withdrawing 1,000 military personnel from South Vietnam and promising that "the bulk" of US administrators would be out by the end of 1965. Then, on November 22, he was assassinated.
While Kennedy was gone, the train had already left the station. In July 1964, eleven days after three activists were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which included a ban on employment discrimination based on sex, race, and religion. (The Southern Dixiecrats, who had controlled the Democratic Party for over a century, abandoned ship--but not politics--regrouping to support Alabama governor George Wallace, who declared in his inaugural speech, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.") The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was redrawn to bring millions of new voters into the system. In 1966, the Freedom of Information Act received congressional approval. In 1967, Colorado legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest, and jeopardy to the mother's health. Similar laws were later passed in California, North Carolina, and Oregon. In March of 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortion at the patient's request. New York followed suit, and that paved the way for Roe v. Wade , which the Supreme Court passed in 1973. The first collective rights for farm workers and public sector employees were negotiated, as were fundamental reforms of university curricula. Anti-sodomy legislation was repealed. Legislation pertaining to homosexual rights was drafted.
But instead of honouring Kennedy's commitment to defuse the Cold War, Johnson escalated it, often on the sly. He tightened the draft and made it more difficult to dodge. Before long, thousands of young Americans were forced to participate in the unconscionable napalming of Vietnamese villages. The Port Huron reformist movement now morphed into a militant anti-war movement that required but failed to develop a stricter hierarchy and firmer lines of authority. Conservatives, especially in the South, began amassing a counterforce. America was fracturing along old fault lines. In 1963, black civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated. So, later, were Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. "We had no idea how much hate there was in America," says Tom Hayden, who wrote the first draft of the "Port Huron Statement" in a segregated jail cell in Albany, Georgia.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI , deployed strategies he had learned from Joseph McCarthy, casting student unrest as treason, and dispatching undercover agents to infiltrate and sow the seeds of suspicion, resentment, and hate. The CIA fell into lockstep, co-opting the AFL - CIO , the student movement's natural ally. The war in Indochina expanded to include Cambodia and Laos, and overnight the size of the protest movement doubled and then redoubled. However, Richard Nixon, now president, had signed tough new environmental and consumer protection laws to appease students and workers, and he would not be deterred. As the death toll mounted, rational conversation became impossible. "You had to be against the whole thing," says Hayden. Students began burning their draft cards, and some even self-immolated. The protest movement collapsed in the smoke and shattered windows of the counter-culture. None of the old SDS leaders could imagine other ways to organize the growing and entirely out-of-control army of hippies and yippies and stoners. Timothy Leary's beat-like motto, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," dissolved the last vestiges of idealism.
In 1968, when I was old enough to apply for membership in SDS , Hayden was talking about independent territories from which bands of militant students would lurch, recede, regroup, and strike out. Then, in June 1969, the Progressive Labor Party took over SDS , leaving its remnants to regroup as the paramilitary Weathermen. Operating under the banner "Bring the War Home" and launching a series of "days of rage," they terrorized America until April 30, 1975, when the war in Vietnam ended with the collapse of Saigon. By then, most everyone who had been involved in the student movement was either in jail, in therapy, hiding at some university, or swimming awkwardly back to the mainstream. The dramatic renewal of democratic spirit that began in Port Huron disappeared. As the "long '60s" came to an end, so did America's patience. The people wanted stability restored. A toothy Ronald Reagan agreed.
NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images Jay Cassidy/Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Pride and prejudice Police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, on June 28, 1969; Hayden addresses the Vietnam Moratorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 15, 1969; Black Panther Fred Hampton speaks at a meeting in Chicago in 1969.
A nd then they were back . In January 2010, when everything in the '60s began to turn fifty, the leaders of the student movement--Al Haber, Tom Hayden, and others--started turning up at conferences, seminars, and public lectures, and in television and radio interviews, raising questions and eyebrows much the way they had when they were young. What, I wondered, were they up to? What had they learned during their long years in exile? What lessons could they impart to writers like Matt Taibbi, who believes that "America never got over the '60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics."
In October 2012, my friend Kenny and I join a stream of young pilgrims making their way to Ann Arbor for a three-day event called A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement in Its Time and Ours. We check in to our hotel close by the University of Michigan and make our way to the Michigan Union, where JFK announced the birth of the Peace Corps. Tonight the speaker is former US senator Tom Hayden. A greybeard resembling Al Haber wearing a tubeteika sits on the auditorium floor, his back against the wall, facing the audience. As we make our way inside, Kenny trips on someone's leg, prompting two young women in the third row to stand up, smile, and offer us their seats. "You need them more than we do," the brunette says to Kenny, who argues with her sheepishly. The women tell us we shouldn't worry, because they have many friends in the overflow area. Kenny and I take their places, feeling our age, and pretty stupid.
A history professor from the university says a few welcoming words, then introduces Hayden, the principal author of the "Port Huron Statement." He is wearing a cashmere jacket over a blue V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt in a paler blue. He is svelte for seventy-two, his swagger intact, his hair still thick but now grey and slicked back, and he has acquired a beatnik goatee since the '60s. He leans on the podium and looks up at the projection booth. The lights dim, and Bob Dylan's voice rings out: "While riding on a train goin' west." On the big screen at the front of the hall runs a slide show of yellowed, campy photographs of the movement's patriarchs: John Dewey, Albert Camus, C. Wright Mills. The audience claps intermittently, respectfully. Kenny, who has no threshold for sentiment, says he feels nauseated, stands up and leaves. A photo of a leaner, bespectacled Al Haber draws fulsome applause. More shots follow of Hayden and others, and finally a recent photograph of the newest SDS chapter in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Hayden tells us this is the seventh or eighth event he has attended in the past year to celebrate the "Port Huron Statement." He says he is weary, hasn't slept well for days, and recently visited the site of the UAW hall, which was demolished. "There's a man standing there, who looks like a California surfer, with his feet in the water, his hair is wild, windblown....He says to me, 'I wondered when you were coming.'" Hayden says he thought the man had mistaken him for Jesus Christ. He says he told the man, "You must be John the Baptist." Then Hayden says to us, the faithful assembled in the Michigan Union auditorium, "And sure enough, he was like this prophetic figure who's helping us cross from the old world to the new." Some of the old-timers sitting on the floor near Haber roll their eyes, reminded perhaps of a time when many people were convinced, and none more than Hayden himself, that he was some sort of saviour, but most of the people in the audience are too young to have such recollections. They enjoy the story, laughing out loud.
Hayden does not explain why he seems so obsessed with the '60s, why he leaves his third wife and young son at home, what he is after--what makes Tom run. "I won't say [the '60s] traumatized us," he says, although in the opening line of his new book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama , he writes, "The sixties shaped my character permanently." And is this not what trauma is: an experience that changes a person forever? As he speaks, it becomes clear that, like Taibbi, he is having a hard time getting over the '60s. The events that transformed him from a brilliant and aimless candidate for the lost generation into a still-brilliant but hardened, suspicious, and sometimes cruel older man, continue to gnaw at his insides. Like so many of his fellow activists, he cannot find a way of stepping back, cannot stop blaming others for bringing the America of the '60s all too close to civil war. "The lesson I learned," he says, "was that it was not a crisis of the youth. It was a failure; it was a default of the elders. Had the elders done their job...much of this would have been averted."
Perhaps it is because he cannot get over the pain, forget the rage, and bury the grudges that he resorts to the pleasures of taxonomy. He is too intent on parsing the decade, trying to fit big, blubbery things like the student movement into little boxes. The spirit was born in a manger, he suggests, and then through no fault of its own became a dark horse and was put down. He mentions the fragmentation but blames it on the CIA . He leaves out his own indiscretions: the disruptive koan for which he became famous; the time he wrongfully accused Abe Peck, a friend of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, of working for the CIA ; the breaks with nearly every other student leader. He does not mention that he was forced out of his commune, moved to Venice, California, changed his name to Emmett Garity, and became an alcoholic. Evidently, he thinks these things are better left unsaid.
"Who wrote the 'Port Huron Statement? '" Hayden asks. "I wrote it. I drafted it. I fought the elders and some of my friends to get it even considered at the convention. The convention revised it. They told me to go away and rewrite it again. It was never voted on. That's why it's called a living document." But that leaves out what the other fifty-eight people did. Were they merely, as Hayden suggests, groupies? "They came to own it; they came to possess it." He pauses, shifts gears, goes into overdrive--as if to prove that he still has the magical touch that earned him a reputation as the supreme moralist of his generation. "This is where I may seem to be leaving my senses," he says. "I want to argue to you that the 'Port Huron Statement' wrote us." He tries to explain himself, drawing on James Joyce: "We were articulating the unconscious conscience of our generation....We were in a process of birthing ideas and language that didn't really exist until the experience itself."
Howard Ruffner/Life Images/Getty Images Burt Glinn/Magnum David Fenton/Getty Images The things they carried The Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State on May 4, 1970, killing four protesters; the family attends Robert F. Kennedy's funeral on June 8, 1968; Weathermen leader Bernardine Dohrn splits from SDS in 1969.
T o what spirit is Hayden pointing when he argues that "the 'Port Huron Statement' wrote us"? Was it the embryonic spirit of the '60s? No one who experienced it could deny its existence. It was ubiquitous, omnipresent, immediate, a cyclone lifting everything in its wake, transforming politics, science, journalism, the plastic arts, music. It dictated the way we spoke, how we dressed, the way we grew our hair, hallucinated, and made love--but, as Hayden knows, the ideas that animated the "Port Huron Statement" originated long before. He reminds the audience at the Michigan Union of the several hundred years of revolt against slavery that preceded the '60s. He reads an excerpt from Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, reflecting on a century of struggle for women's rights. Unfortunately, he stops short of calling the spirit what it really is: not the spirit of the '60s, but the spirit of reform.
Calling it the spirit of reform helps us to resist the temptation confronting every generation that experiences it--namely, to imagine that it is all about us and our times; that we are exceptional; that nothing like this has happened before or will ever happen again. To understand how wrong this is, one only need remember the hundreds of thousands who were seized by the spirit during the American, French, and Bolshevik Revolutions. Or one might consider the more recent events in Tahrir Square and, closer to home, in a hundred different encampments launched by the Occupy movement. Seeing it as the spirit of reform rather than of the '60s allows us to construct a history in which the decade figures as just one of many powerful surges. When was it born? Those comfortable with oral history may go back as far as the year zero, when a young Jewish reformer named Joshua of Nazareth challenged the authority of the rabbinical elders. For those who prefer written history, it probably makes more sense to imagine its conception sometime in the twelfth century, when British barons began whittling away at the legitimacy of Henry I. From either of those distant places, it would not be wrong to leapfrog to the Magna Carta, and from there to that incandescent morning when Martin Luther protested the sale of indulgences.
Any history worth its salt will need to pause in the study of Charles Louis de Secondat, commonly known as Montesquieu, who in the eighteenth century imagined the outlines of an emerging British parliamentary system in terms he called the " trias politica ." Secondat's work warrants the stop because it inspired the American federalists who fleshed it out, renaming it the system of "checks and balances." More significant, of course, was the American Revolution itself, because at that moment the spirit of reform, which in Europe was locked in an endless moral struggle aimed at loosening man-made authority, was given a new mandate: to bring the best of the old-world concepts in line with the revolutionary idea of a people's democracy. Everything needed to be realigned. American intellectuals, writers, and activists rolled up their sleeves and put themselves to work in what may someday be called the Great Realignment, in which the '60s will have played a large but not decisive role.
The '60s, after all, failed to mine the full potential of the spirit of democratic reform. The decade did not, for example, reimagine the party system. In his farewell address, George Washington, the first president of the United States, warned that political parties would entrench old hatreds and engender new ones. The party system emerged, not from the Constitution, but from the reformist spirit of the Jacksonian era. But with prescient vision, Washington saw the dangers of partisan politics: the hobbling of government, the shredding of civil society, and destabilization of the economy.
The '60s also ignored the corrosive influence of institutionalized religion. In the early draft of the "Port Huron Statement," Hayden tried to put forward an alternative: " We regard Man as infinitely precious and infinitely perfectible ," he declared, as though he were writing the introduction to a new American bible. Mary Varela, who represented the Catholic contingent at Port Huron, argued that Hayden's words contradicted the doctrine of original sin and would therefore alienate progressive Christians. The assembly agreed and struck the words out. But fifty years later, Hayden is unrepentant. "The 'Port Huron Statement' would have been more spiritual had we completed our meetings," he says. While he could not have written anything that would have persuaded any democratically elected government to restrict an individual's right to worship as he or she pleased, he could have proposed what the great American sociologist Robert Bellah called America's civil religion. What would it look like? Would it drop the old-world model of ineluctable authority in favour of something more compatible with the American dream of individual autonomy? Would its rituals perhaps resemble the discussions of everyday moral issues that took place in the ragtag encampments of the Occupy movement?
I n his book, Tom Hayden wrote that the spirit of the '60s is very much alive. This was six months before the birth of the Occupy movement, which, along with reviving the spirit of the '60s, may herald yet another surge of the spirit of reform. One must resist conceiving of Occupy as a movement concerned only with economic disparity. Think instead of its many splinter groups, including Occupy Faith, the radical assembly that attempted to take over Trinity Church in New York. What unites them, however disparate their origins, are moral concerns. And is their uprising, however uncoordinated, not the moral revolution the authors of the "Port Huron Statement" called for but never completed?
This appeared in the April 2014 issue. |
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The Tampa Bay Rowdies have signed Alex Morrel for the 2017 USL season. Morrell, 22, is a Lakeland native that joins the Rowdies from Major League Soccer's Chicago Fire. He spent part of last season in the USL on loan to St. Louis FC. Morrell will wear the No. 9 jersey for the Rowdies. "We're [...]
Last night in St Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Rowdies who currently play in the lower division USL launched a bid to join Major League Soccer, the top league in the United States and Canada. Orlando City SC has averaged over 30,000 fans in its first two MLS seasons and will move to a new stadium [...]
The Tampa Bay Rowdies have created a splash in the football world with the signing of Joe Cole. The addition of the three-time (English) Premier League Champion and two-time World Cup participant for England. Cole's pedigree was well-established by the time he left West Ham United in 2003 to join ambitious rival Chelsea. Cole left [...] |
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Nothing captures the spirit of the Christian holiday of Easter better than ranting about immigrant children and...
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have decided that they have no problem detaining pregnant women in...
Back in February, Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Security was considering barring immigrants who had...
The Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California began this week to publicly post the date and time that...
The sheriff in Santa Clara, CA, has acknowledged that her staff "mistakenly" allowed federal deportation officers to...
One tool that Immigrations and Custom Enforcement agents use against immigrants is a lack of knowledge about what legal...
Mitt Romney, who is currently trying to become a U.S. senator in Utah, bragged on Monday about his extraordinary...
Leave it to the U.S. government under the Trump administration to act about as un-American as it gets with an Army vet...
Border Patrol officials in Arizona are struggling to fill jobs. Like, really struggling. The agency is so desperate...
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson went on an openly racist rant on Monday night warning viewers about "bewilderingly fast"...
Government budgets are a clear indication of where our priorities are. And so far it appears that securing the...
City council members in a small Southern California town have voted to exempt themselves from the state's so-called...
Several lawmakers have joined women's health, immigration, and human rights advocates in calling for the resignation or...
U.S. immigration officials last year classified 51% of the 39,000 immigrants in detention as posing no risk and no... |
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On Monday, White House officials began spelling out the President's budgetary goals. President Trump is proposing increasing defense spending by $54 billion, while other departments will face massive cuts. Several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have already spoken against the plans, but perhaps the most surprising criticism comes in the form of a letter. Over 120 retired generals wrote to Congress condemning the proposed budget.
The letter sharply criticizes the plan to slash funding to key diplomatic agencies. Without non-military solutions, the former military leaders fear that violent solutions are inevitable. Quoting the current Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the letter says, "if you don't fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition."
While key details of the plan have yet to be released, many fear that the uptick in military spending will lead to a never-ending military operation against ISIS and other extremist groups. One signer, Retired Marine General John Allen, spoke to CBS News about the letter,
"Cutting the State Department budget by 30 percent is consigning us to a generational war."
Regarding the budget cuts, Trump told reporters last week that he plans to "make our government leaner and more accountable." While streamlining the federal government may be a needed and noble cause, experts like the retired generals, have cautioned that proposed budget will not allow us to address the underlying issues that allowed ISIS to thrive,
"The military will lead the fight against terrorism on the battlefield, but it needs strong civilian partners in the battle against the drivers of extremism- lack of opportunity, insecurity, injustice, and hopelessness."
The budget talks come just as President Trump prepares for his first address to a joint session of Congress. Along with tax reforms and health care, many expect the budget to be a key part of the President's address on Tuesday night. |
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One signer, Retired Marine General John Allen, spoke to CBS News about the letter |
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Chick-fil-A is back in the news, and once again, it's not for a new menu offering.
The fast-food chain's president Dan Cathy sent a personal tweet Wednesday criticizing the Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage.
The tweet was deleted, but not before it was seen and captured in screen shots and on Topsy.
Via Topsy , Cathy's tweet read:
Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy Twittter
Cathy is no stranger to controversy over his vocal opposition to gay marriage.
In 2012, Cathy came out "'guilty as charged' for backing 'the biblical definition of a family,'" the Blaze reported.
The ensuing controversy was so heated and explosive, conservative supporters held a Chick-fil-A "Appreciation Day" that was a "record-setting day" for the chain, Fox News reported on Aug. 2, 2012.
As before, Cathy's comment has caused new backlash toward the company.
Chick-fil-A spokesman Jerry Johnston issued a statement Thursday on Cathy's tweet that read, "Dan Cathy, like everyone in this country, has his own views. However, Chick-fil-A is focused on providing great-tasting food and genuine hospitality to everyone," the Huffington Post reported.
Later on Thursday, Johnston explained to the Post why Cathy deleted his tweet.
"[Cathy] realized his views didn't necessarily represent the views of all customers, restaurant owners and employees and didn't want to distract them from providing a great restaurant experience," Johnston told the paper.
The Blaze published a sampling of angry tweets directed toward Cathy's Chick-fil-A:
We know first-hand that censorship against conservative news is real. Please share stories and encourage your friends to sign up for our daily email blast so they are not getting shut out of seeing conservative news.
"And though she be but little, she is fierce." And fun! This conservative-minded political junkie, mom of three, dancer and one-time NFL cheerleader holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science. [email protected] Twitter: @JaneenBPR
Latest posts by Janeen Capizola ( see all ) |
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The fast-food chain's president Dan Cathy sent a personal tweet Wednesday criticizing the Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage. |
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Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF GIF via YouTube
Internet personalities Baked Alaska and Millennial Matt had a lot of fun at this past weekend's white supremacist rallies. Well, until Baked Alaska was maced , I guess. They used tools like Twitter and YouTube to bring their online followers into the heart of the racist action. But curiously, the two still insist that they're not neo-Nazis. So what the hell is a neo-Nazi?
The rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia were the largest collection of white supremacists in the United States in at least two decades. It left one woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, dead and dozens more injured. So it's curious to see both Baked Alaska (real name Tim Gionet) and Millennial Matt (real name Matthew Colligan) insist that they're not neo-Nazis and that they've never advocated violence. I'm starting to think that maybe they don't know what words mean.
If you're in the same boat, and don't know if you're a neo-Nazi, I've made a helpful guide to determine if you are. To be clear, the "neo" in neo-Nazi is simply meant to differentiate between Nazis who were around in the 1940s versus those who subscribe to Nazi beliefs today but weren't alive during Hitler's time. Sadly, there are still old school Nazis around, like 98-year-old Michael Karkoc who massacred women and children and currently lives in Minnesota .
If you answer "yes" to any of the questions below, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you regularly tweet the 14 Words?
The so-called 14 Words were coined by the late white supremacist David Lane and became a slogan for neo-Nazis around the world. The 14 Words read, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." It's not exactly subtle as far as Nazi slogans go.
In 1984, David Lane helped plot to kill Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host, and acted as the getaway driver when he and his fellow neo-Nazi scum shot and killed Berg in his driveway. Lane was sentenced to 190 years and died in prison in 2007.
Baked Alaska loves to tweet the 14 Words. He sends it to President Trump and he makes videos of it . Lots of videos of it .
Yesterday, Baked Alaska tweeted his defense of the 14 Words, saying that there's "nothing wrong" with the slogan and that "just because others have used them doesn't change the meaning." It's unclear if he understands the origin of the phrase, but he certainly understands that it means "white advocacy."
But even if he has no idea that it was coined by a murderous white supremacist thug, it's still a poisonous idea that has no place in society.
If you tweet the 14 Words you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you say "Hitler did nothing wrong"?
Some people insist that Baked Alaska and Millennial Matt can't be neo-Nazis because they're simply saying outrageous things to get a rise out of people. One of those things is that "Hitler did nothing wrong." But at some point you're no longer "trolling" and you're simply stating what you believe.
Millennial Matt has said "Hitler did nothing wrong" so many times that it's become his catchphrase. He says it on radio, in tweets, and in videos .
But what the hell does such a phrase mean? Adolf Hitler systematically killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Saying he did nothing wrong is an endorsement of those deaths.
Amazingly, Millennial Matt says that he's never advocated for violence against anyone. In a weepy YouTube post he whined that people were now threatening his life after he attended the rallies in Virginia. "There's nothing funny about threatening people's lives," he said.
But when you say that Hitler did nothing wrong you are explicitly advocating for violence against nonwhite people. That's explicitly what Hitler did. It's kind of what he's known for. When you say Hitler did nothing wrong, and you say it so many times that people start to riff on it with jokes about other people who " did nothing wrong " you're advocating for violence. That's kind of how this works.
If you say Hitler did nothing wrong, you're a neo-Nazi.
Have you attended a rally with people giving Hitler salutes?
The salute goes by a lot of names: The Roman salute, the Hitler salute, and the Bellamy salute. But it only has one meaning since it was adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s. It means you're a neo-Nazi.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF Footage of the infamous neo-Nazi tiki torchlight rally in Virginia on Friday taken by Baked Alaska (GIF made via Baked Alaska's YouTube)
Baked Alaska documented his trip from his home in Los Angeles to Virginia on Twitter and YouTube for all the world to see. And one of his most frightening videos came from Friday during the infamous tiki torchlight riot . Baked Alaska shot video as his fellow marchers viciously assaulted non-violent counter protesters. They can be seen in the video beating people with their torches. The counter protestors later described fearing for their lives .
And when Baked Alaska pans around in the crowd, you can clearly see people giving Nazi salutes as they chant "white lives matter."
If you attend a rally with people giving Hitler salutes, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you shout "hail victory" while carrying a torch in public?
Did you see footage of people shouting "hail victory" at the rallies this weekend? It's the English translation of "sieg heil," the notorious Nazi slogan. Baked Alaska shot video of himself saying just that.
"They thought we weren't going to stand up," Baked Alaska shouts into the camera . "Guess what, we're standing up for our rights! We're proud to be white!"
"We're proud to be white, brother," he continued while shaking hands with another white supremacist. "Hail victory! Hell yeah! Thank you, love you guys."
If you shout "hail victory" while carrying a torch in public, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you deny that the Holocaust happened?
Holocaust denial is pretty much textbook neo-Nazism. And Millennial Matt peddles in it constantly. At the 52-minute mark during the livestream from Virginia, Millennial Matt encourages viewers to "look into revisionist history." Revisionist history often hinges on the belief that historians are lying about the fact that Nazi Germany executed millions of people.
"The history that they taught you in middle school is not factually accurate," Millennial Matt tells his viewers. "The reason that they teach you the civil rights movement and slavery in middle school is because you haven't fully developed your brain yet."
"If you wonder why people emotionally react when you talk about slavery, when you talk about the Holocaust, the reason people emotionally reaction is because they taught this to you before you were even old enough to realize what it is they were teaching you," he continued.
"The history that they teach you about the Holocaust is not factually accurate whatsoever," he says.
"The truth is, the Holocaust is one of the biggest hoaxes in world history," he said. "It's one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the human race."
If you deny the Holocaust you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you believe America's treatment of Nazis was worse than the Holocaust?
Aside from believing that the history of the Holocaust isn't accurate, Millennial Matt also believes that Nazi soldiers were treated more poorly than Jews during World War II . He goes so far as to compare Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people were systematically tortured and murdered, to a 5-star resort.
If you believe America's treatment of Nazis was worse than the Holocaust you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you publish photos of Jewish people you disagree with in gas chambers?
Baked Alaska also enjoys publishing photoshopped photos of Jewish people he doesn't like in gas chambers. President Trump is often depicted as the one administering the gas, dressed in Nazi regalia. Baked Alaska was even temporarily banned for doing it, but insists he'd do it all over again.
An image posted by Baked Alaska of a Jewish member of the alt-right in a gas chamber with President Trump administering the gas (Twitter)
If you publish photos of Jewish people you disagree with in gas chambers you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you have a photo of Joseph Goebbels in your Twitter header?
You're never going to guess what WWII-figure Millennial Matt has in his Twitter header. Yes, that's Joseph Goebbels, easily one of the most evil men in history and responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
The Twitter header of Millennial Matt which features a bloody Pepe, Joseph Goebbels and David Duke (Twitter)
Oh, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke is also in there. "Ironically," no doubt.
If you have a photo of Joseph Goebbels in your Twitter header you're a neo-Nazi.
Have you marched with people who physically assault others because of their race?
New footage has emerged overnight of the vicious assault endured by 20-year-old Deandre Harris at the hands of white supremacists in a parking garage . It's brutal to watch.
"Me and about five of my friends were out protesting. We thought [the racists] left, but at one point they came back. Everyone was exchanging words with the group, but then the KKK and white supremacists just rushed us," Harris told The Root .
Harris is lucky to be alive. Judging by the video, it doesn't appear like Baked Alaska or Millennial Matt were anywhere in sight and had nothing to do with the beating. But if you're marching with these people, this is what you're marching for.
If you march with people who physically assault others because of their race you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you want to hear the good news? You don't have to be a neo-Nazi forever. What you've done in the past doesn't have to define your future if you'd like to live a happier life. How do you stop being a neo-Nazi? Just stop doing all of the things above. You don't even have to join a new organization or donate to a nonprofit. Just stop being filled with irrational hate for people that are slightly different than you.
It's really as simple as that. Members of the alt-right have tried to rebrand their particular flavor of hate as new and stylish. But it's the same old Nazi shit. If you do the thing above you're a neo-Nazi. If you stop doing the things above you can stop being a neo-Nazi.
So give it a try! I promise it won't hurt. In fact, it might give you time to pursue things that are more fun. Do you enjoy making memes? Try making anti-Nazi memes. Or you can forget about Nazism altogether. Watch a movie, or build a tree fort, or go jerk off. I promise that they're all more fun than spreading the hatred of Nazism. |
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 23, 2018
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Brienne Kordis, CODEPINK Media Liaison, brienne@codepink.org, 757-513-1934
Protesters Rally at BlackRock Shareholders Meeting
Coalition Calls on CEO Larry Fink & Shareholders to Stop Profiting on War & Violence
New York, NY - Today representatives and allies of the anti-war movement demonstrated in front of BlackRock's Manhattan office across from the Lotte Palace Hotel where BlackRock's shareholders will be attending their annual meeting.
Organizations including CODEPINK, Action Corps NYC, The Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance, Catholic Worker, the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, Enlace, Granny Peace Brigade, Gulf Coast Raging Grannies, Muslim Peace Fellowship, Muslims United for Justice, NYC Metro Raging Grannies, Peace Action New York State, Seeding Sovereignty, Show Up America, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace NYC Chapter 34, War Resisters League NYC, World Beyond War, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom protested the world's largest shadow bank for its practice of investing in weapons manufacturers and companies that profit from war and violence, in the U.S. and around the world.
"The U.S. is engaged in seven active conflicts and is the world's largest arms dealer, all while our domestic infrastructure crumbles and millions of Americans live in poverty," says Ariel Gold, CODEPINK National Co-Director. "BlackRock and its shareholders are profiting from war and violence by investing in companies who export weapons around the world and into our communities."
BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, controlling more than $5 trillion in assets. One of BlackRock's iShares funds is exclusively dedicated to "defense spending" - in other words, a fund that is exclusively profiting off of weapons of war. BlackRock has $7.25 billion invested in Boeing; $3.3 billion in General Dynamics; $5.6 billion in Lockheed Martin; $3.4 billion in Northrop Grumman; and $4 billion in Raytheon. Additionally, BlackRock holds investments in civilian gun manufacturers such as Sturm Ruger, Remington, and American Outdoor Brands (formerly Smith & Wesson).
They position themselves as a company that is socially responsible, while they profit from the world's worst humanitarian crisis - the devastation of Yemen, which has been fueled by American made arms and munitions. BlackRock is raking in billions from these very weapons manufacturers, while Yemenis starve and die from treatable diseases. BlackRock's investments are used to fuel war and violence around the world - in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and of course here in America. These weapons and the conflicts they fuel are responsible for the deaths of countless civilians. In Syria, thousands of civilians have been killed with U.S. weapons since 2014. In Yemen, one child dies every ten minutes from a preventable disease. In just the last seven weeks in Gaza, over a hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire while peacefully protesting. And in America, 2018 has already seen 22 school shootings - while BlackRock remains the leading investor in American Outdoor Brands, America's number one gun manufacturer.
The weapons funded by BlackRock's investments breed instability at home and abroad. In 2012, the FBI released a report indicating that U.S. military intervention abroad was responsible for the rise in terrorism around the world and at home. Far from making us safer, the products made and sold by these companies are creating an endless cycle of violence which disrupts peace and security at home and around the world.
"BlackRock claims to hold companies accountable for being socially responsible citizens, while their executives and shareholders continue to profit off of the most morally-corrupt companies in the world. They are making a killing on killing," says Sarah Eckel-Dalrymple, CODEPINK's Divest from the War Machine Campaign Manager. "Corporate accountability must extend to those who hold the shares of these companies. There should be no profit from war and violence." |
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Protesters Rally at BlackRock Shareholders Meeting |
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Photo by Matthew Murphy
To make a great stage version of a towering film musical sounds like an impossible task. However, gay playwright Craig Lucas did just that with his 2014 stage adaptation of An American in Paris . The 1951 Oscar Best Picture-winner was inspired by George Gershwin's 1928 orchestral composition. Though Alan Jay Lerner's script for the film is charming as all get-out, Lucas transcends that by exuding that same charm while adding a deeper dimension of the characters' demoralization done by the Nazi occupation of France. The benefit a being a few generations further along has actually made the original story even better, thanks to Lucas. The Ordway is hosting the national tour of the Broadway hit and it is simply superb.
The musical takes place as World War II has just ended and reflects the paradoxical energies of grief sprung from 1. war's devastation and 2. the renewal of life after a dark, gruesome chapter. The musical focuses on a young woman and three men with strong feelings for that young woman. Her family was victimized by the Nazis.
Photo by Matthew Murphy
McGee Maddox and Sara Esty are picture-perfect as the romantic leads: American veteran, Jerry, and Jewish survivor, Lise. Etai Benson as Adam, a disabled U.S. veteran and a struggling composer, brings vibrant pluck to his role. Nick Spangler embodies the rigid decorum of Henri, the son of French industrialists. One wonders to what degree his family may have been collaborators with the Nazis.
Two supporting performances are notable. Gayton Scott as Henri's rigid, appearance-driven mother, and Emily Ferranti as Milo Davenport, an American socialite who champions young artists. Both performances reveal a lovely empathic humanity beneath what could be seen at first glance as arrogant self-preservation and opportunism.
An American In Paris has been directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon with a glorious mix of the balletic, the jazz scene, the modernist style, and that good old-fashioned boy-meets-girl prototype. Wheeldon is an absolute visionary. Scene after wonderful scene flows like a magical river.
Natasha Katz's lighting design and the projections by 59 Productions make for some of the most stirringly beautiful visuals you may ever see in a stage production. Faded images of Paris. Chalk-like drawing occurring right up on stage outlining such images, as if inscribed by God's hand. Bold evocations of modern art that fill up the stage space.
One of the show's most beguiling numbers is "Fidgety Feet" wherein a sensuous, sensual, slow-moving classical ballet is juxtaposed with an audience with the fidgets. Two dance styles appear simultaneously. Both are equally enthralling and underscore just how sophisticated and yet fully accessible An American in Paris truly is.
And the music! Well it's the incomparable George Gershwin. Need I say more? And lyrics by his brilliant brother Ira. Rob Fisher's adaptation and arrangements are marvelously handled.
An American in Paris Through June 18 Ordway Center, 345 Washington St., St. Paul (612) 224-4222 www.ordway.org |
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I'm not sure when it started, exactly. Maybe in elementary school, when the nuns used to pull me out of class to altar serve funerals because they knew I wouldn't cry? Maybe when Nova aired that documentary on the Ice Man mummy? Maybe when I started losing my baby teeth and my mom gave me a little box with a cat on it to put them all in? Who knows. Regardless, I've long been fascinated with human remains, and throughout my travels, I've seen quite a few.
Here are the top 9 I've witnessed. Happy Halloween.
9. Vial of one year's worth of eye boogers from a couple at the Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata.
8. Plastinated bodies at Our Body: The Universe Within.
7. Slides of Albert Einstein's brain at the Mutter Museum.
Via Mutter Museum .
6. Graves in the cemetery behind my apartment in Brooklyn that someone invited me on a date to one time.
Green-wood Cemetery via NYTimes .
5. The Mummy of Artemidora at the Metropolitan Museum.
Via Met Museum .
4. Oldcroghan Man, a preserved set of remains found in a bog in Ireland.
3. The Incorruptible Tongue of St. Anthony, which was still wet and undecayed 30 years after his death.
VIa iIvarfjeld.com .
2. The Catacombs in Paris, which holds the remains of over 6 million people relocated from overflowing cemeteries.
1. Specks of dust on the wind with every breath we take, because there are way more people who are dead than people who are alive. It's fine.
Via shutterstock . |
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Republican Sen. Bob Corker recently attended a classified, private briefing on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and he left the room feeling confident the United States would be doing everything it could do to "annihilate" ISIS, and that President Donald Trump is "not playing around."
Corker, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there was the impression that "more energy was going toward wiping out the extremist group," according to a recent report.
"There is just a lot more clarity, a lot more focus on annihilation," Corker said, according to the Washington Examiner. "Anybody that listened to that hearing understands they're all about killing every ISIS member they can get ahold of."
"The Trump administration is not playing around and is focused on completely annihilating ISIS," Corker tweeted. "I could not be more encouraged by the briefing."
(Twitter)
"There is a lot more clarity and a lot more focus on partnering with other countries to completely annihilate ISIS," he continued. "There is a renewed energy and a renewed focus, and I think every senator present today knows this administration is not playing around."
"Their approach is to kill members of ISIS and do everything they can to prevent them from escaping to other countries where they could inflict harm," he added.
Other senators declined to comment on the briefing, the Washington Examiner reported.
The closed-door briefing for the senators was given by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.
While the officials provided an update on the progress made toward eliminating ISIS, they did not deliver any new strategy handed down by the Trump Administration, which has been highly anticipated.
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Republican Sen. Bob Corker recently attended a classified, private briefing |
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Last evening I made a huge mistake and broke a cardinal rule of mine. While I should have been sleeping, I read a post about a weird anti-woman diatribe against Ivanka Trump .
At the time, my mind was still reeling over the Rosanne debacle .
The grim reaper of social divisiveness was working overtime.
All of the media attention -- television, film, radio and social media -- to the emotional tirades and strife-filled content (intentional and unintentional) is currently jamming frequencies of healing, reconciliation -- and unity.
On our radio show "Changing Your Community Broadcast," my friend and co-host Emmanuel Boose makes some good points. We should not fan the flames of anarchy. Also, selective judgment is fake justice. If you're going to clean house, be thorough.
Talk about draining the swamp.
Can we please take a step back from political enmity and emotional tirades; stop taking the stealthy anti-Christ bait of strife and division; and try to love each other, not as color blind but as One Race/One Blood human beings ?
Yes. I broke my own rule and ignored my own advice against consuming inflammatory verbal and visual garbage when I should be sleeping or praying, Philippians 4: 6-7 "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
My rule -- in the ongoing effort to overcome evil with good, it's wise to avoid intake of a dietary overabundance of vitriol and divisive media driven cerebral dishes at odd hours.
In other words, flooding your senses with negative and inflammatory reports early in the morning or late at night is bad for your overall health.
We are facing sensory diarrhea. Are we becoming so anti-everything that we are disrupting all that is good about humanity? Yes, people are dying prematurely. Yes, people are suffering. Yes, we need help. But devouring each other in strife won't solve our problems. We need a spiritual antacid.
We need a good dose of reconciliation . It won't hurt to take a bit of time and smell the roses. Promises are being kept from the White House [which lest we forget was built with free labor by our African ancestors].
Across the nation job rates are up, lower tax rates boost families and the economy, lower regulations stimulate growth, no longer punishing business, babies in the womb are safer, [in]justice overhaul is in progress. Let's continue to Pray for America .
Please support our Roe V. Wade Movie
Dr. Alveda C. King grew up in the civil rights movement led by her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life and Gospel of Life Ministries. Her family home in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed, as was her father's church office in Louisville, Ky. Alveda herself was jailed during the open housing movement. Read more reports from Dr. Alveda C. King -- Click Here Now. |
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A zine examining the role of prisoner resistance in prison abolition efforts, first hosted at the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee site .
Quote: This monster -- the monster they've engendered in me will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit... They won't defeat my revenge, never, never. I'm part of a righteous people who anger slowly, but rage undammed. We'll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble...
- George Jackson, Soledad Brother, (1970) Introduction
Aftermath of a prison riot
On February 1st of 2017, prisoners at Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna, Delaware took guards hostage and occupied a portion of the facility. Their public statement demanded education, rehabilitation programming, and budget transparency. They also spoke of conditions worsening since the recent presidential election and they expected that trend to continue and escalate under the Trump regime (Thompson, 2017). The uprising at Vaughn follows years of growing prisoner resistance, which reached a national level on September 9 th of 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica rebellion. These revolts, protests, and strikes signal a return to militant post-civil rights era opposition to prison and white supremacy at large. The monster George Jackson spoke of was created by the white supremacist politics of confinement and carceral torture and, after several decades, that monster continues to haunt every cellblock, special housing unit, and supermax. Prison rebellions have great power to draw out the inherent contradictions between the racist origins of carceral power and the "postracial" liberal democratic society that purports to offer equality and fairness.
As anarchists, we assert that the capitalist, patriarchal and white supremacist state construct carceral "solutions" to social problems in order to maintain status quo interests and to subdue ungovernable populations (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2015; Simon, 2009). The U.S. chooses to rely on prisons not due to a lack of awareness, but because the prison system ensures the maintenance and reproduction of exploitative social arrangements. Dominant approaches to prison abolition praxis tend to focus on shifting this reliance on incarceration by developing and demonstrating the superiority of community- based alternatives to prison (CR10 Publications Collective, 2008; McLeod, 2015). Prison abolition scholars offer nuanced understandings and theories on the shape of state power and repression in the United States, particularly as it is informed by settler colonialist logics of confinement and disappearance (Dayan, 2013; Muhammad, 2011; Nichols, 2014). The anarchist and prison rebel's approach to abolition seeks to augment and accelerate these strategies through direct action. The praxis of leveraging this power is underdeveloped within the abolitionist cause, which would benefit greatly not only from increased awareness, but active support of and participation in prisoner-led resistance actions. We must not merely convince society to turn away from carcerality, but to remove the choice altogether; we must render carcerality impossible by amplifying prisoners' ungovernability and creating a perpetual "crisis of legitimacy" for prison officials (Habermas, 1975; Irwin and Simon, 2013).
This contribution will outline the importance of emboldening prisoners' resistance efforts against state-sponsored terror and patterns of degradation. Prisoners provide an informed and grounded analytic of state repression, carceral power, and resistance that is invaluable to abolitionist thought and strategy. We argue that prison uprisings, rebellions, and prisoners' analytics are integral to constructing a more robust abolitionist ethic and praxis. Through this framework, we analyze the ways in which prisoners' organizing efforts of the past decade have helped to propel the urgency of the abolitionist project, while signaling an opportunity for collaboration in making visible the inherent "cracks" of a system built on a long legacy of racialized violence. We first discuss the nefarious connections between prisons, slavery, and colonialism before transitioning into current efforts prisoners are making in resisting the white supremacist politics of confinement and pacification, specifically in how prison rebels are creating counterhegemonic civic spaces. We concretely discuss examples of prison rebellions and direct actions undertaken by prisoners in the last decade to illustrate our points.
The Afterlife of Slavery and Colonization
Prisoners working in the fields.
Quote: Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It's the same but with a new name.
- Ruchell Cinque Magee, SF Bay View, (2008)
The enduring legacy of white supremacy has persisted despite the abolition of more overt forms of racial control. Saidiya Hartman refers to this continuous haunting as the "afterlife of slavery"; racial terror transforms and its contemporary manifestations are "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment" (2008, p. 6). The insidious cause of this afterlife is the deep entrenchment of a racial calculus that hierarchicalizes social value based on one's closeness to or distance from whiteness. The European colonizers' constructions of the indigenous as "savage" and the African slave as a "non-person" created a durable outsider status that has since been legally transmuted and imposed upon populations deemed undesirable, or in some cases, less than human (Fanon, 2008; Wynter, 2003). The residual echoes of the "other" are felt from the initial colonial contact with indigenous Americans and Africans, through to the slave holds, plantations, "Indian" removal policies and reservations, Jim Crow segregation policies, boarding schools, Japanese internment camps, conversion therapy, redlining, and the war on drugs. The ghosts of slavery and colonization continue to possess American logics and institutional life, animating a carceral grid of captivity and disappearance (Deer, 2015; Hernandez, 2017). Yet, this system of conquest extends beyond the original targets of settler colonialism and chattel slavery; it applies a "foundational eliminatory logic" for anyone who is unable or unwilling to conform to a white supremacist heteropatriarchal society, but especially indigenous and racialized communities, along with houseless, poor, and/or queer populations (Hernandez, 2017; see also, Nichols, 2014, Rodriguez, 2008; Simpson, 2014).
The white supremacist project in the United States, one fueled by racist logics and institutions, along with punitive (white) sentiments, now uses the prison system as its primary tool in enforcing an eliminatory logic. The penal leviathan is a result of a turn in the politics of domination, one that relies on carceral-punitive apparatuses - incarceration in particular - to criminalize those opposing state repression and ongoing racial terror. During the Civil Rights Movement, conservatives linked civil disobedience to criminality and "lawlessness," rather than to a defined political movement (Alexander, 2012). With later liberatory struggles, like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Black Liberation Army, the Brown Berets and related Chicanx struggles, and the Weather Underground, the U.S. employed an aggressive assaultive against political dissidents through the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO (Churchill & Vander Wall, 2001; Abu-Jamal & Fernandez, 2014). The state's disruption of civil rights and liberation movements set the stage for a much larger campaign of mass incarceration through the ideological framework of "colorblindness" (Alexander, 2012; Berger, 2014; Taylor, 2016). Under this facade, elitist political discourses marked the targets of carceral confinement as "deserving" of its consequences rather than victims of institutionalized racial control. Criminalization represents a pinnacle of state repression, attempting to control unruliness and prevent disruptions to "law and order" while maintaining status quo racial and class interests.
The state's ability to use criminalization to control social movements and "unruly" populations became a historical possibility because of the firm embeddedness of racialized violence within the democratic order of the U.S. (Dayan, 2013; Gilmore, 2000). The juridical fixture of racial terror is perhaps the most apparent with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, in which the U.S. abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. And, though the analytic connections between slavery and prison are popularly being embraced by a more mainstream audience as of late, Black liberationists and their accomplices have acutely understood and observed the entanglement of anti-blackness in our legal structures soon after slavery was supposedly abolished, and up until the present day. As famed sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois notes,
Quote: Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work that they did before emancipation... (2013 (1935), p. 166).
Du Bois and other slavery abolitionists understood that until the political order that legalized, condoned, and maintained chattel slavery was unmade, equity and liberation could not become a possibility. Yet in the aftermath of slavery, Black codes and the convict leasing program preserved racialized patterns of domination; the "nonperson" status of slaves - the legal dispossession of personhood - was transmuted to the "civil death" status of criminals (Dayan, 2013).
A description of the modern carceral state would be incomplete without an examination of its white supremacist origins and the enduring continuity of racialized violence. The technologies and logics of domination slightly change their form, but the core function remains: racialized social control and the preservation of a white supremacist order. The Thirteenth Amendment allows slavery to live on through criminal punishments, which were aggressively ramped up in the civil rights and black/Chicanx/indigenous power era, leaving the United States with the sordid reputation of being the global leader in incarceration rates. The prison system has its power in imposing the antebellum era notion of "social death" upon its captives. The "legal engines of dispossession," enabled by white supremacy and mechanized by the criminal legal system, inflict this social death upon those deemed to be criminal, which is the "loss of status so extreme that life ceases to be politically relevant" (Dayan, 2013, p. 60). The official narratives that frame "criminals" as having poor moral character, being highly dangerous, and needing redemption and/or transformation legitimate the removal of criminalized peoples from the body politic in order to prevent "contamination." This social death process marks a denial of civil and political personhood for the prisoner - which, when viewed in the aggregate, results in the dispossession of racialized communities to their self-determining authority and sovereign claims to governance. Yet, this legal disenfranchisement is not totalizing and, as described throughout the rest of this chapter, currently incarcerated prisoners are resisting this social death and creatively crafting new, collective forms of political personhood. Prison Revolts: Resisting Civil Death, Creating
Inmates negotiating with authorities at Attica.
Quote: I urge each and every one of you to imagine yourself drowning... All your training goes out the window, but your survival instincts emerge. You were taught to not flail about when drowning, yet at the moment of drowning, you do flail. Was I not to flail? Was I supposed to accept death by suffocation in [this] sweat box?
- Greg Curry, Repression Breeds Resistance, (2014)
On September 9th of 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, prison rebels engaged in diverse protests against their captivity, exploitation, and the systems of capitalism and white supremacy. According to estimates gathered by prisoner supporters, there were over 57,000 prisoners affected by the action that impacted at least 46 facilities across the nation 1 . Solidarity Research calculated that the strike cost the California prison system alone $636,068 in revenue each day (2016). The events of September 9th also broke through the typical media blockade around prisoner resistance, gaining coverage in mainstream national and local papers, as well as many alternative news sources (SPR, 2016a). This was by far the largest prisoner protest in U.S. history, and the first to be nationally coordinated. Prisoners' actions were supported by robust outside protests. Solidarity actions around the 9th and days following included marches, blockades, noise demos, general assemblies, letter writing, phone calls to officials, and an attack on a local democratic party office in Bloomington, Indiana (It's Going Down, 2016). The National Lawyer's Guild, The Industrial Workers of the World, Critical Resistance, and various other organizations endorsed and supported the strike and attempted to coordinate legal defense and public awareness campaigns for prisoners facing retaliation (SPR, 2016b).
The September 9th strike came after years of expanded mass organizing within U.S. prisons. In 2010, prisoners in Georgia staged a state- wide work strike (Dixon, 2010) which was the largest in history, until 2016. In 2011 and 2013 California prisoners engaged in massive rolling hunger strikes involving 30,000 participants (St. John, 2013). These protests inspired lasting prisoner unity in the CA prison system plagued with gang violence and racial divisions (Jamaa, 2017). In Alabama, prisoners initiated a steady stream of hunger strikes, work stoppages, and rebellions beginning in 2014 and continuing to the present. They also formed an organization entitled The Free Alabama Movement and outlined a strategy against prison slavery they called "Let the Crops Rot in the Fields" (FAM, 2015). The Industrial Workers of the World, at the urging of Black anarchist and former prisoner Lorenzo KomBoa Ervin, formed an Incarcerated Worker's Organizing Committee (IWOC), which quickly burgeoned into a national organization taking a key role in the September 9th prisoner strike.
Prisoner resistance is complex and myriad. Though in this chapter we focus on mass prisoner movements that are collectivized and either statewide or national, we want to acknowledge that we are not capturing the entirety of prisoner resistance. Much of the academic and activist literature, as well as media accounts, focus on uprisings that take the form of hunger strikes, work stoppages, or violent rebellions. We want to make it abundantly clear that we do not believe this is the only type of prisoner resistance or set of oppositional tactics. Diffused and informal acts of defiance are everyday occurrences. We assert that simply surviving in the brutal prison context is a political act, which becomes a useful framework when considering the resilience of prisoners with neurodivergence, those with different physical abilities, and those experiencing gendered oppression, such as women and trans prisoners. Yet, there are also many instances of incarcerated subpopulations resisting the prison system through political channels that are underemphasized: forming study groups, making resistance art, and raising public awareness about women's, trans, and LGBQAI issues in prison (Law, 2012; Black & Pink, 2017). Though the scope of this paper cannot allow a more in-depth inquiry into these different political efforts, we welcome more support efforts and scholarly inquiry into the wide array of prisoner resistance with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and ableist oppression.
Governor tour of Holman, looking at a shattered window from the recent rebellion.
Carceral-punitive apparatuses seek to inscribe an "otherness" onto the bodies of those captured within its cages, prompting prisoners to employ a "strategy of visibility" (Berger, 2014), whereby they utilize the power of the pen - and at times, the sword - to reassert their human dignity and substantive need for human relations within and beyond the prison walls. In affirming their subjectivities through rhetorically connecting with collective movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter and trans liberation projects, prisoners demand the recognition of their political subjectivities (Hasan & Shakur, 2015). The recent string of uprisings demonstrate the ways that prisoners continue to collectively resist the ontological and social death that comes from the terror of state control over prisoners' bodies, labor, and identity (Cacho, 2012; Rodriguez, 2008).
Much like the civil rights and black power era of prison organizing, contemporary prison rebels use a framework and analytic of slavery in their critique of the prison regime and their conditions of confinement (Berger, 2014). This rhetoric of enslavement was particularly salient in the historic September 9th, 2016 prison strikes that demanded prisoners to stop working on prison plantations and to - literally and metaphorically - "let the crops rot in the field" (FAM, 2015). We will discuss how prisoners' frameworks first focused on forced labor and abysmal working conditions before we move to prisoners' understandings of prison slavery as also being about the state's attempts at controlling and warehousing bodies and also about the state's attempt to strip prisoners of their political voice. Slavery as forced labor: work stoppages and strikes
Many of the prisoner demands from the last decade focus on improved working conditions and wages (FOM, 2016; Dixon, 2010; IWOC, 2016). Pay for prison labor ranges from an average of $0.93 per day to none at all (Blau, 2016). This is often central to media coverage of the strike, and can lead to an assumption that prisoners are organizing for better jobs and better pay within their captivity, but it is important to recognize this rhetoric in terms of strategy as much as goals. The Free Alabama Movement has been explicit about this from the start, stating "The numbers support our contention that "MONEY" is the motive...[t]herefore, an economical response is our most effective strategy" in an article that lists five broad demands, four of which are aimed at reducing sentences and releasing prisoners (Amun, 2015). Refusing labor is often a tactic employed to gain freedom and basic human rights. This is a Call to End Slavery in America, the title of the call to action for September 9th, illustrates the broader goals of a work stoppage:
Quote: Our protest against prison slavery is a protest against the school to prison pipeline, a protest against police terror, a protest against post-release controls. When we abolish slavery, they'll lose much of their incentive to lock up our children, they'll stop building traps to pull back those who they've released. When we remove the economic motive and grease of our forced labor from the US prison system, the entire structure of courts and police, of control and slave-catching must shift to accommodate us as humans, rather than slaves (SPR, 2016d).
This analysis understands that by withholding labor power, prisoners assert themselves as full subjects and demand a place in the political economy of a nation built on its ability to deny them such.
A prisoner work stoppage does not merely impact the prison factories, denying profits to either private companies or state industries that operate within the prison, it also shuts down the facility itself. Relatively few prisoners work in the factories, instead fulfilling most of the jobs needed to clean, maintain, and operate correctional facilities, along with feeding and caring for other prisoners - particularly those who are aging or unable to care for themselves. During a work stoppage, correctional officers must take over prisoners' jobs. They do so resentfully, and at great cost to the prison. The correctional officers will do the work exceptionally poorly, both as retaliation and because of the sudden expansion of job responsibilities. This adds images of unsanitary conditions, inadequate meals, and cruel negligence to the public narrative of the strike (Speri, 2016). Prison administrators also resort to paying officers overtime or bringing in work release prisoners to replace the strikers (Turk, 2016a). The costs of these responses, in terms of finances, public legitimacy and ability to maintain order are unsustainable in any correctional institution. Anarchist prisoner Sean Swain argues that a well-supported prisoner work stoppage lasting more than 30 days would likely bankrupt most state budgets (2008). This is the economic impact prisoners hope to leverage by refusing slavery and withholding their labor power (Turk, 2016b). Slavery as physiological evisceration: fighting with the body
The analytic currency of slavery offers more than just a critique of coerced work and conditions of work. Prisoners also contest the ways in which their enslavement involves state control over their bodies. In commemorating the September 9th strikes, the editors of True Leap Press remark on the function of physiological evisceration through imprisonment:
Quote: While the economic dimensions of the prison industrial complex are indeed important to recognize and challenge; its primary function is to warehouse and disappear poor and working class Black (and in many regions Brown and Indigenous) people. Its purpose is to immobilize and liquidate white America's "undesirables" from society--to render Black and Brown people civilly and socially dead (2016).
One egregious example of corporeal exploitation include the practice of nonconsensual tubal ligation procedures done by the California Department of Corrections between 1997 and 2010, which effectively sterilized up to 250 women prisoners, most of them Black and Latina (California Coalition for Women Prisoners, 2013). This state control of reproductive systems strongly resembles eugenics programs that centered women as the bearers of societal "contamination." It additionally hearkens back to the institution of slavery in that it encompasses more than just slaveholders demanding forced labor; rather, the slave's body becomes subject to inhumane medical procedures and the slaveholders' own personal objectifications.
This project of liquidating undesirable bodies extends into the belly of certain prisons. Secure housing units (SHU), administrative control (AC), supermax prisons, and other forms of segregated housing create more tightly confined spaces that are essentially "prisons within prisons" (Gomez, 2006). Prisoners confined in long term solitary confinement experience a "living death," with expanded restrictions on movement, access to space, communication, visitation, food and other commissary items, reading materials, legal resources, income opportunities, education and religious programming, and medical assistance. In segregation, a prison rebel's protest options, like everything else, are severely restricted, leading prisoners to engage in desperate acts that put their own lives and well being at risk (Swain, 2015; Mai-Duc, 2015). Segregation often involves steady harassment, surveillance, threats, and psychological torture until the prisoner is broken down to involuntary neuro-biological responses. Prison authority aspires to have absolute control of captive bodies in a project of disappearance, liquidation, and rendering the target socially dead. Every year, approximately 185 state and federal prisoners commit suicide and an unknown number attempt suicide (Noonan et al., 2013). Given the invasive and destructive aspects of prison authority, we must admit these desperate and tragic acts, including suicide, are also a form of resistance that ought to inspire an urgent devotion to not merely phasing prison out, but ending it categorically and immediately, regardless of social costs. At times, prisoners only have their bodies to fight back with.
An example in a Wisconsin prison illuminates the practice of corporeal resistance. In June of 2016, more than thirty prisoners in the AC unit in Waupun Wisconsin declared a hunger strike. Afraid to use the phrase "hunger strike" because of Wisconsin Department of Corrections' (WI DOC) reputation for harsh reprisals, they called it a "food refusal protest" which they named Dying to Live (FFUP, 2016). WI DOC quickly lived up to their reputation. After only ten days of refusing food, prison officials had deterred most of the hunger strikers. To break the few remaining, they sought and received judicial approval to force feed the prisoners (Hall, 2016). The hunger strikers persisted, enduring dozens of painful and high-risk violations of their bodily autonomy. Prison staff shoved tubes down restrained prisoners' noses and poured liquid nutrition into their stomachs against their will. When the method failed on Joshua Scolman because of a deviated septum, the DOC doctor threatened to surgically install a feeding tube directly to his stomach (Swan, 2016). He quit the protest instead. Once prison staff determined that administering three force feedings a day would be too laborious, they began a regimen of refeeding, where the prisoner would be allowed to starve and severely dehydrate for a few days and then be force-fed a large quantity in one sitting, which shocks the system (Turk, 2016c). Force feeding is not medically necessary after only 10 days, and the refeeding regimen WI DOC subjected prisoners to risks heart failure and increases dehydration and serious injury (Inglis-Arkell, 2015). This specific case demonstrates that the prison regime is ideologically opposed to allowing prison rebels to exercise authority over their own lives and will stop at nothing to assert its exclusive dominion in controlling prisoners' bodies.
Slavery as voicelessness: asserting political personhood
The third way in which prisoners frame their captivity as slavery is demonstrating how the prison regime attempts to deny them their voice through the use of various social pacification tools, brute force, censorship, and managerial democracy. By infantalizing criminals as not knowing what is "good" for them or demonizing criminals as evil or dangerous, the prison regime attempts to undermine the legitimacy of prisoners' political personhood. Many prisoners assert their capacities for political agency, often through writing treatises and political analyses, forming study groups, and issuing demands. Kinetik Justice, Dhati Khalid and Melvin Ray, for example, formed an impromptu study group in Alabama prisons, hearkening back to the civil rights era emergence of prisoner-led ethnic studies groups. This was the genesis of the Free Alabama Movement (The Thread, 2016).
Prisons are sites where any form of protest or organizing is considered illegitimate. Prison authorities have broad freedoms to monitor and censor communication via the mail, phone, and visitation. They can move prisoners into isolation and cancel education and religious programming with the creation of a potentially fabricated disciplinary report. Despite these restrictions, prisoners continue to organize and brazenly risk punishment to assert their political personhood and pursue their organizing efforts. Siddique Abdullah Hasan, a survivor of the Lucasville Uprising, who has been incarcerated for most of his life and has spent the last 23 years in solitary confinement battling his death sentence is, despite these deprivations, a skilled political organizer. Hasan was the first prisoner to risk publicly speaking about his role in planning the September 9th national work stoppage and protest (Hasan, 2016), He, like the Free Alabama Prisoners mentioned above, has suffered greatly to maintain and expand his organizing access and capacity. Starting with a 13-day hunger strike in 2010, undertaken with two other death sentenced Lucasville Uprising survivors, in which he won access to partial contact visits (after 19 years without touching another human who wasn't putting handcuffs on him), access to the law library, increased recreation and phone time, Hasan and his comrades have steadily expanded their ability to contact the outside world (Democracy Now!, 2011). By pushing the boundaries and being as persistent as the prison machine designed to wear people down, Hasan has successfully had his voice featured in numerous national media outlets, including the popular National Public Radio show "On Point" and an episode of the Netflix documentary "Captives" (Ashbrook, 2016, Blake, 2016). In response to these efforts and other forays into public political venues, Hasan has been sanctioned repeatedly, responding with hunger strikes (Speri, 2016; Sonenstein, 2017). From mid- August 2016, until the end of May 2017, Hasan will have had phone access restricted for 210 out of 280 days based on conduct reports that were either fabricated or improperly filed. During that time he responded with two hunger strikes, refusing food for a total of 45 days.
This assertion of political personhood can take the form of confrontational insurgency, one that strikes back "against the respectable, non- scandalous, legitimated forms" of protests (Rodriguez, 2016). At Holman Correctional in Alabama, prisoners made gains through a diverse array of tactics, between March and November of 2016. Between the Free Alabama Movement's non-violent approach of work stoppages, less organized uprisings, occupations, and arsons, as well as frequent attacks on staff including the stabbing of multiple guards and one warden, Holman was on the leading edge of crisis in the prison system (Blinder, 2016; Denton, 2016). At the end of September, an entire shift of correctional officers refused to come to work, leaving the prison administration to perform daily operations themselves. Kinetik Justice described the situation for Democracy Now!:
Quote: Right now the commissioner is passing out trays. Warden Peterson is pulling the cart. Deputy Commissioner Cullum: passing out trays. Every cell, he passing out the tray. I can't believe this. To they black slide-in shoes, brown knitted pants, white tweed shirt with the collar bust open, sweatin at the temples. Is real. No officer came to work, they completely bumped on the administration. No more will they be pawns in the game. In our time, it's going down (2016).
The image of wardens and superintendents walking the halls and passing out trays best demonstrates the power of sustained, diverse and well-supported prisoner resistance to render prison facilities untenable. More support and participation in these organizing efforts can extend the length and depth of the prison's crises. FAM's explicit non-violent approach has been rejected by other Alabama prisoners, both in word and deed (Kimble, 2017), but unlike many "free-world" pacifists, FAM has never denounced or sided with the authorities against rebels who take violent action; indeed, they have consistently helped raise awareness of uprisings and occupations. This shows a more mature and sophisticated approach to organizing than many protest movements on the outside.
By asserting themselves as political actors, accessing media coverage, and creating crises within the prisons, rebels drag prison officials into a competition for credibility. Events in Michigan around September 9th demonstrate what strong and well-supported prisoner resistance can cost a prison system in terms of legitimacy. During the spring and summer of 2016, Michigan prisoners engaged in a series of meal boycotts to demonstrate unity against conditions in multiple facilities (SPR, 2016e; Egan, 2016a). Then, on September 9th, prisoners at Kinross CI in Kincheloe, MI refused to work and the next day, organized a nonviolent march around the yard. They refused to re- enter the buildings until the administration met demands regarding specific changes to conditions in the prison. At the same time, outside protests took an intersection in downtown Lansing in solidarity with the strike (Ross, 2016).
Chris Gautz, a public information officer from the Michigan DOC is one of the few prison officials who talked to the media when the strikes were going on. He was on a panel for Al Jazeera English's "The Stream" program with Kinetik Justice and Phillip Ruiz of IWOC. Gautz claimed that Michigan doesn't have trouble with prisoner protests, and when asked what happens when prisoners refuse to work, he said "Michigan prisoners are not forced to work." Kinetik and Ruiz pushed back expressing doubt about Gautz's statements (Stream, 2016). Shortly thereafter, word of the protest in Kinross became public, and The Detroit Free Press shared prisoner's stories of the state's response to their work refusal. After being promised by the warden that their demands would be met, the prisoners returned to the cellblock, where they were attacked. An Emergency Response Team entered the block and fired tear gas guns at prisoners at point blank range, dragged prisoners back to the yard, hog tied them for hours in the rain, and transferred them to other facilities across the state (MAPS, 2016; Egan, 2016b).
Outside supporters with Michigan Abolition Prisoner Solidarity (MAPS) and IWOC coordinated interviews between family members and journalists, and continue to support prisoners with call-in campaigns and news releases about hunger strikes and resistance from prisoners in segregation (IGD, 2017). The crisis created by prisoners and augmented by outside support efforts dragged officials into the public light where they tried and failed to legitimize the prison. The work of MAPS in this effort is at once essentially important, strategically effective, and easily generalizable. It does not require special talents or extraordinary risks, merely a willingness to engage authentically with the trauma of dire circumstances prisoners find themselves in, some straightforward writing, and attention to basic administrative, outreach and communication tasks, all skills which are relatively easy to learn by doing.
Conclusion: Making Prisons Impossible Fire at Holman prison
Quote: To treat us this way is wrong, evil and unsustainable socially. Stand with us. Lend your voices, your labor, and your ideas to this historical work. We can win, but only with you all by our sides. In the final analysis, this is a struggle to determine the nature of humanity itself... Until we win or don't lose.
- Dorrough, Denham, and Robinson, SF Bay View, (2012)
The prison rebellions of the past decade, and especially the nationwide strike on September 9th, exploit this dependency to illuminate the lived crises of prisons. They throw into question the legitimacy of the state and call forth the contradictions of "democracy." Positing a multidimensional framework of slavery to understand the politics of their confinement, prisoners awaken the public to the inherent problems with caging life and its deep roots in white supremacy. With the increasingly popular historicization of the prison as a site of deeply embedded racial terror, there are new revolutionary possibilities - if done in conjunction with prisoners held captive.
Supporting and generalizing prisoner resistance requires more resources than current solidarity organizations are capable of or have access to. Though we applaud the many abolitionist projects around the world and the constructive possibilities they hold in crafting a new social imaginary, we urge organizers and scholars to act with prisoners in actively abolishing the prison system. Eroding the logic, credibility, and power of prisons is a matter of defiant survival and asserting personhood on a daily and hourly basis for prisoners. We want readers to ask the question, how can our support efforts better match prisoners' commitments to crumbling the prison system?
We assert that supporting large-scale actions described in this chapter is just the start. Prisoners have called for another national action on August 19, 2017, with a greater focus on mass outside support (IAmWe, 2016), but steady, reliable, and long-term support projects are also essential. Developing relationships with prisoners establishes an infrastructure and network of resistance across prison fences. There are many programs already in place that could use human capital, as well as financial support. Such efforts include books or zines to prisoners, penpal programs, prisoner publications, classes inside prisons focusing on political education or radical trauma work, and workshops or discussion meetups in the community 2 . These support efforts help prisoners organize themselves, spread their knowledge of the horrors of the carceral regime, assert their political agency, bring attention to their particular cases, and importantly, connect with "free-world" abolitionist projects and scholarship. Actively organizing with our captive comrades to refuse the carceral regime is an essential part of crafting a society that rejects white supremacy and colonialism.
Works Cited
Citations truncated for space, if you have difficulty finding these resources with an internet search, please contact Firehawk666@riseup.net
Abu-Jamal, Mumia and Fernandez, Johanna. (2014). Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor: The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the U.S. Alexander, Michelle. (2012). The New Jim Crow Amun, Kinetic Justice. (2015). A Flicker Turns into a Flame: Alabama's Prisoners Want Change. The Incarcerated Worker, 1(1). Ashbrook, Tom. (2016). American Prison Inmates, On Strike. On Point. September 28, 2016. Berger, Dan. (2014). Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Black and Pink. (2017). Purpose and Analysis. Black and Pink: Prison Abolition Now! Blake, Meredith. (2016). The Netflix documentary series 'Captive' takes a gripping look at hostage crises across the globe. Los Angeles Times. Blau, Max, & Grinberg, Emanuella. (2016). Why US inmates launched a nationwide strike. CNN. October 31, 2016. Blinder, Alan. (2016). Alabama Prison Uprisings Come as State Grapples With How to Fix System. New York Times. March 15, 2016. Cacho, Lisa Marie. (2012). Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York, NY: New York University Press. California Coalition for Women Prisoners. (2013). Stop CDCR Sterilizations! The Fire Inside, 49, p. 7. Churchill, Ward & Vander Wall, Jim. (2001). The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. CR10 Publications Collective. (2008). Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Curry, Greg. (2014). Repression Breeds Resistance: Greg Curry on the Lucasville Uprising and Aftermath. [Zine]. Lucasvilleamnesty.org Davis, Angela. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Deer, Sarah. (2015). The Beginning and End of Rape Democracy Now! (2011). Prisoners at Supermax Ohio Penitentiary Begin Hunger Strike to Protest 17+ Year Solitary Confinement. DemocracyNow.org. Democracy Now! (2016). Alabama Guards Stage Work Strike Months After Prisoner Uprising at Overcrowded Holman Facility. DemocracyNow.org. Denton, Jack. (2016). Prison Labor Strike in Alabama: "We Will No Longer Contribute to Our Own Oppression" SolitaryWatch.com. May 5, 2016. Dayan, Colin. (2013). The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dixon, Bruce. (2010). GA Prison Inmates Stage 1-Day Peaceful Strike Today. Black Agenda Report. December 9, 2010. Dorrough, Zaharibu, Denham, J. Heshima, & Robinson, Kambui. (2012). Feeling Death at Our Heels: An Update from the Frontlines of Struggle. SF Bay View. Du Bois, W.E.B. (2013). Black Reconstruction in America. Egan, Paul. (2016a). Prisoners protest food under new contractor Trinity. Detroit Free Press. March 22, 2016. Egan, Paul. (2016b). Kinross inmate: Raid with pepper spray sparked vandalism. Detroit Free Press. October 4, 2016. Fanon, Frantz. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. FFUP. (2016). Demands of Food Refusers June 2016, supported by petition sign. Dying to Live. June 1, 2016. FAM. (2015). Let the Crops Rot in the Fields. Free Alabama Movement. February 26, 2015. FOM. (2016). Demands. Free Ohio Movement. October, 2016. Gilmore, Kim. (2000). Slavery and Prison: Understanding the Connections. Social Justice, 27(3), 195-205. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. (2015). The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement. Social Justice, Feb 2. Gomez, Alan Eladio. (2006). Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972. Radical History Review, 96, 58-86. Habermas, Jurgen. (1975). Legitimation Crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hall, Dee. (2016). Wisconsin prison officials begin force feedings as solitary confinement protest continues. WisconsinWatch.org June 23, 2016. Retrieved from http://wisconsinwatch.org/2016/06/wisconsin-prison-officials-begin-force- feedings-as-solitary-confinement-protest-continues/ Hartman, Saidiya. (2008). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Hasan, Siddique Abdullah. (2016). IWOC interview with Siddique Abdullah Hasan. April 17, 2016. Recording retrieved from https://youtu.be/OO5RODJXK1s Hasan, Siddique Abdullah & Lamar, Keith. (2015). Never Dormant on Death Row. [Zine.] Youngstown, OH: Author. Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. (2017). City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. IamWe. (2016). Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March. Iamweubuntu.com. Inglis-Arkell, Esther. (2015). Here's What Really Happens When You Force-Feed Someone. Io9. April 21, 2015. Irwin, John, & Simon, Jonathan. (2013). The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. It's Going Down. (2016). Spreading the Strike: Solidarity Actions Across North America for September 9th. ItsGoingDown.org. August 16, 2016. It's Going Down. (2017). Harold Gonzales, Kinross Prisoner, to Be Released from Solitary. ItsGoingDown.org. April 30, 2017. IWOC. (2016). IWW's in Texas Prisons Planning Work Stoppages for Early April. IWW Incarcerated Worker's Organizing Committee. April 4, 2016. Jackson, George. (1994). Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. Jamaa, Sitawa Nantambu. (2017). PHRM: Our Fifth Year to the Agreement To End Hostilities: Recognize Our Humanity! Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. Kimble, Michael. (2017). A Look at the Free Alabama Movement. Anarchy Live! January 25, 2017. Law, Victoria. (2012). Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, 2nd edition. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Magee, Ruchell Cinque. (2017). Ruchell Cinque Magee, sole survivor of the Aug 7, 1970, Courthouse Slave Rebellion. SF Bay View. Mai-Duc, Christine. (2015). Prison hunger strikes in the U.S. are few, and rarely successful. Los Angeles Times. August 5, 2015. MAPS. (2017). What happened at Kinross? MichiganAbolition.org McLeod, Allegra. (2015). Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice. UCLA Law Review Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. (2011). The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nichols, Robert. (2014). The Colonialism of Incarceration. Radical Philosophy Review Noonan, Margaret, Rohloff, Harley, & Ginder, Scott. (2013). Mortality in Local Jails & State Prisons, 2000-2013 - Statistical Tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1-40. Rodriguez, Dylan. (2008). "I Would Wish Death on You...": Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime. Borders on Belonging Rodriguez, Dylan. (2016). Policing and the Violence of White Being: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez. True Leap Press. Ross, McKenna. (2016). Prisoners' rights demonstrators block downtown traffic as part of nationwide protests. The State News. Simon, Jonathan. (2009). Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Simpson, Audra. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Solidarity Research. (2016). Prison Strike's Financial Impact in California. Solidarity Research. October 7, 2016. Sonenstein, Brian. (2017). Ohio Prisoner On Hunger Strike Against Punishment For Netflix Documentary Enters Infirmary. Shadowproof. Speri, Alice. (2016a). Striking Prisoners in Alabama Accuse Officials of Using Food as Weapon. The Intercept. Speri, Alice. (2016b). A Prison Strike Organizer Suffers Retaliation for Speaking With Journalists. The Intercept. SPR. (2016a). Coverage. SupportPrisonerResistance.net Retrieved from https://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org/coverage/ SPR. (2016b). List of Endorsements. SupportPrisonerResistance.net Retrieved from https://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org/endorsements/ SPR. (2016c). Strike Tracking and Retaliation Support. SupportPrisonerResistance.net SPR. (2016d). Call to action. SupportPrisonerResistance.net April 1, 2016. SPR. (2016e). "This was about unity": A Wave of Protest Spreads Through the Michigan Prison System. SupportPrisonerResistance.net. April 20, 2016. St. John, Paige. (2013). California prison officials say 30,000 inmates refuse meals. Stream, The. (2016). The labour rights fight in US prisons. The Stream. Swan, Peg. (2016). Joshua Scolman, having a really hard time in solitary. Stranded Friends. August, 2016. Swain, Sean. (2007). Each One, Teach One Interview Series: Sean Swain / Anthony Rayson. [zine]. Chicago, IL: South Chicago Zine Distro. Swain, Sean. (2015). Direct Action. Wildfire Issue 1. April 2015. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Thompson, Heather Ann. (2017). What Happened at Vaughn Prison? Jacobin. The Thread. (2016). Episode 1: Prison Organizing, Fighting Poverty, and Electoral Politics. DefeatMassIncarceration.com. June 1, 2016. Turk, Ben. (2016a). Free Alabama Movement May Day Work Stoppage Interview. Truth-Out. May 27, 2016. Turk, Ben. (2016b). Power on the Inside: Why Incarcerated Lives Matter to the Black Lives Matter Movement. [zine] Turk, Ben. (2016c). Dying to Live Hunger Strikers Kept on the Brink of Death by Retaliatory DOC. Dying to Live. August 22, 2016. Wynter, Sylvia. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337. 1. Lack of transparency in most state prison systems makes accurate numbers very difficult to acquire. Organizers from supportprisonerresistance.net used the following method: "We have tracked 46 prisons and jails that experienced some kind of disruption between September 8th and 21st. This total includes both lockdowns reported by officials... and reports of protests from prisoners and supporters (some of which did not lead to lockdowns or full strikes). Of these, 31 facilities experienced a lock-down, suspension or full strike for at least 24 hours. Those 31 facilities house approximately 57,000 people." (SPR, 2016c). 2. Some examples include: Books and zines to Prisoners (Chicago Books to Women in Prison, Prison Books in Chapel Hill NC, Books Through Bars in New York, Midwest Pages to Prisoners in Bloomington IN); Penpal programs (Anarchist Black Cross, Black and Pink); Prisoner publications (The SanFrancisco Bayview, Fire Inside, Unstoppable!, The Incarcerated Worker, Black and Pink, The Abolitionist, Wildfire); Classes inside prisons (WEBS of Support).
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"What a pleasure it is to award the 2017 Amazon First Novel Award to such an arresting and important piece of writing! The jury noted that The Break is a book in which the author funnels an epic vision--including the varied and sometimes difficult histories of a city, a people, and a family--through the lens of violence. The women of the Charles/Traverse family are fierce and tender; the ways that they care for each other will stay with you long after you finish reading the book. Katherena Vermette has combined lyricism with the suspense of narrative action to make a compulsively readable novel about conflict and the resilient Metis women who move through it and forward into the world."
--Tanis MacDonald, Head Judge, Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer from Treaty One territory in Winnipeg. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her NFB short documentary, this river , won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Peoples' Festival, and a Canadian Screen Award. The Break was shortlisted for both a Governor General's Literary Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and was a finalist in the CBC's 2017 Canada Reads competition.
The Amazon.ca First Novel Award is excited to be a part of Canada's sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017. Over the last four decades, the First Novel Award has recognized outstanding literary achievements by first-time Canadian authors and launched the careers of some of Canada's most beloved novelists, including Mona Awad ( 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl ), Alix Hawley ( All True Not a Lie in It ), Wayne Grady ( Emancipation Day ), Anakana Schofield ( Malarky ), David Bezmozgis ( The Free World ), and Eleanor Catton ( The Rehearsal ). This year's winner will receive $40,000 and the shortlisted finalists will each receive over $6,000.
Head judge Tanis MacDonald selected the finalists. The author of three books of poetry, Tanis was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism in 2013 for her study of elegies, The Daughter's Way . She is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing. She has also served on the juries for the Edna Staebler Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program. The winner will be chosen by a panel composed of MacDonald; Casey Plett, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction; and Gurjinder Basran, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
The finalists for the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, listed alphabetically by the author's last name, are: White Elephant , Catherine Cooper (Freehand Books) Accordeon , Kaie Kellough (ARP Books) So Much Love , Rebecca Rosenblum (McClelland & Stewart) Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains , Yasuko Thanh (Hamish Hamilton Canada) The Break , Katherena Vermette (House of Anansi)
"It was a distinct pleasure to be introduced to the dozens of great books that were entered into this year's competition," says head judge Tanis MacDonald. "The writing and publishing of a first novel is a huge accomplishment in itself. If I had it my way, the shortlist would not have been short at all. While all five books show a great range of styles, perspectives, and subject matters, they have in common a remarkable reach. Each book stretches towards the telling of a big story--sometimes via intimate connections--in which people puzzle over history as it has happened (or is happening) to them and how they will live in the face of change. I feel very lucky to have read these books early on in their long shelf lives. I encourage everyone to read them all."
Q&A: Katherena Vermette, The Break
A one-on-one conversation about trauma, violence, and restorative justice with the Winnipeg-based winner of the 2017 Amazon First Novel Prize.
I read that the plot of the novel came to you as a vision of sorts. When did you realize you had to channel the idea into a book?
I don't know where books come from; I've never found a satisfactory answer from any writer. They're kind of like dreams. The concept for the book came about two years ago now. There was a lot of news about girls perpetuating violence, particularly gang violence. The idea was super heinous and everyone was super surprised. My response was "Why are we surprised?" Females are not simply the victims of violence--one of the responses to the abuse we receive is to go on and abuse other people. I thought, What would propel someone to do something like that? What has to happen in someone's life to hurt another person? It scared me to talk about violence, and I didn't want to do it in an isolated, exploitative way. People have such amazing resilience and strength. If I talk about someone who commits violence, I also want to talk about the dozen other people who don't.
The book is situated in Winnipeg's North End, your old neighbourhood. What compelled you to start the book where you, too, started?
I think there are many places in Canada that are not written about enough. The North End is one of those unwritten areas--unless its notoriety is written about, its [reputation as] a racism-and-murder-capital. But that's an outside vision. There's a lot more to the community than the stats that people pull out. It's a neighbourhood that's incredibly rich culturally, with an incredibly rich history. It was comforting to be home as I was writing about this stuff. But I'm across the river now.
The story has ten Indigenous narrators. Did you do that to send a message about the community's complex experiences beyond tragedy?
Any group of people, whether they share demographic information or not, has its own characters, and everyone has their own history and ways of coping with the past. The women in The Break all have different reactions to tragedy, and they're not perfect, but they're incredibly strong, for the most part. That's the danger of writing from the perspective of any minority group: as soon as you write one character, they become a stereotype. It's only one voice.
You have compared the structure of the book to a restorative-justice circle. Why?
The story centered on Phoenix: what she did and how everyone was coming to terms with that. Then I started writing about Lou, a social worker, who is involved, but not directly. Then came a mom and a grandma. As I was writing, I inadvertently came to this circle idea--that everyone was affected by this one event, especially within a family. And a restorative-justice circle [exists when] everyone comes together from a family or community to talk about how that one thing has affected them. The perpetrator of that event--violence or theft or whatever--has to understand how their actions affect everyone.
The idea of bearing witness seems central to the book. Do you see yourself as a witness, even if you're writing fiction?
As much as I am representing my nation and community in talking about my truth, it's still my truth. Stories tell us more about the teller than they do about the story itself.
Not all the authors nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award situated their novels on home terrain. The books feature a Quebecois conspiracy and a crime in rural Winnipeg, but also war-torn Sierra Leone and the teeming marketplaces of colonial Vietnam. Still, Canadian literature has left an indelible impression on the finalists, despite their vividly imagined travels. Here, in their own words, the five shortlisted authors reveal the first Canadian works of fiction they loved.
Prochain episode by Hubert Aquin
"I first read this novel nineteen years ago. It gave me insight into the anguish and energy at the heart of Quebec and inspired some reflection on our collective struggle toward self-definition. In Lausanne, an imprisoned revolutionary writes a novel that parallels his experience. Separated from his country and his lover, he struggles to escape the conventions of the detective genre. Double agents multiply and cryptic messages are exchanged. Still, conventions encroach, as does a realization that although he chooses violence he cannot overcome his personal or national history. The story emphasizes that as we reckon with our material conditions we remain vulnerable to our doubts and defeats." --Kaie Kellough, Accordeon
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
"I think I was thirteen when I first read it, and it had a big impact on my teenage ideas about romance--for better or worse. I suspect that if I read it for the first time now, I would appreciate it in different ways and certainly find it less romantic. Seeing the movie somewhat obscured my memory of the book. The only details I remember that aren't in the movie are the parts about Laszlo drinking Hana's menstrual blood and her sticking a fork into him." --Catherine Cooper, White Elephant
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
"This might be a slim novel, but it's anything but meagre. [It features] a town under water, a Vietnam vet father, and an unnamed narrator trying to uncover the mystery of her father's past. I love that Skibsrud eschews plot for a lyrical interiority, and her metaphors are startling and tone-perfect. I'm reminded of Sartre. Skibsrud's slow-paced revelations achieve an intellectual intimacy that's rare. This book attracts me as a writer who has, often unsuccessfully, veered away from traditional storytelling. Skibsrud's philosophical musings cut to the marrow of loss." --Yasuko Thanh, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
"I was fourteen when I bought Generation X at Barnes and Noble in New York. I loved the idea of a long story full of little stories. That generic confusion is the definition of what life is, so it made sense to me. It was funny and weird and about a world so completely foreign to me: the idea that people weren't religious but spiritual was strange for someone from a heavily Christian town. The characters were isolated from their families, and when you're fourteen, you're right in the middle of your family all the time. And it [contained] so much pop culture that I didn't get: marginalia and footnotes and definitions and cartoons and all these ideas that were new. I didn't understand that you could tell stories and write yourself into them--that was an exciting thought for me then." --Rebecca Rosenblum, So Much Love
In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier
"This was the first novel I fell in love with, and I still love everything about it. When I first read it as a young teenager, it changed and healed things inside of me. I saw my people and my city in a story for the first time. There is truth and beauty on every page, and April is a literary hero of the highest calibre. [Mosionier's novel is] the definition of courage and a lesson in the power of story. This was the book that made me want to write, and this is also the book that told me I could." --Katherena Vermette, The Break
White Elephant
Dr. Richard Berringer, his wife, Ann, and their thirteen-year-old son, Torquil, have abandoned their dream home in Nova Scotia and moved to Sierra Leone, despite warnings that the West African country is embroiled in a civil war. Two months on, things are not going well. Tensions are rising between Richard and his boss; Torquil--who hates Sierra Leone almost as much as he hates his father--has launched a hunger strike in an effort to convince his mother to take him back to Canada; and Ann is bedridden, stricken with illnesses that Richard believes are all in her head. While the Berringers battle with themselves, each other, and the worlds they inhabit, the narrative repeatedly returns to their past, shedding light on what brought them together, what keeps them together, why they have come to Sierra Leone, and why they might not be able to go home again.
Catherine Cooper is a Nova Scotian writer with a master's degree in English literature and creative writing from Concordia University. Most recently, she has had works published in Brick and Guernica . Her first book, The Western Home: Stories for Home on the Range , was a collection of short stories published by Pedlar Press in 2014. White Elephant is her first novel. She currently lives in New Zealand.
Accordeon
Accordeon is an experimental novel, an unsparing deconstruction of Quebecois culture, an ode to Montreal--a city where everything happens all at once and all realities exist simultaneously. Seeking to control every detail of daily life, the Ministry institutes a vast surveillance program, planting agents in offices, cafes, and daycares. When Accordeon's itinerant narrator is arrested on a street corner, their testimony reveals the existence of a conspiracy that would involve using a flying canoe to thwart the Ministry and decolonize Quebec society. Through his depiction of a Ministry of Culture devoted to quotas and a repressive cultural code, and his representation of voices and images from the margins, Kaie Kellough interrogates our collective sense of Quebec's identity.
Kaie Kellough is a word-sound systemizer. The author of two collections of poetry, Lettricity (Cumulus Press) and Maple Leaf Rag (ARP Books), he has issued two sound-recordings, Vox:Versus (WOW) and Creole Continuum (HOWL!), and given hundreds of sound poetry performances in Canada and abroad. His writing fuses formal experiment and social engagement, and has appeared in journals in Africa, Japan, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Accordeon (ARP) is his debut novel.
So Much Love
When Catherine Reindeer vanishes from the parking lot outside the restaurant where she works, an entire community is shattered. Moving back and forth between her outer circle of acquaintances and her closest intimates, So Much Love reveals how an unexpected disappearance disrupts the lives of those left behind: Catherine's fellow waitress now sees danger all around her. Catherine's mother seeks comfort in saying her name over and over again. The missing woman's professor finds himself thinking of her constantly. Her husband refuses to give up hope that she will one day return. But at the heart of the novel is Catherine's own surprising story of resilience and recovery. This riveting work deftly examines the complexity of love and the power of stories to shape our lives.
Rebecca Rosenblum 's first collection of short stories, Once , won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was named one of Quill & Quire's "15 Books That Mattered in 2008." Her second collection, The Big Dream , was published in 2011. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Awards, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She lives in Toronto. So Much Love is her first novel.
Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
How can you stand up to tyranny when your own identity is in turmoil? Vietnam is a haunted country, and Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh is a haunted man. In 1908, the French rule Saigon, but uneasily; dissent whispers through the corridors of the city. Each day, more Vietnamese rebels are paraded through the streets toward the gleaming blade of the guillotine, now a permanent fixture in the main square and a gruesome warning to those who would attempt to challenge colonial rule. Journey Prize winner Yasuko Thanh transports us into a vivid, historical Vietnam, one that is filled with chaotic streets, teeming marketplaces, squalid opium dens, and angry ghosts that exist side by side with the living.
Yasuko Thanh 's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Fire , Descant , PRISM international , and Vancouver Review . Her story collection Floating Like the Dead was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The title story won the prestigious Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2009. She was a finalist for the Future Generations Millennium Prize, the Hudson Prize, and the David Adams Richards Prize, which recognizes unpublished manuscripts. She recently received her MFA from the University of Victoria. She has lived in Mexico, Germany, and Latin America, and now lives in Victoria. Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains , inspired by the history of her father's family in French Indochina, is her debut novel.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of three books of poetry. She was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism in 2013 for her study of elegies, The Daughter's Way . She is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing, and has served on the juries for the Edna Staebler Award in Creative Non-Fiction and for the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program.
SHORTLIST JUDGES
Casey Plett wrote the short-story collection A Safe Girl to Love , winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction. She was also awarded the Honour of Distinction for the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging LGBT Writers and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers . She grew up between the Prairies and the Pacific Northwest and is currently the publicity and marketing coordinator at Biblioasis in Windsor, Ontario.
Gurjinder Basran 's debut novel, Everything Was Good-bye , won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award in 2011 and was featured as a Chatelaine Magazine Book Club pick in 2012. The CBC named her as one of the "Ten Canadian Women Writers You Need to Read in 2012." She lives in Delta, British Columbia, with her family.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews .
About the Walrus Foundation
The Walrus Foundation is a registered charitable non-profit (No. 861851624-RR0001) with an educational mandate to create forums for matters vital to Canadians. The foundation is dedicated to supporting writers, artists, ideas, and thought-provoking conversation. We achieve these goals across multiple platforms, publishing The Walrus magazine--which focuses on Canada and its place in the world--ten times a year in print, tablet, and mobile editions; curating and producing the national series of public Walrus Talks; convening annual sector-based leadership dinners; posting original, high-quality content daily at thewalrus.ca; and designing such digital projects as Walrus Ebooks and Walrus TV. The foundation also trains young professionals in media, publishing, and non-profit development.
For additional information about the finalists and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and to purchase the books, visit www.amazon.ca/firstnovelaward .
For more information, or to book an interview, please contact amirah.el-safty@thewalrus.ca or (416) 971-5004, ext. 253. |
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The other day I read a five part New York Times article entitled "Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life." It detailed a beautiful, responsible, smart, talented, independent, determined eleven year old girl who lived with seven younger siblings and her parents who are recovering addicts in public rodent infested housing described as, "no place for children ."
I was immediately drawn in to Dasani's personal story, (which I suggest everybody read immediately when you are done here), but in the days since I read the article I also thought about what her story says about the greater problem of homelessness. Issues of poverty, addiction, access to food and education and avoiding the constant "shelternization" of the spirit so that one might gather the resources to climb out of the hole is a difficult task. The psychological impact of being poor takes its toll and causes people to do irrational or financially irresponsible things that contradict progress toward financial stability. The heartache of poverty causes self destruction, teen pregnancy, school dropout, addiction, and violence.
On an individual basis recovering from homelessness as an adult seems impossible enough, but when we zoom out to a bigger picture and we realize that there are 22,000 Dasanis, homeless children in New York, and there are many more nationwide, suddenly the future becomes overwhelming.
Dasani's parents, Chanel and Supreme, are not represented as being financially responsible and it is clearly stated that they rely on a methadone clinic to cope. For these reasons I believe that it is reasonable to assume that the cycle of homelessness is more likely to end with Dasani than her parents. I suspect this is true of many homeless children.
To beat the odds Dasani has to escape the pitfalls of violence, teen pregnancy and addiction. Her salvation will be education. The NY Times describes Dasani's resilient determination, " She likes being small because "I can slip through things." In the blur of her city's crowded streets, she is just another face. What people do not see is a homeless girl whose mother succumbed to crack more than once, whose father went to prison for selling drugs, and whose cousins and aunts have become the anonymous casualties of gang shootings, AIDS and domestic violence..."That's not gonna be me," she says. "Nuh-uh. Nope ."
Oh, Dasani. We can only hope you will remember those words and let them steer you past the drugs and sex and violence that so often comfort those who have so very little. When you are raised to be the one who takes care of children and tolerates addiction and fights for basic survival it is hard to put these things in their place and recognize them as the staggering hurdles to success that they are.
Every day Dasani has to battle the stigma of poverty, hiding the fact that she is homeless as long as she can and then acting out of character by fist fighting when she is found out:
" Soon, all of Dasani's uniforms are stained. At school, she is now wearing donated clothes and her hair is unkempt, inviting the dreaded designation of "nappy." Rumors are circulating about where she lives. Only six of the middle school's 157 students reside in shelters.
When the truth about Dasani emerges, she does nothing to contradict it. She is a proud girl. She must find a way to turn the truth, like other unforeseeable calamities, in her favor.
She begins calling herself "ghetto." She dares the girls to fight her and challenges the boys to arm-wrestle, flexing the biceps she has built doing pull-ups in Fort Greene Park. The boys watch slack-jawed as Dasani demonstrates the push-ups she has also mastered, earning her the nickname "muscle girl."
Her teachers are flummoxed. They assume that she has shed her uniform because she is trying to act tough. In fact, the reverse is true. "
As a mom who raises two boys in my own version of poverty, I know how hard I work to ensure that they always have haircuts and clean cloths so that the people outside our home don't know that we have to go without. I am sure there are times my efforts fail and I dread what shame they must feel for things that are never their fault, for shortcomings that are only mine.
16.4 million children live in poverty in our nation. I wonder how many of them hide stains on their shirts or tuck long hair behind their ears or shove their feet into too small shoes? I wonder how many come home with scrapes and bruises and detention slips after defending their honor.
Dasani could easily loose the little she has. If one of her parents went back to using drugs everything could come crumbling down, " Dasani learned to spot a social worker on the street by the person's bag (large enough to hold files). She became expert at the complex psychic task of managing strangers -- of reading facial expressions and interpreting intonations, of knowing when to say the right thing or to avoid the wrong one. " Too much responsibility falls on Dasani's shoulders as she becomes a third parent to her seven siblings due to the consequences of her parent's addiction, " In the crib is Baby Lele, who is tended to by Dasani when her parents are listless from their daily dose of methadone.
Chanel and Supreme take the synthetic opioid as part of their drug treament program. It has essentially become a substitute addiction
The more time they spend in this room, the smaller it feels. Nothing stays in order. Everything is exposed -- marital spats, frayed underwear, the onset of puberty, the mischief other children hide behind closed doors. Supreme paces erratically. Chanel cannot check her temper. For Dasani and her siblings, to act like rambunctious children is to risk a beating ."
Every day families like Dasani's are crammed into single rooms, forced to live on shoestring budgets, battling demons like addiction and abuse and poverty feel like they are pushed to their wits end. The supreme, the head of household, the top of the food chain; they don't pay the consequences, the littlest do. The weakest do. The wives, the children, the babies who cry and don't stop- they pay the consequences and sometimes the stakes are high - according to the NY Times, in the Institution where adasani's family stayed, "Just this year, there have been some 350 calls to 911 from the shelter -- including 24 reported assaults, four calls about possible child abuse and one reporting a rape."
Living in the shelter is hard. It is hard to do anything, especially to get decent food. Even though the family receives food stamps they can not cook food or even own a microwave in the small room they occupy. They eat in a soup kitchen-like cafeteria instead. This means that Dasani's three meals a day come from an institutionalized cafeteria setting, breakfast at the shelter, lunch at school and dinner at the shelter. For three years she has not had a home cooked meal.
As far as eating while homeless goes many would say they are lucky to have what they do at least. Even if homeless families are able to qualify for benefits like food stamps not being able to cook, not having access to food storage and other impediments keeps them from having any kind of quality nutrition at all. Many children who are homeless live in cars and eat breakfasts like canned fruit and brush their teeth with water in gas station bathrooms so perhaps, in the scheme of things, Dansani is lucky.
Even though Dasani is an honor roll student, she has seven younger siblings to care for and this holds her back, like many other kids like her. The article tells us that, " New York's homeless children have an abysmal average attendance rate of 82 percent, well below what is typically needed to advance to the next grade. Since the start of the school year, Dasani has already missed a week of class and arrived late 13 times." Dasani's fierce independece, fighting spirit and determination are a product of her surroundings and in spite of her surroundings she surviving but I worry for her future , "Dasani and her siblings have grown numb to life at the shelter, where knife fights break out and crack pipes are left on the bathroom floor. In the words of their mother, they have "become the place." She has a verb for it: shelternized. "
I wonder; How is it even possible her family to climb out? Assume they gather the money for a first and last months rent, say they have a deposit... Then what? Dasani's parents ask the same question:
" The problem for Chanel and Supreme comes down to basic math: Even with two full-time jobs, on minimum wage, they would have combined salaries of only $2,300 per month -- just enough to cover the average rent for a studio in Brooklyn ."
It probably seems like an impossible hope to Dasani to dream that she will ever live outside public housing. She has spent one third of her life there, three years, and it seems that every time any amount of money comes into the family it immediately goes out:
" Suddenly, Supreme leaps into the air. His monthly benefits have arrived, announced by a recording on his prepaid welfare phone. He sets off to reclaim his gold teeth from the pawnshop and buy new boots for the children at Cookie's, a favored discount store in Fulton Mall. The money will be gone by week's end.
Supreme and Chanel have been scolded about their lack of financial discipline in countless meetings with the city agencies that monitor the family.
But when that monthly check arrives, Supreme and Chanel do not think about abstractions like "responsibility" and "self-reliance." They lose themselves in the delirium that a round of ice creams brings. They feel the sudden, exquisite release born of wearing those gold fronts again -- of appearing like a person who has rather than lack."
I can understand this. I buy things I know I shouldn't because I am tired of telling myself no, tired of telling my kids no, all the time. What is the point of paying a bill, you know you'll never pay off anyway, when you know you can buy the brand name cereal your kids want for once? Why pay the interest on the bill that will still be there next week when you can splurge on the snow boots they've needed since last month?
It is hard to save money when you haven't got any money left at the end of the week and the creditors are still calling. It is hard to prioritize the needs against the wants with the constant incoming flow of both. It is hard enough when you have just enough to cling to an apartment or a duplex... But when you are in a shelter trying to scrape together what it takes to get a place it must seem impossible.
What breaks my heart is the fact that so many children have to live with the heartache and worry in their guts wondering if their parents are ever going to pull it together. It makes one wonder if and when children should be removed and given to foster families with homes and meals and stability.
On one hand it seems cruel to leave these kids in a state of constant limbo, always wondering when they will have a meal, when they will have a home or if they will have a bed or how many siblings they will have to share it with. It seems even worse to continue to put them in situations where they grow up learning how to be homeless adults instead of successfull contributors to society. On the other hand, when asked what she thought about this issue, Dasani, " pauses, "I love my parents. They're tough, but I should not be taken away from them."
In the end, I trust her.
When considering the issues of homelessnes it is easy to get caught up in thinking of the panhandler on the street and not the those left behind at the shelter, in the car, or in the alley. There are literally millions of families living far below poverty, with vermin in shelters in various states of disrepair and filth. They bathe their babies in sinks and their children sleep two and three to a bed before they prepare for school in public restrooms and heat frozen breakfasts in shelter microwaves after standing in line for twenty minutes. They hide stains from lack of laundry access and braid their hair so no one can tell it is dirty. They scarf down free school lunches and fight for their dignity. These are the invisible children, the millions of invisible children of America.
To end homelessness in America we have to give these kids a fighting chance. When you are poor, you get sucked into the things that are cheap that make quick money, that give you reputation, and that make you feel good. These are things that other people buy with money. Instead, poor people often turn to drugs for quick money, sex to feel good, and violence for reputation. We have to help homeless kids break these cycles of poverty and take the different routes to self satisfaction that lead to more financially responsible standards of living.
We have to reduce their dropout rates by giving kids in poor neighborhoods quality educations that rival those in the neighborhoods just blocks away. We need to make school lunches in these schools competitively nutritious too. We need to work hard and put in the effort it takes to prevent teen pregnency. We need to give these girls the opportunity to trade diapers for diplomas.
We need to give our young men positive role models. I think this means putting positive educated, male teachers in the classrooms. It means funding guidance councilors, funding extra curricular activities, doing what it takes to give kids of both genders an alternative to violence, sex, and addiction.
When I make these generalizations I am not trying to say that all homeless people are dropouts or addicts. I am trying to say that these are hurdles that some young homeless children face, particularly those who live in urban environments like Dasani does. To end homelessness for people like Dasani and her family we need to use whole system thinking. We need to address what is wrong with the whole community, not just what is wrong with Dasani or her family.
We need to look at both individuals and communities when we ask ourselves how to heal the wounds of homelessness. We need to ask ourselves about our responsibility to indiviuals like little girls who have untapped and unlimited potential like Dasani does when we do our analysis of what we can and should do to fix the problem.
Building more shelters is a nice and perhaps a necessary quick fix but in the long run it will take a whole lot more investment in the families and the youth of our communities to heal homelessness. It will take investment in education, especially in the poverty stricken areas. It will take finding quality role models like the teachers who keep Dasani afloat, and offering opportunity for people to survive by raising minimum wage so that Supreme and Chanel could work full time, pay rent and survive. It seems fair that our community find a way for this to happen.
Until we work to fix our whole community, beautiful individuals who are willing to give wholly of themselves; people who are smart and capable and determined, people who could change the world, people like Dasani, might fall through the cracks... and be lost forever. And that is a shame, a shame on all of us.
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Sarah Zacharias is the State Director for Wyoming's chapter of www.UniteWomen.org . She is a mother of two, a wife of nearly 10 years, and a fifth generation Wyomingite. Sarah battles several debilitating illnesses while working from home as a writer and activist. She created her blog, The Bucking Jenny ( www.Bucking-Jenny.com ), in February of 2012 by first writing about women's issues. Since then she has also chosen to talk about tough topics including poverty, homelessness, rape, addiction, abortion and mental illness. In her short time as an online persona, Sarah has been thrilled to make alliances with many fine progressives. She has received shout outs on Twitter from Sandra Fluke and Mark Ruffalo. Her farewell letter to Mitt and Paul was read aloud on both the Randi Rhodes Show and The Stephanie Miller Show and she has several pieces featured on The Wyoming Democrats website. Sarah enjoys working as an administrator with forward facing Facebook pages like The Pragmatic Progressive, Third Wave Feminism , Real Truth Now, What The Hell Is Wrong With US?, and Wyoming Progressives as well as for her personal Facebook page, The Bucking Jenny. She has also become a columnist for several online news magazines including The Spare Changer, Addictinginfo, and www.TheBigSlice.org , in addition to her work here at Liberals Unite .
Latest posts by Sarah Zacharias ( see all ) |
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The other day I read a five part New York Times article entitled "Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life. |
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Thanks. One way or another, I'll end up where I belong. It isn't in Washington State, that's sure!
Yeah, Patient Advocate is a joke. I had written a lot here on how to document the ineptitude and lack of concern you are encountering with yours, with the aim of her future unemployment, but when I got to going on things that might really help you, well, your Advocate suddenly seemed not so very important.
Right now we need to see you on the right path to fix your problem. So I slashed a small book... Fixing this, I pray, starts below.
First, in general: Document, make notes, names, dates, actions, communications, protect your documents, bring your own copies for others so tbey don't make "mistakes" with yours. Bring your originals, but don't relinquish them.
If a lot has transpired without actually being well documented, just do a little catch up memo to yourself. Details help and could be very useful to you.
With Government, as with so many things, it's all about the paper trail. Don't go sleuthing with videoing your interactions, I found out how dangerous that can be, legally, for us Citizens. Not a fun experience. All the above are just a modicum of the general guidelines on extricating oneself from SNAFUs.
So:
It IS weird that it's the US Treasury's fines you are facing. Evidently, the VA fines are collected in that fashion. If you get a traffic ticket on a Military base as a Civilian, your fine will be payable to the US Marshall's! It's the Government. It's weird, cruel, and nonsensical.
For you, it should be irrelevant which agency collects the VA's @#!& fines. The VA levied the fine. Treasury CANNOT change that. They are not in a position to arbitrate VA rules, they couldn't help you if they wanted to. It's the VA, and them alone, that can cancel that fine.
It only becomes a Treasury problem if they don't recognize tbe cancellation or they had already taken adverse action by the time the VA relents. We pray that will not be an issue, right?
Let the DAV help you get that canceled.
Let them tell the Treasury to hold their horses while they address the issue.
Let them demand that the VA provide their client documentation, proof positive, of having been notified of the necessity of providing such a signed document on a regular basis.
Even if they can provide a copy of the first letter you signed, and that letter has verbiage to the effect that it has to be repeated every three months, the DAV can question whether that document had a place to initial understanding of that requirement and if it was so initialled. Also, did the VA provide you a copy? You can't follow rules that you weren't provided.
The DAV can question the complete lack of notification to you of a pending requirement to re-sign. Question the lack of any grace period or notification that the "authorization" or whatever it was had expired and requested you return to sign another.
The DAV could, and should, question why the VA didn't automatically provide you, via USPS, two weeks in advance, an actual copy of that form with an explanatory letter and a return envelope?
Even if your agent hasn't seen this issue before, these common sense questions should be sufficient for them to hammer the appropriate VA official into submission. Take courage, Right is on your side.
DAV, asap, please. Don't sign up through the mail and wait for a membership card. Find your local DAV agent, walk in and join there at the same time you wish to press this issue. Bring your documentation, but do not relinquish it.
They do tend to have odd hours at the clinic or facility level offices, actually all of them I think, 0700 to a 1.5 hour lunch and an early closed time, and half a day Friday to permit training. I pray someone is close for you. If you must voyage to see him, or her, really make sure you have an appointment and they will be there for you.
Should the unthinkable happen, and they stink, there is the VFW, and even low income law clinics could take a stab at it I would hope.
Firstly, examine your documents to ensure that something was not over-looked. We all miss things from time to time. You are obviously very clear minded but I myself have made some really big embarrassing oversights as I am not always 100%, to say the least.
They still should have gone to much greater lengths to aid you. Their system stinks. The idea of sending a new form in advance of the due date sounds to me like a best practice. Bringing their shortcomings to light, even if you have "erred" on the fine print, could still gain you a break if a representative of DAV or VFW presses it.
Also, as if I haven't said enough already, make sure you are not entirely ignoring the Treasury people. Let them know you aren't yet in a position to pay the fine, and that you are contesting them as the VA did you wrong.
Don't let them increase that fine or go into collections, which could be from your current Government income. They are like any creditor, they need their fur stroked.
I could be wrong, but if I could avoid paying it I would. It is easier to have them dismiss a fine than to try to have them pay you back.
Maybe paying a little could keep them from going crazy on your SS payment, I don't like that idea, but I don't know.
I'm little more than a jailhouse lawyer at this point, well intentioned, but much is speculative. Which is why I want you to have representation. Call the DAV!
All this is worth exactly what you paid for it. But I pray it will be of benefit to you, I truly do.
I also pray you see this! My goodness, it's getting late. I need to put this thing down at 2100 and leave it alone! But you are worth it. I love my Treeper family.
God Bless you, and Goodnight, Maquis |
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Milo Yiannopoulos, the former bright star of the Alt Right, has fallen from grace after a video emerged of him appearing to defend pedophilia as a great way for young boys to "discover who they are." Apparently the GOP is perfectly fine with sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, but pedophilia is the breaking point. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
For about the last year, Milo Yiannopoulos from Breitbart has been the rising star among the alt right. Basically the rising star amongst all of the racist Republicans that helped to put Donald Trump in office. Well this past weekend, new audio/video from a podcast emerged that Yiannopoulos had done a while back, where Yiannopoulos told us that he believes people under the age of 16 in the United States, some teenagers should be legally allowed to consent to sex.
Essentially what Milo Yiannopoulos did here was say that he thinks that pedophilia in some cases is okay because anyone under the age of 16, by law if you engage in intercourse with them, consensual or not, it is considered pedophilia. You become a registered sex offender because that is against the 1956 sexual offenses act in the United Kingdom at least.
Here's the thing, after this audio of Yiannopoulos surfaced, he lost his speaking position at this week's CPAC convention. Shortly thereafter he lost his book deal with Simon and Schuster and as it stands right now is most likely, if he hasn't already, going to actually lose his job at Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos in the span of three days has lost his entire future and deservedly so. There is no sympathy. There are no tears for this madman. He is a man who was banned from Twitter last year for sexist and racist attacks on the cast of Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters reboot.
His whole career is built around essentially being the male version of Ann Coulter, just a little bit more extreme. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, you name it, this guy has done it all. To be honest for Republicans, up until the pedophilia comments, all of this was perfectly fine. In fact going back to those comments, Yiannopoulos actually said during that podcast that he thinks sex for 13, 12 year old boys is perfectly fine because it helps them discover who they are.
At that age of 12 or 13 a child, a teenager is not able to fully understand one the choice that they're making and two any potential consequence from those choices. Yiannopoulos is dangerously misguided on this issue and he is a dangerous person, not just because of the pedophilia comments but because of the way he seems to hate any non-white person. Yes, it is good that Yiannopoulos has lost his future. He's lost his book deal.
I am sure there's some other right wing publisher that's already talking to him right now. He's going to write a book. He's going to make millions off it because there's enough hateful disgusting people in this country that are going to go out and buy it. They're still going to listen to what this guy says, so he hasn't lost everything. He's still going to be around, this little cockroach is going to survive this nuclear storm that's currently happening in his life, but he doesn't deserve to.
Anyone like that, anyone who makes a career off of peddling hate in this country, or in any country, should not be given credence. They should not be given guest spots on Real Time with Bill Maher, where Bill Maher appeared to be best friends with Milo. This is the kind of guy that you ignore. This is the kind of guy that you don't talk about, and I can promise you, this is going to be the only time that we actually address what this whack job did, because to be honest, beyond this he's not worth our time. |
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WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of contracted airport service workers walked off the job Wednesday morning at Dulles International and Reagan National airports, speaking out against their employer and demanding to be paid a minimum of $15 an hour.
"They're on strike today to demand higher standards," said protest organizer Jaime Contreras, vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ.
"This is something that is very hard for them to do, but they've had enough."
The employees, including baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants, are with Huntleigh USA Corporation, a contractor that does business directly with airlines.
It has around 400 workers at the two airports.
Organizers of the demonstration said the employees often have to work two or three jobs to support their families and earn as little as $6.15 an hour plus tips.
"We're here today to make sure these workers get what they deserve which is a higher wage and respect and dignity on the job," Contreras said.
It was not the first time contracted airport service workers in the D.C. area walked off the job. Employees at Reagan National went on strike in late March as part of a nationwide protest involving people who do various jobs including cleaning airplanes, checking and hauling bags and assisting passengers who have disabilities.
Tuesday's protest was the first involving employees from Huntleigh, and it marked the first time that contracted airport workers from Dulles International agreed to strike.
"We work very hard to ensure that travelers have a safe and clean airport, but we are ready to go on strike to ensure we can provide for our families," said Aynalem Lale, a wheelchair dispatcher at Dulles.
"If I made $15 an hour, I wouldn't have to work two jobs and would not have to sleep at the airport between jobs."
Travelers should not notice any difference in operations.
"There has been no adverse impact on airport passengers or flights at Reagan National and Dulles International Airports. We expect normal airport operations during the peaceful protest," said Rob Yingling, a spokesman for the airports.
Protesters also planned to attend a Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board of directors meeting to ask for a new rule, requiring airline contractors such as Huntleigh to pay workers $15 an hour. |
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Hundreds of contracted airport service workers walked off the job Wednesday morning at Dulles International and Reagan National airports |
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As Twitchy reported earlier, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted Saturday morning about how she'd be told to leave a Lexington, Va., restaurant the night before because she works for the Trump administration. Moral reasons, you see.
Former Hillary Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson thought he'd try to own the conservatives by making what we're sure sounded to him like a spot-on analogy to the "bake the cake" case recently settled by the Supreme Court.
Weird.
GOP is ADAMANT that a cake baker in Colorado can DECLINE to make a cake for someone who is LGBTQ.
GOP is ADAMANT that a restaurant in Virginia must SERVE the spokesperson for a lying, racist, egomaniac with dictator envy. #Priorities https://t.co/zXjPW3CpqZ
-- Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) June 23, 2018
Um ... where did anyone in the GOP say that the restaurant MUST serve Sanders?
Who exactly is ADAMANT that the restaurant must SERVE her? https://t.co/hGMKArDmw8
-- Kate Ness (@KateSNess) June 23, 2018
So, her politely leaving is being ADAMANT about being served?
You don't know what ADAMANT means, do you? https://t.co/X6rT8uMxBi
-- Ordy's Summer Lovin' (@OrdyPackard) June 23, 2018
Actually, it's the Supreme Court that's adamant about that cake thing. https://t.co/Q8Gl3UkL3r
-- Timothy Connolly CFA (@SconsetCapital) June 23, 2018
Where did she say any of that?
-- Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) June 23, 2018
She didn't demand that they serve her. Why are you lying? https://t.co/5HrbfzbyVY
-- Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) June 23, 2018
She says right in her tweet that she politely left when asked.
She didn't. They're "changing the narrative."
-- BornFree (@squid1209) June 23, 2018
One of these is not like the other. https://t.co/GAZU2BW5zQ
-- Phineas Fahrquar (@irishspy) June 23, 2018
You should work on your reading comprehension.
She didn't DEMAND service. She walked out.
Nice try projecting outrage, Cupcake. Better luck next time! https://t.co/FTyFFg9KfX
-- Jack (@TheWaukeganKid) June 23, 2018
The difference is Sanders isn't suing anyone to force them to serve her.
It's not incongruous to believe that businesses have the right to refuse service and to also believe that they can be assholes for doing so.
-- unTaylored (@unTayIored) June 23, 2018
Exactly. If I was a baker, and the baker across the street had a sign that reads "We Don't Decorate For Gays", I would have a sign that reads "We Do"
-- Dannyboy (@Dangela2004) June 23, 2018
Free market, baby. Call the news, slam that baker, and spend your money where you please.
-- unTaylored (@unTayIored) June 23, 2018
I'm not GOP, but am conservative. Am not adamant that anyone be forced to serve anyone. Seems like Sanders wasn't either. ? She quietly walked out and The State will not bankrupt this business.
-- Mr P (@BayonetDivision) June 23, 2018
Now show me the part where the restaurant faces crippling fines and compliance penance for its civic sin
We'll wait for you https://t.co/A2zLLvVHHa
Wait, I missed the part where Sarah Sanders sued this restaurant for not serving her. Did that happen? If she didn't, your comparison is dumb.
-- Jeremy Bell (@bellvedere) June 23, 2018
I was going to write this off as moronic ignorance, but then I noticed this guy is a SPOX for Hillary. This is willful ignorance.
When asked for a single example of someone DEMANDING the restaurant serve Sanders, he will change the subject. https://t.co/LrYoOMPNn5
-- Toxic Miscuelinity (@Dave_DelFavero) June 23, 2018
No.
We are adamant that a business should be free to refuse to participate in or associate themselves with an event or cause based on moral opposition.
No LGBT person was refused service or kicked out for being gay.
The hypocrisy is yours. You gotta own it. #OpenToAll https://t.co/h4yK63mQjR
-- Chad Felix Greene (@chadfelixg) June 23, 2018
Amazing. Even when the Right is consistent on its approach to freedom of association you have to invent an inconsistency out of whole cloth. #Derp
-- The Quick Draw Podcast (@Ornery_Opinions) June 23, 2018
Cool. Show me the part where the restaurant faces enormous fines and being forced by the courts to serve her. I won't hold my breath.
-- Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) June 23, 2018
Did the government fine the restaurant? Will the government fine the restaurant?
-- Rohan Cassanova (@irishswamp) June 23, 2018
Weird. Democrats don't get that we are fine with the restaurant refusing service but we want the rules to be applied equally.
-- Freedom Recon (@FreedomRecon) June 23, 2018
Hard to think how Hillary Clinton lost when she has this genius working for her. https://t.co/ApmaL6fJx5
Related :
Blue check Resistance appalled Sarah Sanders tweeted name of restaurant that kicked her out https://t.co/1UqMK8ia8W
-- Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 23, 2018 |
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Brooks Butler Hays is a freelance writer in Washington DC. His first book, "Balls on the Lawn," is an irreverent ode to lawn sports (available spring 2014). You can find him blogging at Art&Sport . His writing typically covers less serious material; he promises more fart jokes next time.
If you're a pizza eater, you may also be a patron of the arts.
That is if you order from Domino's--you know, the second largest pizza chain in the world, the one without Peyton Manning as a spokesperson. " Our pizza sucks. " Yeah, that one.
Earlier this year, Dominos' erratic marketing strategy took another strange turn when, via a Super Bowl commercial, the company proffered its pizza makers and delivery drivers as artists-in-training. That's right. You might have thought your lukewarm pepperoni pan pizza was being delivered by some no-future teenage stoner. You thought wrong. A little Van Gogh-in-waiting is pounding your never-frozen dough right now (be careful, that mushroom kind of looks like an ear...).
"It really bugs me that people think that I'm just a pizza maker or just a pizza boy," Diego Garcia complains in an online video posted as part of the "Handmade by Domino's" campaign.
Of course, Diego isn't just a pizza maker. He's also a human being--a living, breathing young man with normal wants, needs, desires, interests, and insecurities. He's probably a little bit like you. Diego is also one of some four million American workers who earn minimum wage or less. Many of Diego's colleagues make less, in fact, somewhere around five bucks an hour, as they fall under one of several minimum wage exemptions (tipped employees, full-time students, certain disabled workers, and others).
But Diego's not poor. He's got his art. Remember?
When Diego isn't plying West Texans with mass-market pizzas, he can be found spray-painting colorful graffiti-like murals on city walls or working towards his art degree at nearby University of Texas El Paso. Living the newest American dream.
In the main Super Bowl commercial ( it's supplemented by others on Domino's site ), which now receives regular airtime on national television, Diego is joined by Crystal, a Dominos store general manager and avid watercolorist, and Chris, delivery driver and glassblower. As they tell it, working at Dominos is a swell compliment to their artistic lives--each place, a nurturing home for their skills as craftsmen and craftswomen.
Like Diego, Crystal is miffed at how she, as an employee of Domino's, is perceived by the outside world. "A lot people think I'm just a punk teenager making pizzas, but that's just not true," Crystal tells the camera, "I also has a degree in watercolor."
The commercial didn't exactly sway my pizza allegiances; the chance of me ordering Domino's in the next several months sits at a steady four percent. But the commercial did make me uneasy. Even as I mocked them, I recognized the insecurities of Diego and Crystal.
All through college, I soaked through countless blue button-downs hustling trays of butter-drowned salmon filets out of a profanity-filled restaurant kitchen and onto the tables of hungry tourists and local senior citizens. As I handed them their dirty Stoli martinis "up with an extra twist," I felt a near-constant need to explain my situation--a need to help them understand that I wasn't just some punk kid waiting tables, that I was a history student or a recent graduate or working to become a writer.
And I got the sense that my customers were as relieved to hear me reveal these things, as I was to tell them--after all, we all want to believe that the kid checking us out at the grocery store has got a bright, bright future.
This exchange, between my customers and me, left me assuaged of my shame--and them absolved of their guilt--but in its aftermath, I'd feel almost instantaneous remorse.
I felt guilt, shame, and remorse for the same reasons I now feel disdain for Diego and Crystal. In validating their occupational anxieties, they--as I did too--create a hierarchy: between those that are just a pizza maker and those that aren't just some kid making pizza. In other words, making minimum wage or less is something to be embarrassed about, ashamed of, unless you've got some sweet art projects, or an unfinished novel, you're working on when you get home.
It's true that Diego and Crystal are easy targets, and also sympathetic ones. Their motivation is simple and understandable enough: they wanted some extra money and some validation. We all do. Still they willingly played puppets in Dominos' little capitalist morality play, and they can take the heat.
Dominos' motivation is no secret. Like any other major corporation, Domino's wants to grow profits. They want to sell as many pizzas as possible and make as much money as possible by maximizing revenues and minimizing costs.
But Domino's seems to recognize in the pizza-ordering public the same thing I saw in the eyes of my customers--some buried uneasiness over the exchange between low-wage earners and consumers. If we can't keep these sorts of transactions entirely anonymous, executives must think, we can at least make things appear as peachy as possible. Ignorance is bliss after all, and blindly happy customers tend to spend a lot more money.
This isn't a Marxist call to arms or rant against franchise food, only a reminder that our humanity calls on us to confront that shame and uneasiness head on, not veil it with hyperbolic veneer and extra cheese.
Next time you order from Domino's or go to a gas station or visit a McDonalds, just remember, for every Diego there are just as many men and women who have been delivering pizzas, pumping gas, cleaning bathrooms, and flipping hamburgers for five, ten, fifteen years--college dropouts, single moms, drug peddlers, addicts, racists , religious fanatics, larpers--none of them pursuing art degrees. |
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Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, has announced that he will, by executive order, restore the voting rights to felons on parole or probation in New York state -- a bloc that numbers about 35,000. He'll pull off this unusual move by pardoning the 35,000 currently on parole and then subsequently the newly released who [...]
The Muse has descended on the curriculum developers at Columbia University: they have designed a class entitled Pop and Social Justice Songwriting 101. Which implies that there will be a 102. But it seems unlikely that Columbia students will be able to major in it because the course is being offered to high school kids, [...]
Time was when the largest concentrations of Catholics in the country were in the big cities -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. It's said that in Boston, for example, if the cardinal spoke out against a particular issue that was coming before the legislature, the bill went down in flames. Because most of [...]
There was a period in my younger days when I became fascinated with epics disasters, and read about them almost to the exclusion of anything else. Pompeii. Chicago Fire. San Francisco Earthquake. Krakatoa. Most of the books were okay-ly written. The pick of the disaster crop of was (and remains) David McCullough's account of the [...]
On December 1, 2017, Los Angeles welcomed an exhibit taken from the collection of the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden. The exhibit showcases examples of innovations that didn't just flop, but have become classic examples of "what were they thinking?" This is especially true when the fiasco is dreamed up, manufactured, and taken to [...]
You probably recall hearing about the 24-year-old North Korean border guard who put down his weapon and sprinted across No Man's Land in a desperate attempt to reach freedom and security in South Korea. His former comrades opened fire on him and he went down. He was pulled to safety by South Korean border guards, [...]
Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest cities, are both located in Saudi Arabia. As guardians of these sacred sites, the Saudi royal family has decreed that no non-Muslim house of worship may be erected in the kingdom. Of course, not everyone who lives in Saudi Arabia is Muslim. There are many thousands of foreigners in [...]
Remember video stores? They tended to be hole-in-the-wall shops stacked floor to ceiling with VHS cassettes of every movie you didn't want to rent, but you couldn't rent the one you wanted because it had been rented already. In terms of customer satisfaction, this unhappy arrangement was problematic. But if video stores did one thing [...] |
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Crowds gathered in New Orleans to protest Tuesday against a plan by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal to reinstate food stamp work-requirements.
The federal government has required work or job training to qualify for benefits since 1996. After the recession, many states were granted waivers that allowed them to ignore the requirements. With the improved economy, several states have decided to not request their waiver be renewed . Louisiana let its waiver expire Oct. 1. The move, however, has faced adamant opposition.
"The Department of Children and Family Services and Governor Jindal do not understand the impact of their policy change," the protesters said in a letter obtained by The Times-Picayune. "For many, food stamps stand between subsistence and starvation. Taking food out of people's mouths will neither promote self-sufficiency nor create jobs, but rather only leave entire communities hungry."
The protest was organized by Stand with Dignity. The group has filed an administrative complaint demanding that state reverse its decision. Protesters note 62,000 state recipients are at risk of losing their benefits. The work-requirements apply to able-bodied adults without children. The job must be at least 20 hours a week and the training must be federally approved. Without the waiver, state residents have three months to comply.
"We continue to seek opportunities for SNAP recipients to increase their self-sufficiency," Children and Family Services Secretary Suzy Sonnier said in September. "Engaging in work activities is a key step in that transition. We are striving to reduce reliance on public benefits, increase the number of clients participating in education or workforce activities and connect Louisiana employers with ready and willing to work job candidates."
Not everyone believes ending the waiver is a good idea. Louisiana Budget Project Director Jan Moller argues the decision ignores economic realities.
"Parts of the state that are very rural and very poor with unemployment rates far above the national average, that's what this waiver was designed to address," Moller told The Times-Picayune. "There are people who are desperately poor and need help."
As of June, 44 states have either a waiver or a partial waiver. The food stamp program is officially known as The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Run by The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), it is the nation's largest food -assistance program.
"We're not talking about a luxury villa and a Cadillac in the driveway," Moller continued. "Telling people you're taking food off table for ideological reasons is bad policy and bad economics."
According to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) , the program has increased from 17 million participants in 2000 to nearly 47 million in 2014. The improved economy has helped decrease the number of participants in recent years. Since participation hit its peak in December 2012, the number of people receiving benefits has declined by more than 1.5 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office .
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org. |
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Silvina met Nelson at a boliche (nightclub) in Miramar. It was 1986, and Silvina was nineteen years old. Nelson was two years younger but hot, a jitterbug from Mar del Plata, an hour away, who would cruise over every weekend with his buddies to dance and get laid. " Le gustaba la milonga a ese ," says Silvina . " Todavia le gusta la joda. [He liked to party. He still likes to party.]" But so did Silvina: " Era un tiro al aire yo. [I was a loose cannon. I liked Nelson, I liked his friend, I liked the neighbor, I liked them all.]" Three months after their eyes first locked, Silvina was pregnant. Yet they didn't marry until Mathew -- their oldest boy -- turned eleven months.
Having a child out of wedlock and being older than your groom-to-be are distinctions frowned upon in Argentine society. As in most Latin-American countries, "respectable" women in Argentina are still expected to remain virgins until marriage, and they usually marry much older men. "Usually there are two categories into which women fall," says Andrew, Silvina's gray-haired, 32-year-old confidante, who also is from Miramar. "There are women for the kitchen, the kind you want to have a relationship with, the type you want to have children with. And there are women who are only good for fucking." Silvina has blurred the lines. "She likes men," acknowledges Andrew. "But she's also a struggling mother trying to make it. La flaca es una buena mujer . Silvina [who's called la flaca -- the skinny one] is a good woman," he concludes.
"The first year of my marriage with Nelson was great," Silvina relates. "We got along very well. We had fun together and went out often. We led very social lives, and at first it was exciting." But by the second year, he began making his rounds with the ladies once again. "He had an affair with a girl from Buenos Aires. Even when my boys were sick in the hospital with respiratory problems, he had affairs. He had affairs through my pregnancies. It didn't matter. He fucked every woman he could.... My mother said to me: He's never going to change.' She was right. Here it only got worse. There's more variety. Already he's been through Colombia and Brazil," Silvina laughs.
In Miami Beach, Silvina says, Nelson's white painter's pickup truck became his roving bachelor pad: "He had it equipped with everything he needed. I just got sick of it. I couldn't stand him touching a single hair on my head. I was disgusted by him."
Last December, soon after the last time Silvina caught Nelson in bed with yet another woman, she met a young guy named Alex through Andrew and George. Alex is also from Miramar. The skinny, black-haired 26-year-old, who's into motorcycles and has tattoos of an eagle and a unicorn, is the father of a five-year-old boy in Argentina. Silvina began a relationship with him and kicked Nelson out.
"George told me one day: Guess who's got his eye on you?'
"Who?' I asked, surprised. He said, Alex.' I said, QUEEEE! -- what!' I never looked at him in that way." Then one day Alex expressed his feelings. "He said, ?No sabes las ganas que tengo de comerte a besos? [Don't you know I want to eat you with kisses?]'" Silvina recounts. "I melted. From then on we've been inseparable. He even keeps the cigarette butts of the first ones we smoked together."
But Alex put up with a lot, Silvina admits. During his weekend stays at her place, Nelson would burst into the house and hurl insults at the lovers. In their absence he'd break into Silvina's apartment and search through all of her and Alex's belongings. He'd follow the couple like a shadow, and on several occasions spied on them through the windows while they had sex. "Twice I caught him looking at us while we made love," Silvina says with her hands on her waist. Her eyes are smiling, and she's biting her bottom lip.
One day Nelson slipped into the back seat of Silvina's black Honda Civic just as she was parallel parking, with Alex in the passenger seat. "Keep driving," Nelson told her. When she refused, Silvina recounts, Nelson pulled her out of the car, threw her on the sidewalk, and began kicking her in the ribs. Alex leaped out of the passenger seat, and Nelson ran away. On the beach one day he grabbed Silvina by the stomach and twisted her skin. Alex was sunbathing nearby. "There were times I really struggled to contain myself," Alex says. Silvina's husband even threatened to run her over with his truck.
One night he came close to following through on his threats. According to Silvina and her neighbor George, Nelson once again broke into her apartment through the living-room window and then began screaming he would kill himself with a kitchen knife if Silvina didn't leave Alex. "But first he tried to stab me," she says. Somehow Silvina managed to wrestle the knife away from Nelson. She chased him out of the apartment and her lanky husband made it to his white truck. But Silvina followed and they wrestled like WWF stars inside the pickup. "He kept saying he was going to kill himself," Silvina now laughs hysterically. "So I called 911. I thought he was going to do it." But then he drove away. " Es un hincha pelotas mi marido . Un boludo -- He's a nuisance, an idiot. He got lucky that night," she boasts, still laughing. "I was holding back because I really thought he'd do it." George, from upstairs, witnessed the scene. So did Silvina's three-year-old daughter, Jessica. "The only thing I could do was hold on to the girl," George says. "She's a rare woman, Silvina."
Eventually Alex went back to Argentina, and Silvina sometimes thinks of joining him.
When they first arrived in North Beach, Silvina, Nelson and the two boys rented an efficiency with the help of a family friend they knew from Argentina who had been living there for several months.
North Beach, an area that stretches from 63rd to 87th street between Collins Avenue and Indian Creek Drive (which becomes Dickens Avenue north of 71st Street), is a magnet for Argentines. "It's easier to adapt to North Beach," says Graciela Mitchelli, who co-owns a newspaper in Miami called El Argentino Mercosur with her husband, Alberto. "There are other Argentines living there, the rent is lower, there is greater access to public transportation, and the language barrier is minimal." Of course the main attraction in this neighborhood of Miami Modern apartment buildings, single-family homes, Jewish learning centers, and Argentine delis and restaurants, is the beach. "Argentines love the beach and the heat," says Mercedes Garcia, a 28-year-old economic reporter from Buenos Aires, recently in Miami looking for freelance work. Alberto Mitchelli agrees: "It's a dream most Argentines have to live in a tropical place." (He has been in Miami since 1981.)
But there are other reasons why Miami in general, as opposed to other cities in the country, is on Argentine immigrants' radar. "Argentines, especially portenos [natives of Buenos Aires], are all about living the good life," explains Garcia. And Miami has that image. "In Argentina it's considered cool, or chic, to live in Miami. The city represents a mix of prosperity and the good life. New York is for people who want to break their backs working. Miami is for people looking for a more laid-back approach."
But soon Argentines face reality. They find that even for those just trying to survive, Miami is not much different from New York, Graciela Mitchelli says.
Shortly after they arrived from Argentina, Nelson painted buildings and Silvina cleaned hotel rooms in South Beach at night for minimum wage. During the day she also cleaned apartments in Miami Lakes for about $30 each. After two months she got a job at a pasta factory, for a meager salary as well, and the family was able to move to her present address. The one-bedroom apartment was at least bigger, if not less dingy. In January 1998 Silvina had a third child by Nelson, a daughter, Jessica. Suddenly the family had to make do with one paycheck and more demands on it. " Me sentia para la mierda -- I felt like shit," Silvina says about having another child. By then finances were intruding on her dreams of America, and of marriage.
Every day Silvina struggles to make ends meet. Often the most basic necessities, such as food, are not easy to get. There are days when she goes "hunting" to feed her children. Hunting, in Silvina's world, is asking for enough money for food for the day. She'll corner her husband until she's finally able to scrape $40 from him. "That's on a good day," she gripes.
If Nelson turns out dry, Silvina resorts to neighbors. She owes Andrew ten dollars. And recently she borrowed $60 from Elsa the Paraguayan, who also lends Silvina her old Mercedes-Benz to run errands with. "Silvina is alone," Elsa says. "From the time I've known her she's always depended on the kindness of others." Then there's the Cuban girl who lives on 77th Street. When Silvina needs to use the phone because hers has been disconnected, she calls on the Cuban girl from her kitchen doorstep and voila -- she's telephonic again. And when Silvina's electricity is cut off every now and then because she hasn't paid the bill, she'll cook over there, too. The Cuban girl saves for her everything from rice to toilet paper to leftover pizza, so Silvina's children won't have only a school lunch in their stomachs.
Silvina's last job was cleaning the Key Biscayne home of a rich Buenos Airean family who owns an air cargo company with offices in Miami, Chile, and Argentina. They paid her $250 per week to clean, do the laundry, iron clothes, and bathe the dogs. Silvina says that aside from exploiting her, the family was also verbally abusive, though not intentionally. "It's just the way they are," she asserts. "Although la mujer es un asco [the missus is disgusting], and she screams at me for nothing, she likes me. She's just very domineering." (Like Silvina's mother.) "The other day she called me every name in the book because I mixed colored towels with white ones in the dryer. You should see their house. They buy rare, exotic objects from places like Russia and Greece. I'm afraid to even go near them. Can you imagine if I broke some high-priced vase? I'd probably be working for a year to pay for it."
Silvina's way of overcoming humiliating experiences is by laughing. The smelly sneakers she wears to work became a big joke between her and Ronaldo, a Nicaraguan man who worked with her in Key Biscayne. "The other day I was cleaning the dining room when Ronaldo said, Silvina, the smell coming from your feet es impresionante -- impressive.' So I grabbed a can of country-scent Raid and sprayed out the room." Silvina laughs at the thought of using roach spray as an air freshener.
But she doesn't take everything lightly. "When it gets to be too much, I lose it," she says. "I have a very short temper. Me rayo. " Recently she told Estela, the rich Key Biscayne Argentine, to basically "fuck off." She got fired but the next day was hired back, with an apology. "She told me: Voz sos una barbara Silvina, eres unica. ' [You're a barbarian, Silvina, you're unique.]" But eventually Silvina quit that job. Currently she's out of work.
In the past, when there was no other way, Silvina lap-danced at Porky's II in Miami. For three months beginning in March, she worked steadily at the nude bar and made about $500 every weekend. One night at my house she proudly showed off her routine.
Silvina leaped up from a rocking chair, admitting she enjoys lap dancing, and sashayed across the living room and into the dining room, where she mounted a chair. "If you saw me you wouldn't recognize me," she said, while slowly grinding an invisible man. " Me transformo -- I transform myself." The vertical blinds of my dining-room window were open. Silvina's friends from above her apartment have an inside view of my home. That night los chicos del siete were also at Andrew and George's place playing video games. They became her audience. I warned Silvina about peeping Toms, but she didn't care. "Three or four girls do the lap dance together in a room," she explained. "There's one man for each girl. Then we rotate. You should see how those old men wet themselves. It really turns me on," she said, lifting up her shirt, her nipples erect. The following day, whispering excitedly, she confided like a teenager: "The guys from upstairs told me they were dying last night."
Though Silvina may escape most problems via comic relief, when it comes to her children, she's stern and often gets physical. Indeed dealing with her adolescent boys has become more of a challenge since her separation from Nelson, she admits. To each other the boys speak English, a language their mother doesn't understand. And of course Silvina receives no moral support from her husband. "The other day one of the boys asked his father for money. Nelson said, Go tell your mother to turn tricks so she can give you a few bucks.' Do you think after hearing that my boys will respect me? That's why they act they way they do."
Thirteen-year-old Mathew and twelve-year-old Anthony began getting into trouble in the neighborhood. One day in June the brothers were shooting rockets out on the street. Night had fallen when Anthony threw one and it landed inside a Brazilian woman's apartment, setting her curtains on fire. Amid the fire-rescue sirens the woman ran to Silvina's home. Clutching her cordless phone, she began lecturing Silvina on how to raise her children. But in the broken Spanish with a Portuguese twang, the lesson fell on deaf ears. After the incoherent sermon, Silvina called Anthony to her and smacked his face. The boy ran away crying.
Trying to make ends meet and raising three children on her own is just part of Silvina's struggle in a foreign land. Staying healthy is another. Because she has no medical insurance, Silvina hasn't been treating a kidney infection. On a recent night she drove herself to Jackson Memorial Hospital when the pains became unbearable. "It was like I was going through labor," she says, horrified. The doctor gave her a prescription, but Silvina hasn't filled it. Recently she suffered from a strong headache, and her physical therapist referred her to a neurologist who, according to Silvina, said she had suffered a brain convulsion. "He said I could have died," she shrugs.
Silvina was the twelfth child born to a poor family from Mar del Plata, 60 miles from Miramar. When she was two months old, her biological mother abandoned her in a stroller in the middle of a road. "I don't understand why she left me," Silvina recounts. "She already had so many children. What difference would one more make?" According to Silvina, a driver came upon the baby and took her to a hospital in Mar del Plata. There a well-off but childless Italian couple living in Miramar adopted her.
Though her family treated her as if she were their biological daughter, Silvina says she grew up feeling discriminated against by extended family members. When she was eight or nine, she began asking questions. "I first began noticing through photos. I always thought I looked so different. It was a strong feeling I had of not really belonging," says Silvina, a curvaceous woman whose full lips naturally pout when she complains, which is often.
On its official Website, Miramar is described as " la ciudad de los ninos -- los chicos nunca se olvidan [the city of children -- children never forget]." The coastal town, population 20,000, faces the Atlantic and is about 500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. It is heavily dependent on tourism in the summer; its beaches are good for surfing. In the winter "we die of hunger," say the Miramarans living in Little Buenos Aires. The winters are harsh, jobs are few, only the butcher and the baker have work, attests Allen, a witty, curly-haired 24-year-old who arrived from Miramar about five months ago and who lives in apartment seven, behind Silvina's place. But, he cautions, Argentines, as part of their national character, tend to exaggerate a lot.
Indeed says Mark Szuchman, professor of Latin-American history at Florida International University, anguish is an Argentine way of life. In fact, he says, there are more psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires per capita than in any other place in the world. "If Woody Allen knew this, he would move from New York," Szuchman assures.
Mercedes Garcia, the Argentine economic reporter, agrees. "We're a pessimistic people," Garcia concedes. "We're tragic, melancholic, and we like to complain a lot. Individually, we're overconfident and arrogant -- in Argentine slang we call it being chanta . But we lack those qualities as a nation. Argentines have no faith in Argentina."
According to last year's census, there were nearly 23,000 Argentines concentrated in South Florida. But according to the General Consul of Argentina in Miami, Deputy Maximo Gowland, there are more than twice that number -- about 60,000 -- residing in Miami-Dade alone, a growth of 61 percent since 1992. He warns the figure is only approximate. "More or less," Gowland says. "Though I would venture to say it's more." (By some accounts at least 100,000 Argentines have reached South Florida.)
Three years ago the number of Argentines coming to Miami-Dade increased sharply, as South America's second largest economy entered a demoralizing slump. To date Argentina remains mired in a muck of economic and political turmoil. "Things have gotten worse," says Szuchman. "There's been a considerable and growing amount of unemployment."
Mercedes Garcia, who works for El Cronista , says her country's economic woes are deeply entrenched in the nation's idiosyncrasies. "During the years of President Carlos Menem, between 1990 and 1999, there was a lack of economic reform," she explains. "The economy was growing, there was a lot of privatization going on, but instead of embracing needed changes, the government went all out. Argentina's foreign debt was enormous. Yet despite the country's growing deficit, the public sector continued to spend money left and right and nothing was really getting done. The mentality was mientras pueda safo ' --get away with it while you can. It's the Argentine way."
Currently, Garcia explains, international markets have no faith in Argentina. The South American country was pounded into a recession three years ago when Brazil, Argentina's biggest trading partner, devalued the real, Brazil's currency. As a result Argentina, which depended heavily on Brazil to purchase its exports, lost one of its biggest customers.
In Argentina salaries have been slashed, workers have been laid off, hundreds of small businesses have closed, and consumers have stopped spending. "It's a cycle that seems to never end," Garcia says. Argentine political scandals have aggravated the situation. (Last year former Vice President Carlos Alvarez resigned in the aftermath of a vote-buying debacle in the Senate. Menem is under house arrest for his alleged role in arms sales to Croatia, while an international arms-sales embargo was in place during the Balkan wars, and to Ecuador during its border war with Peru; ironically Argentina was a peace guarantor for a cease-fire.) "Just one of 20,000 cases of corruption," Garcia contends. Like most of her countrymen, she is cynical about her government. The disillusion is strongest among young people attempting to come into their places in Argentine society. They feel shut out by age and corruption.
Raul Costa, a political analyst from Cordoba, Argentina, paints a dismal picture affecting not just Argentine youth. "No matter what the government does in reaction to the economic crises, common Argentines, the ones sitting out in the bleachers, will have no victories to celebrate, no matter what the result of the game," writes Costa via e-mail. "For ordinary Argentines the suffering won't end when the referee blows his whistle.
"Here there is not a single day that goes by without protests or bad news," Costa writes. "The economic slump has translated into a national psychological depression. The situation is worse for young adults. You can't find work without a profession. But even for young pros, it's hard. In Argentina there are no social programs for people without jobs. Being without work can easily translate into homelessness. To have to live in a country where you can't plan beyond a few days is truly difficult."
Indeed the middle class has been pulling up roots and settling in places like Italy and Spain, where many Argentines not only have strong cultural ties, but citizenship as well, and for the more adventurous there's Miami. Professor Szuchman, an Argentine specialist, explains Miami is a natural attraction for business types and professionals. "I hear that every other Argentine waiter in South Beach is an architect."
But Deputy Maximo Gowland describes the exodus as being heterogeneous. "There are all kinds," he says. "From investors to blue-collar workers to the sons and daughters of the comfortable middle class." This group of young people, in their midtwenties to early thirties, comes as tourists and then sticks around to "see what happens." Some are students, others are typical middle-class slackers, often partly subsidized from home by Mom and Dad.
In the North Beach enclave known as Little Buenos Aires, working-class Argentine families with little or no educational background mix with the sons and daughters of the privileged middle class. "Their parents were European immigrants who saw Argentina rise. Ironically just as their parents emigrated to Argentina from Europe, this new generation have themselves become immigrants, however temporary it may be," professor Szuchman says.
Argentines can travel as tourists to the United States without American visas and stay in the country for up to 90 days, thanks to something called the Visa Waiver Permit Program. Owing to hard times back home, many Argentines are taking advantage of their traveling perks. But they're overstaying their visits in Miami-Dade. According to Gowland, there about six flights daily arriving at Miami International Airport from Argentina. More and more are beginning to drink their mate in public.
In Miami there are at least ten publications for Argentines, according to Gowland. Three civic organizations in the area -- the Association of Argentines in Miami, the Lions Club, and Association San Martiniana (named after Argentine independence hero San Martin) -- are among the dozen groups throughout Florida. On the beach soccer fans wear their favorite team jerseys everywhere -- red and white River Plate fans; yellow and blue for Boca Juniors . ( Futbol is Argentina's passion, and the game played in North Shore Park often sparks into flame.) One guy I met had Diego Maradona's face -- an Argentine soccer legend-turned-coke addict -- tattooed on his arm. Neighborhood cars are adorned with Argentine flags and nationalistic paraphernalia. Argentine delis, cafes, and restaurants are lined along Collins Avenue between 65th and 75th streets and along the 71st Street commercial corridor. "They stand out from other Latin Americans," says one non-Argentine neighbor. "They come, they stay, and they're loud about it."
"The question is how long are they here for," Szuchman says. "Argentines have had a history of migrating and then returning. They don't leave Argentina happily."
Silvina is an exception. She was thrilled to leave Miramar, the cold weather, and her domineering mom. "I was one of the first to arrive here," she claims. "In 1995, when I came, there were very few Argentines. Now they're everywhere."
"I tried to get away from [ los Argentinos ], and they followed me," Silvina contends sarcastically. "They should all go back to Argentina. Que se vayan ," she says loudly, one day walking back from the beach. A young Argentine couple is walking hand in hand just a few steps in front of her. Silvina breaks out into frenzied laughter. " Que se vayan todos los Argentinos. Son una porqueria -- they're trash."
Apartment seven, behind Silvina's place, is the nightly gathering spot for the clan of Miramarans inhabiting this slice of Miami Beach, Silvina's fan club, los chicos del siete, of which Allen is the newest member. Jokingly he calls his place el boliche -- the nightclub. "People are constantly coming and going," he says "We can even identify everyone's particular knock. So we don't bother opening the door anymore, we just shout, Come in,' or else we leave the door open. Though lately the mosquitoes and palmetto bugs have been forcing us to close up." Los chicos used to throw asados [barbecues] every Friday, just outside their apartment. The Argentine tradition is perhaps the closest thing to a meat-eater's nirvana on Earth: "If I go a day without meat, I feel something is not right," Allen affirms. "We're carnivores," he adds with a mischievous smile. "Vampires!" Birra -- beer -- is usually the chicos' drink of choice. And cigarettes ( puchos ) are chain-smoked. "Oh ... I can tell you some anecdotes about our gatherings," John says one night, while sitting near the sidewalk.
Now that Alex is gone, Silvina has started frequenting apartment seven again, once her children are tucked into bed. There she is the center of attention. The "boys" from Miramar see her as both a mother figure and sexually tempting. "When I hang out with them, se cagan de la risa -- they die of laughter. Que tengo, payasos en la cara. What is it with me? Do I have clowns coming out of my face? No la verdad es que son unos buitres . No, really, they're vultures. You see their faces, and you think they're angels. They're not," Silvina warns. " Mujer que ven, mujer que quieren montar . Any woman they see they want to ride. In fact," she adds, "there's so much jerking off going on in apartment seven they could open a ricotta factory.
"But I have no problems," Silvina continues. "I'm into menores [minors]." Silvana, however, is mostly all talk. Lately her mind has been on Alex, who's back in Miramar. "Alex used to say to me: Silvina, you're so liberal. I love that in a woman. You have no problems with sex.'"
"Do you consider yourself a feminist?" I ask.
" Yo lo que soy es una desgenerada -- I'm more of a degenerate," Silvina answers with a smirk, biting her bottom lip. A sexual predator in the most pure and innocent way, Silvina loves sex, men, and flirting. Riding in the car with her one night, on our way back from Normandy Supermarket, she flirts with every man walking on Dickens Avenue: "Here all you have to do is smile and wave and before you know it you'll have a handsome bachelor sitting in the passenger seat of your car."
Most of the things Silvina says are expressed with sexual undertones. She loves to pose in front of the camera. Before Alex left he shot photos of her dressed in black Victoria's Secret lingerie. He left her one photo and took the rest to Argentina. Silvina showed most of her young male neighbors and even displayed the pic on her refrigerator. Back in Argentina Alex showed the ones he took with him to his father and friends. "They told him he was crazy for leaving behind such a woman," Silvina says.
One night in apartment seven, John and his roommates were playing a soccer video game. (Losers wash the dishes.) AC/DC was playing on the stereo, and the slackers from Miramar were passing around a faso (a joint). The walls are adorned with a Bob Marley poster, a magazine cut-out of a marijuana plant, and a giant Indian dream catcher. A bookcase is filled with empty liquor, beer, and wine bottles. "The bottles are an offering to La Virgen de las montanas ," Allen says. But, I remark, there's no statue of a Virgin to place an offering to. "I don't think she'll be coming here," Allen laughs. "We just want to be ready."
Once the weed kicks in, John answers my questions about why he came to Miami. "Our parents are comfortable in Miramar," he says. "But they have only enough for themselves. There's nothing for us there. In South America Miami is the golden dream." A friend who is visiting argues that leaving Argentina for Miami, Spain, or Italy has become fashionable among young Argentines. "Okay, so it's appealing, but people are leaving because they are prompted by a reality," John counters. "The reality is that there's no room for us. But now that I've lived the dream, I think I'd rather go back."
Economics wasn't the motive for Silvina's move, she contends. She was upper middle class, her family traveled frequently to Europe. Her father, who passed away in Silvina's arms when she was sixteen, was in the military for ten years, then became a contractor on profitable construction projects. Silvina hardly ever worked. In fact, confirms her mother in Argentina, she owns two homes, five apartments, and two retail spaces in her native country. But none of the rental property is occupied. "I attended the best private schools," Silvina says. "The only thing missing was knowing where I came from."
When Silvina married Nelson, the couple depended partly on the family's riches and partly on Nelson's job working at a Pepsi factory. "My mother gave us anything we needed," Silvina revealed one night while hanging wet clothes on a line outside her place. "I wanted Nelson to start playing a more dominant role as the family's breadwinner. That's why I decided we should relocate. But look at me. Here in Norte America I'm poor, working as a housecleaner, de cabaretera [lap-dancing] on the side." Recently Nelson was fired from his job painting buildings. "He would show up to work whenever he felt like it," Silvina says. For her part she couldn't take any more of the cleaning life. So tonight, in a different part of town, Silvina is looking for work as an exotic dancer. By the end of the month she'll have to pay rent.
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"I'm probably going to end up moving in with my husband," Silvina pouts. "Where else am I going to go? Me, the kids, and the big-screen TV....
"I suppose I could sell the TV ... but no, what am I crazy? I can't sell that TV -- it's a great TV....
"I mostly just glance at it when I can. My kids have it mostly tuned to music videos. But I don't care what's on. Che, the few seconds I get sucked into it is like being at the movies. It's one of my few escapes, sabes? Alex is another escape for me ... even though he's gone."
Names in this article have been altered in some cases. All incidents are true. |
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You've probably heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment from a textbook, a documentary, or maybe you even saw the 2015 feature film of the same name. If not, this was an experiment carried out in 1971 by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. The idea was to hire students to act as either prisoners or guards for two weeks to see how they would react to the experience. But after just six days, the experiment was ended. The student guards had immediately become vicious authoritarians toward the "prisoners," some of whom had psychological breakdowns which were caught on camera. The conclusion drawn at the time by Zimbardo and many others was that human behavior is often contingent on the situation we find ourselves in, not the personality of individuals.
But in recent years the extent to which the entire experiment was a coached, misleading lie has come to light. Earlier this month author Ben Blum published a lengthy piece at Medium outlining some of what he uncovered :
It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.
"I mean, Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside!" he yelled, kicking furiously at the door. "Don't you know? I want to get out! This is all fucked up inside! I can't stand another night! I just can't take it anymore!"...
The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves. But its deeper, more disturbing implication is that we all have a wellspring of potential sadism lurking within us, waiting to be tapped by circumstance. It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ultimate symbol of the agony that man helplessly inflicts on his brother is Korpi's famous breakdown, set off after only 36 hours by the cruelty of his peers.
There's just one problem: Korpi's breakdown was a sham.
"Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking," he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he has granted in years. "If you listen to the tape, it's not subtle. I'm not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I'm more hysterical than psychotic."
Now a forensic psychologist himself, Korpi told me his dramatic performance in the SPE was indeed inspired by fear, but not of abusive guards. Instead, he was worried about failing to get into grad school.
Korpi had signed up for the experiment for the money, which was good, hoping he'd be left alone in a cell where he could study for his GRE's which were coming up in a little over a week. But once inside, the "guards" refused to give him his books. He wanted out of the experiment so he could study, but when he went to Zimbardo, he was told he couldn't leave. So Korpi and two other prisoners began acting up. As Clay Ramsay said, "I regarded it as a real prison because [in order to get out], you had to do something that made them worry about their liability."
So Korpi's mental breakdown was him acting crazy so he could get out and get back to studying. But doesn't the behavior of the "guards" prove at least some of the study was accurate? After all, they did refuse to give Korpi his books.
Only the behavior of the guards was coached by a grad student who designed most of the experiment. The guard who became most abusive, known as "John Wayne" said he based his performance, which included a fake accent, on characters he'd seen in the prison film Cool Hand Luke :
Though most guards gave lackluster performances, some even going out of their way to do small favors for the prisoners, one in particular rose to the challenge: Dave Eshelman, whom prisoners nicknamed "John Wayne" for his Southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi's breakdown. His overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the experiment succeed.
"I took it as a kind of an improv exercise," Eshelman said. "I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I'd do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona. I'd never been to the South, but I used a southern accent, which I got from Cool Hand Luke."
An attempt to replicate the results in 2001 failed and actually showed almost the opposite results:
In another blow to the experiment's scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher's attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo's findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.
"We discovered that he was privately writing to editors to try to stop us getting published by claiming that we were fraudulent," Reicher told me.
Given all of this, why is this still the most famous and frequently taught and cited psychological experiment in history? The answer has to do with the media and politics :
Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be "tough," nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did...
In the wake of the prison uprisings at San Quentin and Attica, Zimbardo's message was perfectly attuned to the national zeitgeist. A critique of the criminal justice system that shunted blame away from inmates and guards alike onto a "situation" defined so vaguely as to fit almost any agenda offered a seductive lens on the day's social ills for just about everyone. Reform-minded liberals were hungry for evidence that people who committed crimes were driven to do so by the environment they'd been born into, which played into their argument that reducing urban crime would require systemic reform -- a continuation of Johnson's "war on poverty" -- rather than the "war on crime" that President Richard M. Nixon had campaigned on. "When I heard of the study," recalls Frances Cullen, one of the preeminent criminologists of the last half century, "I just thought, 'Well of course that's true.' I was uncritical. Everybody was uncritical." In Cullen's field, the Stanford prison experiment provided handy evidence that the prison system was fundamentally broken. "It confirmed what people already believed, which was that prisons were inherently inhumane," he said.
Zimbardo himself even admitted he was a "social activist" looking to impact prison reform policy:
He at first denied that the experiment had had any political motive, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release disseminated on the experiment's second day explicitly stating that it aimed to bring awareness to the need for reform, he admitted that he had probably written it himself under pressure from Carlo Prescott, with whom he had co-taught a summer school class on the psychology of imprisonment .
"During that course, I began to see that prisons are a waste of time, and money, and lives," Zimbardo said. "So yes, I am a social activist, and prison reform was always important in my mind. It was not the reason to do the study."
There was always plenty of reason for skepticism of the methods and the results, but the findings fit with what social engineers on the left wanted to believe about crime and punishment and prisons. So the Stanford Prison Experiment was accepted uncritically and given a warm welcome from the media for nearly 50 years. It seems to me there are some lessons that can be drawn from this about people's willingness to take advantage of the unearned authority presented to them but those lessons have nothing to do with prisons. |
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
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Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.
About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
Ethics Policy
The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity. |
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As of late, LGBTQ rights advocates have challenged religious organizations for endorsing oppressive and discriminatory doctrine under the guise of spiritual guidance . These disagreements with the Church as an institution , while generally valid, particularly target historically Black churches and often reduce these congregations to a monolith of homophobia. Without a doubt, many historically Black churches have stood in opposition to marriage equality; but, it's also important to recognize how historically Black churches fit into a larger context of LGBTQ rights and that the situation at hand may be more nuanced than it appears at first glance.
When President Obama announced in May of 2012 that he supports same-sex marriage , his statement divided many members and leaders of historically Black churches. Although historically Black churches, like many other religious groups, have grappled with the question of LGBTQ acceptance, the fact that the nation's first Black president -- who once opposed same-sex marriage -- aligned himself at least somewhat with LGBTQ individuals forced historically Black churches and congregations to break the silence surrounding the issue of queerness and faith.
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III , the pastor of Trinity United Church of Chicago, spoke up only a few weeks after the President issued his support of same-sex marriage. Rev. Dr. Moss entered the conversation not only because he was President Obama's former pastor, but also because he believed that even if the Black clergy who opposed same-sex marriage were unwilling to change their political position, they should at least be willing to further the dialogue between historically Black churches and LGBTQ communities. In his letter to the Black clergy and in a sermon, Rev. Dr. Moss encouraged religiously-inclined people to interrogate their beliefs and to make sure that their faith truly embraced a practice of love.
"Tell your brethren who are part of your ministerial coalition to 'live their faith and not legislate their faith' for the Constitution is designed to protect the rights of all. We must learn to be more than a one-issue community and seek the beloved community where we may not all agree, but we all recognize the fingerprint of the Divine upon all of humanity. There is no doubt people who are same-gender-loving who occupy prominent places in the body of Christ. For the clergy to hide from true dialogue with quick dismissive claims devised from poor biblical scholarship is as sinful as unthoughtful acceptance of a theological position. When we make biblical claims without sound interpretation we run the risk of adopting a doctrinal position of deep conviction but devoid of love. Deep faith may resonate in our position, but it is the ethic of love that forces us to prayerfully reexamine our position."
Unfortunately, Rev. Dr. Moss' support is hardly proof that once Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, Black religious folks decided that homosexuality is okay. In fact, many Black religious leaders voiced and continue to voice their deep disapproval for same-sex marriage and queerness. Former Illinois senator Rev. James Meeks targeted Black lawmakers' territories by sending emergency robocalls condemning same-sex marriage to approximately 200,000 households. These Black religious leaders who stand in opposition to same-sex marriage often put enough pressure on lawmakers to stall or halt the repeals of same-sex marriage bans.
While historically Black churches have opposed same-sex marriages, using support of same-sex marriage as a measure of homophobia distorts the relationship between historically Black churches and queerness. In a study about views about homosexuality in U.S. religious traditions , the analysis found that 39% of historically Black churches think that homosexuality should be accepted by society, versus 46% that do not. These findings do suggest that historically Black churches are not eager to support queerness but when compared to other religious traditions, historically Black churches are far from the most homophobic. 64% of Evangelical Churches, 68% of Mormons, 76% of Jehovah's Witnesses, and 61% of Muslims who participated in the survey think that homosexuality should be discouraged by society. If the reality of the situation is that historically Black churches are pretty split on the question of queerness, and it's not like Black religious leaders are the largest population of Christians popping into other countries and preaching LGBTQ-hate (I see you right-wing Evangelicals), why are historically Black churches often deemed monolithic spaces of homophobia and the biggest proponents of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric?
This trend of almost unquestionably associating Black churches (and people) with homophobia stems from a lack of understanding or analysis of real Black communities. In the United States, whiteness is the norm; for that reason, when we think about white churches and their views on homosexuality, we can imagine all of the nuances that "white" can entail. It's not hard to believe that not all white people or even all white churches are homophobic because our society teaches us that "whiteness" encompasses a lot of different categories. Furthermore, in LGBTQ spaces, we are overwhelmed with images of white people being queer, so it's hard to think that all white people could be homophobic if clearly some queer white people exist. I believe that this phenomenon reveals why there are few research studies specifically devoted to homophobia in white communities or religious spaces. There's an assumption in our society that we don't need to study white behavior or culture because whiteness is the measure of what is socially or culturally "normal". I mean, how many research studies have you seen that try to explain why white people are the way they are, period? It doesn't matter that Westboro Baptist church is composed mostly of a white family , or that white evangelicals have spread hate for LGBTQ people in other countries ; those people don't represent all white people.
On the other hand, when our society invokes images or ideas of Black people, it's as though there are only two ways to be Black: religious and intolerant of everything, or... not. Additionally, our society rarely speaks about Blackness in nuanced terms, and even throws around the phrase "the Black community" as if Black people form a homogenous collective. Therefore, when a group of Black people become associated with a quality -- especially a negative quality -- mainstream society imposes that quality on all Black people. Some church-going Black people are homophobic, so society portrays all Black people (especially if they are religious) as homophobic. And that, my friends, is how stereotypes are created.
It is important for those of us who care about the safety and well-being of LGBTQ communities to challenge groups and organizations that seek to oppress queer folks. However, if we treat historically Black churches as all anti-LGBTQ, we ignore our queer siblings who do find themselves in historically Black churches and also ignore the potential of alliances between LGBTQ communities and Black religious communities. For example, more than a few gay Black churches have sprouted up across the United States. Rev. Phyllis Pennese , an openly gay pastor, runs an African-American church with a predominantly LGBTQ congregation called Pillar of Love Fellowship. Pillar of Love, located in Chicago, was the 1,000th church to join the Open and Affirming (ONA) movement. The ONA movement consists of churches that belong to the United Church of Christ sect and are dedicated to providing a religious space for LGBTQ people. Rev. Pennese explains :
"Pillar of Love, like other ONA churches, is a community where LGBT individuals and families can be restored to wholeness. Our church motto is that 'we have the courage to be all that God created.' I do believe that because so many of us in the LGBT and black LGBT community have been abused and brutalized in the church, the only way we can heal and grow and walk confidently into what God has called us to be is to be showered with love."
These gay Black churches are not limited to cities like Chicago. In Harlem, NY, a gay and a lesbian pastor merged their churches to form the Rivers at Rehoboth Church , a Black church with a mission of "radical inclusivity." This inclusivity is not limited to only LGBTQ people but extends to any who have been marginalized.
The Rivers at Rehoboth choir and ministry via The Spook Who Sat by the Door
As LGBTQ communities hold religious groups accountable for the wounds that they have inflicted on queer folks, we must be careful not to burn bridges that may be useful. When we simplify historically Black churches as only a monolith of homophobia, we alienate LGBTQ folks who may need the community and spiritual support that historically Black churches have provided them, we disregard Black churches that are creating new frameworks for LGBTQ inclusion, and we ignore the political potential of an alliance between LGBTQ and Black religious communities.
Historically Black churches have been political birthplaces for civil rights movements. The 1960s in particular saw the organization of protests, and political campaigns in Black houses of worship and among Black congregational members as well as religious leaders. Furthermore, in the Jim Crow era of U.S. history, historically Black churches had a less hostile and antagonistic relationship with LGBTQ people. In her book Salvation: Black People and Love , writer and social activist bell hooks suggests:
"Without idealizing the past, it is important for black people to remember that love was the foundation of the acceptance many gay individuals felt in the segregated communities they were raised in. While not everyone loved them or even accepted their lifestyle, there was enough affirmation present to sustain them. Since legalized racial segregation meant that black communities could not expel gay folks, those communities had to come to terms with the reality of gay people in their midst. Straight folks who had been taught by religious teachings to love everybody as oneself were compelled to create a practice of acceptance that was redemptive for both the heterosexual and the homosexual because it offered them an opportunity to, as it was common to say then, "live the faith." ... In some small segregated black communities the church was a safe house, providing both shelter and sanctuary for anyone looked upon as different or deviant, and that included gay believers."
This church was built in 1823 as the Moravian church for African Americans via Learn NC
Integration meant that historically Black churches no longer needed to exist as a sanctuary for people rejected from the mainstream white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative society. There were more spaces for Black LGBTQ folks to feel welcomed or to enter into, and perhaps this shift compromised the tradition of inclusivity that played such a big role in the structure of historically Black churches. Without returning to segregation, I still believe that historically Black churches can return to a model of inclusivity.
Bishop Yvette Flunder , founder of the gay Black church City of Refuge, argues that the reason why this divide between historically Black churches and queerness presents such a problem is that people working in Black churches get studied instead of being brought into conversations about faith and sexuality. Bishop Flunder insists in an interview with Religion Dispatches that "It's just that folks are not talking to folks like me [who are people of faith and same-gender loving]. I have to make my way to folks to get them to hear." In the interview, she explains that conversations about homosexuality and faith could really change the game. Using her relationship with her mother as an example, Bishop Flunder says that the more the two women talked theology and sexual orientation, the more their understanding of one another expanded until her mother eventually accepted that perhaps queerness and faith were not irreconcilable. Ultimately, her mother even went as far as to join Bishop Flunder's gay Black church.
As a lesbian with ties to historically Black churches, I do not think it's impossible to open up a real dialogue about queerness and spirituality. Historically Black churches, as well as other religious traditions, must be held accountable for the crimes that they have committed against queer people; however, I will not reduce historically Black churches to some exemplar of homophobia and hatred when the situation at hand has a more complicated story. Imagine a world where historically Black churches championed the rights of LGBTQ individuals. Such an alliance truly would be a force to reckon with, and I think that with time, dialogue and acceptance (not reluctant tolerance) we can move in that direction.
Related: christianity intersectionality race religion |
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1. One dead after 20,000 Muslims burns down Hindu village in Bangladesh over rumoured Prophet Mohammed
A mob of angry Muslims burned down a Hindu village in Bangladesh after a rumor spread a local had insulted Prophet Mohammed on Facebook.
One person was killed and at least five more seriously injured after 20,000 Muslims attacked Hindu homes in the village of Thakurbari, in the Rangpur Sadar region of the country, on Friday.
Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the crowd after trouble flared when a villager allegedly posted a defamatory status about Prophet Mohammed.
By the time police arrived at the village at least 30 homes had already been burned down while others had been looted and vandalised, according to the Dhaka Tribune."
The article makes no mention of what the alleged slight to the founder of the Islamic doctrine was however.
More at the Dhaka Tribune .
2. Muslim crime gangs penetrate German police
Related:
3. Syrian refugee arrested for "raping" a pony in front of children at a German petting zoo
The German article is here .
An excerpt from the translation :
A young man allegedly sexually assaulted a pony of the "Children's Farm" in Gorlitzer Park. An employee of the institution confirms this to Berliner Morgenpost. The incident occurred on Friday of last week around 3 PM. Amanda F. (name changed by our editorial staff) described the incident to Berliner Morgenpost.
"My babysitter took a walk with our son through Gorlitzer Park. They had to witness the man sexually assaulting the pony." Her babysitter told her about the incident, and also spoke to the so-called "park runners". She did not want to comment on the incident. The scene was too traumatic."
4. ISIS in DIRECT threat to Trump as US President arrives in 'new home of jihad'
Jihadis have been circulating propaganda featuring the a picture of the US President covered in bullet holes as they urge fighters to kill him.
The threats come as Trump this evening flies into the Philippines in the final stop of his tour of Asia.
Security forces in the Philippines have been battling the threat of jihadis for years, with the city of Marawi being to reduced to rubble by ISIS.
Terrorists have been circulating the image on encrypted messaging app Telegram - urging fighters to "lie in wait" and "ambush" the US President.
Trump's Russian opposite number Vladimir Putin also features in the propaganda off to the side, his face also riddled with bullets."
Video of jihadis training in the Philippine jungle and presumably threatening the unbeliever in Tagalog, at link.
5. Saudi Arabia 'scrambles fighter jets' amid fears of WAR in Middle East
The kingdom has mobilised its F-15 fighter jet fleet to launch a military operation against the Iranian-backed terrorist militia of Hezbollah in Lebanon, regional news website The Baghdad Post reports.
Saudi Arabia previously accused both Lebanon and Iran of committing an act of war against it after rebels fired a missile at the King Khalid International Airport in the kingdom's capital of Riyadh.
Yesterday, Saudi Arabia ordered its citizens to leave Lebanon escalating fears of war to new heights - which the US have dubbed grounds for a "proxy war".
Hezbollah are the most powerful military and political force in Lebanon and receives major support from Iran.
Related : The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia vows to move "back to a moderate, open Islam."
6. Brussels riot after Morocco World Cup qualifier win
More than 20 police officers were injured in Brussels when celebrations over Morocco's qualification for football's World Cup turned violent.
The Moroccan national side qualified for the 2018 tournament in Russia with a 2-0 victory away to Ivory Coast on Saturday, topping their group.
Fans hit the streets after the game and burned at least one car, smashed glass and looted shops, police said.
Belgium has a large Moroccan community, making up 4% of the population.
One witness posted video to Twitter of water cannon being used on a crowd. Police said it was used on a group of about 300 people, some of whom were throwing stones.
There were also riots in Antwerp and Amsterdam and the Dutch police did nothing
7. Lee Rigby's killer is tormenting his victim's family by still waging jihad from behind bars
'He spends his time working out and is strong, physically imposing and a very intimidating presence,' says a source at the prison. 'But it's not just that -- his devotion to radical Islam is total, unbending and all-consuming.
'Because of that he is always giving the staff a hard time. He refers to them as kafirs and infidels and is constantly making threats against them.
'All the time he is on the offensive, upping the tension. There have been altercations -- spitting and throwing cups of urine at them. He regards himself as an active terrorist, as still being very much 'in the fight'.
To those who know anything of Adebolajo's history that will come as little surprise. In May 2013 he masterminded the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby near his barracks in Woolwich, South-East London.
8. Germans With Turkish-Sounding Names Denied Chinese Visas - Chamber of Commerce
The Chinese immigration authorities are reportedly denying Germans visas to visit China because they have Turkish-sounding names; the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce suspects that Turkey's support for Uyghurs in China is behind the move, Wirtschaftswoche reports.
The Chinese immigration authorities appear to be discriminating against Germans with Turkish-sounding names and those who have spent a long time in Turkey, according to the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK).
The DIHK has indications "that the Chinese consulate is not issuing visas to German businesspeople with Turkish-sounding names," the organization's foreign trade chief Volker Treier told the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche on Friday.
Treier warned that the issue could affect trade relations between China and Germany. In 2016, trade turnover between the two countries was EUR169.9 billion ($198.2 billion), making China Germany's biggest trade partner, ahead of France.
9. Generation Identity movement, mischaracterized in this video as "Far right", explain their position:
10. In a stunning show of loyalty to their nation, people, culture and religion, the Polish people took to the streets to mark Poland's national day: |
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I noted the other night that Donald Trump may have opened the "Overton Window" for Ted Cruz, by making Cruz acceptable to both Republican establishment types and general election voters who otherwise would have considered him Cruz conservative. I noted the fear of a liberal who wrote: Donald Trump looks like the warm-up...
Bowe Bergdahl, who reportedly left his post to go look for al Queda, was charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. Today, it was announced that Bergdahl will face a court martial and a possible life sentence. CNN reports: U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will face a military court on charges of...
UPDATE (12/14/15, 5:39PM): Jurors dismissed for the day, back to deliberations at 8:30AM tomorrow. UPDATE (12/14/15, 5:22PM): Both prosecution and defense agree with Judge Williams that no additional legal definitions will be provided to the jury. UPDATE (12/14/15, 5:11PM): Jury asks for legal definitions of "evil motive," "bad faith" and "not honestly." That doesn't bode well for...
Daesh (ISIS) is waging digital war and the Department of Homeland Security refuses to look at an applicant's digital footprint. That seems smart. But that's not even the worst part. DHS kept the no social media policy in place for fear of "bad public relations." Terrorist attacks on the homeland? Meh. We can't...
Last week, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) schooled an official from the Department of Homeland Security on our Constitutionally protected right to due process. "Let me ask you another question about the terrorism list, what process if afforded a U.S. citizen before they go on that list?" Gowdy asked. After a brief pause, Ms....
There was a sense of panic on the political stage in France as two mainstream parties Conservatives and Socialists scrambled to prevent French regional government from falling into the hands of Front National in the second round of the voting. Last week, Front National under the leadership of Marine Le Pen had emerged as...
Here's something you may have missed over the weekend. While most Americans are concerned about terrorism and the growth of ISIS, President Obama and other world leaders met in Paris to discuss climate change. When an agreement was reached, journalists reacted like excited teenage girls. T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner has...
We reported dive crews were searching a lake in San Bernardino for evidence related to the terror attack that left 14 Americans dead. It appears that investigators may have located some: Divers recovered items from a lake in San Bernardino, Calif., where a couple who killed 14 at a nearby regional center Dec. 2 possibly dumped...
The Yale campus erupted in protests after a claim that a fraternity held a party but allowed in female guests limited to "White Girls Only." It started with a Facebook post: The frat denied the claims: An investigation by Emily Shire at The Daily Beast also called the claims into question. But none of that...
Posted by edgeofthesandbox # December 13, 2015
If, dear reader, you are wondering how easy it is to lie to the United States immigration officials, you are not wondering alone. A little over 25 years ago I, along with other Soviet Jews, were going through the immigration process wondering out loud about how easy it would be to deceive our future...
With Ted Cruz soaring to a 10pt lead in Iowa, Chris Christie gaining momentum in New Hampshire, Ben Carson losing some ground, Marco Rubio gaining in some polls and holding steady in others, Jeb Bush teetering along, and Donald Trump still dominating in most state and national polls, Tuesday's CNN debate...
In June, the Treasury Department announced plans to replace Alexander Hamilton's mug on the $10 bill with a gal. Feminists applauded the move, the news instigated an awkward question to Republican candidates in a GOP presidential primary debate, and the rest of us who know American history were less than impressed. Treasury...
While in Paris last month, Obama was petulant and dismissive in criticizing Republicans who "pop off" about his nearly imperceptible ISIS strategy. He said, "if folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisers...
Tom Cotton, the freshman senator from Arkansas, has never minced words when giving his opinion of Guantanamo Bay detainees. In a speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation in Washington last week, he reiterated this position, making a strong case for continuing to hold the remaining 107 prisoners in Cuba. Opening his remarks...
Had to post this. I love this video. Brilliant. It's also an excuse to tease out that we're *likely* to have a new section of Legal Insurrection sometime early in the new year where we can do more spontaneous, shorter posts in addition to the full posts in the main column. Want to know...
There have been some major developments over the last seven days. Let's review, shall we? Trump continues to dominate polls and headlines. Trump Calls for Ban on All Muslims from Entering US - Even American Citizens HuffPo: Gee, Maybe Trump Stories Do Belong on the Politics Page ACLU Board Member Urges People to Kill Trump... |
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Warning: some may find this footage disturbing. A cargo plane crashed Monday at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, killing all 7 passengers aboard (Americans). . This article says, "The Boeing 747-400 -- owned by National Airlines, a Florida-based subsidiary of National Air Cargo -- was en route to Dubai, carrying vehicles and other cargo." The [...]
David Graeber, author of The Democracy Project, writes in a guest column for "Informed Comment" The recent defeat of gun buyers' background check legislation in the Senate--legislation backed by an almost unimaginable 90% of the American public--has been taken as a somber day in the history of American democracy. We've been having a lot of [...]
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai on Monday confirmed an NYT report that he has been receiving cash payments in a paper bag every month from the US Central Intelligence Agency. Karzai maintained that the money actually goes to the director of national intelligence to be used for intelligence work, but the implication of the NYT article [...]
The Constitutional crisis in Egypt between the Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Morsi, and the thousands of judges in the Egyptian judiciary, according to Amr Moussa, derives from a misplaced desire for revenge on the part of the Brotherhood. Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood was only semi-legal, and members were often imprisoned (Morsi [...]
Alice K. Ross writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism 'Drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis,' Farea al-Muslimi told a rare US Senate hearing on targeted killing last week. The Yemeni journalist and activist gave emotive testimony at a Senate subcommittee about the impact of drone strikes and targeted killings on [...]
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz write at Tomdispatch.com A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can't escape it in our cars. It's in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, [...]
Julie Poucher Harbin presents an interview with Peter Feaver via Islamicommentary According to an assessment signed by White House director of the office of legislative affairs Miguel Rodriguez, which was sent to lawmakers on Thursday (April 25) "Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons [...] |
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People used to have to go all the way to Amsterdam to smoke some legal weed, but here I am, in an office/house on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., wearing a weird red smurf-looking hat and smoking a joint with Adam Eidinger, the man who can claim a lot of responsibility for the fact that this joint is entirely legal. This is one of the first times in the last 20 years that I was not breaking any law at all.
Earlier in the day, I broke the law when I brought about a gram of weed from Maryland--where it is a civil crime for which I could face a $100 fine--and three pot cookies (gingerbread), which were still under the 10-gram limit. Still, I was slightly nervous about that criminal aspect when the K-9 unit made its rounds at Penn Station as we waited for our MARC train down to that contradictory city to the south. The dog sniffed the bench beside us and then kept going.
I broke federal law when the train crossed the district line, but, even in places like Washington, D.C., Washington state, and Colorado, which have legalized pot, the smoker is still breaking federal law, because the hypocrites in Congress and the Obama administration and the Department of Justice are content to continue allowing states to incarcerate citizens for possessing a plant which many of them have undoubtedly used.
A one-way MARC ticket cost us $7 and took one hour, as opposed to the $1,500 and 10-plus hours it would take to get to Amsterdam--and there are even a couple of Vermeers in D.C. too. So, the City Paper art team packed up our notebooks and pens and mini recorders and headed south to see what freedom felt like. We would have a long, exhausting day in the District, which would include putting the high in high art at the National Gallery (see page 24) and even an encounter, in front of the Bojangles' at Union Station, with New York magazine Art Critic Jerry Saltz, who interrogated us about our inebriation, but it started, after we divided up one of our cookies (three for $5), at Eidinger's house, which also serves as the office of the DC Cannabis Campaign, the group which won the weed referendum.
Eidinger is way up on Massachusetts Avenue, and as we walked up Embassy Row, we wondered if the headquarters for D.C.'s legalization campaign could really be here.
When we saw a toy skeleton propped up against the wall out front, we knew we were in the right place.
Inside, Eidinger, whose boyish face is marked by round wire-rimmed glasses and a landing-strip soul patch, and Nikolas Schiller, the DC Cannabis Campaign's director of communications, were sitting at laptops on either side of a table, littered with newspapers and red felt hats.
"What I have in this box here is perfectly legal," he said, opening a small box with a bag of marijuana, a grinder, some papers, and other undetermined paraphernalia. I had a vaporizer in my pocket and I took it out, loaded it, and ignited it.
Eidinger, who works for Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps as a day job, said that none of the other journalists who had come to write about the campaign had ever smoked and one claimed he couldn't write his story because of a contact high. None of them, I thought, were from fucking Baltimore.
"You want a hit?" I asked as I handed him the vaporizer. He took but said he was a smoker and pulled out a rolling paper which he held between his fingers over the next quarter hour as he talked nonstop, letting it flap a bit in the forceful wind of the words.
D.C.'s mayor, Muriel Bowser, Eidinger said, was "a marijuana defender and someone who has surprised a lot of people by being with the people--I think because she's born and raised she wants to maintain street cred," though he adds that he has occasionally disagreed with her, as when she said she didn't want D.C. to be like Amsterdam. "Really that was an insult to Amsterdam," he said. "They did a viral campaign that the Dutch embassy published. So they trolled the mayor and said 'let's compare D.C. and Amsterdam,'" in ways that greatly favored the Dutch city.
"But they have places to consume cannabis and we don't. That's what this was about," he continued. "They introduced an emergency bill to prevent us from having social clubs for using cannabis lawfully. But what we're doing right now, using cannabis in this room is legal, but as soon as we go into a bar, that has a smoking area for smoking pipes, tobacco I should say, if you light up a joint, it's not legal."
This is the biggest drawback for Baltimore weed tourists. You really can't go down to the District to get high unless you know someone who lives there. It is still illegal to smoke in public and there is no way to buy it. But Eidinger, Schiller, and their allies are fighting that too.
Part of the responsibility for this prohibition falls on us, anyway, because Republican U.S. Rep. Andy "Dick Hole" Harris tried to threaten the funding for the District in order to stop the will of its people from being enforced.
When I told Eidinger about our attempt to attach the name "Dick Hole" to Harris, he said, "That's definitely Baltimore humor," and explained that he, at one time, planned to attack Harris more directly. "If he succeeded in overturning our initiative, I was going to move to his district and run against him personally."
Instead, they burned him in effigy--its his plastic skeleton that leans against a wall outside. "We are bastard constituents," he says of the way that the District is treated by Congress people such as Harris and Rep. Jason Chaffetz , who runs the committee which oversees affairs in the District.
Before he lit up the joint--which he rolled with an astounding facility--Eidinger went into a long discussion of the red smurf hats on the table, which are actually Phrygian hats and play an important role both in ancient history--it was the cap that Phrygian slaves wore after they bought their freedom--and in revolutionary America. "You might wonder about these weird hats here," he said. "This is what a liberty pole is, a pole with a hat on it. This is a Phrygian cap and it's been around for over 2,000 years . . . before we [in revolutionary America] had a flag, this was the symbol. It went also back to the assassination of Caesar in Rome . . . but this pole started popping up in different colonies." |
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By now, you've likely heard the story of Michael Rotondo, a 30-year-old college dropout from Camillus, New York, who refused to move out of his parents' house.
For months, they have encouraged him to find a job and have offered to help him find a place to live on his own. "There are jobs available even for those with a poor work history like you. Get one--you have to work!" one of their notes to him said. But he has refused to budge.
They served him an eviction notice in February and eventually took him to court. State Supreme Court Justice Donald Greenwood rightly ruled in the parents' favor on Tuesday, and while Rotondo called the decision "outrageous" and has vowed to appeal, it would be wise for him to begin searching for his next home.
The story of a work-capable young adult mooching off of his parents has become all too common, and unfortunately, many of these people are allowed to mooch off of taxpayers, as well.
Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka the food stamp program), which currently pays benefits of up to $192 per month to an estimated 5.4 million able-bodied adults without dependents ("ABAWDs" in Agriculture Department-speak).
While the program, on its face, requires that such an individual work at least 20 hours per week or engage in a job search or training--or at least volunteer in order to receive benefits--federal law provides that states may request that these work requirements be waived for all individuals who reside in any "area" that "does not have a sufficient number of jobs."
That has been interpreted through regulations to mean an unemployment rate as low as 20 percent above the national average. With the U.S. jobless rate at an 18-year low of 3.9 percent, an area with an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent could qualify.
One such area is the city of Syracuse, a 4.8-mile drive east of Mark and Christina Rotondo's home in Onondaga County. Its latest unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, in line with the national average for the past 50 years, but not a single one of its residents would be expected even to look for work, much less put in 40 hours per week, in order to qualify for SNAP benefits.
If Michael Rotondo finds a place to live there, he can rest assured that he will be able to continue his unspecified "successful" business, which he has called "the overwhelmingly superior choice for the economic well-being over the working of a full-time job," without actually having to work for his food--all thanks to U.S. taxpayers.
The recent debate on the farm bill in the House has focused primarily on whether those responsible for the care of dependents below a certain age should be made subject to SNAP work requirements, largely ignoring the extent to which geographic-area waivers undermine the existing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents who have the least excuse not to work.
For example, my colleague Robert Rector and I found that the farm bill now before Congress, H.R. 2, as drafted, would allow 4.3 million of these able-bodied adults without any dependents to remain exempt from the work requirement. And, along with Mimi Teixeira, we laid out five specific steps Congress could take to encourage work in the food stamp program.
If Congress wants to get serious about encouraging those who can work to do so, it should start by ensuring that those living in places such as Syracuse are not exempted from work requirements during an economic boom.
That would ensure that someone like Rotondo can't just move 5 miles to join them on the food stamp rolls. |
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Binney points to the critical evidence that shows that yes, Trump communications were surveilled.
President Donald Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.
"I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored," Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.
Binney resigned from NSA shortly after the U.S. approach to intelligence changed following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He "became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop -- nicknamed ThinThread -- were being used to spy on Americans," PBS reported.
On Monday he came to the defense of the president, whose allegations on social media over the weekend that outgoing President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign have rankled Washington.
Via FreeBeacon :
Leaders of the "Day Without a Woman" strike are working with a group that does not have a single female in a leadership position.
The Women's March protest group is asking female employees to skip work on March 8 to draw attention to the importance of females in the workplace and highlight "hiring discrimination" against women.
"We believe that creating workforce opportunities that reduce discrimination against women and mothers allow economies to thrive," the Women's March website states. "Nations and industries that support and invest in caregiving and basic workplace protections--including benefits like paid family leave, access to affordable childcare, sick days, healthcare, fair pay, vacation time, and healthy work environments--have shown growth and increased capacity."
Despite striking for equal opportunities for women in the workplace, the Women's March is working with the Action Network, a group that does not have a single female in its leadership.
The Action Network is a Washington, D.C.-based "progressive online organizing platform" that is managing the website and email lists of the Women's March. The group's work is "specifically designed to help organizers channel scattered grassroots energy into something more focused," Vox reported.
Via Politico :
Some House Freedom Caucus members dismissed the bill as creating a new "entitlement program" by offering health care tax credits to low-income Americans. A Republican Study Committee memo sent to chiefs of staff, obtained by POLITICO, echoed those comments and blasted the bill's continuation of the Medicaid expansion for three years.
"This is Obamacare by a different form," former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO. "They're still keeping the taxes in place and Medicaid expansion, and they're starting a new entitlement."
Because "no law in any country can tell me I am a criminal"... except every country.
Via Huffington Post :
I am not illegal.
Today I stumbled upon an article that talked about Golden Door, a program aimed to help undocumented students continue their education. The article talks about the expansion of the program and how it has helped 92 undocumented students attend college, and how the all the students who have graduated so far had job offers. Feeling proud of the accomplishments of those involved in the program, and being a part of it myself, I decided to read the comments to read the reaction of those around me.
The negativity that people poured into the comment section was beyond any of my expectations. A man talked about how we are just here to steal jobs. Someone said we need to be deported right now. Another person thought it necessary to talk about our inability to contribute to society. One guy thought it was funny to talk about how if we were somewhere else we would be incarcerated. All of these comments referred to us as illegals.
Illegal is defined as forbidden by law, especially criminal law. I am not defined as forbidden by law. No law in any country can tell me that I am a criminal simply for wanting a better life. I did not come to the U.S. by choice, as I was a child, but I will never resent my parents for making that decision for me. They chose to give up their lives and careers for my wellbeing, and that is more than I could ever ask for. To see the negativity hurts, and it stings to see people truly think of me as a criminal. [...]
To say I am illegal is to deny my humanity and reduce me to a criminal. To say we are illegal is to say our entire existence is defined by the laws of a country who thinks of us as numbers not people. I am not a criminal -- we are not criminals -- because we are not illegal. It has taken us years to be able to come out of the shadows, but today we are unafraid. We are unapologetic. We are undocumented.
ESPN programming and commentary has gone full social justice warrior and I no longer visit their web site or their TV channel.
As sports cable network ESPN continues to bleed cash, another round of layoffs is about to hit that will reportedly take out some well-known reporters and on-air faces.
Reports say that ESPN management is being tasked with cutting "tens of millions" of dollars of staff salary from its payroll, meaning that on-air personalities are on the chopping block, according to Sports Illustrated.
"Today's fans consume content in many different ways, and we are in a continuous process of adapting to change and improving what we do. Inevitably, that has consequences for how we utilize our talent," ESPN said in a statement. "We are confident that ESPN will continue to have a roster of talent that is unequaled in sports."
The news of the massive cuts comes on the heels of reports that ESPN is losing millions per year.
Once a sports powerhouse, ESPN has gone from must-see-TV for millions of sports fans to a financial boondoggle for owner Disney with the network losing up to 10,000 subscribers a day, reports said last month.
"A floundering ESPN, with rising costs and declining viewership, continued to sink Disney's DIS, +0.24% financial results during its fiscal first quarter," MarketWatch.com reported.
With ESPN dragging on the company, Disney's revenue fell 3 percent, and its profits sank 14 percent, the financial site reported.
As to ESPN itself, the network lost subscribers, found its average viewership crater, and experienced falling advertising rates even as its programming costs climbed. And this fall from grace continued even after Disney insisted that ESPN had reached its bottom after the previous quarter came to an end.
ESPN's crashing revenue coincides with its increasingly leftward political content, a drift so blatant that the network's ombudsman felt pressured to address the network's political content. |
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The National Firearms Act (NFA), 72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236, enacted on June 26, 1934, currently codified as amended as I.R.C. ch. 53, is an Act of Congress in the United States that, in general, imposes a statutory excise tax on the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms and mandates the registration of those firearms. Congress does not have the power to do that regarding private sales withing a state - they do not have the taxing power to do so.
"Firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011," according to a report by the federal , "and nonfatal firearm crimes dropped from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.
These gun shows are particularly controversial because they allow individuals to buy guns from other individuals without going through background checks. False. The existence of a gun show is completely independent of private buyers purchasing from private sellers. Gun shows are not special zones where what is usually illegal is legal, which is what the article expressly claims. I can legally buy a gun from a private seller regardless of geographic location, as long as we are both residents of the same state. No background check will be done (at least as required by Federal law; states can vary). This canard stems from the continuously-repeated "gun show loophole" talking-point. So you can claim that gun shows "facilitate" criminals, because they can put prohibited persons in close contact with a variety of private sellers to purchase guns. That's fine. But either the news source or the OPer is factually incorrect with the highlighted line, and is merely repeating an inflammatory falsehood.
About rdharma Statistics and Information Account status: Active Member since: Sun Feb 3, 2013, 12:59 PM Number of posts: 4,033 Number of posts, last 90 days: 1490 Favorite forum: General Discussion, 705 posts in the last 90 days (47% of total posts) Favorite group: Gun Control & RKBA, 363 posts in the last 90 days (24% of total posts) |
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Congress does not have the power to do that regarding private sales withing a state - they do not have the taxing power to do so.
"Firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011," according to a report by the federal , "and nonfatal firearm crimes dropped from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.
These gun shows are particularly controversial because they allow individuals to buy guns from other individuals without going through background checks. False. The existence of a gun show is completely independent of private buyers purchasing from private sellers. Gun shows are not special zones where what is usually illegal is legal, which is what the article expressly claims. I can legally buy a gun from a private seller regardless of geographic location, as long as we are both residents of the same state. No background check will be done (at least as required by Federal law; states can vary). This canard stems from the continuously-repeated "gun show loophole" talking-point. So you can claim that gun shows "facilitate" criminals, because they can put prohibited persons in close contact with a variety of private sellers to purchase guns. That's fine. But either the news source or the OPer is factually incorrect with the highlighted line, and is merely repeating an inflammatory falsehood.
About rdharma Statistics and Information Account status: Active Member since: Sun Feb 3, 2013, 12:59 PM Number of posts: 4,033 Number of posts, last 90 days: 1490 Favorite forum: General Discussion, 705 posts in the last 90 days (47% of total posts) Favorite group: Gun Control & RKBA, 363 posts in the last 90 days (24% of total posts |
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A fundraising email from the Democratic National Committee today featured a member of the Congressional Black Caucus vowing that the country could not go back to the days of segregated schools and lunch counters.
The subject line of the email is Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) saying, "I boycotted Trump's inauguration. Here's why."
Lee also skipped the State of the Union address in January, citing an "all-out assault on our democracy" being waged by President Trump from "relentless attacks on the press to outrageous statements that undermine the intelligence community and the Russia investigation, and repeated threats to our judicial system." She also said his recent at the time comment calling El Salvador, Haiti and African nations "shithole countries" was "racist and further demonstrates a lack of respect for the office of the presidency."
In the new DNC mailer, Lee said she skipped the inauguration because she "could not in good conscience celebrate an incoming president who had normalized the most extreme fringes of the Republican Party."
"After riding racism and fear to the White House, Trump is now pushing policies that harm people of color, immigrants, and working people. For many of us, his presidency represents an attack on our very existence," she said. "But we cannot afford to give up hope. There is far too much at stake for us to retreat from this fight."
After the email asked for donations to aid Democrats' midterm election campaigns, Lee said that "the rising tide of hate is a reality we must continue to grapple with -- even at the highest levels of our government."
"Let's not forget that Donald Trump led the birther movement to question the legitimacy of Barack Obama -- our first African-American president. Instead of rejecting Trump's racist attacks, the Republican Party threw their support behind him," she said. "Trump also sent a clear signal to white supremacists that it was time to 'take their country back.'"
"We will not go back to the days where I could not enroll in a public school unless it was segregated," said Lee, a 71-year-old Texas native. "The days when my dad, a World War II and Korean War veteran, was denied entry at restaurants due to the color of his skin. The days when my mother was refused the opportunity to buy a house because African-Americans weren't allowed to purchase homes."
The congresswoman declared "we must do everything we can to fight against the forces of hatred that are on the rise under Trump -- and that starts with organizing in our communities ahead of November's election."
Last week, DNC Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent out a survey to gauge how party members rate the importance of issues such as jobs and income inequality, taxes, climate change, immigration, healthcare, racial justice, gun violence prevention, veterans support, LGBTQ issues, retirement security and more heading into midterm elections. |
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In these days of growing media concentration, Green Left Weekly is a proudly independent voice committed to human and civil rights, global peace and environmental sustainability, democracy and equality. By printing the news and ideas the mainstream media won't, Green Left Weekly exposes the lies and distortions of the power brokers and helps us to better understand the world around us. |
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We have all been so conditioned by constant repetition of the nauseating nostrums of neoliberalism that it's hard to think coherently any more. Blog
It turns out the B.C. Liberals' Climate Leadership Plan was drafted by industry representatives in the Calgary boardroom of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers! Blog
Gillian Steward recounts how the Klein government allowed an industry dominated "task force" on oilsands development to pass itself off as a neutral agency with ties to the government. Blog
This new study shows that Canada cannot meet its global climate commitments while at the same time ramping up oil and gas extraction and building new export pipelines. Blog
Why do Canadian politicians fight so hard for pipelines that aren't going to do much to raise the price fetched by our oil? In Alberta, to do otherwise would be political suicide. Blog
Media and employers cannot be depended on to make Alberta workplaces safer. Only government can do this job. A new report by the Parkland Institute shows the way. Blog
Alison Redford haunts us still -- and not just the dynastic governing party she brought low, and possibly destroyed. Blog
How does the CTF reach the conclusion Alberta is $17 billion in debt when the RBC projects the province will have no net debt for 2015-2016? Blog
It is a hopeful sign that yesterday saw the announcement by the Alberta government of its plan to improve gender equality and increase women's economic security. Blog
While groups like Progress Alberta have the potential to shake up political discourse generally, they may have a less comfortable impact on other advocates for progressive policies in Alberta. Blog
What are the tasks facing the Canadian left following the defeat of the Harper government? The Parkland Institute tackled these questions and more at its 19th annual conference. Blog
Even with a ban on corporate and union donations in place, right-wing parties will continue to enjoy a significant advantage thanks to corporate help. Blog
The Alberta government should legislate a minimum wage close to the living wage, and it should do it fast enough to have an impact on poverty. Blog
If I were setting the NDP's agenda, I would place that promised ban on corporate and union donations right at the very top of my legislative to-do list! Blog
Maybe all of us -- Jim Prentice included -- are just too conditioned by the fact that the Tories always win, no matter what. Blog
Surely this ironic juxtaposition is a hint the commitment of the Prentice government to the rights of women is not very deep or particularly sincere. Blog
The latest drop in oil prices has revealed that "the tide is out and Alberta is naked from the waist down..." It is not an edifying sight. Blog
With an election looming, Albertans may be right to worry about a fleet of shredder trucks descending on the Legislature between now and election day. Blog
Thanks to the appalling funding situation at the University of Alberta, the university has taken to skimming 5 per cent off the top when Albertans donate to the centres and institutes on campus. Blog
Researchers say: fully 84% of Albertans either agree or strongly agree that election-spending limits should be introduced in the province. Blog
Limited hours for liquor sales are a management decision and there is no reason that public liquor stores can't be open at hours that are more convenient for consumers. |
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Jonathan Schell's Comments about the Watergate scandal, published in the magazine in 1973, shed light on the high stakes surrounding the firing of James Comey. May 11, 2017
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A PETITION calling for Donald Trump's state visit to the UK to be called off has soared to more than 900,000 signatures this morning.
It comes as Jeremy Corbyn piles the pressure on Theresa May to step in, saying she would be "failing the British people" if she doesn't cancel the invitation after his controversial travel ban against Muslims came into force .
The Labour leader said it is not right to host Mr Trump while the "awful attacks on Muslims" are going on, joining Lib Dem leader Tim Farron in the growing calls to postpone the visit.
He told ITV's Peston On Sunday: "Is it really right to endorse somebody who has used this awful misogynistic language throughout the election campaign, awful attacks on Muslims, and then of course this absurd idea of building a wall between themselves and their nearest neighbour?"
He added: "I think we should make it very clear we are extremely upset about it, and I think it would be totally wrong for him to be coming here while that situation is going on. I think he has to be challenged on this.
5 Tim Farron has also urged for the invitation to be withdrawn
5 A petition calling for Trump's visit to be cancelled reached more than 900,000 signatures - surging by 200,000 overnight
"I am not happy with him coming here until that ban is lifted, quite honestly.
"Look at what's happening with those countries, how many more is it going to be and what is going to be the long term effect of this on the rest of the world?"
Mr Trump is due to be hosted by the Queen in London later this year after accepting an invite for a state visit from Theresa May.
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The ban has seen several Brits affected, including Olympic hero Sir Mo Farah, who slammed the ban as being born of "ignorance and prejudice" .
Mr Corbyn questioned why Mrs May was so quick to invite the president given his highly controversial policies, including plans to build a wall blocking the US border with Mexico.
He said: "It's slightly odd he should be invited so quickly, particularly in view of the statements he has made, and I suspect this visit is something which might find its way into the long grass."
Getty Images
5 Mr Corbyn is urging for Theresa May to stand up to Mr Trump over the ban
After his TV appearance he put out a statement confirming his call for the visit to be cancelled.
The Labour leader said: "Donald Trump should not be welcomed to Britain while he abuses our shared values with his shameful Muslim ban and attacks on refugees and women's rights.
"Theresa May would be failing the British people, is she does not postpone the state visit and condemn Trump's actions in the clearest terms.
"That's what Britain expected and deserves."
Getty Images
5 Labour MP Chuka Umunna has joined with his leader in calling for Mr Trump to be blocked from coming here
Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson also joined calls to cancel the visit.
Davidson called his policy "cruel", "divisive" and "discriminatory".
In a statement she said the US president should not be welcomed to Britain "while a cruel and divisive policy which discriminates against citizens of the host nation".
She said: "State visits are designed for both the host, and the head of state who is being hosted, to celebrate and entrench the friendships and shared values between their respective countries.
"A state visit from the current President of the United States could not possibly occur in the best traditions of the enterprise while a cruel and divisive policy which discriminates against citizens of the host nation is in place".
Senior Labour MP Chuka Umunna backed Corbyn's call for the state visit invitation to be revoked.
"I agree with that," the former frontbencher told ITV One's Peston on Sunday. "If it was a different position, what would that say to this country's three million Muslims?"
He added: "State visits happen at the instigation of governments and, of course, you have got a prime minister who you want to have a decent working relationship with a US president but they need to understand, just as they will put America first, we will put British values first."
And the muslim Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has also condemned the travel ban , also suggesting the visit should be called off.
He said: "I don't think there should be a state visit while this ban is in place."
Another senior Labour figure, former Cabinet minister Yvette Cooper, said to go ahead with the visit while the ban is in force would be "divisive, wrong and ultimately counter-productive".
She added: "We can't stay silent against the kind of prejudice and discrimination that he is pursuing.
"It undermines the democratic values that have underpinned our relationship with the US for generations."
Farron spoke to Sky News, and said: "I thought the offer for a state visit was hasty, especially given the things he is coming out with.
"We should not be giving in so lightly because Theresa May is in a desperate position."
But in a statement released afterwards the Lib Dem leader was much stronger in his attack, saying: "Downing Street has finally distanced itself from President Trump's appalling ban on Muslim people after Theresa May failed to do so. By then the damage to Britain's reputation had been done.
"The British people were waiting for a Love Actually moment, instead they saw our prime minister behaving like Trump's poodle.
5 Donald Trump signed the controversial order which came into effect at the weekend
"Any visit by President Trump to Britain should be on hold until his disgraceful ban comes to an end. Otherwise Theresa May would be placing the Queen in an impossible position of welcoming a man who is banning British citizens purely on grounds of their faith.
"Still Boris Johnson's Foreign Office is dithering and has provided no travel advice to British citizens who could be caught up in the ban.
"When will Theresa May's Conservative Brexit government stop costing up to unsavoury leaders and get a grip of this mounting crisis?"
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has been alone in defending Trump's executive order and even suggested Britain should follow the President's lead.
Alex Salmond, the SNP's foreign affairs spokesman, said he thought the state visit was "a very bad idea".
He told Sky News' Sophy Ridge: "You shouldn't be rushing into a headlong relationship with the President of the United States."
And Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has also said it should not go ahead while the bans is in place.
After initially refusing to intervene, the Prime Minister has now confirmed she does "not agree" with the policy .
. @realDonaldTrump should not be welcomed to Britain while he abuses our shared values with shameful #MuslimBan & attacks on refugees & women -- Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) January 29, 2017
For those asking my view on US State visit: would be wrong for it to go ahead while bans on refugees & citizens of some countries in place. -- Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) January 29, 2017 |
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September 27, 2017 Admin 8
(Daily Caller News Foundation) President Donald Trump said Wednesday afternoon that the administration and Republican leadership...
September 27, 2017 Joshua Paladino 109
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Television station KNTV in San Francisco has found that progressive politicians -...
September 27, 2017 Emily Larsen 1
(Emily Larsen, Liberty Headlines) A new bill would require the Congressional Budget Office to publish...
September 27, 2017 Editor 309
(Zero Hedge) Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee kneeled during a speech on the House floor...
September 27, 2017 Editor 0
(Breitbart) With the results now clear in Alabama's hotly-contested U.S. Senate Republican primary race, the...
September 27, 2017 Quin Hillyer 71
(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore trounced incumbent U.S. Sen. Luther Strange,...
September 26, 2017 Quin Hillyer 44
(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) The NFL-protest controversy is playing out politically in unpredictable ways, with at...
September 26, 2017 Admin 6
(McClatchy Washington Bureau) A new study suggests that Democrats can re-energize African-American voters even if President...
September 26, 2017 Admin 4
(LifeZette) Immigration hard-liners on Monday panned an amnesty bill described as a "conservative" alternative to the...
September 26, 2017 Admin 62
(Daily Caller News Foundation) The GOP tax reform framework to be unveiled Wednesday will likely allow...
(Daily Caller News Foundation) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is no longer expected to bring the...
September 26, 2017 Editor 6
(Fred Lucas, Daily Signal) President Donald Trump's new restrictions on travel from certain nations adapt...
September 25, 2017 Joshua Paladino 84
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) The Public Interest Legal Foundation--a nonpartisan, nonprofit law firm dedicated to preserving...
September 25, 2017 Admin 3
(FoxNews.com) Disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison, facing the most...
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Apparently, cartographers are really horny -- that or God is.
One Imgur user posted this photograph of a map hung in his or her firehouse. The person explained, This map has hung in my firehouse for years. I just looked at it for the first time.
If you don't see it right away, here is a hint: boobs. Look for the boobs.
This is why we have to do something about climate change! Think about what this hot land lady is going to look like covered in water. How sad would that be!?
A new study showed disastrous climate change problems could arise within decades, not centuries. Now, I know that's all really boring for most people, but think of the HOT LAND LADY! Also, think of the hundreds of thousands of people who will die from storms and floods, and the fact we all will likely have to abandon our coastal cities in the near future if things continue as they are.
BUT MOSTLY, HOT LAND LADY!!!
Donate here to help make a difference, assh*les.
Side note: Maybe God finally watched "Armageddon" and decided to make that creepy animal cracker scene into a reality with the hot land lady.
Geefux on YouTube
Oh, and by "creepy," I obviously mean romantic and super sad 'cause he's going to go save the Earth. I love this movie unabashedly.
Elite Daily on YouTube |
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Cheers to Andra Day and Common singing "Stand Up for Something" as a tribute to the Dreamers
From a reader:
On the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Andra Day and Common dedicated "Stand Up for Something" to the Dreamers. (Watch and listen here .)
Before singing, Andra Day said, "I just gotta take a minute to address all of the Dreamers. With the end of DACA and the possibility of deportation looming, we just want you guys to know that we stand with you, and we will not stop fighting for you. We dedicate this performance to you guys tonight."
At the end of the song, Common said, "For the Dreamers: Trump and Congress are failing you, but we the people will fight to the end till we win the Dream Act. We will fight to the end. We the people, we stand with you."
Here are the heartfelt lyrics of the song. Read more.
Cox Farms Calls for Resisting White Supremacy
From a reader:
Cox Farms, located in Centreville, Virginia, has been posting signs about social issues. Their most recent one reads "RESIST WHITE SUPREMACY."
Last year they posted other signs on the street outside their farm: "We Love Our Muslim Neighbors" and "Immigrants Make America Great!"
On their Facebook page, they explained the new sign:
Our little roadside signs have power. Most of the time, they let folks know that our hanging baskets are on sale, that today's sweet corn is the best ever, that Santa will be at the market this weekend, or that the Fall Festival will be closed due to rain. During the off-season, sometimes we utilize them differently. Sometimes, we try to offer a smile on a daily commute. Sometimes, a message of support and inclusion to a community that is struggling makes someone's day. Sometimes the messages on our signs make people think... and sometimes, they make some people angry.
Last week, some of our customers and neighbors asked us to clarify the sentiment behind our sign that said "Rise & Resist." So, we changed it to read "Rise Up Against Injustice" and "Resist White Supremacy." We sincerely believe that fighting injustice and white supremacy is a responsibility that can- and should- unite us all. We struggle to see how anyone other than self-identified white supremacists would take this as a personal attack.
Some have asked why we feel called to have such a message on our signs at all. Here is why:
Cox Farms is a small family-owned and family-operated business. The five of us are not just business-owners; we are human beings, members of the community, and concerned citizens of this country. We are also a family, and our shared values and principles are central to our business.
(see Cox Farm Facebook page. )
The local pig union showed its true white supremacist colors by calling for a boycott of Cox Farms' hay rides and pumpkin patches.
When someone responded to the sign by posting on social media "Resist white supremacy is not an inclusive message.... When you single out a group of people you exclude them. This is a sad message," Aaron Cox-Leow responded, "Yes, generally speaking, we are comfortable excluding white supremacists."
Gregg Popovich: "We Live in a Racist Country"
From a reader:
When Gregg Popovich, who is white and is the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, was asked about the importance of the NBA celebrating Black History Month, he said:
I think it's pretty obvious the league is made up of a lot of Black guys. To honor that and understand it is pretty simplistic. How would you ignore that? But more importantly, we live in a racist country that hasn't figured it out yet. And it's always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people. The point is, you have to keep it in front of everybody's nose so they understand it still hasn't been taken care of and we have a lot of work to do.
On Wednesday, Dan Le Batard, who has a radio and television sports talk show on ESPN, essentially said, "I think we should consider playing the audio clip of Popovich saying 'We live in a racist country' at the end of each show this week."
U.S. Winter Olympian rips Vice President Mike Pence as leader of the U.S. Olympic Delegation as other U.S. Olympians speak of possible protests
From a reader:
Adam Rippon, an openly gay U.S. Winter Olympian figure skater, was dismayed to find out that Vice President Mike Pence was leading the U.S. Olympic delegation. He told USA Today :
You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy? I'm not buying it. If it were before my event, I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren't a friend of a gay person but that they think that they're sick. I wouldn't go out of my way to meet somebody like that.
I don't think he (Pence) has a real concept of reality. To stand by some of the things that Donald Trump has said and for Mike Pence to say he's a devout Christian man is completely contradictory. If he's okay with what's being said about people and Americans and foreigners and about different countries that are being called "shitholes," I think he should really go to church.
Pence's office immediately issued a release that, in part, stated, Rippon's "accusation is totally false and has no basis in fact." Of course this is another lie by someone in the fascist Trump/Pence regime, as a statement Pence made in 2000 on his congressional campaign website stated, "Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior." It is widely believed that this meant "conversion therapy." Further, in 2006, when Pence voiced his support for a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman, he said gay relationships would bring about "societal collapse." (For more on Pence see the revcom.us articles " Vice President Mike Pence: The Christian Fascist 'Alternative' to the Fascist Donald Trump ," May 13, 2017, and " Mike Pence: A Christian Fascist Who's a Heartbeat Away from the U.S. Presidency ," November 21, 2016.)
Rippon is not the only U.S. Olympian who is speaking out. Others have said that they are considering protesting, despite Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which states: "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas."
Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn has already said that she will not go to the White House with the Olympic team. She said, "I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president. I want to represent our country well. I don't think that there are a lot of people currently in our government that do that."
Olympic bobsledders Elana Meyers Taylor and Kehri Jones may speak out. Meyers Taylor said, "I think the hardest thing is that all of us would love to just stick to sports--but if you want us to be role models to kids then you need to stand for more than just sports."
Olympic freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy said, "Whether it's Black Lives Matter or trans rights or climate change, there's so much to be stood up for right now ... And I think we will see athletes standing up for it, and I don't know how it will be yet, in what form, but I'm sure that we will."
Laurenne Ross, Olympic downhill skier, said she wouldn't be surprised if a U.S. athlete protests while receiving a medal. She said, "Part of me would be proud of that person for standing up or kneeling, or whatever, for their rights and using their voice. Part of me would be a little bit heartbroken that we are being torn as a nation and we are doing these actions that make us seem that we're not one anymore."
The 2018 Winter Olympics are taking place on the 50th anniversary year of the most famous Olympic protest of all time when U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a black-gloved clenched fist on the victory stand during the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City to protest the oppression of Black people.
Revcom will be reporting if something significant happens at the Winter Olympics being held in PyeonChang, South Korea, starting on February 9.
"Racism is insidious and it's still our national sin" Three white NBA coaches speak out on MLK Day
From a reader:
NBA teams played a full slate of games on Monday as they usually do to celebrate MLK Day. Three white coaches, Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, Stan Van Gundy of the Detroit Pistons, and Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors had something to say about what MLK Day means to them this year.
From Popovich:
"Dr. King, he was truly a person who was interested in making America great for everyone. He understood that racism was our national sin, and if everybody didn't come together it would bring everybody down, including white people. That promise that he basically demanded for America to fill from way back then is what put us on the road to make America great. At the same time, we all know the situation now. And I think he'd be a very, very sad man to see that a lot of his efforts have been held up and torn down. It doesn't matter if you're looking at the Voting Rights Act or the ridiculous number of people of color who are incarcerated."
"(Racism) is insidious and it's still our national sin that we have to work on. Every time I hear somebody (like Donald Trump) say they're not a racist, you know they are. So, those are some of the thoughts I have on this day. You want to be happy for some things, but current circumstances make it very difficult to clap too much."
From Van Gundy:
"Sadly, though, I think the 50th anniversary of his (MLK's) death finds us going backwards on the issue of racial equality. The Voting Rights Act has been largely dismantled. Men of color, and even boys of color, face systemic inequality in the justice system, and we used the war on drugs to lock up a generation of Black men. Affirmative action is being torn down. Police are killing men like a modern-day Bull Connor, and economic equality is headed in the wrong direction."
"Marches like Charlottesville are disturbing. It used to be that the KKK wore hoods, embarrassed to reveal their identity. Now people with racist beliefs proudly march in the open and are not even repudiated by our president. So yes, we honor Dr. King and all that he sacrificed and all that he accomplished. But if we truly want to honor him, we must get back out and fight like he did against the now-resurgent voices of racial injustice, discrimination and hate. I think 25 years ago Dr. King might have been happy to see some progress. My guess is today he would be in tears over where we are headed."
From Kerr:
"I love Martin Luther King Day in terms of what it means to the NBA, what it means to the country. It's become a great day for the NBA because we celebrate basketball, but what we're really celebrating is equality and inclusion, which is what the NBA represents. We've got players from all over the world, all different backgrounds. We've got players who are really socially active trying to promote peace and understanding, and these are all ideals Dr. King felt so strongly about."
"So, today is a great day for the league and for our country, and a good day to remember what's truly important and what we are aspiring for as a country, and that we can do a lot better. All of us."
"(King) would be less than inspired by the leadership in our country, no doubt about that."
"I do think social media has something to do with it. I really do. There's so much anger on social media, and there's such a forum now for everybody to display this anger without repercussion. Just sit behind your keyboard and tell everybody whatever vulgar, profane thing you want to say, and you're free from repercussion, and yet you're sending out this anger and vile into the atmosphere. So there's a lot of that included into what's happening right now."
Stan Van Gundy, Coach of the NBA Detroit Pistons, Supports NFL Players Refusing to Stand for the National Anthem and for Their Demands
From a reader:
In a November 14 essay in Time , Stan Van Gundy, the coach of the NBA Detroit Pistons, said he supports the NFL players who are refusing to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and social injustice and he calls on others "to join me in supporting them."
Van Gundy, who is white, talks about coaching in the NBA for 20 years in a league that is 75 percent Black and what he has learned about "the issues they and their families have had to encounter." He wrote, "I have an obligation as a citizen to speak out and to support, in any way possible, those brave and patriotic athletes who are working to bring change to our country. I believe all of us do."
Van Gundy points out that "These athletes could take the easy route and not placed their livelihoods at risk by standing up for what they believe in. They've put in their hard work. They could accept their paychecks and live lives of luxury. Instead, they are risking their jobs to speak up for those who have no voice."
He goes on to say that "Those who have been at the forefront of great advances in social justice have always been willing to make significant personal sacrifices, and that group has always included athletes," and he names Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Colin Kaepernick as those who have sacrificed for the cause of calling out social injustice, and that these current NFL players are following in their footsteps.
He points out that these NFL players are not just protesting on Sunday, but "On virtually every Tuesday during the NFL season (the NFL's traditional off-day), these committed athletes are using their platform as professional athletes in town halls, statehouses and even Washington, D.C., to listen, learn, meet with leaders, advocate for change and put the issues of criminal justice reform in the spotlight."
The changes they are advocating for are: Ameliorating harsh sentencing guidelines and ending mandatory minimum sentences. Enacting clean slate laws where convictions would be expunged after a certain period of time of good behavior. Eliminating cash bail. Reforming juvenile justice. Ending police brutality and racial bias in police departments. This was the issue that started the current player protests.
At the end of his essay, Van Gundy says, "We should all join them in ensuring their collective voice is heard."
Van Gundy's essay is online here .
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Calls Colin Kaepernick a Hero and Wants to Take a Knee with Him
From a reader
Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, called Colin Kaepernick a hero for taking a knee in protesting police murders of Black people. Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work seeking the ban of anti-personnel mines, gave her support to Kaepernick during her October 15 acceptance speech when she was receiving the Human Rights Awards from the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, New York.
In an interview after her speech, she talked about why the athletes are taking a knee:
(It's because) the seeming inability of this country to deal with racism in general, but in particular, the police brutality against primarily Black men. There certainly has been violence against Black women but the killings of Black men have been very, very disturbing to many people. I think [they] helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.
So when Kaepernick decided to use his fame to take a knee, and by doing so, make a public statement about the need to deal with this, I thought it was outstanding, personally.
And when others joined him, it I think was a pivotal moment in race issues in the country. We may not see a dramatic change immediately, but that Kaepernick took a knee, and then other Black athletes and white athletes joined in in their own way and found the support of the team owners, etc.--it reminds me of the chain of people protesting apartheid outside of the South African Embassy. You know, the impact of doing it again and again and again, famous people and not-so-famous people--it does make a difference.
Then she talked about the importance of those who have a disproportionate influence speaking out:
They mean that important figures have decided that they will use their fame to make a difference. And that also empowers the not-so-famous to stand up and make a difference. I think it's terrific. I think it's long overdue.
Despite the fact that, you know, Muhammad Ali--going to jail instead of going to war, and the two athletes in the Olympics raising their fists--famous people have done it before, but not to this extreme.
I wish I could take a knee with Kaepernick.
When I first saw that he took a knee, I [thought], "Oh, yes! If I could only go to a football game and take a knee with him, I would be so proud." Whether he ever plays football again, the man has made a statement that affects our culture. And for that alone, he is a hero.
Hertha Berlin Soccer Team Takes a Knee in Solidarity with Kaepernick
Hertha BSC (Berliner Sports Club), a German association soccer club based in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin, took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and the NFL players' protest during their home game on Saturday, October 14. Hertha's starting lineup, coaching staff, general manager, club officials, and substitutes joined in the protest before the start of the game.
Sebastian Langkamp, Hertha's defender, told Sky TV, "We're no longer living in the 18th century but in the 21st century. There are some people, however, who are not that far ideologically yet. If we can give some lessons there with that, then that's good." The Club released a statement on Twitter that said, "Hertha BSC stands for tolerance and responsibility! For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!"
Salomon Kalou, a forward for the team, who is from Ivory Coast, said their action was inspired by the NFL players' protest against police brutality and murder of Black and other people of color, in the face of the attacks against them by Trump. He said, "We stand against racists and that's our way of sharing that. We are always going to fight against this kind of behavior, as a team and as a city... [Racism] shouldn't exist in any kind of event, in the NFL or in the football world, soccer as they call it there. It shouldn't exist in any sport, period."
Hertha BSC (Berliner Sports Club), a German association soccer club based in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin, protests Saturday, October 14, in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and the NFL players
Credit: AP
Richard E. Frankel, Professor of Modern German History, on Trump's Pardon of Anti-Immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio: "To this German historian, the implications are ominous"
Richard E. Frankel is associate professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is the author of Bismarck's Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945 . The following originally appeared at historynewsnetwork.org , website of the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences at George Washington University.
In August of 1932, in the town of Potempa, nine Nazi Stormtroopers murdered a supporter of the German Communist Party, kicking him to death in his own apartment as his family watched in horror. Six were convicted with five receiving the death penalty. After the verdict, Hitler sent them a telegram in which he declared to them his "boundless loyalty." Shortly after he came to power in 1933, he pardoned the killers. While former Sheriff Joe Arpaio never kicked anyone to death, his pardon by President Trump raises disturbing parallels.
Upon gaining power, Hitler immediately pardoned allies who'd perpetrated ghastly crimes against those deemed enemies of the nation. What do we make of Trump's pardon of a political ally, a man duly convicted of systemic deprivations of people's constitutional rights--people Trump never considered part of his America? As a professor of modern German history, this administration seemingly provides such unpleasant reminders of Germany's dark past on a regular basis. What can German history teach us about this latest episode? How, for example, did the pardon of the Potempa killers help us better understand Hitler? What implications did it have for development of the Third Reich? And how does that knowledge help us better understand Trump and the danger that his pardon of Arpaio poses for the future of the United States? Read complete article.
Roger Waters: "I support my hero Colin Kaepernick, and all the fellow heroes in the NFL who stood up for rights and justice and equality"
At his September 28 concert in Boston, Roger Waters took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and other sports stars resisting police murder and the recent attacks from Trump.
As he took the knee on stage in front of a massive screen with the word RESIST projected on it, Rogers said:
I support my hero Colin Kaepernick, and all the fellow heroes in the NFL who stood up for rights and justice and equality. They're part of a far larger movement all over the globe standing up for equal civil rights and equal rights for all the peoples of the world no matter what their race, ethnicity or religion.
Rogers' entire current Us + Them tour has been laced with statements of resistance against the Trump/Pence fascist regime.
NBA Basketball Players and Coaches Speak Out in Support of the NFL Players' Protests Against Trump
From a reader :
On Sunday, September 24, the world saw NFL players, joined in some cases by coaches and owners, deliver a powerful statement by sitting, taking a knee, locking arms together, or remaining in the locker room during the singing of the national anthem at nearly every game played that day and at the Monday night game. They were responding to the vicious, racist attacks unleashed by Trump at his Nazi rally in Alabama Friday when he declared that when a player refuses to stand for the national anthem, the owners should "get that son of a bitch off the field now." The taking the knee protest was started last year by then S.F. 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick against the police brutality and murder of people of color. As Carl Dix said , with Trump's fascist, racist rant against the NFL player protesters, this Klucker-in-chief was making clear what his "Make America Great Again" is all about.
The day following the NFL players' Sunday protests was the first day of NBA basketball practice, when all of the teams speak to the press. Many players and some coaches made thoughtful comments to the media, giving a glimpse of the impact the actions of the football players is having. It should be mentioned that last week, after Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors NBA team publicly said he wasn't going to be part of any team celebration at the White House, Trump tweeted that he was disinviting the Warriors.
Here are highlights from some of the comments from NBA players and coaches:
Jabari Parker, player for the Milwaukee Bucks:
I'm not really surprised at what he said, because basically that's the narrative of Mr. Trump and that's the type of person he is. ... I think that anybody with any responsibility has the opportunity to create change and to take a side. You have good and you have bad. There's no in-between, because when you're in the middle, you're in favor of the oppressor. That's a quote by Desmond Tutu.
As far as the flag goes, it's not like people are [protesting] for any ordinary reason. There's a huge meaning, a broad horizon to it. A lot of people are frustrated that nothing's changed from the time that we've learned it from kids until now. There's been a lot of bad going on with the oppression of colored folks and minorities...
Stan Van Gundy, head coach, Detroit Pistons:
There are serious issues of inequality and injustice in this country. People of conscience are compelled to oppose racism, sexism and intolerance of people of different sexual identities and orientation wherever and whenever they see it. I stand with those opposing such bigotry. I as an individual and the Detroit Pistons as an organization support diversity, inclusion and equality.
J.J. Redick, player for the Philadelphia 76ers:
There's very few days that go by where I don't get pissed off at something Trump does, so this weekend was kind of like a normal thing... There's nothing that I would ever want to say to Trump or interact with Trump. I agree with LeBron [James, of the Cleveland Cavaliers] in the sense that what the White House and what the presidency used to represent does not represent that during these four years. It just does not. It's now a mockery of what the presidency and the White House stood for. So, I would have zero interest in ever going there. [Reddick is a white player.]
Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs:
Obviously, race is the elephant in the room and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better. "Oh, they're talking about that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?" Well, because it's uncomfortable. There has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change, whether it's the LGBT movement, or women's suffrage, race, it doesn't matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we're comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means....
You have advantage that are systemically, culturally, psychologically rare. And they've been built up and cemented for hundreds of years.... People want to hold their position, people want their status quo, people don't want to give that up. Until it's given up, it's not going to be fixed....
[Referring to NASCAR team owners who said NFL protesters should be fired and even leave the country...] I had no idea that I lived in a country where people would actually say that sort of thing. I'm not totally naive but I think these people have been enabled by an example that we've all been given. You've seen it in Charlottesville, and on and on and on.
Erik Spoelstra, coach of the Miami Heat:
I commend the Golden State Warriors for the decision they made [not to accept Trump's invitation to go to the White House]. I commend NFL players and organizations for taking a stand for equality, for inclusion, for taking a stand against racism, bigotry, prejudice...
Professor's first act as American citizen--get arrested for protesting in support of DACA students
Harvard Professor Ahmed Ragab's first act as an American citizen was to get arrested for protesting in support of DACA students. Ragab drove directly from his citizenship ceremony to a protest in Cambridge, Massachusetts to stand in solidarity with other Boston area professors and protest the DACA repeal.
He wrote in part in a Washington Post opinion letter :
With the Trump administration abolishing DACA, my students now live in fear that the lives they have built will be wrestled away, that they could be thrown out of this country, which is theirs as much as it will ever be mine. Adding insult to injury, President Trump is using them as pawns in his political games. First, shirking his responsibility, he put their fate in the hands of Congress. Then he suggested that he would take action if Congress doesn't, and that they will not be a deportation priority. Finally, he tweeted that they have nothing to fear "for six months." Throughout, the abuse continues. These young people are to continue working, studying and serving this country while simply hoping that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don't show up, and they are expected to believe in a system that consistently rejects their rights and threatens their lives and families.
The discourse defending DACA focuses on these young people being in the United States "through no fault of their own." This narrative vilifies their parents to avoid difficult, broader questions about immigration, racism and xenophobia. My "DACAmented" students are here thanks to their parents, who made many sacrifices to offer their children better lives. Two generations ago, James Baldwin wrote of "the American Negro": "It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until ... we are able to accept that we need each other, that I am one of the people who build the country, there is little hope for the American Dream." Baldwin's prescient diagnosis is still germane; our society still denies the contribution of millions of undocumented Americans to the making of this country, and dismisses their rights to the fruits of what they helped build. The American Dream lives in tortured dissociation: claimed to be for all, but denied to many.
So last week, my fellow Boston professors and I protested beside a statue of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist who nearly lost his life for rejecting the Fugitive Slave Act. We crossed Massachusetts Avenue to stand in the middle of the street. As a friend put it, we wanted to bridge the distance between law and justice with our bodies. Before we were arrested, the officers informed us that we were disturbing the peace. But the peace that we disturbed is but a veneer obscuring the injustices embedded in arbitrary immigration systems and institutional racism.
Banner unfurled at Boston's Fenway Park: "Racism is as American as Baseball"
Letter from a reader:
On Wednesday, September 13, a group of white people dropped an enormous banner, "RACISM IS AS AMERICAN AS BASEBALL," over the famous "Green Monster" wall in Boston's Fenway Park during a nationally televised game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics.
The group stated "We are a group of white anti-racist protesters. We want to remind everyone that just as baseball is fundamental to American culture and history, so too is racism. White people need to wake up to this reality before white supremacy can truly be dismantled. We urge anyone who is interested in learning more or taking action to contact their local racial justice organization." "We are responding to a long history of racism and white supremacy in the United States that continues to pervade every aspect of American culture today. We deliberately chose a platform in an attempt to reach as many people as possible." After Adam Jones of the Baltimore Orioles was taunted with bags of peanuts thrown at him and being called the "N-word" by Boston fans earlier in the season, the group decided that something had to be done. Other Black players spoke up after Jones did, saying similar things happened to them when they played in Boston against the Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox was the last Major League Baseball team to have a Black player on its roster. Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox from 1933 to 1976, continuously rejected any attempts to integrate the team. He refused to sign Jackie Robinson, who called Yawkey "one of the most bigoted guys in baseball." The current owner of the Red Sox, John Henry, is attempting to remove the name of the street, Yawkey Way, where Fenway Park is located and rename it with the name of a famous Red Sox player, like David Ortiz, who is known as "Big Papi." In speaking to the issue of racism in Boston, the group that dropped the banner said, "...we saw, we see Boston continually priding itself as a kind of liberal, not racist city, and are reminded also constantly that it's actually an extremely segregated city. It has been for a long time, and that no white people can avoid the history of racism, essentially. So we did this banner as a gesture towards that, to have a conversation about that."
A Voice of Conscience in Sports World-- ESPN Reporter Calls Trump a "White Supremacist"
From a reader:
The shit hit the fan on Tuesday, September 12, after Jemele Hill, an anchor on ESPN's SC6 (SportsCenter at 6) news show, tweeted out on Monday that Donald Trump is a "white supremacist."
Hill has been known for not shying away from politics in her commentaries.
She began her tweets about Trump by first going after singer Kid Rock, a supporter of the fascist Trump/Pence regime, by responding to his tweet that he was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate and claiming he "loves black people," and then accused the "extreme left" of "trying to use the old confederate flag BS" to label him a racist. Hill responded by tweeting out, "He loves black people so much that he pandered to racists by using a flag that unquestionably stands for dehumanizing black people."
The Twitter thread by Hill continued after she was attacked for her tweet about Kid Rock. She posted her Trump tweets in reply to them: "Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists." "Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period." "He is unqualified and unfit to be president. He is not a leader. And if he were not white, he never would have been elected." "Donald Trump is a bigot. Glad you could live with voting for him. I couldn't, because I cared about more than just myself." "The height of white privilege is being able to ignore this white supremacy, because it's of no threat to you. Well, it's a threat to me."
Hill then was barraged with racist and anti-woman tweets calling her a "nigger" and a "bitch." The white supremacist supporters of Trump, including Breitbart and Fox News, called for ESPN to fire her. ESPN tried to throw her under the bus when they "disavowed" what she said, and put out a statement, "We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate."
Then on Wednesday September 13 the White House called for ESPN to fire Hill--Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders responded to a question about the tweets by saying "That's one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN."
But broadly from athletes, Hill immediately got support from Colin Kaepernick, who tweeted out, "We are with you @jemelehill." Deadspin.com reported, "ESPN Issues Craven Apology For Jemele Hill's Accurate Descriptions Of Donald Trump." Reggie Miller, former NBA basketball all-star, tweeted out, "I'm on team @jemelehill..." Current NBA all-star Dwayne Wade responded to Miller's tweet with, "Sign me up!"
Hill, who grew up in poverty-ridden Detroit, has continuously brought politics into sports. In 2008, she compared rooting for the Detroit Pistons with rooting for the Boston Celtics, a team that traditionally became known as the team for white people to root for in a predominantly Black league, when she wrote, "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim. It's like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan. Deserving or not, I still hate the Celtics." (Listen to Bob Avakian's talk about the NBA, "Marketing the Minstrel Show and Serving the Big Gangsters," at revcom.us)
Earlier this year, Hill was reporting on Colin Kaepernick not currently being signed by an NFL team because of his political views by refusing to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and murders against Black people. In reporting that Kaepernick had compared the cops of today with "slave patrols," she said the comparison of police to "slave patrols" was "inflammatory, but historically accurate."
After she was attacked for bringing politics into sports and ESPN was attacked as being liberal, she gave an interview to Yahoo.com (See https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sportscenter-anchor-jemele-hill-espns-politics-athletes-dragging-us-193537563.html )
I just hadn't noticed the correlation between us being called more liberal as you see more women in a position on our network... as you see more ethnic diversity, then all of a sudden ESPN is too liberal. So I wonder, when people say that, what they're really saying. The other part of it is that we're journalists, and people have to understand, these uncomfortable political conversations... the athletes are dragging us here. I didn't ask Colin Kaepernick to kneel. He did it on his own. So, was I supposed to act like he didn't? Gregg Popovich, every week at his press conferences, is having a 10-minute soliloquy on Donald Trump. Am I supposed to act like he's not doing that? You have athletes saying they're going to the White House, not going to the White House, that's all sports news. It didn't just start with this generation of athletes, it's always been that way. Sometimes when I hear a viewer say they don't want their politics mixed with sports, I say, "What did you think about Muhammad Ali?" And then all of a sudden it's glowing praise.
In another interview she said:
Whether we want to discuss it or not, athletes are dragging us into these conversations. It's not that Mike [her co-host, Michael Smith] and I wake up one day and say, "Hey, today we're going to be MSNBC." It's usually based off a news story that is relevant to sports.
If ESPN attempts to suspend or fire Jemele Hill for telling the truth, people need to come to her defense in a big way.
Munroe Bergdorf, L'Oreal's First Trans Model Fired for Calling Out White Supremacy
Munroe Bergdorf, a transgender model was recently hired by L'Oreal to be featured in a YouTube ad for its True Match Foundation. However, Bergdorf's deal with the company did not last very long.
Bergdorf posted comments on Facebook calling out white supremacy, white privilege and systemic racism in the United States. She wrote:
Honestly I don't have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people" .... "Because most of ya'll don't even realize or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this shit." .... "Come see me when you realise that racism isn't learned, it's inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege," she added. "Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth... then we can talk."
Immediately the media attacked Bergdorf filled with vitriol, how can she say, "All white people are racist?" The media continued by spreading falsehoods and distorting her statements. In fact, Bergdorf's statements represent undeniable truths about the nature of this system and its foundation in white supremacy that continues up until today. Bergdorf did not remain silent after being fired. She took to Facebook again to clarify her statements, making a powerful point:
"When I stated that 'all white people are racist,' I was addressing that fact that western society as a whole, is a SYSTEM rooted in white supremacy--designed to benefit, prioritise and protect white people before anyone of any other race," she wrote. "Unknowingly, white people are SOCIALISED to be racist from birth onwards. It is not something genetic. No one is born racist."
To read more of Munroe Bergdorf's posts and her response to L'Oreal click here
Messages of Resistance at the MTV Video Music Awards
This week MTV held its annual Video Music Awards. This year's VMAs were far from apolitical--a number of artists made righteous political statements, many against white supremacy.
During her presentation for best pop video, Paris Jackson, daughter of Michael Jackson, condemned the white supremacists and Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. Jackson said, "I hope we leave here tonight remembering that we must show these Nazi, white supremacist jerks in Charlottesville and all over the country that as a nation with liberty as our slogan, we have zero tolerance for their violence, hatred and their discrimination."
Katy Perry jokingly compared the votes for best video award for the show to the votes cast in the election, saying this is "one election where the popular vote actually matters." Somali nominee K'naan wore a mock "Make America Great Again" hat with a message scrawled in Arabic.
The night's big performance was by Kendrick Lamar, who started his song with a brief message about police brutality. Later in the night, singer Cardi B showed support by giving a shout out to Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who is being blackballed from the the NFL because of his refusal to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and murder of people of color. Cardi said, "Colin Kaepernick, as long as you kneel with us, we gonna be standing for you baby."
Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville when a white supremacist slammed his car into a group of anti-racist protestors, took the stage at one point. She was joined by Robert Wright Lee IV, pastor and descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. "We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism and hate," said Lee. "Today, I call on all of us with privilege and power to answer God's call to confront racism and white supremacy head-on."
Strong and steadfast, Susan Bro spoke about Heather and the foundation she has started in honor of her. She then presented the Best Fight Against the System Awards as a tribute to Heather's passion for social justice. Susan Bro said, "I want people to know that Heather never marched alone. She was always joined by people from every race and every background in this country."
The winners of the Best Fight Against the System Awards were: Logic ft. Damian Lemar Hudson, for "Black Spider Man"; The Hamilton Mixtape, for "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done); Big Sean for "Light"; Alessia Cara, for "Scars To Your Beautiful" (Body image); Taboo ft. Shailene Woodley, for "Stand Up/Stand N Rock #NoDAPL"; and John Legend for "Surefire."
Punk Rock Band Anti-Flag: Time to remove "all monuments to the Confederacy and the racism for which they stand"
Punk rock band Anti-Flag has released a new track, "Racists," in the wake of the recent fascist/white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. In the lyric video, photos of the KKK, Confederate flag, pro-Trump signs, and other images appear on the screen along with the song's words, including the chorus:
Just 'cause you don't know you're racist A bigot with a check list Just 'cause you don't know you're racist You don't get a pass when you're talkin' your shit
Along with releasing the song, the band released a statement saying:
We stand in solidarity with those fighting racism and fascism in the streets of Charlottesville and beyond. We believe it is time for the removal of all monuments to the confederacy and the racism for which they stand. We must put these symbols of white supremacy into places where the proper context can be provided for what they actually are; outdated, backwards, and antithetical to what we believe the values of humanity should be. It is past time to have real conversations on systemic racism and America's history of it. There are museums memorializing the Holocaust all across Europe, while America continues to try to hide from its racist and murderous past and present
NFL Player Anquan Boldin Quits Because of Charlottesville: "There's something bigger than football"
All-Pro National Football League wide receiver and Super Bowl champion Anquan Boldin has quit football, just two weeks after signing a contract with the Buffalo Bills, saying, "Just seeing things that transpired over the last week or so [in Charlottesville], I think for me there's something bigger than football at this point." In an interview with ESPN, Boldin said he was "drawn to make the larger fight for human rights a priority" and that "my life's purpose is bigger than football."
Boldin, a 14-year NFL veteran, said that he has been considering retirement for a while, but the events that unfolded in Charlottesville helped prompt his decision. He said, "I can remember as a kid wanting to get to the NFL and wanting to be a professional football player. I dedicated my life to that, and I never thought anything would take the place of that passion. But for me, it has."
He went on, "I'm uncomfortable with how divided we are as a country. Is it something new to us? No. Is it something that we're just starting to experience? No. But to see just how divided we are, I'm uncomfortable with that."
Last year, Boldin was awarded the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award for his volunteer and charity work. In talking about that, he said, "Humanitarian work is something that I've been working on for years. Advocating for equality, criminal justice reform, all of those things are something that I've been working on for years. So this is not just a fly-by-night decision for me. It's something that I've been dealing with for years, and it's something that I'm willing to dedicate my life towards. Do I think I can solve all the problems that we have in this country? Of course not. But I think I do have a duty to stand up and make my voice heard and be a voice for those that don't have a voice.
"My passion for the advocacy work that I do outweighs my passion for football at this point," he said. "So I'm not coming back to play for a contender or to do anything else. I'm done with the game of football."
Artist Joseph Guay on his "Border Wall" Installation in Atlanta
Several weeks ago, a large art installation popped up along a busy Atlanta street. The project is "Border Wall," by Joseph Guay, who explains, "It is modeled after the proposed $20 Billion dollar wall for the US/Mexico 1,989 mile border. The purpose of this installation is to create social awareness on the issues surrounding immigration in the United States." Guay's wall is 40 feet long, 16 feet tall and made of steel, rebar, and concrete.
As part of his conception for the work, the "Border Wall" was constructed by undocumented Mexican workers. One side of the wall shows a giant image of Donald Trump, the other side is adorned with a massive Mexican flag. The "Border Wall" sits strikingly behind a barbwire fence in an abandoned parking lot. Guay has invited anyone who wants to express their thoughts on the Trump wall and on the issue of immigrants and immigration by posting and writing graffiti on the wall. In just a few weeks, the wall has been covered mostly with anti-Trump statements, messages of love for immigrants, and a number of Refuse Fascism NO! signs.
On his website , Joseph Guay says:
"The incredible souls that we label as illegals, poor immigrants, the people who want to steal our jobs...( undocumented Mexican labor workers ) have actually come together to help construct this wall. They believe in showing the world what a dividing wall looks and feels like. They believe in letting the American public know, in a peaceful way, that they are not here to take anything. They are actually here to give and help build our 'United' States. One worker has shared several stories of his difficult journey here. He also explained how other individuals raised $15,000 US in order to pay an illegal transporter to get them into this country... only to be treated like slaves on their arrival. Every story he tells makes me upset at the incorrect way we are dealing with this issue. I hope this project will give a better voice to the difficult topics individuals face that are only looking for a better life, and the difficult topics we face as a country. I can't help but ask myself... Does this wall stand for more than just a border crossing point? Maybe it's a symbol of division.... division of land, of cultures, of race, and equality. If we start going in this direction as a nation then where do we stop? I do not know, but I hope we can collectively explore the path together and find a more humane solution."
Artist Joseph Guay's "Border Wall" Installation in Atlanta Photo: special to revcom.us
Mitch O'Connell, Artist, on his Anti-Trump Billboard in Mexico City: "Mexico came to mind because Trump started out his campaign by being cruel and mean to everyone in Mexico"
Chicago-based artist Mitch O'Connell's artwork featuring an "alien invader" image of Donald Trump now towers above one of Mexico City's busiest roads. The billboard features a monstrous image of Trump with a blue and red fleshless face and the slogan "Make America Great Again," and an American flag waves in the background.
O'Connell said the idea came as he was designing a poster for a science-fiction and horror film festival. The artist said that he intended the project to be posted in a U.S. city but was denied a permit 30 times. "No one wanted to touch it because it's political," he said. O'Connell's mind then turned to Mexico. He said, "Mexico came to mind because Trump started out his campaign by being cruel and mean to everyone in Mexico." With the help of an Argentinian artist living in Mexico City, O'Connell brought his controversial billboard to fruition.
O'Connell says, "With every month that passed since I did the drawing two years ago, he has become more like that crazy alien. It seems over time he became more and more like the movie, so it became more and more appropriate over time."
David Strathairn: "July 15, We Have to Stand Up and Say NO!"
From David Strathairn:
Our form of a humane, compassionate, all-inclusive governance, guaranteed us by the founding principles of our constitution, a government, remember?, "of the people, by the people, and for the people", is in a battle for its life against the vile, malignant, fascist agenda of the Trump/Pence regime.
This regime and it's co-conspirators, is being allowed to infiltrate more widely, more deeply, and more insidiously, into the precious fabric of our daily lives, everyday, assaulting our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by spreading bias, hatred, greed, and distrust; threatening to tear apart our own nation's vital need for communality and inclusiveness; displaying a disgusting example of basic human decency; attempting to establish economic policies that will only fill their already bulging pockets while fleecing tens of millions of people of essential human services; trying to pass laws of ethnic, religious, and gender oppression; seeking to control the way we chose our public servants; arrogantly and ignorantly destabilizing crucial global alliances to a frightening degree; and willfully denying, while adding to, the undisputed scientific facts that the health of our planet is under serious duress. And this is all happening right under our noses.
We have to stand up and say NO. However we can, Wherever we can. Before it's too late. Add your voice on July 15th . The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, National Education Association: "We will not find common ground with an administration that is cruel and callous to our children and their families."
Over the weekend, the National Education Association (NEA) met for their annual conference in Boston. The NEA has three million members at all levels of education and describes itself as the "largest professional employee organization" in the U.S. The tone of the conference was certainly different from years past--fear and defiance of the Trump Regime permeated the air.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the NEA, delivered a speech indicting Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, for their "profoundly disturbing" agenda aimed at destroying public education. She said, "I do not trust their motives. I do not believe their alternative facts. I see no reason to assume they will do what is best for our students and their families."
While not naming them by name, Garcia made clear that the NEA was taking a sharply different stand from heads of other unions who have had friendly meetings with Trump: "There will be no photo-op.... We will not find common ground with an administration that is cruel and callous to our children and their families."
In her speech Garcia warned that educators' resistance will have a backlash from the Trump regime: "They're going to hit us with everything they've got because we are a threat to them. They will try to take away your freedom to organize. They will try to take away your freedom to negotiate with a collective voice. They will try to silence us because when we win, the entire community wins." Garcia went on to say that teachers must be prepared to fight back against the Trump/Devos's fascist agenda while defending the students, families, and communities under attack.
Read text of her talk here
Neil Young: "Children of Destiny"
Neil Young surprise-released a new song titled "Children of Destiny" in time for the Fourth of July weekend. The song features a new young rock group, Promise of the Real, fronted by Willie Nelson's son, Lukas Nelson, as well as a 65-piece orchestra. The video for the song shows flag-waving crowds, protests/marches, beautiful nature scenes, and the destruction of war. The song shifts between upbeat to melancholy and so does the imagery.
The song's chorus is powerful and a call to resistance. Young sings:
Stand up for what you believe Resist the powers that be Preserve the land and save the seas For the children of destiny. The children of you and me
Then, suddenly, the imagery shifts and so does the emotion of the song as Young sings:
Should goodness ever lose, and evil steal the day Should happy sing the blues, and peaceful fade away. What would you do? What would you say? How would you act on that new day?
The upbeat chorus kicks back in as Young answers his own questions with images of resistance and protests: "Resist the powers that be..."
Watch the video:
Corey Stoll, actor in New York Public Theater's production of Julius Caesar , calls the performance an act of resistance
Corey Stoll played Julius Caesar's assassin, Marcus Brutus, in the New York Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar. The Public Theatre's staging of the play depicted the murdered title character as Donald Trump--and this outraged the fascists. Trump's fascist base was up in arms, and they disrupted the performances multiple times.
In an essay written after the final show, Stoll says that he realized that the play itself was an act of resistance. "The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling," recalls Stoll. He continues, "At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance."
Stoll and the rest of the cast performed amidst the media's distortion of the meaning and intention of the play, along with fascist trolls yelling things like, "Liberal hate kills" and "Goebbels would be proud." (Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.) In addition, Donald Trump Jr. went on TV to lambaste the play, claiming that it was responsible for the shooting at the congressional baseball game. The director of the play also said that the performance received multiple death threats.
Stoll writes, "In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act. I'm thankful for all the beautiful defenses of our production written in the last few weeks. But the cliche is true: In politics, when you're explaining, you're losing. So if you're making art, by all means question yourself and allow yourself to be influenced by critics of good faith. But don't allow yourself to be gaslighted or sucked into a bad-faith argument. A play is not a tweet. It can't be compressed and embedded and it definitely can't be delivered apologetically. The very act of saying anything more nuanced than 'us good, them bad' is under attack, and I'm proud to stand with artists who do. May we continue to stand behind our work, and, when interrupted, pick it right back up from 'liberty and freedom.'"
Read Stoll's entire essay at Vulture.com .
Diala Shamas, supervising attorney at the International Human Rights Clinic, on Supreme Court reinstating parts of Trump's Muslim ban: "Lawyers alone can't save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it."
Diala Shamas, a lecturer in law and supervising attorney at Stanford Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, has worked extensively with Muslim communities in the U.S. as well as refugees abroad. Her June 27 piece for the Washington Post, which appeared right after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated large parts of the Trump/Pence regime's Muslim ban, was titled "Lawyers alone can't save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it."
Shamas begins by recalling that when Trump first issued the Muslim ban in January, she and other lawyers who went to the airports to help immigrants and refugees detained or stranded because of the ban were treated like "superheroes" by the crowds that had gathered. While she appreciated the good will, she also writes that "it also seemed to foreshadow a dangerous tendency to rely on the courts and lawyers to act as a balance to our new administration's executive power."
Her fear came to life when the Supreme Court reinstated significant parts of the Muslim ban, which had been blocked by several appeals courts. Shamas explains that "The logic of this decision turns fundamental premises of refugee law, immigration law and the international system on their heads..." As she notes, "Significantly, it was also a per curiam decision, issued on behalf of the full court--meaning that the justices usually considered bastions of the left partook in its holding and its underlying logic."
Shamas warns, "While lawyers are important allies, the dangers of entrusting us with the pushback against executive overreach--as the liberal camp began to do almost instantly after Trump issued the original executive order--are now evident." She points to U.S. history and present-day struggles as evidence that rights cannot be won solely by relying on the courts: "Even landmark civil rights cases--whether Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education-- were preceded by significant organizing and mobilization. Victories in the Supreme Court (and in lower courts) reflected their times, cementing hard-earned popular progress only after the political ground had already begun to shift."
Shamas cautions people against "finding comfort" in the possibility of the Supreme Court further reviewing the case or the case becoming moot by that time. Instead, she remarks, "We must renew popular and political interest in pushing back against the executive order--and the many iterations that could follow, including other forms of discriminatory immigration profiling--in more sustained, nonlegal ways."
Read Diala Shamas's article here .
Moby: "In This Cold Place" music video portrays horrors of the Trump regime--and is attacked by fascist ghouls
Musician Moby and the Void Pacific Choir recently released the new music video "In This Cold Place" featuring animation by Steve Cutts. Among the many animated characters in the video is Trump as a Transformers-like robot that wreaks destruction and then turns into a swastika/dollar sign and self-destructs. Trump supporters are lashing out at Moby for this work of art. One fascist blog, for example, accused him of "corrupting children into hatred and accepting violence against President Trump." As RefuseFascism.org points out, "Meanwhile, around the country, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and others face threats to their well-being and their very lives on a daily basis at the hands of these same fascists. This is art that plays an important part in exposing the illegitimacy of this regime. It deserves to be shared, debated, and defended."
Watch the video:
Reza Aslan, former host of CNN series Believer : "When the house is on fire you can't just calmly describe the flames. You need to get onto the roof and scream at the top of your lungs, 'Fire!'"
Reza Aslan is the former host of the CNN show Believer , which followed Aslan as he traveled the world and explored different religions. Aslan, who is Muslim, and his staff were deep into the production of the second season of the show, and he was literally packing his bags to fly to the first location to shoot some footage when he received the news that his show had been canceled. Why? Following the recent terror attacks in London, Trump seized the opportunity to reiterate the fascist call for a ban on Muslims traveling to the U.S. Outraged, Aslan took to Twitter and called President Trump "a piece of shit"--and for that, CNN fired him. This was soon after this same network cravenly fired comedian Kathy Griffin for a joke she made that Trump did not like.
In a recent interview on Deadline.com, Aslan said he was "bummed" about the canceling of his show and having to let his staff go in the middle of production--but, he said, "I think that there is something much more important right now, which is the assault on our democracy and I need to make sure that that fight is the fight that I am fighting first and foremost."
Asked whether he regrets his tweet, Aslan responded, "I don't regret the sentiment. I'm not trying to exaggerate here but look, when the house is on fire you can't just calmly describe the flames. You need to get onto the roof and scream at the top of your lungs, 'Fire!' And I think that nothing less is tolerable at this time that we are living in."
Aslan's sense of urgency is something that people broadly should learn from and act on.
Read the rest of Reza Aslan's interview here .
Jacob Ayol, Security Supervisor at Denver International Airport and Sudanese Refugee, Speaks Out Against Trump's Muslim Ban
Jacob Ayol came to the United States in 2003 from Sudan. He spent several years in the U.S. military before finding his current job as security supervisor for the Denver International Airport.
He was at the airport when Trump's first Muslim travel ban went into effect, and says there was lots of fear and confusion among many people at the airport. As the head of security, he faced questions from employees and passengers who were coming to him for answers that he could not provide. He states that there was an overall "fear of the unknown." The travel ban reminded him of the fear felt in his former country and the religious divide between Sudan and South Sudan. "Each wanted to be superior, and each was afraid of the other," Ayol says. "It has brought our country to its knees and divided our country. It's not just history; it's real life. We just all want to live. We want to appreciate life and not tell the other what to believe."
Ayol has joined with the Service Employees International Union in opposing the travel ban and believes that sharing his story and the stories of other refugees will help in that fight. "It's important if you've ever lived where you don't see buildings, where you don't know where you will eat tomorrow, you don't see clean water. If you ever live like that, you will understand that it is very important that someone have a shot at life."
Read the rest of Jacob Ayol's story here .
Steven Thrasher, Writer for the Guardian : "Yes there is a free speech crisis. But its victims are not white men."
A writer at large for the Guardian US, Steven Thrasher was, among other honors, named Journalist of the Year in 2012 by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. In a June 5 piece at theguardian.com, Thrasher makes incisive points about what is widely being discussed by media "talking heads on both the left and the right" as a "freedom of speech crisis." Thrasher notes that those talking heads are "not lacking in a freedom to speak, nor are the white conservatives on college campuses they seem so worried about. It's women and people of color who struggle the most finding a platform--but there is a conspicuous lack of concern about that by free speech crusaders."
Thrasher raises the recent example of what happened to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . After she gave a commencement address at Hampshire College in which she said that Donald Trump had "fulfilled the campaign promises of a campaign organized and built upon racism, corporatism and militarism," she was threatened with lynching and being shot in the head; and she said, "I have been repeatedly called 'nigger,' 'bitch,' 'cunt,' 'dyke,' 'she-male,' and 'coon'--a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence."
Thrasher writes that he and his journalist colleagues have also been recipients of such outrageous and violent threats. And as Thrasher notes, all this is not happening in a vacuum: "They are happening in a country where the majority of white voters elected a man who bragged about grabbing women 'by the pussy' without consent. They are happening in a country where, as Business Insider put it , 'Trump has unleashed a white crime wave' against people of color from Maryland to Kansas to Oregon .
"They are happening in a country where Confederate monuments are removed at night (for the safety of those removing them) but where pro-Confederate forces feel safe to carrying torches . They are happening in a country where an academic philosophy journal will publish a Black Lives Matter symposium without any black philosophers.
"And they are happening in a country where black children are shot by the police, where the greatest basketball player of all time has a racial slur painted on his home, and where a noose was found at the nation's newest black history museum."
Read Steven Thrasher's article online here .
C. Christine Fair, Georgetown University Professor, on Confronting neo-Nazi Leader Richard Spencer: "This is our December 1932"
Christine Fair is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. A May 25 op-ed in the Washington Post by Fair was titled, "I confronted Richard Spencer at my gym. Racists don't get to lift in peace." Recently, while working out at the gym, Fair came face to face with Richard Spencer. Spencer heralds himself as the new face of white supremacy, the "alt-right," which is in fact a euphemism for fascist neo-Nazi thugs. Spencer is a strong supporter of Trump, whom he believes is mainstreaming his racist vision of an "ethno-state." Some will recall, after the election, Spencer and his "alt-right" storm troopers celebrating and referring to Donald Trump as their "Fuhrer," giving Nazi salutes, and shouting "Hail Trump," summoning to mind the Nazi "Heil Hitler."
Fair courageously called Spencer out as a "vocal propagandist for racism" right in the middle of his workout. Immediately, Spencer took to YouTube to decry his "unfair" treatment and lambaste Fair in the most misogynist of terms.
As Fair points out, Spencer "sought to garner sympathy by arguing that he is a model gym user--he should be allowed to spread hate and stoke racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and other bigoted forms of violence, and organize torchlit nighttime rallies that conjure up images of similar rallies staged by the Klan--all without facing consequences for his actions when off the job, so to speak." Fair simply responds, "But Spencer is wrong."
Fair goes on to compare the current historical moment with that of Germany in December 1932. She says, "I imagine Germans sitting around their tables in December 1932 lamenting the eroding civil society and expansion of hateful, nationalist rhetoric between bites of Wiener schnitzel and sips of beer. They see what's coming but they are too uncomfortable to do anything."
Fair ends her article with a challenge to today's "Good Germans" (she refers to Richard Collins, a Black U.S. Army lieutenant who was recently murdered by a white man who was involved in a Facebook group that posts racist material):
This is our December 1932. We have a choice. Good people can acquiesce to the purported demands of polite society and concede that Spencer's right to lift weights in peace is more important that the rights of men like Collins to live full and productive lives, that being a white supremacist is not a 9-to-5 job, and that as long as he doesn't bring his torch into an establishment, Spencer and his associates should be treated as any other civilized person. Or we can refuse to treat this hateful, dangerous ideology as just another way of being, and fight it in every space we occupy.
I've made my choice. You need to make yours.
Read C. Christine Fair's op-ed here .
Lincoln Blades, Contributor to Teen Vogue : "White male terrorists are an issue we should discuss"
In a May 9 piece for Teen Vogue , Lincoln Blades explores why the United States needs to take seriously the presence of white male extremists. He contrasts the swirling media coverage and intense government response of mass attacks carried out by Islamic jihadists and the lack of coverage by the media and the government's reluctance to identify attacks carried out by white (often right wing) men as acts of terrorism. He also notes Trump and other politicians' fierce response to attacks by Muslims, while refusing to address the far more likely scenario of white supremacists attacking Black people.
After the San Bernardino shooting, Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio all jumped at the opportunity to declare that America was at "war." Then candidate, and current president, Donald Trump took the rhetoric a step further by calling for a broad-sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States. But, five days earlier, a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs was targeted by a white male devout Christian, and there was no degree of rage expressed by those same Republican presidential candidates or the accompanying hyperbolic war proclamations. In fact, the shooter, Robert Dear, was referred to as a "gentle loner" by The New York Times ....
Who radicalized Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in 2015 executed nine unarmed black churchgoers inside of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina? After he was arrested, it was discovered that he had published a website where he espoused racist ideology, regurgitating bigoted talking points on the false "epidemic" of "black-on-white" crimes, espousing that black people are inherently "violent" and that white women need to be protected from black men. It's easy to say that his views were influenced by a small, fringe group of insane right-wing extremists, but it's seemingly far more difficult for us to collectively accept that these prejudiced talking points have been given life through mainstream media bias, and even by the president of the United States, who once tweeted a racist meme that incorrectly cited myths about "black-on-white" crime in America as fact.
Read Lincoln Blade's entire article here .
Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie--on connection between the murders by a white-supremacist Nazi in Portland and Trump's anti-Muslim bigotry
On May 26, Jeremy Joseph Christian, a known white supremacist and neo-Nazi, began harassing two teenage Muslim women on MAX, Portland's subway train. Christian was verbally assaulting the two young women, yelling racist and anti-Muslim slurs. When several men on the train attempted to intervene, Christian pulled out a knife and stabbed three men. Two of the men died from their wounds, and a third is in a hospital.
Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie, a contributor at HuffingtonPost.com wrote a powerful piece a day after the attacks. Currie is a minister in the United Church of Christ, Director of the Center for Peace and Spirituality, and University Chaplain at Pacific University. He lives just a few blocks from where the attack took place. In his piece, Currie discusses correlation between hate crimes and the election of Donald Trump, pointing to the reported increase in hate crimes by 197% since the day after the election to February. He notes that Trump and others are being helped in spreading anti-Muslim bigotry by "Christian leaders such as Franklin Graham, a close ally of the president."
Dr. Currie calls on Christians and others to oppose the hate incited by Trump and his cronies:
Islam is not evil or a dangerous religion. Fundamentalism, however, can turn any faith tradition into a violent movement. Consider the number of terrorist bombings at women's health clinics in the United States by so-called Christians over the last several decades, and the link between white nationalist domestic terrorist groups that identify as part of a fringe movement within Christianity.
Trump, Graham, and others have helped to incite violence at their rallies and in the streets. This new normal can only be called sinful. The attack in Portland can only be called domestic terrorism.
My prayer is that every Christian body speaks out against hate crimes such as the one that occurred in Portland last night. It is vital that the interfaith movement in the United States continues to stand-up as a counterweight to those who would use religion as a tool of division. All our faith traditions, at their core, are about building just societies and freeing people from oppression. We must be about the work of bringing people together; not building walls to keep one another apart.
Read the whole article by Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie article here .
Max Perry Mueller, Religious Studies Professor: How Trump and Pence Together Embody a "White Christian America" in Decline
Religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller, writing before the election of the Trump/Pence regime, dug into the seeming contradiction between the worldview of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Mueller, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, described Mike Pence's long history of perverse Christian fascist legislation, which is substantial to say the least. He reminded readers that Pence as vice president would be "just a heartbeat--or impeachment--away from the Oval Office," describing him as "a politician who, as Pence himself implied at the vice presidential debate, believes it his 'calling' to legislate his religious views into public policy."
In his piece, Mueller hit on some important reasons why Trump and Pence, despite some of their obvious differences in worldview and public persona, dangerously complement each other:
Pence's first--and primary--identity as a conservative Christian and the governing worldview that it forms in many ways aligns with Trump's own view of seeing the world divided starkly into allies and enemies, good deals and bad deals, security and menace.
In this sense, both Trump and Pence are restorationists. And their restorationist visions for America are complementary. Trump's is racial; Pence's is religious. Together, their ticket embodies a "white Christian America" in decline, as Robert P. Jones has powerfully described it . In a Trump-Pence ticket, white Christian America not only hopes to resist the forces demographic and cultural change, but to restore white Protestant Americans (especially men) to their place of unchallenged preeminence.
See Mueller's article, "The Christian Worldview of Mike Pence," here .
Michelangelo Signorile, Editor of HuffPost "Queer Voices" on Firing of Comey: "Stop Being Polite and Immediately Start Raising Hell"
In a May 10 article, Michelangelo Signorile, editor-at-large of the "Queer Voices" column on HuffPost, says that with the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump "made his most frightening authoritarian power grab yet." He writes, "This could be viewed as a direct step toward consolidating power and, yes, toward fascism, as we've seen play out in other countries--in Turkey recently, and in many other countries in history from which you could choose as an example."
Signorile puts forward sharply that, given this very dangerous situation, "It's time to move beyond polite protests within specified boundaries. It's time to escalate the expression of our outrage and our anger in a massive way."
He goes on:
Starting today and from here on , no elected official--certainly those in the GOP defending and supporting Trump on a variety of issues, for example--should be able to sit down for a nice, quiet lunch or dinner in a Washington, DC eatery or even in their own homes. They should be hounded by protestors everywhere, especially in public--in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts, and yes, on the public property outside their homes and apartments, in Washington and back in their home states.
White House officials too--those enabling the authoritarian--need to be challenged everywhere, as do all those at the conservative think tanks who support Trump and those who publicly defend him in their columns and on television.
Go here to read the entire piece, "To Save America We Must Stop Being Polite And Immediately Start Raising Hell."
Joan Baez: "In the new political and cultural reality in which we find ourselves, there is much work to be done"
On April 7, in recognition of her nearly 60-year folk singing career, Joan Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following is from her acceptance speech:
What has given my life deep meaning, and unending pleasure, has been to use my voice in the battle against injustice. It has brought me in touch with my own purpose. It has also brought me in touch with people of every background... And I've met and tried to walk in the shoes of those who are hungry, thirsty, cold and cast out, people imprisoned for their beliefs, and others who have broken the law, paid the price, and now live in hopelessness and despair. Of exonerated prisoners who have spent decades in solitary confinement, awaiting execution. Of exhausted refugees, immigrants, the excluded and the bullied. Those who have fought for this country, sacrificed, and now live in the shadows of rejection. People of color, the old, the ill, the physically challenged, the LGBTQ community.
And now, in the new political and cultural reality in which we find ourselves, there is much work to be done.
Where empathy is failing and sharing has been usurped by greed and the lust for power, let us double, triple, and quadruple our own efforts to empathize and to give of our resources and our selves. Let us together repeal and replace brutality, and make compassion a priority. Together let us build a great bridge, a beautiful bridge to once again welcome the tired and the poor, and we will pay for that bridge with our commitment. We the people must speak truth to power, and be ready to make sacrifices. We the people are the only one who can create change. I am ready. I hope you are, too. I want my granddaughter to know that I fought against an evil tide, and had the masses by my side.
Read the whole speech here .
Henry Scott Wallace: "American Fascism, in 1944 and Today"
In a May 12 op-ed in the New York Times, Henry Scott Wallace--lawyer and co-chairman of the foundation Wallace Global Fund, which promotes "sustainable development"--compares Trump to the fascist Benito Mussolini, whose regime ruled Italy leading up to and through World War 2. Wallace's grandfather was Henry A. Wallace, who was vice-president under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s.
In 1944, Henry A. Wallace wrote an article in the New York Times titled "The Danger of American Fascism." According to Henry Scott Wallace, his grandfather's article "described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears..." He writes, "'[I]n my view, he predicted President Trump."
In the op-ed, Henry Scott Wallace cites different quotes from his grandfather's article and points to their relevance today. One point the op-ed addresses is how fascists use lies:
In fact, they use lies strategically, to promote civic division, which then justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Through "deliberate perversion of truth and fact," [Henry A. Wallace] said, "their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity."
Thus might lying about unprecedented high crime rates legitimize a police state. Lying about immigrants being rapists and terrorists might justify a huge border wall, mass expulsions and religion-based immigration bans. Lying about millions of illegal votes might excuse suppression of voting by disfavored groups.
The op-ed appears in the May 12 print issue of the NY Times and online here .
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah) in The New Yorker , December 2, 2016
"Now is not the time to tiptoe around historical references. Recalling Nazism is not extreme; it is the astute response of those who know that history gives both context and warning."
Statement from Faculty at the University of Southern California, published in the Los Angeles Times , March 23, 2017
We are USC Faculty.
We are scientists, artists, and thinkers from over 115 countries, working together every day, side by side, to understand the world around us and to share what we've learned with future generations.
We proudly affirm the core mission of the university as a place for the generation of knowledge, the preservation of scholarship, and informed discussion and debate, all of which are vital to a healthy democracy.
We will vigorously defend our core values of academic freedom, high standards of evidence, free inquiry, openness, and inclusion against policies and actions driven by fear, bigotry, and propaganda.
We are committed to:
-- protecting the human rights of our students, our fellow faculty, staff, and all members of the USC community, irrespective of their race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, nationality, or citizenship status.
-- supporting and encouraging all university efforts to provide critical resources for staff, students and faculty who are most vulnerable and at greatest risk.
-- supporting faculty, students, and staff who engage in civil disobedience and protest if members of the academic community are harmed or deported due to targeted state actions.
We will Fight On!
Shaun King: "No President who ever owned human beings should be honored"
In his article "No President who ever owned human beings should be honored" on March 15, Shaun King wrote in the New York Daily News that Adolf Hitler "is a monster who should never be honored," and continued:
Just as this is true for Hitler, it is true for any American President who ever owned human beings and forced them into a life of slavery. The Holocaust and slavery are each an unjust disgrace.
King details the monstrous horrors of slavery and then calls out Trump:
Today, Donald Trump is going out of his way to honor President Andrew Jackson. He should never be honored. Over his lifetime his family owned at least 300 human beings. This is terrible and no contribution he made in his life will ever outweigh this fact. To this very day, Andrew Jackson's own estate openly admits that the key source of his wealth came from owning human beings and forcing them to work on his plantation. At the time Jackson died, he owned about 150 people. He was a full-fledged unrepentant bigot. The enslaved Africans on his plantation were often whipped and beaten. If they escaped, fugitive squads searched for them and returned them back to the plantation. One advertisement put out by Jackson for a runaway slave offered $10 for every 100 lashes given to the slave who was caught. Is that not sick to you?
This makes Andrew Jackson a monster. Nothing he did as President of the United States is good enough to look past this.
The same holds true for every single American President who owned human beings.
Read the whole article here
Michael Bennett, NFL football player, supports the women's strike on International Women's Day
Michael Bennett, who plays for the Seattle Seahawks, who participated in the pro football players' national anthem protest, and who refused to be a shill for Israel against the Palestinian people (see " Pro Football Player Michael Bennett Refuses to Be a Shill for Israel " Revolution, February 14, 2017, revcom.us), had his statement in support of the women's strike on International Women's Day read by Dave Zirin on his podcast.
Here are some excerpts from Bennett's statement:
"As a Black man in America sometimes I get overwhelmed and discouraged by what I see, from the police killings of unarmed Black men to the unequal educational system to mass incarceration, but when I look into my daughter's eyes, I see the courage of Harriet Tubman, the patience of Rosa Parks, the soul of Ida B. Wells, the passion of Fanny Lou Hamer, and the heart of Angela Davis. I see the future. I see hope. And, I'm inspired because it will be women who lead the future. So, I'm writing this to express my unconditional solidarity for the women's strike on International Women's Day, March 8th."
"It's about the women across the Earth who are suffering. Women not so worried about the glass ceiling because they are trying to survive a collapsing floor. It's about women of color across the Earth who live on less than one dollar a day. It's about all women who are subject to sexual assault and violence.
"I stand with the women's strike because I agree with their unity statement that reads that this day is 'organized by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed towards working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, and lesbian women.'"
"I encourage my fellow football players to take off their helmets and stand with these brave women across the world."
"We need change, and to quote Frederick Douglass, 'Without struggle, there is no progress.'"
(The statement is 35 minutes into the podcast at https://www.thenation.com/article/the-edge-of-sports-podcast-the-enduring-legacy-of-hoop-dreams/ )
Former ABC News Reporters, Executives, Producers Urge Strong Stand Against Trump
As of March 1, more than 230 former ABC News correspondents, executives and producers have signed a letter urging the network's top executive to take a firm stand against any Trump administration effort to curtail press access. The letter was written after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a briefing on February 24 and, in an unprecedented move, excluded several news organizations that have done stories Trump didn't like.
The letter called the February 24 incident "an alarming new development enacted by an administration that has declared war on respected news outlets" and asked James Goldston, president of ABC News, to "take a public stand" and "Refuse to take part in any future White House briefings based on an invitation list of who's in/who's out." The letter noted that there has been strong public protest by Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times , and statements by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg that they would not participate in future briefing where reporters are barred.
Signees include former White House correspondent Sam Donaldson; former ABC reporters Ken Kashiwahara, Jeanne Meserve and Lynn Sherr; four former executives and four former executive producers of "World News Tonight" and top leaders at "Nightline," "20/20'' and "Good Morning America." Kayce Freed Jennings, the widow of the late anchor Peter Jennings, was also one of the signers.
ABC News is one of the media organizations Trump has labeled as the "enemy of the American people" and "fake news." ABC was allowed into the Spicer briefing, while CNN, New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Politico and BuzzFeed were denied access. Reporters from other organizations, including the Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine, refused to attend the briefing in protest.
Tim Rogers at Fusion: Calling Trump "Presidential" Is the First Step to Normalizing Fascism
Tim Rogers is senior editor for Latin America at the cable and satellite TV channel Fusion. After Trump's February 28 speech to Congress, Rogers wrote a piece titled "Calling Trump's speech 'presidential' is the first step to normalizing fascism" (March 1, 2017) noting that "talking heads were quick to applaud Trump for acting 'presidential.'" Rogers goes on to say:
But Trump's speech to Congress was only presidential by fascist standards. What Trump laid out, in the methodical words penned by an ideologue behind the throne, was a frightening vision of a country under siege by foreign hordes that are trying to establish a "beachhead of terrorism" to convert the United States into a "sanctuary for extremists."
Trump depicted a dark world in which the U.S. is fighting "a network of lawless savages" that it must "extinguish ...from our planet."
Trump was talking about ISIS in that instance, but his fear-mongering over foreigners wasn't limited to Islamic State fighters any more than the travel ban was limited to Muslims from seven countries. The narrative of barbarians at the gate was woven throughout Trump's speech, which seemed to build on George W. Bush's worldview of "You're either with us, or against us." But Trump's view is even racist and alienating by W's standards.
From his call to build a border wall as "a very effective weapon against drugs and crime," to reiterating his appallingly cynical pledge to create a new Homeland Security Office to "serve American victims" of crimes committed by immigrants, Trump's whole speech was to lay out a dichotomy of us versus them, or "America first" in Trumpspeak. ...
When the speech was over, Trump lackeys congratulated themselves on a "home run"--actually, make that a "grand slam."
But even normally critical pundits said they thought Trump looked "presidential."
That's dangerous thinking. Calling Trump's fear-mongering "presidential" is a first step to normalizing fascism. It's granting acceptance to the dangerous fascists skulking behind the golden curtains of the Oval Office.
Anderson Cooper 360deg @AC360: Van Jones: Trump "became President of the United States" when he honored the widow of the Navy SEAL killed in Yemen. ...
In an America where Trump's speech can be called "presidential," it'll be a slippery slope to despotism.
Read Tim Roger's article in its entirety here .
"I am vowing, here and now, not to show papers in this situation"
" American citizens had their introduction to the Trump-era immigration machine Wednesday ..." So begins "Papers, Please," an article that appeared in The Atlantic online on February 27, about the February 22 domestic flight from SFO to JFK airport where every passenger was told by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents to show their ID before they could get off the plane. The agents claimed they were looking for a passenger who was undocumented and had a criminal record; it turned out that the person they sought was not on the plane.
In the article, written by Garrett Epps, legal scholar, novelist, and contributing editor to The Atlantic , he examines all possible legal authorities and concludes that there is no justification in U.S. law for what was done to the passengers on that plane. And then Epps, demonstrating the courage of his convictions, writes:
" I am vowing, here and now, not to show papers in this situation. I know that it will take gumption to follow through if the situation arises. What will be the reaction of ordinary travelers, some with outstanding warrants or other legal worries? Should we expect heroism of people who just want to get off an airplane? "
"I wasn't pulled out because I'm some kind of revolutionary activist, but my God, I am now." Mem Fox's Terrifying Detention at the Los Angeles Airport
Mem Fox, an award winning author from Australia, was pulled off an airplane when she arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and held in detention for almost two hours and interrogated for 15 minutes. In an op-ed article in The Guardian , she tells of her terrifying, belligerent, and violent experience.
She describes the room "like a waiting room in a hospital but a bit more grim than that.... There was no water, no toilet... Everything was yelled..." She said that she "heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human."
She describes an elderly Iranian woman in a wheelchair where they were yelling at her at the top of their voices--"Arabic? Arabic?" They screamed at her "ARABIC?" She told them "Farsi." A woman from Taiwan was being yelled at about how she made her money: Does it grow on trees? Does it fall from the sky?" Mem said, "...the agony I was surrounded by in that room was like a razor blade across my heart."
When she was called to be interviewed, she was degraded, and called it "monstrous." She told them that she writes books about exclusivity. She had one of her books in her bag and said, "I am all about inclusivity, humanity and the oneness of the humans of the world; it's the theme of my life." He yelled at her, "I can read!" She was standing the whole time and said, "The belligerence and violence of it was really terrifying. I had to hold the heel of my right hand to my heart to stop it beating so hard."
Interview with Claudia Koonz, Historian and Author of The Nazi Conscience
Claudia Koonz is a historian of Nazi Germany and the author of Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, The Nazi Conscience , and other works. She was interviewed on The Michael Slate Show on KPFK Pacifica Radio on February 10. This is a transcript of the interview, slightly edited for length and clarity.
Michael Slate: In broad strokes, let's talk about how fascism developed in Germany.
Claudia Koonz: OK. First of all, let's remember that nobody ever heard of Hitler until the early 1930s. He was unemployed. The only steady job he ever had in his life was when he fought in World War I for four years. He was quite brave.
This was a splinter party. As late as 1928, ten years after the defeat in World War I, the Nazis got 2.6% of the vote. 1930, they got 18% of the vote. 1932 they were up to the high point ever, 37.4% of the vote. So, the Nazis were never voted into power. Hitler was appointed into power.
So the question is, how did this disreputable, fringe party of loudmouth, brawling Stormtroopers get from a tiny splinter party to the center in 1932, which put Hitler in position to get appointed as chancellor?
John Legend: "Are we going to just accept inhumanity, or are we going to resist?"
The singer John Legend has won ten Grammy Awards, one Golden Globe Award, and one Academy Award. He will be playing Frederick Douglass in the second season of the WGN series Underground . In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine he was asked, "Has there been a piece of art that has affected you politically?" He replied:
Books have certainly affected me. In college, I took a class that centered on a book called "Obedience to Authority," which was trying to explain why an ordinary German would be a worker at a concentration camp, or why anyone would be part of a system that is so evil and corrosive, and how they deal with authority and whatever cognitive dissonance they need to have to do something so inhumane. Then we read some James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; all those books in that class opened my eyes to the way human beings deal with authority and deal with how we become inhumane. I took those classes 20 years ago, but I've been thinking about that a lot when I think about how we're reacting to Donald Trump right now.
The interviewer then asked, "How are you applying that thought process to contemporary times?" Legend said:
Yeah, are we just going to go about our lives and try to be normal? I've seen a tweet going around about how a lot of people say that they would have been part of the civil rights movement, so this is basically that chance, this moment of truth for our society. Are we going to just accept inhumanity, or are we going to resist?
Read the New York Times Magazine interview with John Legend here .
Ann Frank Center for Mutual Respect Condemns Trump's So-Called "Condemnation" of Anti-Semitic Attacks
On February 21, Donald Trump issued a statement supposedly condemning anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish institutions. At his February 16 press conference, Trump had insulted and bullied a correspondent from an Orthodox Jewish news agency who asked if Trump could condemn the wave of threats against Jewish institutions. Trump cut him off, yelled "quiet!" and "sit down" and ranted that this was "a very insulting question." Trump then declared himself "the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life" while refusing the reporter's request to condemn attacks on Jewish institutions. Days after this, on February 20, Jewish community centers in ten states were targeted with bomb threats and forced to evacuate. There were also 170 graves at an historic Jewish cemetery in Missouri desecrated in the last few days.
Immediately after Trump's February 21st statement, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect posted a response on Facebook. The Center takes inspiration from Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager hunted down and killed by the Nazis. Her Diary is a famous chronicle of hiding out from the Nazis. The center "calls out prejudice, counters discrimination and advocates for the kinder and fairer world of which Anne Frank dreamed."
The statement said in part:
The President's sudden acknowledgement is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Antisemitism that has infected his own Administration. His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President's Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing.
Berkeley Law School Faculty and Staff: #NoBanNoWall
Members of Berkeley Law (University of California, Berkeley School of Law) are taking a public stand against Trump's executive orders intensifying repression against immigrants and on the U.S.-Mexico border through a #NoBanNoWall photo project . Close-up photos of faculty and staff members show them with handwritten or printed signs.
Their statement reads:
President Trump's immigration executive orders, enforcement actions, and xenophobic threats directly impact members of our law school community.
They undermine the public mission of our university to ensure access to the talented pool of students and researchers that reflects the diversity in the State of California and the world.
They attack the ability of the university to fulfill its unique role as a site for the generation of knowledge and the free exchange of ideas among students, faculty, and staff of all nationalities, backgrounds, and creeds.
They threaten our values of diversity and inclusion, which ensure a vibrant democracy.
We oppose the executive orders and President Trump's attacks on certain communities.
We are committed to maintaining the law school as a just and inclusive community.
The PDF of the poster is available here .
"Hands Off Our Revolution"--More than 200 Artists Around the World Say "We will not go quietly"
When you go to the website, Hands Off Our Revolution, the first thing you see is the flashing words: HANDS OFF OUR BORDERS... WATER... AIR... LAND... CITIES... HOMES... PLANET... BODIES... HEALTH... JUSTICE... FRIENDS... FAMILIES... LOVES.... LIVES...
More than 200 artists, writers, photographers, musicians and curators from around the world--including well-known figures such as Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson, Ed Ruscha, Matthew Barney, Rosalind Krauss, Maya Lin, Hank Willis Thomas, Catherine Opie, Yinka Shonibare, David Byrne, and Michael Stipe--have joined this spirit of resistance, signing the following Mission Statement:
We are a global coalition affirming the radical nature of art. We believe that art can help counter the rising rhetoric of right-wing populism, fascism and the increasingly stark expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and unapologetic intolerance.
We know that freedom is never granted--it is won. Justice is never given--it is exacted. Both must be fought for and protected, yet their promise has seldom been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp, as at this moment.
As artists, it is our job and our duty to reimagine and reinvent social relations threatened by right-wing populist rule. It is our responsibility to stand together in solidarity. We will not go quietly. It is our role and our opportunity, using our own particular forms, private and public spaces, to engage people in thinking together and debating ideas, with clarity, openness and resilience.
The website also announces a project to do a "series of contemporary art exhibitions and actions that confront, head on, the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere... to help envision and shape the world in which we want to live."
The Mission Statement in 10 different languages and the full description of the project are online at handsoffourrevolution.com .
"I want to be a voice for the voiceless": Pro Football Player Michael Bennett Refuses to Be a Shill for Israel
Bennett, who plays in the NFL (National Football League) for the Seattle Seahawks, announced he will not be joining an NFL delegation to Israel.
Bennett has been involved in the struggle by professional athletes to protest police brutality. He took up the protest in the NFL started by San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand for the national anthem. Bennett called for white athletes to take a stand against police murders, saying "You need a white guy to join the fight. The white guy is super important to the fight. For people to really see social injustices, there must be someone from the other side of the race who recognizes the problem, because a lot of times if just one race says there's a problem, nobody is realistic about it." Bennett has also posted photos and quotes from Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on his Instagram page.
Bennett had originally planned to be on the delegation because he wanted to have interaction with both Palestinian and Israeli people. But he learned from an article in the Times of Israel that the trip would isolate him from the Palestinian people and turn him into a "goodwill ambassador." Then he read an open letter in The Nation magazine, signed by John Carlos, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Alice Walker, and others calling on the athletes to "reconsider taking this trip to ensure you are standing on the right side of history."
Bennett then wrote an open letter that he posted on Instagram and Twitter.
Meryl Streep on standing up against "armies of brownshirts and bots": "You have to! You don't have an option"
Actor Meryl Streep received the National Ally for Equality Award at a fundraising gala held by the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ civil rights organization, on Saturday night, February 11. In her acceptance speech, Streep said:
[F]undamentalists, of every stripe everywhere, are exercised and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. We should not be surprised that not everyone is totally down with it.
If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn't lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for. He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is....
I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, over-berated actress, who likes football, of my generation. But that is why you invited me here! Right?
The weight of all these honors is part of what brings me to this podium. It compels me, against every one of my natural instincts (which is to stay home), it compels me to stand up in front of people and say words that haven't been written for me, but that come from my life and my conviction and that I have to stand by....
It's terrifying to put the target on your forehead. ... And it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is if you feel you have to. You have to. You don't have an option, but you have to stand up and speak up and act up.
Hear Meryl Streep's whole speech here .
A Tribe Called Quest at Grammys: "Resist, Resist, Resist"
The Grammy Awards on Sunday night, February 12, closed with an electrifying set by the legendary hip-hop crew A Tribe Called Quest joined by Busta Rhymes, Anderson .Paak, and Consequence. At mid-point in the Tribe's medley of several songs, Busta Rhymes came--on and focused right on the outrages being carried out by Trump and his regime: "I'm not feeling the political climate right now. I just want to thank President Agent Orange for perpetuating all of the evil that you've been perpetuating throughout the United States. I want to thank President Agent Orange for your unsuccessful attempt at the Muslim ban. When we come together--we the people, we the people, people!" As he said those words, Tribe member Q-Tip, along with a woman wearing a hijab and others, bust through a wall on the stage.
Q-Tip then launched into the Tribe song "We the People." And as he went into the hook, which sarcastically hits at those who spew hate and intolerance--"All you Black folks you must go/All you Mexicans you must go/And all you poor folks, you must go/Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways/So all you bad folks, you must go"--a diverse grouping of people of different nationalities, genders, and style of clothing walked up on to the stage. The performers all lined up at one point with fists in the air, and protest signs reading "No Wall No Ban" and photos of different faces were projected in the background.
The powerful performance, inspiring performance closed with the chants from the stage: "Resist! Resist! Resist!"
"The Rock," Misty Copeland, Steph Curry Hit Under Armour for Calling Trump an "Asset"
On Tuesday, February 7, on CNBC's Halftime Report , Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank called Trump "a real asset for the country" and lauded his plans to "make bold decisions and be really decisive." The next day, ballerina Misty Copeland, actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and NBA star Steph Curry, who all have endorsement deals with the athletic clothing company, spoke out against Plank.
Copeland wrote in an Instagram post, "I strongly disagree with Kevin Plank's recent comments in support of Trump." In a Facebook post, Johnson said Plank's comments were "neither my words, nor my beliefs" and said that he would ultimately "stand with this diverse team, the American and global workers, who are the beating heart and soul of Under Armour." Curry told the San Jose Mercury News that he agreed with Plank's comment on Trump... "if you remove the 'et'" from the word "asset." When asked if he would abandon Under Armour, Curry said that if "the leadership is not in line with my core values, then there is no amount of money, there is no platform I wouldn't jump off if it wasn't in line with who I am." Curry went on to say, "So that's a decision I will make every single day when I wake up. If something is not in line with what I'm about, then, yeah, I definitely need to take a stance in that respect."
George Prochnik on Stefan Zweig, Trump, and "When It's Too Late to Stop Fascism"
George Prochnik wrote the book The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (2015). Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer who at the height of his literary career in the 1920s and '30s, was one of the world's most popular writers and most widely translated living author. Zweig was a Jewish intellectual and his books were burned in Berlin in 1933. Like millions of others, with the rise of Hitler, he was driven into exile. Zweig went to London, New York, and then to Brazil where he committed suicide in 1942. Prochnik wrote a piece in the February 6 issue of The New Yorker , "When It's Too Late To Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig." Prochnik says when Zweig sat down to write his biography, "He was determined to trace how the Nazis' reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings." Zweig wrote: "the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the [fascist] movement ... would inevitably collapse in no time" and that Hitler had "elevated lying to a matter of course."
Prochnik writes:
Reading in Zweig's memoir how, during the years of Hitler's rise to power, many well-meaning people "could not or did not wish to perceive that a new technique of conscious cynical amorality was at work," it's difficult not to think of our own present predicament. Last week, as Trump signed a drastic immigration ban that led to an outcry across the country and the world, then sought to mitigate those protests by small palliative measures and denials, I thought of one other crucial technique that Zweig identified in Hitler and his ministers: they introduced their most extreme measures gradually--strategically--in order to gauge how each new outrage was received. "Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest the dose," Zweig wrote. "The doses became progressively stronger until all Europe finally perished from them."...
In Zweig's view, the final toxin needed to precipitate German catastrophe came in February of 1933, with the burning of the national parliament building in Berlin--an arson attack Hitler blamed on the communists but which some historians still believe was carried out by the Nazis themselves. "At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed," Zweig recalled. The destruction of a symbolic edifice--a blaze that caused no loss of life--became the pretext for the government to begin terrorizing its own civilian population. That fateful conflagration took place less than 30 days after Hitler became chancellor. The excruciating power of Zweig's memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.
To read the whole article, go here .
Wagner College (Staten Island, NYC) Profs Denounce Trump Executive Orders
In a February 8 paid ad in the Staten Island Advance newspaper, 33 professors at Wagner College, a liberal arts college in New York City, denounced Trump's executive orders and other actions. The statement is in the form of an open letter to Representative Dan Donovan, a Republican congressman from a district on Staten Island, who supported Trump's executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries saying it was "in America's best interest." The Wagner professors' statement said they "first and foremost" condemn that ban, saying that "this order creates religious discrimination and does so intentionally."
The professors also condemned Trump's removal of any mention of climate change and LGBTQ rights from the White House website, Trump's attacks on the press and fact-based journalism, and his continued profit-making from his global holdings. They ended their statement with: "We believe the above actions, among others, taken by the Trump Administration are a threat to our democracy, our economy, our American values, our international alliances, and the ideals of citizenship and respect for knowledge and diversity that we strive to foster in our students."
Read the statement and list of signatories (PDF) here .
Two NBA Coaches Take On Trump this Week Popovich and Kerr Speak on Racial Inequality and the Muslim Ban
From a reader:
This week GQ published an article by Jay Willis, " Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr Would Make a Great Presidential Ticket " where "these two have no time for the 'stick to sports' bullshit." Kerr and Popovich, both who are white, have been close friends since Kerr played for the San Antonio Spurs, coached by Popovich. Kerr coaches the Golden State Warriors in the San Francisco Bay Area.
When Popovich was asked about Black History Month he said,
"But more than anything, I think if people take the time to think about it, I think it is our national sin. It always intrigues me when people come out with, 'I'm tired of talking about that or do we have to talk about race again?' And the answer is you're damned right we do. Because it's always there, and it's systemic in the sense that when you talk about opportunity it's not about 'Well, if you lace up your shoes and you work hard, then you can have the American dream.' That's a bunch of hogwash. If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally in this society and all the systemic roadblocks that exist, whether it's in a judicial sense, a neighborhood sense with laws, zoning, education, we have huge problems in that regard that are very complicated, but take leadership, time, and real concern to try to solve. It's a tough one because people don't really want to face it."
Kerr was born in Lebanon, where his father was president of the American University of Beirut. His father was murdered at the university by two men in 1984, and soon after an unknown Islamic group called the press to claim responsibility. Kerr weighed in on Trump's Muslim Ban this past week when he said,
"As someone whose family member is a victim of terrorism, having lost my father--if we're trying to combat terrorism by banishing people from coming to this country, we're really going against the principles of what our country is about, and creating fear. It's the wrong way to go about it. If anything, we could be breeding anger and terror, so I'm completely against what's happening. I think it's shocking. I think it's a horrible idea and I feel for all the people who are affected, families are being torn apart."
Kerr also had something to say about the liars in the Trump administration when he told reporters after a game with the Orlando Magic that "Sean Spicer will be talking about my Magic career any second now. 14,000 points. Greatest player in Magic history." Kerr actually scored 5,437 points while playing in the NBA from 1988-2003.
Shawn Gaylord, Advocacy Counsel for Human Rights First: "I would call on the entire LGBT community to stand up and say 'not in our name'"
In a February 3 article for the Advocate titled "Trump's Executive Orders: Divide and Conquer," Shawn Gaylord, advocacy counsel for Human Rights First focusing on LGBT issues, makes an important point about how Trump must not be allowed to pit different sections of the people against each other.
Gaylord writes, "I am sure I am not alone in reading through each statement and each executive order [from Trump] with a sense of foreboding as we watch community after community being targeted by a government that seems determined to roll back the progress of the last few decades." He notes that so far Trump's executive orders have not "specifically targeted people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity," though, as he points out, among the sections of the people targeted so far--women, refugees, immigrants, religious minorities, people of color--LGBT people are part of each.
Noting that there is one direct mention of "sexual orientation" is Trump's executive order banning immigrants and refugees from seven mainly Muslim countries, Gaylord writes:
A quick read might cause you to think it was actually a move to protect LGBT people. But on closer examination, you quickly realize that what is at play is something we dreaded all along. The protection of LGBT people is cited as a justification for a set of cruel and unnecessary new immigration policies that, no matter how carefully worded they might be, amount to a Muslim ban.
The "Purpose" section, which purports to explain what the executive order is designed to accomplish, notes, "The United States should not admit ... those who would oppress members of one race, one gender, or sexual orientation." It is not clear exactly how immigration authorities would know which individuals "would" take such actions, although I suspect they will turn to broad generalizations about religious groups. This language, like other sections of the order, seems clearly designed to target Muslims. We saw this coming and we cannot let it stand....
The Trump administration seems to be employing every tactic at its disposal, but one of the most egregious is this strategy of "divide and conquer." By appealing to the shared desire that LGBT people might live their lives free from violence, the Trump administration is hoping we will turn that desire into fear and hatred of another marginalized community. He did it after Orlando, he did it with this executive order, and I would call on the entire LGBT community to stand up and say "not in our name."
Read Shawn Gaylord's article at the Advocate web site.
Cleveland Clinic Doctors, Medical Students, and Other Medical Staff: Trump's actions "directly harm human health and well-being in the United States and abroad"
When Trump signed the executive order banning Muslims from seven countries from entering the U.S., one of the people affected was a first-year internal medicine student at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic hospital, Dr. Suha Abushamma. Even though she has a legal visa and documents allowing her to legally study and work in the United States, she was not allowed to re-enter the country because she has a passport from Sudan--one of the seven banned countries--and was forcibly diverted to Saudi Arabia.
Her colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic, along with more than 1,400 other medical students, doctors, and other medical staff have issued an open letter criticizing the heads of the hospital for not taking a stand against Trump's Muslim ban. The letter points out that far from condemning Trump's actions, "the Cleveland Clinic silently continues to promote ties with the Trump administration." In fact, an upcoming Cleveland Clinic fundraiser--with tickets costing upwards of $100,000--is scheduled to be held at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The open letter says:
Through this action you are supporting a president who has, in his first ten days in office, reinstated the global gag rule, weakened the Affordable Care Act, fast-tracked construction of both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines through legally protected native lands, and banned legal U.S. residents from majority-Muslim countries. All of these actions directly harm human health and well-being in the United States and abroad. Your willingness to hold your fundraiser at a Trump resort is an unconscionable prioritization of profit over people. It is impossible for the Cleveland Clinic to reconcile supporting its employees and patients while simultaneously financially and publicly aiding an individual who directly harms them.
The open letter and list of signatories is available here
NARAL Pro-Choice America: "Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States..."
After Trump announced the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court seat that has been empty since Antonio Scalia died last year (see " Trump Picks 'Scalia Clone' to Replace Scalia on the Supreme Court "), the pro-choice group NARAL issued a statement saying in part:
...President Trump's decision to speed up the announcement of his Supreme Court nominee will not distract from the hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrating in the streets and at airports. After Trump's disastrous first week on the job--from his global gag rule to his travel ban on Muslims--we cannot afford to elevate his destructive agenda with a lifetime appointment to our nation's highest court.
With Judge Neil Gorsuch, the stakes couldn't be higher when it comes to women and our lives. Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States and must never wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice.
With a clear track record of supporting an agenda that undermines abortion access and endangers women, there is no doubt that Gorsuch is a direct threat to Roe v. Wade and the promise it holds for women's equality. The fact that the court has repeatedly reaffirmed Roe over the past four decades would no longer matter, just as facts often don't seem to matter to President Trump. Confirming Gorsuch to a lifetime on the Supreme Court would make good on Trump's repeated promises to use his appointments to overturn Roe v. Wade and punish women.
NARAL and our 1.2 million member-activists call on the Senate to reject Trump's nominee using any and all available means, including the filibuster.
The complete statement from NARAL on Trump's nomination of Gorsuch is online here .
Emma Stone, Actor: "We have to speak up against injustice, and we have to kick some ass"
At the Screen Actors Guild award on January 29, Emma Stone won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role for her work in the film La La Land . In her acceptance speech she said:
We're in a really tricky time in the world and our country and things are very inexcusable and scary and need action and I'm so grateful to be part of a group of people that cares and that wants to reflect things back to society.
Later in an interview backstage, she said:
We have to speak up against injustice, and we have to kick some ass.... I was thinking about art this year, and that in a time like this, for so many, horrific things are happening. It's so special to be a part of people who want to reflect what's happening back to the world and to make people happy. I would hope that people would fight for what's right and what's just fucking human....
I think if we're human beings, and we see injustice, we have to speak up, because staying silent, as they say, only really helps the oppressor. It never helps the victim. So I think that, yes, right now, I would hope that everyone, when seeing things being done that are absolutely unconstitutional and inhumane, would say something, anything. Whether it's at school or at an awards show or work, offices, or online.
Saira Rafiee, CUNY Grad Student: "We, the 99% of the world, need to stand united in resisting the authoritarian forces all over the world"
Saira Rafiee, an Iranian Ph.D. student in political science at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center, was traveling back to the U.S. from Iran when Trump issued the executive order banning people from seven majority Muslim countries, including Iran, from entering the U.S. Rafiee, an Iranian citizen, was visiting family and was on her way back to New York, with legal documents, to resume her work and studies at CUNY.
Saira Rafiee wrote on Facebook about what happened:
I got on the flight to Abu Dhabi, but there at the airport was told that I would not be able to enter the U.S. I had to stay there for nearly 18 hours, along with 11 other Iranians, before getting on the flight back to Tehran. I have no clue whether I would ever be able to go back to the school I like so much, or to see my dear friends there. But my story isn't as painful and terrifying as many other stories I have heard these days
The sufferings of all of us are just one side of this horrendous order. The other side is the struggle against racism and fascism, against assaults on freedom and human dignity, against all the values that even though are far from being realized, are the only things that would make life worth living. As a student of sociology and political science, I have devoted a major part of my scholarly life to the study of authoritarianism. The media has published enough statistics during the past few days to show how irrelevant this order is to the fight against terrorism. It is time to call things by their true names; this is Islamophobia, racism, fascism. We, the 99% of the world, need to stand united in resisting the authoritarian forces all over the world.
Ben Cohen, Founder/Editor of The Daily Banter : "This Is Straight Up Fascism"
Ben Cohen is the founder and editor of The Daily Banter (thedailybanter.com). Originally from London and now living in Washington, DC, he has written for the Huffington Post and ESPN.com. His January 27 article, "Trump's Weekly List of Crimes Committed by Immigrants is Straight Up Fascism," says in part:
Adding to his list of executive orders and policy proposals designed to roll back civil liberties, wreck the environment and insult foreign nations, the Trump administration is also mandating that Homeland Security "make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens." This was included in Trump's new executive order on immigration, and according to the Independent , "Will also include details of so-called 'sanctuary cities' that refuse to hand over immigrant residents for deportation"...
Make no mistake about it, this is straight up fascism... nothing more than a nasty scare tactic designed to instill fear in white Americans and create a new way of dividing the country along ethnic identity lines. We have seen this over and over again throughout history. Fascist dictators rise to power through the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities, then hold onto office by continuing the tactic. The Trump administration clearly believes it is a winning formula and Trump has made so called "illegals" the focal point of his first few days in office. From insisting that he only lost the popular vote due to (completely non-existent) widespread voter fraud to his executive order to build a wall stopping Mexicans from entering the country, Trump is betting big on white fear keeping him in office. The weekly list of immigrant crime is appalling and will simply fan the flames of xenophobia and hate....
Read Cohen's article here .
Rihanna: "What an immoral pig"
On January 28, singer Rihanna tweeted:
Disgusted! The news is devastating! America is being ruined right before our eyes! What an immoral pig you have to be to implement such BS!!
As of January 30, there have been 175,000 re-tweets of this Rihanna tweet.
Cast of Stranger Things : "We will get past the lies. We will hunt monsters!"
On Sunday night, January 29, the Netflix series Stranger Things won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble. A capsule description of the series says: "In a small Indiana town in the early 1980s, a boy goes missing after finding something sinister lurking in the woods. Nearby, a girl with extraordinary powers escapes from a sinister government facility and joins together with the boy's friends to get him back." At the televised SAG award show, David Harbour, who plays Chief Hopper in the series, stepped up to the mic to accept the award on behalf of the cast. After making a number of acknowledgements he turned to current events. He called on his fellow actors to:
Go deeper and through our art battle against fear, self-centeredness, and exclusivity of our predominantly narcissistic culture.... As we act in the continuing narrative of Stranger Things , we 1983 Midwesterners will repel bullies. We will shelter freaks and outcasts, those who have no hope. We will get past the lies. We will hunt monsters! And when we are at a loss amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will, as per Chief Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the weak and the disenfranchised and the marginalized! And we will do it all with soul, with heart, and with joy. We thank you for this responsibility.
University Science Professors Call for Defense of Science and Government Scientists
Three university science professors--Graham Coop, Professor of Evolution and Ecology, UC Davis; Michael B. Eisen, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley; Molly Przeworski, Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University--have issued a statement in support of scientists within the government who are under attack.
Their message is as follows:
Governmental scientists employed at a subset of agencies have been forbidden from presenting their findings to the public. We have drafted the following response for distribution, and encourage other scientists to post it to their websites, when feasible.
In Defense of Science
We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration's move to gag scientists working at various governmental agencies. The US government employs scientists working on medicine, public health, agriculture, energy, space, clean water and air, weather, the climate and many other important areas. Their job is to produce data to inform decisions by policymakers, businesses and individuals. We are all best served by allowing these scientists to discuss their findings openly and without the intrusion of politics. Any attack on their ability to do so is an attack on our ability to make informed decisions as individuals, as communities and as a nation.
If you are a government scientist who is blocked from discussing their work, we will share it on your behalf, publicly or with the appropriate recipients. You can email us at USScienceFacts@gmail.com .
Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law Professor: "Trump must be impeached for abusing his power"
Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, sent out a series of tweets on January 28--as thousands of people protested at airports across the U.S. against the anti-Muslim order Trump signed the day before:
Vital to impeach and remove Trump before his cruel brand of bigotry and scapegoating seeps even more deeply into our national bloodstream.
Trump just said what he's doing at the airports "is working out very nicely." The man has no eyes, no brain, and no heart.
Trump must be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other President in American history.
The tragic scenes unfolding at JFK and other US airports expose Trump as a heartless merciless monster. He must be stopped.
Trump's promise to prioritize Christian over Muslim refugees when the 90-day ban lifts violates the Religion Clauses of our First Amendment.
Jewish Voices for Peace on Trump's Anti-Muslim, Anti-Refugee Order: "We pledge to resist in every way that we can"
On January 25, Jewish Voices for Peace released the following statement in anticipation of Trump's issuing of an executive order the next day targeting refugees and immigrants from mainly Muslim countries:
As the Trump administration follows through on the some of most harmful and alarming promises of his campaign, we will follow through on ours: to love, defend and fight alongside our friends, neighbors, and communities directly under attack.
Decades of racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic policies and discourses around national security, the "War on Terror," and immigration have laid the groundwork for this nightmare set of policies designed to target, profile, surveil and ban people due to their religion, race, national origin or legal status. These new policies will build on existing infrastructure, primarily impacting people who have fled from countries that the United States has bombed or invaded, as well as those whose local economies have been destroyed by our military operations and trade policies.
While the details of these new policies are still unfolding, we pledge to resist in every way that we can. We'll put our hearts, souls, and bodies on the line to stop hateful and racist attacks. We will organize our communities to stand alongside our Muslim, immigrant & refugee neighbors, in the halls of Congress & government institutions, and in the streets.
We cannot let this stand.
Nikki Giovanni, the well-known African- American poet, essayist, and a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, recently spoke with the Huffington Post. During the interview, she said the following:
"My heart breaks for the next generation with these fools in the white house. Asking us to give Trump a chance is like asking Jews to give Hitler a chance. I read that eight percent of blacks voted for him. That's like a vote for slavery. I'm so proud of women for standing up at the Women's Marches all over the country. In Washington it was so crowded that you couldn't move. These women were telling Donald Trump 'not on our watch'. Saying they won't bow down or bend over and take the worse from him. Why take abortion and make us have children and then deny those kids healthcare?...
"Trump will not listen and only a fool would try to reason with him. He is beyond redemption."
For the entire interview go here :
Philip Roth on Trump: "What is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe"
Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America imagines a scenario where there is a fascist takeover in America--through the ballot box. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh--who in his day was one of the three or four biggest celebrities in the world and a Nazi sympathizer--sweeps the 1940 election in a landslide. Then, in steps both incremental and rapid, fascism comes in. At the time, Roth wrote in the New York Times Book Review that he did not intend to write this as a political roman a clef (a novel in which real people or events appear with invented names). He said he wanted to dramatize some "what-ifs" that never happened in America.
Now Roth is commenting about the current relevance of The Plot Against America. A piece titled "Philip Roth E-Mails On Trump" by Judith Thurman appears in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker . Thurman says Roth was asked via e-mail if the scenario in his book has now happened. Roth's response, in part:
It isn't Trump as a character, a human type--the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist--that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.
I was born in 1933, the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English...
Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven't had their driver's licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don't live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless--or until--there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump's river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit...
My novel wasn't written as a warning. I was just trying to imagine what it would have been like for a Jewish family like mine, in a Jewish community like Newark, had something even faintly like Nazi anti-Semitism befallen us in 1940, at the end of the most pointedly anti-Semitic decade in world history. I wanted to imagine how we would have fared, which meant I had first to invent an ominous American government that threatened us. As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.
The New Yorker piece with quotes from Philip Roth is available online here .
Roger Cohen, NY Times Columnist: "Trump's outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought"
Roger Cohen is an author and columnist for the New York Times . Before becoming a columnist for the Times , he worked as a foreign correspondent in 15 countries. In the January 24 edition of the Times , his column titled "The Banal Belligerence of Donald Trump" said in part:
I have tried to tread carefully with analogies between the Fascist ideologies of 1930s Europe and Trump. American democracy is resilient. But the first days of the Trump presidency--whose roots of course lie in far more than the American military debacles since 9/11--pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire.
To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses. To speak of "carnage" is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of "a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before" is to demonstrate consuming megalomania. To declaim "America first" and again, "America first," is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman , is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.
Trump's outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought. When Primo Levi arrived at Auschwitz he reached, in his thirst, for an icicle outside his window but a guard snatched it away. "Warum?" Levi asked (why?). To which the guard responded, "Hier ist kein warum" (here there is no why).
As the great historian Fritz Stern observed, "This denial of 'why' was the authentic expression of all totalitarianism, revealing its deepest meaning, a negation of Western civilization."
Americans are going to have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why against the banal belligerence of Trump.
Read the whole Cohen column here .
Poem by Nina Donovan, "I am a nasty woman" performed by Ashley Judd at Women's March: "I feel Hitler in these streets"
The poem, "I am a nasty woman" by 19-year-old Nina Donovan was performed by actress Ashley Judd at the Women's March in Washington, DC on January 21. It starts:
I'm not nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheetos dust.
A man whose words are a distract to America. Electoral college-sanctioned, hate-speech contaminating this national anthem. I'm not as nasty as Confederate flags being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is going to rise again. Maybe for some it never really fell. Blacks are still in shackles and graves, just for being black. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin.
I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a pride flag, and I didn't know devils could be resurrected but I feel Hitler in these streets. A mustache traded for a toupee. Nazis renamed the Cabinet Electoral Conversion Therapy, the new gas chambers shaming the gay out of America, turning rainbows into suicide. I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege ... your daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes. Yeah, I'm a nasty woman -- a loud, vulgar, proud woman.
To listen to the whole poem performed by Ashley Judd go here :
Sierra Club on Trump's Energy Plan: "A shameful and dark start"
The Sierra Club is the largest grassroots environmental organization in the U.S., with more than 2.7 million members and supporters. On the day of his inauguration, Trump released his energy plan (available on the White House website). In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune released the following statement:
Minutes after he was sworn in, any illusion that Trump would act in the best interests of families in this country as President were wiped away by a statement of priorities that constitute an historic mistake on one of the key crises facing our planet and an assault on public health. What Trump has released is hardly a plan--it's a polluter wishlist that will make our air and water dirtier, our climate and international relations more unstable, and our kids sicker. This is a shameful and dark start to Trump's Presidency, and a slap in the face to any American who thought Trump might pursue the national interest.
Matthew Rothschild: "Trumpolini.... Beware"
Matthew Rothschild is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonprofit, nonpartisan political watchdog group. His January 21 article titled, "The fascist overtones in Trump's inaugural address" starts underneath a photo of Benito Mussolini, leader of Italy's National Fascist Party from 1922 until 1943, and says in part:
It was hard to listen to Trump's inaugural address without hearing some not-so-faint echoes of fascism.
The most obvious was his invocation of "America First" as the "new vision" that "will govern our land." But it's not a new vision or a new name. In fact, "America First" was the name of the isolationist and anti-Semitic organization in the 1930s that wanted to accommodate Nazi Germany.
But there were other echoes as well....
Like 20th century fascists, he extolled the nation's "glorious destiny." He saluted "the great men and women of our military and law enforcement."
And then he invoked the divine will. "Most importantly," he said, "we are protected by God."
And let's not forget that his campaign slogan and the coda to his inaugural address, "Make America great again," itself strikes a fascist chord: nostalgia for national greatness, mixed with grievances (that can lead to scapegoating) about who is to blame for the loss of such greatness.
If you were looking for Trump to take the high ground in his inaugural address and call on "the better angels of ourselves," you were kidding yourself.
That is not who he is. He is Trumpolini.
To read the whole article go here
Big Bang Theory on Eve of Trump Inauguration: "Beware of Darkness"
Vanity cards have become a trademark for Chuck Lorre Productions. At the end of every episode of shows Lorre produces there are different messages that read somewhat like a comment or observation on life or what's going on in society. This was done with shows Lorre produced like Dharma & Greg and Two and a Half Men . And these vanity cards appear at the end of The Big Bang Theory-- the #1 comedy on TV for many seasons . On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, the message that flashed across at the end of The Big Bang was the lyrics to George Harrison's song, "Beware of Darkness":
Watch out now, take care, Beware of greedy leaders They'll take you where you should not go While Weeping Atlas Cedars They just want to grow, grow and grow Beware of darkness
Then another quote, this one from Monty Python:
Run away! Run Away!
Roger Waters from Pink Floyd on Inauguration: "The resistance begins today"
Roger Waters, English singer, songwriter, bassist, and composer, is the co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd--internationally known for albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. On January 20, the day of Trump's inauguration, Waters posted a video for his Trump-slamming performance of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" in Mexico City last October. A message also went up on his Facebook: "The resistance begins today."
The performance took place in Zocalo Square before 300,000 fans. During the song, the huge screens flash graphics of ugly Trump faces with text like "Charade" and "Gotta stem the evil tide." There is an image of Trump doing a Hitler Nazi salute and the KKK. At the end, disgusting quotes from Trump are seen on the screen. The final text: "Trump eres un pendejo" (Trump, you're an asshole)."
Some of the lyrics to "Pigs (Three Different Ones)":
Big man, pig man, ha ha charade you are You well heeled big wheel, ha ha charade you are And when your hand is on your heart You're nearly a good laugh Almost a joker With your head down in the pig bin Saying "Keep on digging." Pig stain on your fat chin What do you hope to find When you're down in the pig mine You're nearly a laugh You're nearly a laugh But you're really a cry
Petition to White House Correspondents' Association: "Stand up to Trump's blacklist"
At his January 11 press conference, Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, saying, "You are fake news." Angelo Carusone from Media Matters posted a petition, "Tell the White House Press Corps: Stand up to Trump's blacklist," to be delivered to the White House Correspondents' Association, which says:
If Trump blacklists or bans one of you, the rest of you need to stand up. Instead of ignoring Trump's bad behavior and going about your business, close ranks and stand up for journalism. Don't keep talking about what Trump wants to talk about. Stand up and fight back. Amplify your colleague's inquiry or refuse to engage until he removes that person/outlet from the blacklist.
The goal is to get 300,000 signatures. As of January 22, nearly 290,200 people had signed. The petition includes a background that says in part:
Trump has a history of doing this--and worse.
He has literally banned the Des Moines Register from covering his events. He banned Univsion from attending his events. He revoked The Washington Post's credentials for a period in retaliation for a headline that he didn't like. He revoked Politico's credentials for a while to punish them for an article he didn't like. BuzzFeed--which Trump called "a pathetic pile of garbage" during the press conference--has been on a blacklist since June of 2015. The Daily Beast is on the blacklist and is almost always denied credentials as a result. This list isn't exhaustive, either.
But journalists covering Trump don't learn. Time and time again, as one outlet after another is frozen out, reporters continue to go about their interactions with Trump and his people as if nothing is wrong.
Enough is enough. Some principles are more important than competition among news outlets....
To read the petition and full background go here .
Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism: "We cannot remain silent as we witness the rise of an American form of fascism"
Citizen Therapists for Democracy, an association of psychotherapists, states that their mission is to: "Learn and spread transformative ways to practice therapy with a public dimension; Rebuild democratic capacity in communities; and Resist anti-democratic ideologies and practices." The website of Citizen Therapists for Democracy contains "A Public Manifesto" from Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism. It has been signed by 3,500 people and says in part:
As psychotherapists practicing in the United States, we are alarmed by the rise of the ideology of Trumpism, which we see as a threat to the well-being of the people we care for and to American democracy itself. We cannot remain silent as we witness the rise of an American form of fascism. We can leverage this time of crisis to deepen our commitment to American democracy....
Why speak collectively? Our responses thus far have been primarily personal--and too often confined to arm-chair diagnoses of Donald Trump. But a collective crisis faces our nation, a harkening back to the economic depression and demoralization of the 1930s (which fed European fascism) and the upheaval over Jim Crow and Black civil rights in the 1950s.... As therapists, we have been entrusted by society with collective responsibility in the arena of mental, behavioral, and relational health. When there is a public threat to our domain of responsibility we must speak out together, not just to protest but to deepen our commitment to a just society and a democratic way of life. This means being citizen therapists who are concerned with community well-being as much as personal well-being, since the two are inextricably joined.
To read the whole statement go here .
Punk Band United Nations on Inauguration Day: "Never Again Is Fucking Happening Again"
United Nations, hardcore supergroup led by frontman for the band Thursday, Geoff Rickly, released a new song on January 20, the day of Trump's inauguration. The song is called "Stairway to Mar-a-Lago"--Mar-a-Lago is Trump's estate in Florida which he says will be his "winter White House."
Some of the lyrics go:
Dimwitted bigot Misplacing sympathies From on your cross Tell them who matters Policing cities in ruin
It blows my mind How these Nazis Took the stage And pandered to Your deepest fears Dead and cold The Gipper must be Rolling in his grave
Never again, Again and again Never again is Fucking happening Again
New from Outernational: "Decision"--"How will you live? What will you decide?"
The band Outernational released a new song and video on the morning of the Trump inauguration, titled "Decision." Miles Solay of Outernational wrote, "I am writing to you from the USA on the morning that a fascist regime is being coronated. I will be in the streets of Washington, DC today and tomorrow. The regime of Donald Trump and Mike Pence is illegitimate because fascism is illegitimate. If ever there was a time in our lives to act as if the future depended on us, now would be that time. GET INVOLVED AND TAKE TO THE STREETS WHEREVER YOU ARE."
The lyrics of "Decision" include:
Decision! Enforced! You can't say you hate this While you're waiting for the cure...
Deception! All the lies! America was never great Eat your apple pie and genocide
Decision! Of your life! How will you live? What will you decide?...
Listen and download audio here .
New Anti-Trump Song by Entrance: "Not Gonna Say Your Name"
"There are people who say we ought to give you a chance. But there's not a chance in hell that we'll sit back and watch you try to turn back the clock and sigh and say, oh well."
This is how "Not Gonna Say Your Name" starts--a new song released on January 16 by Los Angeles-based musician Guy Blakeslee (aka ENTRANCE). The song's video features clips of anti-Trump protests that broke out in the days after the election.
Blakeslee says, "I really wanted to write a song expressing my own feelings about the election and the state of things in our country--like many I was in a state of mourning. I wondered, how can I sing about this without saying his name?" All proceeds from song purchases are going to Planned Parenthood. Blakeslee said: "I decided to use the song to benefit PP because one of the things that is so shocking about the election result is that it sends such a negative message to women and girls.... It's the least I could do - for all of the women in the world, in my life, and especially for my mother - to fight back and make a clear statement that we will not accept this backwards agenda." In a piece in TheTalkhouse, Blakeslee wrote:
When the result was called at the crack of dawn that November morning, I knew I had to come back home as soon as possible and join with my fellow Americans in resisting this imminent slide toward fascism, tyranny, intolerance, bigotry, sexism, xenophobia and unchecked capitalist pillaging.
In a psychological state quite similar to mourning, I was inspired and comforted watching from afar on social media as friends and family joined hundreds of thousands of others in the streets and wished I could be there with them to say NO to hatred and regression and YES to love and continued communal progress.
While in Amsterdam a few days later, the idea for this song ("Not Gonna Say Your Name" ) came to me; I was writing a lot of angry words and I was desperately trying to figure out how to say something positive, to make some kind of contribution and offer a different way of thinking about the situation instead of just complaining and fixating on this person that so many of us can't help but despise.
To read the whole piece by Blakeslee go here
To watch the video of "Not Gonna Say Your Name" go here .
News of Girl Scouts Marching for Trump Inauguration "filled me with rage"
The Girl Scouts of America have come under severe criticism for its decision to have 75 Girl Scouts march in Trump's inauguration parade. People are saying they should not participate--given Trump's ugly comments about women and Pence's extreme anti-abortion views. Jean Hannah Edelstein, a New York-born, London-based journalist and the author of Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them , wrote in a January 18 opinion piece in the Guardian :
The news that the Girl Scouts are sending a contingent to participate in Donald Trump's inauguration filled me with real rage. How can an organization that promises to build "girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place" send them to celebrate the ascent of a leader who would likely consider them fair game for sexual assault if they grow up to be "beautiful"?
...what would be emotionally and physically safe for a girl about watching the swearing-in of Mike Pence as Vice President, a man who's sworn to overturn the laws that allow them to use the bathrooms where they feel safe? What of Muslim Girl Scouts, who've been told that their names will be put on a list, or undocumented girls, who are also welcome to join Girl Scouts? Should they march, or should only the girls who Donald Trump might one day rate "a 10" be encouraged to participate?
...Yes, it's a tradition: they've marched at inauguration for decades. But does tradition justify collaboration with an administration that promises to oppress the young women it's supposed to serve? As shown by John Lewis and the other members of Congress who are choosing to skip the inauguration, sometimes human rights are more important than protocol. The Girl Scouts is an organization that has stood up for the human rights of girls and women for many years. Why quit now?
Read this whole piece here .
Charles M. Blow on the Day Before Inauguration Day: "Are You Not Alarmed?"
New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow's piece on January 19, 2017 is titled, "Are You Not Alarmed?" and says:
I continue to be astonished that not enough Americans are sufficiently alarmed and abashed by the dangerous idiocies that continue to usher forth from the mouth of the man who will on Friday be inaugurated as president of the United States.
Toss ideology out of the window. This is about democracy and fascism, war and peace, life and death. I wish that I could write those words with the callous commercialism with which some will no doubt read them, as overheated rhetoric simply designed to stir agitation, provoke controversy and garner clicks. But alas, they are not. These words are the sincere dispatches of an observer, writer and citizen who continues to see worrisome signs of a slide toward the exceedingly unimaginable by a man who is utterly unprepared.
In a series of interviews and testimonies Donald Trump and his cronies have granted in the last several days, they have demonstrated repeatedly how destabilizing, unpredictable and indeed unhinged the incoming administration may be. Their comments underscore the degree to which this administration may not simply alter our democracy beyond recognition, but also potentially push us into armed conflict...
This is insanity. But too many Americans don't want to see this threat for what it is. International affairs and the very real threat of escalating militarization and possibly even military conflict seems much harder to grasp than the latest inflammatory tweet.
Maybe people think this possibility is unthinkable. Maybe people are just hoping and praying that cooler heads will prevail. Maybe they think that Trump's advisers will smarten him up and talk him down.
But where is your precedent for that? When has this man been cautious or considerate? This man with loose lips and tweeting thumbs may very well push us into another war, and not with a country like Afghanistan, but with a nuclear-armed country with something to prove.
Are you not alarmed?
Green Day: Trump and "Troubled Times"
Green Day continues to call out Trump as a fascist. A video of the song "Troubled Times" from their latest album, Revolution Radio , was released on Monday, MLK Day. A statement from Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said, "Today we celebrate love and compassion more than ever." The song/video doesn't name Trump but the message is clear through the imagery. There's a Trump-like figure with KKK teeth wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap--spewing hateful, racist garbage before crowds as Kluckers come out of the White House. Cops beating up Black people. But there are also images of resistance: People with signs saying "Stop racism, islamophobia, and war," "No border wall," and "Against racist hate." Clips from the Civil Rights Movement and the the women's suffrage battle. At the end, the stakes of the situation are underscored with a nuclear mushroom cloud.
This isn't the first time Green Day has called out Trump. Shortly after the election, during their MTV and American Music Awards performances of the song "Bang Bang," they added the chant: "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA." Armstrong said, "It was a good start to challenge [Trump] on all of his ignorant policies and his racism."
The lyrics to "Troubled Times" are searing:
What good is love and peace on earth? When it's exclusive? Where's the truth in the written word? If no one reads it A new day dawning Comes without warning So don't blink twice
What part of history we learned When it's repeated Some things will never overcome If we don't seek it
The world stops turning Paradise burning So don't think twice
We live in troubled times We live in troubled times
Rapper T.I.: "Be Aware or Be Bamboozled"
On MLK Day, Rapper T.I. (Tip Harris) sent out a series of tweets and videos addressed to Black celebrities and athletes who are meeting with Trump.
"Attn.!!!! Be clear.... There IS an agenda behind all these meetings. "There's a strategic plan that people are trying to make you a part of.... Do not accept any invitation to have any meeting, no matter how positive you think the outcome may be." "Given what's going on between him & Congressman Lewis... All y'all looking CRAZY right now!!!! Be Aware, BE Alert, Or Be Bamboozled."
One tweet has a photo of Malcolm X with a quote from him: "The first thing the (white racist) does when he comes in power, he takes all the Negro leaders and invites them for coffee. To show that he's all right. And those Uncle Toms can't pass up the coffee. They come away from the coffee table telling you and me that this man is all right." T.I. writes: "Sound familiar? Malcolm knew it then.... Be Aware, Be Alert, or Be Bamboozled."
One tweet addresses Trump: "Should it ever seem at times like we are against you, I assure it is a result of you defining yourself as the representative of those who are and who always have been against us... The deck has always been stacked against us in this country. With every generation there has been strategic steps to oppress, imprison, and control us."
See T.I.'s tweets and videos here .
Statement from Michael Dietler, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, at Chicago Protest Against Trump-Pence Regime and Police Terror on MLK Day
A small but determined group of protesters rallied in the cold Chicago rain on MLK Day, where Christian clergy, representatives from the Muslim community, and youth spoke along with other fighters in the movement to Stop Trump and Pence. After the rally the protest took off in two parallel marches down both sides of State Street, stopping on the corners to speak to people who were out on the cold, wet street. Protestors criss-crossed back and forth across State Street, blocking traffic briefly a number of times. Some people along the route joined in the march briefly, and others took up posters and/or bundles of the Call and were organized to organize others in the fight to stop the fascist Trump-Pence regime.
Speakers at the rally addressed the need and possibility of stopping the Trump-Pence regime from taking power and the recently released Justice Department report detailing years of abuse of Black and brown people by the Chicago police. They included Rev. Gregg Greer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Rev.Pughsley; Salman Aftab from the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections; Raja Yaqub from the American Muslim Aliance; and a middle school student who spoke about the terror Pence will bring to the LGBTQ community with his promotion of electro-shock torture "conversion therapy." The following statement from Michael Dietler, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago was read.
This day, of all days, should raise awareness of the danger that Donald Trump poses to this country, and to the world. The contrast with Martin Luther King could not be stronger.
Today the nation honors a fearless champion of human rights and human dignity, a man of principle who dedicated his life to the service of others and was willing to be sacrificed in the struggle against injustice. We also honor all those heroes of the Civil Rights movement, those thousands of ordinary people who courageously put their bodies and their lives on the line to oppose the racist, oppressive, violent regimes that tried to deny people their rights.
In ironic contrast, this Friday, a new president will be sworn in who waged a disgraceful campaign of lies and deceit, of racist bigotry and hatred, of misogyny, fear, and ignorance. Donald Trump has no principles, no concern for anyone but himself. He has spent his life in the relentless pursuit of personal wealth and power, using any means available without regard to the consequences for others.
He is a liar, fraud, and a dangerous egomaniac who has already normalized racism, xenophobia, and misogyny and prepared a cabinet of robber barons ready to pillage the country. Now is the time for all good people of conscience to come together to oppose this destructive force, before it is too late. Let the voice of the people rise again in solidarity with the spirit of the Civil Rights movement: justice and equality for all! Stand up against racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and greed!
Clip from Ava DuVernay Documentary 13th-- Searing Exposure of Trump on the "Good Old Days"
Ava DuVernay is an American director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor. Her film Selma , which told the story of the campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King for equal voting right and the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965,was nominated for Best Picture at the 2014 Oscars. And DuVernay became first Black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
DuVernay's recent Netflix documentary 13th just picked up three Critics' Choice Awards and is on the Oscar shortlist for best documentary. 13th , named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery with the exception of punishment for crime, digs deeply into and exposes the rise of mass incarceration in the USA. 13th includes a series of powerful clips that shows Donald Trump and footage from the Civil Right era--where Trump is talking about "the good old days."
During the film's press screening at the New York Film Festival in October, DuVernay talked about how she debated whether to include Trump, who at the time was the Republican presidential candidate, in the documentary. She said, "Take him out? Leave him in? No, he doesn't deserve a place in this thing, and such. But you gotta show that stuff because it's too important and it can't be forgotten,"
13th is available to stream on Netflix.
Pete Vernon in Columbia Journalism Review: "Trump and his team have shown a willingness to retaliate, bully, and ban journalists"
At his January 11 press conference, Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, saying, "You are fake news." In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review titled "Trump berated a CNN reporter, and fellow journalists missed an opportunity" Pete Vernon says:
CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stood pleading with Trump to acknowledge his question, referencing earlier attacks made by Trump and his press secretary about the accuracy of a CNN report detailing Trump's ties to Russia. "Mr. President-elect, since you have been attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance?" Acosta yelled above the scrum of reporters.
"No! Not you. No! Your organization is terrible," the President-elect shot back. When Acosta persisted in shouting for recognition, Trump pointed a finger at him and said, "Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question."
Trump then turned to the next question, and the press conference proceeded from there. It was a striking moment not only for the direct confrontation between the two men, but also for the fact that it seemed to have no effect on other journalists in the room. No one immediately leapt to Acosta's defense....
I wished those journalists in attendance had picked up Acosta's line of questioning, or even refused to continue asking questions, until the President-elect acknowledged the organization he had earlier attacked....
Next Friday, the new administration begins. As a candidate, and now as the President-elect, Trump and his team have shown a willingness to retaliate, bully, and ban journalists whose questions he doesn't want to answer. As an industry, we must be prepared for more moments like today's, and we must be ready to respond accordingly.
Peter Vernon's article is available online here .
Theologians Raise Opposition to Jeff Sessions for "positions that compromise the rights of these vulnerable populations"
A group of Christian theologians of various denominations delivered an open letter to the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. The signatories include Peter Goodwin Heltzel, New York Theological Seminary; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Fordham University; Gary Agee, Anderson University (Indiana); Cornel West, Harvard University; James Cone, Union Theological Seminary; Jim Wallis, Sojourner ; and others.
The theologians' letter says in part:
Vulnerable populations in our country--victims of police brutality, undocumented workers, LGBTQ persons, women, people of color, and people of non-Christian faiths--are placed at increased risk of further harm when our laws are not upheld. Yet, throughout his career, Senator Sessions has taken positions that compromise the rights of these vulnerable populations. His racist comments reflect prejudice against people of color. His opposition to immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, women's rights and equal access for persons with disabilities make it unlikely that he shares the Christian vision of justice and protection of the vulnerable that we embrace.
The letter and signatories are available online here .
Powerful Video Produced by Katy Perry: #DontNormalizeHate
A moving and deeply thought-provoking PSA video produced by Katy Perry asks the question: is history repeating itself? The short video features actor Hina Khan, a Muslim of Pakistani heritage, and begins with the voice of 89-year-old Haru Kuromiya--recalling how, when she was a girl during World War 2, her family, along with about 120,000 other Japanese Americans, were first put on a registry and then forced by the U.S. government into concentration (internment) camps.
According to the LA Times , "Codirected by filmmakers Aya Tanimura and Tim Nackashi, the #DontNormalizeHate PSA landed the early support of director Spike Jonze and actor-activist George Takei. But it was Perry whom Tanimura credits for making the short possible." The video has close to 300,000 views since it was posted on YouTube--it should be seen by millions. Watch it below:
Bruce Springsteen: "The country feels very estranged..."
Bruce Springsteen on Marc Maron's WRTF podcast on January 2 (at the end) is asked what his biggest fear is about Trump and says:
That a lot of the worst things and the worst aspects of what he appealed to come to fruition. When you let that genie out of the bottle - bigotry, racism, when you let those things out of the bottle, intolerance, they don't go back in the bottle that easily if they go back in at all. Whether it's a rise in hate crimes, people feeling they have license to speak and behave in ways that previously were considered un-American and are un-American. That's what he's appealing to. And so my fears are that those things find a place in ordinary, civil society; demeans the discussions and events of the day and the country changes in a way that is unrecognizable and we become estranged, as you say, you say hey well, wait a minute you voted for Trump, I thought I knew who you were, I'm not sure. The country feels very estranged, you feel very estranged from your countrymen. So those are all dangerous things and he hasn't even taken office yet.
The podcast is available here
Children's and YA authors refuse "to quietly accept or assent to this 'Gleichschaltung,' this getting in line with fascism and making it mainstream"
Recently, Threshold, an imprint of the book publisher Simon & Schuster, gave a $250,000 book deal to Milo Yiannopoulos, writer for the neo-Nazi, white-supremacist Breitbart News Network and supporter of Trump. There was immediate outrage against the deal from writers, bookstores, book reviewers, and others. (See " Outrage at Simon & Schuster's Book Deal for Pro-Trump Racist .") Now more than 160 children's and young adult (YA) book authors and illustrators with Simon & Schuster have sent a letter protesting the deal to the Simon & Schuster CEO and "all the readers and supporters of books for children."
As technology editor at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos promoted "GamerGate," a vicious flood of degrading attacks and terroristic threats against prominent women in the video game development community. This summer he was banned from Twitter after his followers carried out a racist harassment campaign against Black comedian/actor Leslie Jones.
The letter from the authors and illustrators reads in part:
Threshold has placed Simon & Schuster's considerable reputation and weight behind one of the most prominent faces of the newly repackaged white supremacist/white nationalist movement and financially supported a man who routinely denigrates, verbally attacks, and directs dangerous internet doxxing and hate campaigns against women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims, and anyone he chooses to target who supports equality and human decency. Irrespective of the content of this book, by extending a mainstream publication contract, Threshold has chosen to legitimize this reprehensible belief system, these behaviors, and white supremacy itself....
As Simon & Schuster authors and illustrators who are already published, with books in the release pipeline, with contracts in place, we do not have to quietly accept or assent to this "Gleichschaltung," this getting in line with fascism and making it mainstream. We reject the wisdom of this decision. This man, and this book, are not America. This man, and this book, are not the bulk of Simon & Schuster. This man, and this book, are not us, the authors and illustrators of Simon & Schuster. We believe that the children we write for deserve a better America.
Among the signers of the letter are winners of Newbery, Caldecott, and National Book Award honors, including Cassandra Clare, Laurie Halse Anderson, Christian Robinson, Dan Santat, Marla Frazee, Ellen Hopkins, and Rachel Renee Russell. The Publisher's Weekly article on this, including the text of the full letter and the list of signatories, is available online here .
Charlotte Church, Singer, Refuses Invitation from Tyrant Trump
Charlotte Church is a Welch singer who performs in many genres and has a big following. She has sold over ten million records worldwide.
The Trump team, which has already been turned down by most of the entertainers they have asked to perform at the inauguration, sent an invitation to Church. Church tweeted her reply directly to Trump @realDonaldTrump:
"Your staff have asked me to sing at your inauguration, a simple Internet search would show I think you're a tyrant. Bye."
Her message was followed by four poop emoji.
This is the link to her tweet.
Australian Tennis Star: T-Shirt Statement on Trump
At the Australian Open tennis tournament, Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios made a statement about Donald Trump with his T-shirt. During his match with Rafael Nadal he wore a shirt that had Trump's face covered with devil-like illustrations and the words "Fuck Donald Trump" at the bottom.
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: "Sessions has 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights"
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter to the U.S. Senate opposing the confirmation of Sessions as Attorney General, saying:
On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations committed to promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, and the 144 undersigned organizations, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the confirmation of Senator Jefferson B. Sessions (R-AL) to be the 84th Attorney General of the United States. Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the Attorney General of the United States. In our democracy, the Attorney General is charged with enforcing our nation's laws without prejudice and with an eye toward justice. And, just as important, the Attorney General has to be seen by the public--every member of the public, from every community--as a fair arbiter of justice. Unfortunately, there is little in Senator Sessions' record that demonstrates that he would meet such a standard.
To read the whole letter go here
Shaun King: "One of the most dishonest men on Earth is about to become our leader"
Shaun King's column in the Monday, January 9 New York Daily News was titled "Americans must call Trump out on lies, not get so used to them that we become desensitized to his dishonesty." King writes, in part:
Last night, Meryl Streep, in an acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award that she won at the Golden Globes, reminded the audience that our incoming President once openly mocked a reporter with a physical disability from the stage of a rally....Trump has now outrageously said he has no recollection of ever meeting Kovaleski and was not aware of his disability, but that is another outrageous lie. He did not meet Kovaleski once or twice. He did not meet him three or four times, or even half a dozen times, but met with Kovaleski at least a dozen times across the years. They met in Trump's office, at events, and at press conferences. They were so close that Kovaleski described them as being "on a first name basis for years."
To fight back against Streep reminding us of what he did, Trump is lying about lies about lies. His lies have so many layers that it often seems like he gets lost and simply cannot keep up....
Our incoming President of the United States is a liar. He tells them often. He lies far more often than he tells the truth. We must call him out on it. We must not become desensitized to his lies. We must not get so used to them that they become normal to us.
One of the most dishonest men on Earth is about to become our leader. I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't deeply concerned about what comes next.
To read the whole piece by Shaun King, go here .
Meryl Streep at Golden Globe Awards Speaks Out on Trump: "When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose"
On Sunday night, January 8, Meryl Streep received The Cecil B. DeMille Award, an honorary Golden Globe Award given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment." In accepting the award, she said, in part:
An actor's only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that--breathtaking compassionate work. But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
Watch Meryl Streep's acceptance speech here
Jello Biafra on Trump: "What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0"
Jello Biafra is the former lead singer for the band Dead Kennedys, known for songs like "California Uber Alles" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." In a recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine he said:
As laughable as Rick Perry has been as governor of Texas and other [presidential] campaigns, he's also very dangerous. At first they were saying Secretary of Agriculture for him, but then suddenly Secretary of Energy. That dude is in charge of our nukes now and he's also part of a fundamentalist Christian doomsday cult. ... It was basically yet another cult like the one Sarah and Todd Palin prescribed, whose whole mindset was "Jesus is coming soon, and in order to expedite we should be wasting every last natural resource and clear-cutting every tree we can right now because Jesus is coming back again. It's OK to run up further budget deficits, because Jesus loves America, he's going to put the money back."...
People are freaked out that Trump has made the head of Exxon the Secretary of State, and the guy is so tight and in bed with Putin--well, there's another part of Rex Tillerson I hope people are going to highlight, too. He's the one who finally admitted climate change existed as head of Exxon, but then he said mankind will adapt and so it's no big deal....
What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0, and they're going to be even more hardcore about that in the 2018 election, to keep anybody with a conscience from being able to vote. Look at who the new Attorney General is going to be, the same guy who in the Eighties said he thought the people in the Ku Klux Klan were all right "until I saw some of them smoked pot."
Cornell William Brooks: NAACP opposes nomination of Jeff Sessions "bodily, spiritually, morally, by encouraging civil disobedience"
Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and five other civil rights leaders were arrested January 3 after sitting in at Jeff Sessions' office in Washington, DC, demanding the withdrawal of his nomination by Trump for Attorney General. In a January 5 interview on Democracy Now , Brooks said:
Our objections are, fundamentally, Senator Sessions represents a kind of dim and dystopian view of American civil liberties and civil rights. And so our objections are at least threefold, first of which is that he has demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of voter suppression that we have seen from one end of the country to the other, as attested to in the Fourth Circuit decision that found voter suppression in North Carolina, the Fifth Circuit decision which found voter suppression in Texas. He has not acknowledged the reality of that, and certainly not the reality of voter suppression in his own state...
In terms of immigration rights, he is one--among one of the most conservative, ultraconservative, extremist senators in terms of his opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. In addition to that, he has voiced an openness to a immigration ban on a global religion, namely Islam, which cannot be squared in any way, shape, fashion or form with the U.S. Constitution.
Number three, his views on criminal justice reform stand in stark contrast to both red state and blue state governors. In other words, he stands for law and order in Nixonian and draconian terms, at a moment in which we have over 2 million Americans behind bars, 65 million Americans with criminal records, 1 million fathers behind bars....
Brooks said the NAACP is "unapologetically opposed" to Sessions and is calling for civil disobedience protests:
The board of directors of the NAACP voted to oppose this nomination. And we're doing so not only as a matter of policy, but we're doing so bodily, spiritually, morally, by encouraging civil disobedience--that is to say, standing in the tradition of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, standing in that tradition by sitting down. And so, we understand that the odds may be difficult, but we, as the NAACP, don't gauge our principled opposition to a nominee based upon odds and probabilities, but rather the rightness of the cause....
Read the whole interview here .
Joshua Pechthalt, Calif. Federation of Teachers President: "The similarities with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s...are chilling"
In the November-December issue of California Teacher, Joshua Pechthalt, the president of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), which is part of the American Federation of Teachers, has a piece titled "Responding to election of Donald Trump: Reassess, Mobilize, Defend." Pechthalt writes:
In the last few weeks, I have had many discussions trying to sort out the implications of a Trump presidency. His nomination for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, who has been a pro-voucher, pro-charter school advocate, demonstrates he wants to privatize and charterize public schools. President-elect Trump is making clear where he wants to take the country.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has said positive things about the KKK and will likely head the Justice Department, indicates this administration will not be an advocate for criminal justice reform, voting rights, and countless other social justice efforts. More disturbing will be Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court. A generation of justices will be in the majority and committed to an agenda that is opposed to union rights, women's rights, voting rights, environmental protection, and other matters that will affect our children and grandchildren.
Trump has also strengthened his relationship with Steve Bannon, the former leader of Breitbart News and one of the leaders of a movement known as the alt-right. The alt-right sees this appointment as an opportunity to fan the flames of white nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. One needs only to watch the Nazi salute at a recent gathering of alt-right supporters in the nation's capital to be alarmed. The similarities with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and the growing neo-fascist movement now gaining traction in Western European countries, are chilling and require a response...
The issue of California Teacher containing the article by Pechthalt is available online here .
Thousands Sign Petition Against University of Tennessee Marching Band Participation in Trump Inauguration
The University of Tennessee marching band is scheduled to march in Trump's Inauguration parade, but a lot of alumni of the school and residents of Tennessee are protesting this. More than 3,340 people have already signed an online petition calling on the president and director of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to stop the university marching band from playing in the inaugural parade. The change.org petition , signed "Concerned Citizens and Alumni," says in part:
As either proud residents of Tennessee or proud University of Tennessee alumni, we are greatly disturbed by the behavior exhibited by Donald Trump both during and after the recent presidential campaign. He has made racist and sexist remarks that should never come out of the mouth of someone in public office.
As residents of Tennessee, we believe that the attendance at the upcoming inauguration of a band representing the state of Tennessee would condone this behavior. As alumni, we believe that no university should risk its reputation and credibility by welcoming such ignorance and celebrating a man like Trump. It is for this reason that we urge that the band not march at the upcoming inauguration.
San Francisco teacher calling on educators across the country to take up the "NO!"
Rosie O'Donnell on Trump: "Less than 3 weeks to stop him"
On January 1, comedian and TV entertainer Rosie O'Donnell tweeted:
DONALD TRUMP IS MENTALLY UNSTABLE - LESS THAN 3 WEEKS TO STOP HIM AMERICA
The day before, in response to a Donald Trump New Year's Eve tweet, O'Donnell tweeted:
@realDonaldTrump - we know what to do RESIST YOU - and everything you represent #notANYONESpresident #resist #liar #cheater #fraud #crook
She also tweeted:
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. ~ Maria Robinson
Then on January 3, @ROSIE retweeted:
#NoFascistUSA @RefuseFascism
The amount of flak @Rosie O'Donnell is taking right now for stating fact, as if SHE's out of line, is criminal. #NoFascistUSA #DontNormalize
Petition at Olivet Nazarene, Christian University, Speaks Out Against Trump's "well-documented sexism, his political alliances with white supremacists, and his hostility toward immigrants and refugees"
Olivet Nazarene is a Christian university located south of Chicago in Illinois. When school officials announced that the Olivet Nazarene band would be taking part in Trump's inauguration, there was immediate opposition. An online petition, "Withdraw Olivet Nazarene University from Inaugural Parade," has gathered over 2,000 signers. The petition , addressed to the college president and administrators, says in part:
Sadly, President-elect Trump has consistently articulated and advocated policies that undermine the Christian commitments of communities like Olivet. His well-documented sexism, his political alliances with white supremacists, and his hostility towards immigrants and refugees are just a few positions incompatible with Christian teachings in general and the Nazarene message of holiness in particular.
Any university presence at the inauguration would suggest toleration or, even worse, endorsement of the President-elect's objectionable attitudes on these and other issues. Such a presence is simply unacceptable.
We call on you to decline this and any other invitations to participate in President-elect Trump's inaugural festivities. We make this request not out of partisan opposition. Both educational and religious organizations should be capable of holding differing political opinions within the bonds of community. Yet, conservatives and liberals alike acknowledge that President-elect Trump has demeaned and alienated many, with little or no effort made towards reconciliation. For Olivet to embody the faith it proclaims, we have a responsibility to stand with those marginalized by the President-elect's divisive rhetoric rather than march in celebration of it.
Rebecca Ferguson Says She'll Sing at Trump Inauguration Invite IF She Can Sing "Strange Fruit"
Rebecca Ferguson is a British singer and songwriter. Her 2015 album "Lady Sings the Blues," covering classic songs by Billie Holiday, made the charts in the UK. Ferguson says she was asked to sing at Trump's inauguration and says she will do it.... IF she can sing "Strange Fruit"--a song first recorded by Billy Holliday in 1939 that scathingly indicts the lynchings of Black people in the American South. Ferguson wrote on TwitLonger:
I've been asked and this is my answer. If you allow me to sing "strange fruit" a song that has huge historical importance, a song that was blacklisted in the United States for being too controversial. A song that speaks to all the disregarded and down trodden black people in the United States. A song that is a reminder of how love is the only thing that will conquer all the hatred in this world, then I will graciously accept your invitation and see you in Washington. Best Rebecca X
Gregg Popovich, Coach of NBA San Antonio Spurs: "[Trump] is in charge of our country. That's disgusting"
Soon after the election, Gregg Popovich, one of the top coaches in the National Basketball Association (NBA), was asked to comment on Trump's victory. The following are excerpts from his comments:
It's our country, we don't want it to go down the drain. Any reasonable person would come to that conclusion. But it does not take away the fact that he is fear-mongering--all the comments, from day one--the race baiting, trying to make Barack Obama, the first Black president, illegitimate. It leaves me wondering where I've been living and with whom I'm living.
And the fact that people can just gloss that over and start talking about the transition team, and we're all gonna be kumbaya now and try to make the country good without talking about any of those things. And now we see that he's already backing off of immigration and Obamacare and other things, so was it a big fake? Which makes you feel it's even more disgusting and cynical that somebody would use that to get the base that fired up. To get elected. And what gets lost in the process are African-Americans, and Hispanics, and women, and the gay population, not to mention the eighth-grade developmental stage exhibited by him when he made fun of the handicapped person. I mean, come on. That's what a seventh-grade, eighth-grade bully does. And he was elected president of the United States. We would have scolded our kids. We would have had discussions and talked until we were blue in the face trying to get them to understand these things. And he is in charge of our country. That's disgusting.
See a YouTube of Popovich (along with another NBA coach, Stan Van Gundy) commenting on Trump here .
Mormon Tabernacle Singer Quits Over Trump Inauguration: "I could never throw roses to Hitler."
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is scheduled to sing at Trump's inauguration and 19,000 members of the Mormon Church have already signed a petition against them performing. Now, a member of the choir, Jan Chamberlin, has resigned over this, saying, "I could never throw roses to Hitler. And I certainly could never sing for him." Her letter, which was posted on Facebook, says:
Since "the announcement" [of the Choir performing at the inauguration], I have spent several sleepless nights and days in turmoil and agony. I have reflected carefully on both sides of the issue, prayed a lot, talked with family and friends, and searched my soul.
I've tried to tell myself that by not going to the inauguration, that I would be able to stay in Choir for all the other good reasons.
I have highly valued the mission of the Choir to be good-will ambassadors for Christ, to share beautiful music and to give hope, inspiration, and comfort to others.
I've tried to tell myself that it will be alright and that I can continue in good conscience before God and man.
But it's no use. I simply cannot continue with the recent turn of events. I could never look myself in the mirror again with self respect...
I also know, looking from the outside in, it will appear that Choir is endorsing tyranny and fascism by singing for this man...
Tyranny is now on our doorstep; it has been sneaking its way into our lives through stealth. Now it will burst into our homes through storm. I hope that we and many others will work together with greater diligence and awareness to calmly and bravely work together to defend our freedoms and our rights for our families, our friends, and our fellow citizens. I hope we can throw off the labels and really listen to each other with respect, love, compassion, and a true desire to bring our energies and souls together in solving the difficult problems that lie in our wake...
History is repeating itself; the same tactics are being used by Hitler (identify a problem, finding a scapegoat target to blame, and stirring up people with a combination of fanaticism, false promises, and fear, and gathering the funding). I plead with everyone to go back and read the books we all know on these topics and review the films produced to help us learn from these gargantuan crimes so that we will not allow them to be repeated. Evil people prosper when good people stand by and do nothing.
We must continue our love and support for the refugees and the oppressed by fighting against these great evils.
For me, this is a HUGELY moral issue....
I only know I could never "throw roses to Hitler." And I certainly could never sing for him.
To read the whole letter go here .
Rockette Speaks Out Against Trump: "A moral issue, a women's issue"
The Radio City Rockettes, whose trademark routine is a line of dancers doing eye-high leg kicks in perfect unison, are scheduled to perform at Trump's inauguration. Right away there were signs that some of the dancers are very disturbed about this. In a shameful move, the union representing the Rockettes, the American Guild of Variety Artists, sent an email to the dancers saying they were "obliged" to perform at the inauguration. Later the company that owns the Radio City Rockettes, the Madison Square Garden Company, told Rolling Stone magazine that individual dancers "are never told they have to perform at a particular event, including the inaugural. It is always their choice." But one can imagine the pressure being put on these women to perform and what it could mean for their careers if they refuse.
Recently, MarieClaire.com wrote a piece about this controversy, including quotes from an exclusive interview they did with "Mary," one of the Rockettes. The following are some excerpts from this article:
The dancer next to Mary was crying. Tears streamed down her face through all 90 minutes of their world-famous Christmas Spectacular as they kicked and pirouetted and hit mark after mark on the glittering Radio City Music Hall stage. This was Thursday, three days before Christmas, the day the Rockettes discovered they'd been booked to perform at the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.
"She felt she was being forced to perform for this monster," Mary told MarieClaire.com in an exclusive interview. "I wouldn't feel comfortable standing near a man like that in our costumes," said another dancer in an email to her colleagues.
For Mary? "If I had to lose my job over this, I would. It's too important. And I think the rest of the performing arts community would happily stand behind me." ...
"There is a divide in the company now, which saddens me most," Mary says. "The majority of us said no immediately. Then there's the percentage that said yes, for whatever reason--whether it's because they're young and uninformed, or because they want the money, or because they think it's an opportunity to move up in the company when other people turn it down." ...
Mary says that to her knowledge, no women of color have signed up to perform that day. "It's almost worse to have 18 pretty white girls behind this man who supports so many hate groups." ...
"This is not a Republican or Democrat issue--this is a women's rights issue," she continues. "This is an issue of racism and sexism, something that's much bigger than politics. We walk into work and everyone has different political views. The majority of the stage crew are Trump supporters; there's a 'Make America Great Again' bumper sticker on the crew doors at the side of the stage."
But the majority of the staff skews liberal, she says, especially considering the many LGBT employees at Radio City. "It's the ensemble. It's the people in our wardrobe and hair department, some of whom are transgender," she says. "These are our friends and our family, who we've worked with for years. It's a basic human-rights issue. We have immigrants in the show. I feel like dancing for Trump would be disrespecting the men and women who work with us, the people we care about."
On December 29, former Rockette Autumn Withers said in an interview on cable news channel MSNBC that the group has performed at previous inaugurations but Trump is different:
[W]e've never had an incoming president who has publically and repeatedly demeaned women and said derogatory things about women. And I think that's what makes this is a really unique situation and elevates it above a situation of just doing your job as a Rockette as you would for any other event and elevates it to a moral issue, a woman's rights issue. What does this say, the optics of having the Rockettes perform at Trump's inauguration? How does that normalize these comments and remarks that Trump has made to women at large and is that OK?
He has talked about grabbing women's genitals, he has called them names from dogs, pigs, slobs, crooked, nasty. And to have a beautiful line of women dancing behind him I think on a larger level kind of normalizes his derogatory comments. I have Republican female family members and even when you bring up his comments they're very uncomfortable and they still agree that this is a women's rights issue....
The whole MarieClair.com article is available here .
To listen to the MSNBC interview with Autumn Withers, go here .
1,500 Past and Current Fulbright Scholarship Recipients: "The consequence [of Trump becoming president] could be dire for both international cooperation and peace"
The Fulbright Program, funded by the U.S. government and private sources, gives prestigious scholarships to about 8,000 recipients yearly--for students, academics, artists and others in the U.S. to study and do research abroad and for recipients in other countries to do the same in the U.S. After the presidential election, three past and current Fulbright grant recipients wrote an open letter expressing alarm at Trump's victory. The letter has gathered signatures from over 1,500 other past and current Fulbright scholarship recipients from 95 countries.
Their letter says in part: "We have, for the last eighteen months, watched the electoral process unfold in the United States as the president-elect openly engaged in demagoguery against a number of vulnerable populations, courted hate groups, threatened the press, and promised vindictive actions against his opponents. This is not populism; it is recklessness. The consequence could be dire for both international cooperation and peace. We are now worried by the prospect of his inauguration into one of the world's most powerful offices with the power to carry out his stated intentions. While we respect the American electoral system, we write to express our deepest concerns."
The letter and list of signatories are available online here .
Franz Wasserman, Survivor of Nazi Germany: "We have to counter this trend toward fascism in every way we can."
Franz Wasserman, 96 years old, was a youth in Germany during the 1930s and saw the rise of the Nazis first-hand. He's never considered himself an activist. But with the election of Trump, he felt he had to act. He wrote a letter to U.S. senators warning of the parallels between Trump and Hitler--and shared it with others. Jerry Lange, a columnist for the Seattle Times, received a copy, and he wrote a piece on Wasserman that appeared on December 26.
Wasserman begins the letter: "I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1920. I lived there during the rise of the Nazi Party and left for the U.S.A. in 1938. The elements of the Nazi regime were the suppression of dissent, the purging of the dissenters and undesirables, the persecution of communists, Jews and homosexuals and the ideal of the Arians as the master race. These policies started immediately after Hitler came to power, at first out of sight but escalated gradually leading to the Second World War and the holocaust. Meanwhile most Germans were lulled into complacency by all sorts of wonderful projects and benefits."
Today, Wasserman writes, "The neo-Nazis and the KKK have become more prominent and get recognition in the press. We are all familiar with Trump's remarks against all Muslims and all Mexicans. But there has not been anything as alarming as the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump's Chief Strategist. Bannon has, apparently, made anti-Semitic remarks for years, has recently condemned Muslims and Jews and he and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the pick as National Security Adviser, advocate the political and cultural superiority of the white race. At the same time Trump is trying to control the press... We can hope that our government of checks and balances will be more resistant than the Weimar Republic was. Don't count on it."
The Seattle Times article with quotes from Franz Wasserman and his story is available here .
Feminist Scholars: "We cannot and will not comply. Our number one priority is to resist."
The following "Statement by Feminist Scholars on the Election of Donald Trump as President" is posted at a number of sites on the Internet and so far has more than 900 signatories:
"On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, a sizeable minority of the U.S. electorate chose to send billionaire Donald Trump, an avowed sexist and an unrepentant racist, who has spent nearly forty years antagonizing vulnerable people, to the White House. Spewing hatred at women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and those with disabilities is Trump's most consistent, and well-documented form of public engagement. Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women because, as he quipped, his celebrity made it easy for him to do so. We can only assume that the hostile climate and anxiety about what is to come were contributing factors. The political shift we are witnessing, including the appointment of open bigots to the president-elect's cabinet, reaffirms the structural disposability and systemic disregard for every person who is not white, male, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and middle or upper class.
"As a community of feminist scholars, activists and artists, we affirm that the time to act is now. We cannot endure four years of a Trump presidency without a plan. We must protect reproductive justice, fight for Black lives, defend the rights of LGBTQIA people, disrupt the displacement of indigenous people and the stealing of their resources, advocate and provide safe havens for the undocumented, stridently reject Islamophobia, and oppose the acceleration of neoliberal policies that divert resources to the top 1% and abandon those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. We must also denounce militarization at home and abroad, and climate change denial that threatens to destroy the entire planet.
"We must also reject calls to compromise, to understand, or to collaborate. We cannot and will not comply. Our number one priority is to resist. We must resist the instantiation of autocracy. We must resist this perversion of democracy. We must refuse spin and challenge any narratives that seek to call this moment "democracy at work." This is not democracy; this is the rise of a 21st century U.S. version of fascism. We must name it, so we can both confront and defeat it. The most vulnerable, both here and abroad, cannot afford for us to equivocate or remain silent. The threats posed by settler colonialism and empire around the globe have never been more real, nor has our resolve to oppose these injustices ever been stronger. Concretely, within the U.S., we oppose the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the establishment of a registry for Muslim residents.
"We owe this moment and the communities we fight for our very best thinking, teaching, and organizing. We must find creative solutions to address the immediate needs of those who will be acutely affected within the first 100 days of Trump's presidency. We must push ourselves into new, and more precise and radical analytical frameworks that can help us to articulate the stakes of this moment.
"The most important thing we can do in this moment is to make an unqualified commitment to those on the margins through our actions, insist that the media be allowed to do its job; and protect the right to protest and dissent. We recognize clearly that our silence will not protect us. Silence, in the aftermath of 11/8 is not merely a lack of words; it is a profound inertia of liberatory thought and praxis. So - what are we waiting for? We are who we are waiting for. We pledge to stand and fight, with fierce resolve, for the values and principles we believe in and the people we love."
The statement and list of signatories is available here .
Center for Constitutional Rights: "We must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism"
Shortly after Trump's election, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City issued this statement:
"We send love and solidarity to all those who are hurting and afraid that Donald Trump's America excludes them. We share the despair of the millions who are in shock that a candidate supported by the KKK has won the presidency of the United States.
"If there is a silver lining in this election result it is that it is impossible now to deny the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that have been part of America for centuries. Our duty is to stand together with all those who dissent from this bigotry and to defend and protect vulnerable communities. That has been CCR's mission for 50 years, and we will work harder than ever to defend civil and human rights and the U.S. Constitution.
"The dangers of a Trump presidency go beyond the attacks on people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. His campaign was marked by the strategies and tactics of authoritarian regimes: endorsing and encouraging violence against political protesters, threatening to jail his opponent, refusing to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost, punishing critical press. Together with all those who value freedom, justice, and self-determination, we must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism.
"Resistance is our civic duty."
Lauren Duca, Teen Vogue Editor: Trump's "Gaslighting" and the Fight for the Truth
Lauren Duca is an editor for Teen Vogue magazine and has been a contributing reporter/writer for several other magazines including Huffington Post , Vice , New York , and The New Yorker . In a December 10, article published in Teen Vogue titled "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," she writes:
"Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a bucket of ice over your head while listening to 'Duel of the Fates.' Donald Trump is our President now; it's time to wake up.
"'Gas lighting' is a buzzy name for a terrifying strategy currently being used to weaken and blind the American electorate. We are collectively being treated like Bella Manningham in the 1938 Victorian thriller from which the term 'gas light' takes its name. In the play, Jack terrorizes his wife Bella into questioning her reality by blaming her for mischievously misplacing household items which he systematically hides. Doubting whether her perspective can be trusted, Bella clings to a single shred of evidence: the dimming of the gas lights that accompanies the late night execution of Jack's trickery. The wavering flame is the one thing that holds her conviction in place as she wriggles free of her captor's control.
"To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that's precisely what Trump is doing to this country.... At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.... The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we're not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It's on every single one of us to stop pretending it's always been so hot in here...
"The road ahead is a treacherous one. There are unprecedented amounts of ugliness to untangle, from deciding whether our President can be an admitted sexual predator to figuring out how to stop him from threatening the sovereignty of an entire religion. It's incredible that any of those things could seem like a distraction from a greater peril, or be only the cherry-picked issues in a seemingly unending list of gaffes, but the gaslights are flickering. When defending each of the identities in danger of being further marginalized, we must remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together. As we spin our newfound rage into action, it is imperative to remember, across identities and across the aisle, as a country and as individuals, we have nothing without the truth."
To read the whole article go here .
Journalist Summer Brennan: "I promise to be a siren going off..."
On December 19, Summer Brennan, an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, tweeted:
"Trump is a fascist. I promise to be a siren going off about this national disaster until it is averted or stopped. #resist"
Constitutional Law Scholars to Trump: "We feel a responsibility to challenge you in the court of public opinion"
In an open letter to Trump dated December 13, constitutional legal scholars associated with law schools across the U.S. wrote, "Some of your statements and actions during the campaign and since the election cause us great concern about your commitment to our constitutional system."
The open letter gets into some of these issues: First Amendment protection of the rights of free speech and free press; "poisonous anti-Muslim rhetoric"; violation of government checks and balances; threats to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion; appointment of Alabama Senator Sessions, with a "troubling history on voting rights and civil rights," as Attorney General; "baseless charges concerning voter fraud"; and "inflammatory rhetoric" that has been "taken as invitation to discriminate and to act out in all kinds of hate-filled ways."
In the point on anti-Muslim attacks, the open letter notes: "To make matters worse, your proposed national security advisor, Michael Flynn, has described what he calls 'Islamism' as a 'vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people' that 'has to be excised.' Such rhetoric is shocking in its ignorance and bigotry; it must not become normalized. We continue to hear talk of a 'Muslim registry' being created by your administration--or a nationality-based registry that would be a proxy for religious discrimination. To our national shame, the federal government during World War II carried out--and the Supreme Court's discredited Korematsu decision upheld--the mass internment of Japanese Americans based upon no individualized suspicion of wrongdoing; the federal government under President Ronald Reagan subsequently apologized and paid reparations. We urge you to reconsider your naming of Flynn and to renounce a Muslim registry or anything like it."
The open letter concludes: "Although we sincerely hope that you will take your constitutional oath seriously, so far you have offered little indication that you will. We feel a responsibility to challenge you in the court of public opinion, and we hope that those directly aggrieved by your administration will challenge you in the courts of law. We call upon legal conservatives who cherish constitutional values to join us in speaking law to power. And we call upon citizens, lawyers, educators, public officials, and religious leaders to use every legal means available to protect the most vulnerable members of our society and our constitutional guarantees. At no point that any of us can remember has this need been more imperative than it is now."
See a pdf of the open letter and list of signatories here .
America Ferrera: Future under Trump is "terrifying" but "we can't give up the fight"
America Ferrera is an actress who has won many awards, including an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In a December 14 interview, she was asked, "How are you feeling about the future of our environment during the Trump administration?" She said:
"When you have a president-elect who says he doesn't even know if climate change is real, for the next four to eight years, the future looks pretty horrible. We know that climate change is real, and yet he's still questioning it. So, that's pretty terrifying. We haven't had any time to waste for a long time now, and it's a pretty devastating thing to start moving backward. So yes, I think that it's really daunting. But we have to be committed to staying alert and staying awake and staying educated and using our voices to push back. It doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, or there's ever going to be a defining last fight where we win and we never have to go back and defend the idea that climate change is the real thing we need to pay attention to. But we can't give up the fight."
Celebrities Refuse to Perform at Trump Inauguration
During his presidential campaign, many musicians, actors, and other celebrities spoke out against Donald Trump. And now he and his team are having a hard time getting musicians to perform at his inauguration. A number of celebrities have been asked and refused, and some have made it clear that if they are asked, they will refuse.
Read more here
Open Letter Protesting American Library Association Press Release: "I am absolutely not ready to work with President-elect Trump"
On November 20, Sarah Houghton wrote an Open Letter to Julie Todaro, President of the American Library Association, protesting a press release from the ALA in which Todaro stated, "We are ready to work with President-elect Trump, his transition team, incoming administration and members of Congress to bring more economic opportunity to all Americans and advance other goals we have in common."
Houghton has been an active member of the ALA for 16 years and says, "I have never before this week considered canceling my membership." Houghton says in her letter: "I am absolutely not ready to work with President-elect Trump. He has stood for racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination for his entire life--including during his campaign. Those are all things ALA stands firmly against. Explain to me why we're ready to work with a bigot? Because I'm not ready for that at all. The rest of this release went on to detail some of the things libraries do for communities--coming off as a weak and pandering missive begging for scraps and, in truth, coming from a place of fear."
Houghton points to another ALA press release that highlights "how libraries can advance specific policy priorities of the incoming Trump administration in the areas of entrepreneurship, services to veterans and broadband adoption and use" and says:
"This trajectory away from justice and toward collaboration with a fascist regime disturbs me greatly. These comments are tone deaf and, not only do not represent my values as a librarian, but do not represent the shared values of the American Library Association and its membership. There is a time to walk a middle road, to give voice to a moderate viewpoint of an organization's membership. This is not that time. This is the time to stand tall and proud, and give voice to the fiery ethics and values that our profession has held dear for so long in the face of fascism and bigotry.
"I have no intention of supporting this incoming administration in any way whatsoever. With the transition team and other appointments being floated in the press, President-elect Trump has made it clear that racism, sexism, bigotry, assault, discrimination of all kinds, and the destruction of basic civil liberties are foundational to his administration's philosophy. I refuse to be complicit in the work of the Trump administration and cannot in good faith remain part of a professional organization that chooses to be complicit."
Read the whole letter here .
Celebrity Chefs vs. Trump
Anthony Bourdain , currently host of CNN's travel and food show Parts Unknown, was asked in a recent interview about sushi chef Alessandro Borgognone's decision to move his restaurant to Trump's Washington, DC, hotel. Bourdain said he would "never eat in his restaurant" and felt "utter and complete contempt" for the chef. He explained, "I'm not asking you to start putting up barricades now, but when they come and ask you, 'Are you with us?' you do have an option. You can say, 'No thanks, guys. I don't look good in a brown shirt. Makes me look a little, I don't know, not great. It's not slimming.'" In a tweet on December 22, Bourdain said, "I am not 'boycotting' anything. I choose to not patronize chefs who tacitly support deporting half the people they've ever worked with"--clear reference to Trump's threat to deport millions of Mexican immigrants.
Jose Andres operates more than a dozen restaurants in cities including Washington, DC; Miami; Las Vegas; and Los Angeles. In 2015, after Trump made disgusting racist comments about Mexican immigrants, Andres withdrew the commitment he'd made to open a restaurant in Trump's new DC hotel. Trump sued him for breach of contract, seeking $10 million in damages. Andres countersued, and said, "More than half of my team is Hispanic, as are many of our guests. And, as a proud Spanish immigrant and recently naturalized American citizen myself, I believe that every human being deserves respect, regardless of immigration status." Andres tweeted on December 19: "I am a proud immigrant!! To my fellow immigrants thank you for the amazing work you do every day. #ToImmigrantsWithLove" Trump is required to appear to be deposed in Andres's suit, just weeks before his scheduled inauguration.
Fiona Apple's Christmas Song: "Trump's nuts roasting on an open fire..."
At the December 18 "We Rock with Standing Rock" benefit concert in Los Angeles, singer Fiona Apple did a fiery performance of her version of the Christmas standard "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" that begins: "Trump's nuts roasting on an open fire..." She ends with "Donald Trump... Fuck You!" to the loud cheers of the audience. Watch it here:
George Polisner, Executive of Tech Company Oracle: "I am here to oppose [Trump] in every possible and legal way"
George Polisner, a top executive at the tech corporation Oracle, publicly resigned from the company on December 19 after Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz announced she was going to join Trump's presidential transition team. Catz was among the executives from major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Apple, who met with Trump last week--a shameful meeting that helped to lend legitimacy to the Trump-Pence fascist cabal. When Polisner learned of this, he sent his letter to Catz and at the same time posted it on the LinkedIn website.
His resignation letter says in part, "Trump stokes fear, hatred and violence toward people of color, Muslims and immigrants. It is well-known that hate crimes are surging as he has provided license for this ignorance-based expression of malice.... He seeks to eviscerate environmental protections, the public education system, LGBTQ rights and women's rights."
And Polisner says in the letter: " I am not with President-elect Trump and I am not here to help him in any way. In fact--when his policies border on the unconstitutional, the criminal and the morally unjust--I am here to oppose him in every possible and legal way." (emphasis in the original)
Polisner told the UK Guardian that he decided to make his resignation letter public because he "decided it was too important to die as a private letter" and that "I thought I could either be a role model in terms of a path forward or a cautionary tale."
Read George Polisner's resignation letter here .
Actor Michael Sheen: "In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped"
Michael Sheen is a Welsh stage and screen actor whose work includes starring roles in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon and the current Showtime series Masters of Sex. On December 17, the Sunday Times of London ran a profile on him, titled "Michael Sheen gets political. This time it's for real." The writer of the profile had expected Sheen to discuss his role in the upcoming sci-fi film Passengers. "Instead, Sheen, 47, wants to talk about politics. Lately, it's been bothering him a lot. No, that's not nearly strong enough. What he calls the 'demagogic, fascistic' drift of politics in the western world in the past few years, culminating in Donald Trump's election victory, has left Sheen horrified, furious and determined to do everything he can to counter it. It's why, after several years of increasing commitments to a broad spread of causes, including the NHS, Unicef, the Freedom of Information Act, fighting homelessness and campaigning against fracking, the actor is preparing to go all in. He plans to start fighting the rise of the 'hard populist right'--evident in France, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States--via grassroots organizing in his beloved Port Talbot (he pronounces it "P'Talbot") and see where it takes him." (Port Talbot is Sheen's hometown in Wales.)
Later, the profile quotes Sheen saying, "In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped. But it has to be understood before it can be stopped."
The whole profile is available at the Times website here (the site requires registration for free access).
100+ Professors at Notre Dame Say: We are coming forward to stand with the professors you have called "dangerous"
A website called "Professor Watchlist," run by a group called Turning Point USA, has posted the names of more than 200 professors they accuse of putting forward "leftist propaganda" and "discriminating" against right-wing students. This campus witch-hunt is a sign of the time of Trump.
Among the names appearing on the Watchlist are two Notre Dame academics: philosophy professor Gary Gutting and Iris Outlaw, director of Multicultural Student Programs and Services. The Watchlist said Gutting was added because he wrote that the country's "permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism," and Outlaw because she "taught a 'white privilege' seminar that pledged to help students acknowledge and understand their white privilege."
In response, more than 100 Notre Dame faculty members published an open letter in the Observer , the student newspaper at Notre Dame, defying the Professor Watchlist. Their statement said in part: "We surmise that the purpose of your list is to shame and silence faculty who espouse ideas you reject. But your list has had a different effect upon us. We are coming forward to stand with the professors you have called 'dangerous,' reaffirming our values and recommitting ourselves to the work of teaching students to think clearly, independently, and fearlessly.
"So please add our names, the undersigned faculty at the University of Notre Dame, to the Professor Watchlist. We wish to be counted among those you are watching."
The full letter and list of the names are available at the Observer site.
In his December 5 piece titled "Trump's Agents of Idiocracy," in the New York Times , columnist Charles Blow wrote:
"What if Trump has shown himself beyond doubt and with absolute certainty to be a demagogue and bigot and xenophobe and has given space and voice to concordant voices in the country and in his emerging Legion of Doom cabinet? In that reality, resistance isn't about mindless obstruction by people blinded by the pain of ideological defeat or people gorging on sour grapes. To the contrary, resistance then is an act of radical, even revolutionary, patriotism. Resistance isn't about damaging the country, but protecting it..."
Read the whole column here
MIT Faculty: "The President-elect has appointed individuals to positions of power who have endorsed racism, misogyny and religious bigotry, and denied the widespread scientific consensus on climate change."
More than 500 members of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have issued a statement opposing Trump's official appointments and "upholding the value of science and diversity." The signers include people from every academic department at MIT, nine department and program heads, and four Nobel Prize recipients. Notable signatories to date include Susan Solomon, Co-Chair of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor; Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus; Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab; and Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author.
This is an important development, and this kind of stand needs to spread to other campuses and through the academic community, even as people get more clarity on the actual fascist nature of Trump and the incoming regime. Read the MIT faculty statement here .
Shaun King: "No, we should not wait and see what a Trump administration does. We should organize our resistance right now."
New York Daily News columnist Shaun King's writes: "Now, in the name of a peaceful transition, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton are striking a conciliatory tone. I understand that such a tone is a tradition in American politics, but everything about Donald Trump and this election breaks with tradition. President Obama may feel obligated to strike such a tone, but I don't have such an obligation. Perhaps President Obama feels that by striking such a tone, it makes it more likely that Donald Trump will be moderate after his inauguration. I don't believe that for one second."
His column concludes: "We can't wait until he does those things before we act against him. We must outsmart and out-organize his team. I implore you to ignore anybody saying anything other than that. They've been wrong all year. We must act and we must act now."
Read Shaun King's piece here .
"Trump is saying Hitler-level things in public... And I feel like it's dangerous for us to be complacent"
Read John Legend's comments here .
Green Day at American Music Awards, November 20: NO TRUMP! NO KKK! NO FASCIST USA!
During the live TV broadcast of the American Music Awards on Sunday night, November 20, the punk rock band Green Day let loose with a defiant condemnation of Donald Trump. In the middle of performing "Bang Bang," from their latest album Revolution Radio, the band, led by singer Billie Joe Armstrong, broke into the chant:
"No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!"
ABC TV executives were reportedly thrown "completely off guard." The audience gave Green Day a standing ovation.
This is the kind of bold, truth-telling denunciation of Trump--calling out what he actually represents--that we need much more of, right now!
Watch a video clip here.
"Farewell, America" by author Neal Gabler, November 10
Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently ...
With Trump's election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public's contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information - a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.
With the mainstream media so delegitimized -- a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies -- they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism -- if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.
Read more here .
Architect Resigns from Association for Pledging to "Play Nice" with Trump
Two days after Trump's election, Robert Ivy, the CEO and executive vice president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), sent a memorandum to the organization's members saying, "The AIA and its 89,000 members are committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues our country faces, particularly strengthening the nation's aging infrastructure. ... It is now time for all of us to work together to advance policies that help our country move forward."
When Frederick "Fritz" Read, the founder and head of Read & Company Architects in Baltimore, saw this, he acted immediately. He sent a letter condemning Ivy's statement and declaring his resignation from the AIA. He wrote: "The alacrity with which Robert Ivy hopped out there to promise the President-Elect that the AIA will play nice with his administration, without even a pro forma caution that what Mr. Trump has promised and threatened are deeply antithetical to the values that many of us cherish, is the final straw for me, the last bit of evidence I needed, that our only serious interest as an organization has become a craven interest in securing our piece of the action. The AIA does not represent my personal or professional interests. Please consider this my resignation from the AIA, effective immediately, and remove both my name and that of my firm from your membership records. I am appalled."
In a subsequent email to an official of the Baltimore AIA chapter who talked about how AIA relations with the U.S. government have always been and should continue to be "neutral," Read wrote: "Am so curious how a pledge made explicitly on behalf of all 89,000 members of open-ended and unqualified support for a climate-change-denying, xenophobic, racist, sexist, repeated bankrupt can possibly be understood as a statement of organizational neutrality. ... Ours is not an honorable history of willingness to forgo enrichment simply on principle, and this statement slips all too closely to the worst of that: are we all too young or forgetful to recall that Albert Speer was one of ours?" Speer was Hitler's chief architect who headed major projects under the Nazi regime and became Minister of Armaments and War Production during World War 2.
Under mounting criticism from architects, architecture faculty, and other architecture professionals, Ivy and other leading AIA officials were forced to apologize to the membership for their craven remarks about working with the Trump administration.
Read more about this here at Architect News online
Center for Biological Diversity: "Lash Out at the Darkness and Fight Like Hell"
In the November 10 issue of their online newsletter "Endangered Earth," the Center for Biological Diversity included a statement saying, "We're only thinking about one thing right now: stopping Donald Trump from destroying the planet." The statement goes on to say, "If President Trump carries out the disastrous promises he made while campaigning, the Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted, the Endangered Species Act will be repealed, old-growth forests will be clearcut, hard-fought global climate change agreements will be undermined, and polluters will be given free rein over our water and air."
And the center vowed, "There's no way in hell we're letting that happen." Read the entire statement here.
Read the Center's piece here .
Jewish historians speak out on the election of Donald Trump
Hostility to immigrants and refugees strikes particularly close to home for us as historians of the Jews. As an immigrant people, Jews have experienced the pain of discrimination and exclusion, including by this country in the dire years of the 1930s. Our reading of the past impels us to resist any attempts to place a vulnerable group in the crosshairs of nativist racism. It is our duty to come to their aid and to resist the degradation of rights that Mr. Trump's rhetoric has provoked.
However, it is not only in defense of others that we feel called to speak out. We witnessed repeated anti-Semitic expressions and insinuations during the Trump campaign. Much of this anti-Semitism was directed against journalists, either Jewish or with Jewish-sounding names. The candidate himself refused to denounce--and even retweeted--language and images that struck us as manifestly anti-Semitic. By not doing so, his campaign gave license to haters of Jews, who truck in conspiracy theories about world Jewish domination.
Read entire statement here
Issa Rae, Actor: "The scariest part is how normal it's becoming to some people"
Issa Rae is star of the HBO series Insecure . Sunday night, January 9, on the red carpet at the Golden Globes awards in Los Angeles., she was asked what she thought of Trump. Rae said:
Every single time I see a tweet from that man, every single time I see the administration that he's bringing in, it just gets worse and worse. And the scariest part to me is how normal it's becoming to some people. And I think we just have to keep calling things out, it's like nope, you're lying, nope, that's not true, nope, that doesn't work that way. As long as we don't continue to let him slide, then there might be some hope, but it's scary.
Actor Debra Messing: "This is a regime that will strip away the rights of millions..."
Debra Messing, best known for her starring role in the TV comedy series Will & Grace, tweeted on December 18:
This is a regime that will strip away the rights of millions. Threaten the lives of millions. And threatens the planet. #NOFASCISTUSA
Messing is one of the signatories of the Call to Action of RefuseFascism.org. On Wednesday, January 4, when the Call appeared as a full page in the New York Times, she tweeted a photo of that Times page with the #NoFascistUSA hashtag and link to refusefascism.org.
Literary Magazine Editor Philip Elliot: "Fascism is rising. Not just in the U.S. but across Europe too"
Philip Elliot is the editor-in-chief of Into The Void , a print and digital literary magazine based in Dublin, Ireland, "dedicated to providing fantastic fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art from all over the world." In a recent roundtable with several editors, the online journal The Review Review asked the question "How Will a Trump Presidency Impact Literary Magazines?" Elliot answered:
Fascism is rising. Not just in the U.S. but across Europe too. In the West we're experiencing similar circumstances that led to its rise a century ago and now the wheel has turned again. People say to me, especially because I live in Ireland, that I'm overreacting to this; that's it's just more politics, everything will blow over, etc. They fail to see the bigger picture. What's been put into motion here, catalyzed by the election but arisen from a far more complex sense of discontent and fear, is the greatest threat to our newly-progressive societies that we've ever seen. More than anything else, my fear is that we as artists and curators of art will allow our way of thinking to become the "It's just politics, it will all blow over soon" attitude. I fear that because nothing terrible is going to happen right away, we will normalize this whole affair and accept it. What people forget is that Hitler began his slow climb to absolute power in 1918. Bad things are coming, that's for certain, but they will come slowly, and they will come under the guise of good. As writers, we peer under the masks of things for a living and that skill is more important now than ever. Art's duty to criticize the bad and protect the good is infinitely more important in times of darkness. It reminds us what we can be. And it must also remind us of the terrible evil we once did. Because if we truly remembered, how could we have let this happen again? At Into the Void, we'll be paying close attention to work that criticizes the actions of our supposed leaders in the months and years to come.
Elliot's comments and others can be found here .
Petition Against Museum Loan of Art for Inauguration: "We object...to an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency"
When the St. Louis Art Museum announced that they were making an artwork from their collection available on loan to serve as a centerpiece of the Trump inauguration luncheon, art historian Ivy Cooper and artist Ilene Berman began an online petition calling for the cancellation of the loan. According to the petition, the 1855 painting, "Verdict of the People" by George Caleb Bingham, "depicts a small-town Missouri election, and symbolizes the democratic process in mid-19th century America." The petition goes on to say:
We object to the painting's use as an inaugural backdrop and an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency and his expressed values of hatred, misogyny, racism and xenophobia. We reject the use of the painting to suggest that Trump's election was truly the "verdict of the people," when in fact the majority of votes--by a margin of over three million--were cast for Trump's opponent. Finally, we consider the painting a representation of our community, and oppose its use as such at the inauguration.
Art can be used to make powerful statements. Its withdrawal can do the same. Join us in our campaign.
As of January 6, close to 2,700 people have signed the petition, which is available here .
Gothamist.com on Refuse Fascism NY Times Ad: "It's a Noble Cause..."
In a January article at Gothamist.com, an article by Rebecca Fishbein titled " Celebrities, Activists Publish Anti-Fascist, Anti-Trump Ad In NY Times " said, in part:
Rosie O'Donnell, Debra Messing, and a handful of celebrities and activists have joined forces with RefuseFascism.org, a Cornel West and Carl Dix-helmed group dedicated to opposing the incoming Trump Administration and calling Trump's presidency "illegitimate."
The group took out a full page ad in the Times yesterday calling for a month long resistance effort against Trump: [facsimile of the ad is included]
Refuse Fascism is also asking for donations to help reprint the Times ad in papers across the country, as well as "to support volunteers going to D.C., to produce millions of copies of Refuse Fascism material and get them out everywhere, and to support organizers and speakers."
It's a noble cause, and there's nothing wrong with celebrities speaking out. Influential people should be speaking out against Trump, and advocating activism, and fighting him at every turn....
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Poet and Literature Professor: "Full-fledged U.S. fascism has come"
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept. In a New Year's Eve blog post, Gonzalez wrote of Donald Trump:
Shall I repeat the litany of his faults--his misogyny, his racism, his homophobia, his bigotry, his profound ignorance? His analysis, his description, his judgment of anything does not go beyond stock superlatives; he knows nothing of ideas, much less policy, not an iota of science. "I am a business man," he says proudly as if that justified all his conniving, his dishonesty, his thievery. Should we doubt it, he has his billions to prove it. So the empire now gets its own, homegrown Caligula. Sociopathic megalomaniac, he too may come to declare himself divine. True, we have been governed by criminals before (can one govern an empire and not be criminal?), but this is a case apart.
It is the cruelty I fear, the utter heartlessness in the face of suffering, the willingness, nay, the intent to cause suffering and pain. Nor compassion nor justice is a hallmark of the 1%, the Republican Party he represents and that brought him to power. (Being a Democrat is no guarantee of decency, but it seems that a decent Republican is an oxymoron.) With Republican control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive (the proposed Cabinet reads like a Hitlerian wish-list), full-fledged U. S. fascism has come, a fascism prepared to destroy the Earth itself for the sake of wealth and power. Can it be called anything but madness?
He went on to write:
Democracy once lost is very hard to restore. Our resistance must be immediate and overwhelming, our love fierce, our joy protected. Our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities must be made bulwarks of justice, of refuge. Our schools sanctuary of freedom of thought and inquiry, our churches voices for justice rooted in compassion. Much is demanded of us and great may be the sacrifice, but if we all share it, it will be much, much less. Let us then take to the streets and public places dressed in our most joyful colors, making music with our drums and flutes, dragging our pianos out our doors if we must, dancing, singing, chanting, turning all our art into protest and celebration--and make our spaces truly our own.
Read the whole piece by Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, titled "Thoughts for the Last Day of the Year 2016," available in English and Spanish here .
More Than 1,100 Law Professors Tell Senate to Reject Sessions Nomination
More than 1,100 law school professors from across the country are behind a letter sent to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, January 2, calling for the rejection of Trump's nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general. The letter says (in full):
We are 1140 faculty members from 170 different law schools in 48 states across the country. We urge you to reject the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions for the position of Attorney General of the United States.
In 1986, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, in a bipartisan vote, rejected President Ronald Reagan's nomination of then-U.S. Attorney Sessions for a federal judgeship, due to statements Sessions had made that reflected prejudice against African Americans. Nothing in Senator Sessions' public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.
Some of us have concerns about his misguided prosecution of three civil rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in 1985, and his consistent promotion of the myth of voter-impersonation fraud. Some of us have concerns about his support for building a wall along our country's southern border. Some of us have concerns about his robust support for regressive drug policies that have fueled mass incarceration. Some of us have concerns about his questioning of the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change. Some of us have concerns about his repeated opposition to legislative efforts to promote the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of us share all of these concerns.
All of us believe it is unacceptable for someone with Senator Sessions' record to lead the Department of Justice .
The Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer in the United States, with broad jurisdiction and prosecutorial discretion, which means that, if confirmed, Jeff Sessions would be responsible for the enforcement of the nation's civil rights, voting, immigration, environmental, employment, national security, surveillance, antitrust, and housing laws. As law faculty who work every day to better understand the law and teach it to our students, we are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation's laws and promote justice and equality in the United States. We urge you to reject his nomination.
To read the statement with list of signatories go here .
Outrage at Simon & Schuster's Book Deal for Pro-Trump Racist
When the book publisher Simon & Schuster recently signed Milo Yiannopoulos, writer for Breitbart News Network, to a $250,000 book deal for the Threshold imprint, there was immediate outrage. Breitbart is a neo-Nazi, misogynistic, white-supremacist website whose former owner, Steve Bannon, is now Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor. As technology editor at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos promoted the vicious campaign known as "GamerGate," a flood of viciously degrading attacks and terroristic threats against the very small number of prominent women in the video-game development community. Among the despicable things he's written is: "...Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the internet without feminist whining. It will be fun! Like a big fraternity..." And Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter this summer after his followers mounted a racist harassment campaign against Black comedian/actor Leslie Jones.
After the Simon & Schuster signing of Yiannopoulos, the Chicago Review of Books tweeted:
In response to this disgusting validation of hate, we will not cover a single @simonschuster book in 2017.
A bookstore in Dublin, Ireland, tweeted that it would not be carrying any Simon & Schuster titles:
Sometimes it's a tough call for bookshops between respecting free speech and not promoting hate speech. Sometimes not. Byebye
Writer Danielle Henderson's memoir is scheduled for publication by Simon & Schuster next year. Henderson wrote in a series of tweets:
I'm looking at my @simonschuster contract, and unfortunately there's no clause for "what if we decide to publish a white nationalist"
But know this: i'm well aware of what hill I am willing to die on, and my morals and values are at the top of that list.
I will happily go back to slinging coffee--I'm not afraid to stand for what I believe in, and I make a MEAN cappuccino foam
Comedian Sara Silverman tweeted:
The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him & give him a platform tells me a LOT about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS
Shannon Coulter, a marketing specialist who started a campaign to boycott Ivanka Trump products, tweeted ("@Lesdoggg" is Leslie Jones' Twitter handle):
@simonschuster are you concerned $250k book deal you gave Milo Yiannopoulos will read as condoning the racist harassment @Lesdoggg endured?
Poet Nikky Finney: Talladega College should stand with others "protesting the inauguration of one of the most antagonistic, hatred spewing, unrepentant racists"
The January 2 announcement that Talladega College, a historically Black college in Alabama, would send its marching band to be part of Trump's inauguration march was met with immediate outrage from many students and alumni. Nikky Finney, a poet whose 2011 work Head Off & Split won the National Book Award, is an alumna of Talladega and currently a chair in creative writing and Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. Finney said of Talladega's decision:
The news that Talladega College has forgotten its steady and proud 150 years of history, by making the decision to not stand in solidarity with other clear-eyed and courageous people, academic institutions, and organizations, protesting the inauguration of one of the most antagonistic, hatred-spewing, unrepentant racists, has simply and unequivocally broken my heart today. Historical Black colleges are duty bound to have and keep a moral center and be of great moral consciousness while also teaching its students lessons about life that they will need going forward, mainly, that just because a billionaire--who cares nothing about their 150 years of American existence--invites them to a fancy, gold-plated, dress-up party, they have the moral right and responsibility to say "no thank you," especially when the blood, sweat, and tears and bodies, of black, brown, and native people are stuffed in the envelope alongside the RSVP.
This should have been a teachable moment for the President of Talladega College instead it has become a moment of divisiveness and shame. Bags of money and the promise of opportunity have always been waved in front of the faces and lives of struggling human beings, who have historically been relegated to the first-fired and the last-hired slots of life. It has been used to separate us before. It has now been used to separate us again.
Stan Van Gundy, Detroit Pistons Coach: "We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus"
Speaking about Trump after his election victory, Stan Van Gundy, coach of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Detroit Pistons, said in part:
We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus, and I have problems with thinking that this is where we are as a country. It's tough on [the team], we noticed it coming in. Everybody was a little quiet, and I thought, "Well, maybe the game the other night." [The Pistons were badly beaten in the game that night.] And so we talked about that, but then Aron Baynes said, "I don't think that's why everybody's quiet. It's last night."
It's just, we have said--and my daughters, the three of them--our society has said, "No, we think you should be second-class citizens. We want you to be second-class citizens. And we embrace a guy who is openly misogynistic as our leader." I don't know how we get past that.
Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice." I would have believed in that for a long time, but not today.... What we have done to minorities... in this election is despicable. I'm having a hard time dealing with it. This isn't your normal candidate. I don't know even know if I have political differences with him. I don't even know what are his politics. I don't know, other than to build a wall and "I hate people of color, and women are to be treated as sex objects and as servants to men." I don't know how you get past that. I don't know how you walk into the booth and vote for that. I understand problems with the economy. I understand all the problems with Hillary Clinton, I do. But certain things in our country should disqualify you. And the fact that millions and millions of Americans don't think that racism and sexism disqualifies you to be our leader, in our country....
We presume to tell other countries about human-rights abuses and everything else. We better never do that again, when our leaders talk to China or anybody else about human-rights abuses. We just elected an openly, brazen misogynist leader and we should keep our mouths shut and realize that we need to be learning maybe from the rest of the world, because we don't got anything to teach anybody...
To see a YouTube of Van Gundy's remarks (along with another NBA coach, Gregg Popovich) go here.
Scientist Lawrence M. Krauss on "Donald Trump's War on Science"
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and director of its Origins Project. He was one of the producers of the documentary film The Unbelievers, which promotes a scientific view of the world. An article by Krauss appeared in the December 13 issue of The New Yorker titled, "Donald Trump's War on Science." In this article Krauss says:
The first sign of Trump's intention to spread lies about empirical reality, "1984"-style, was, of course, the appointment of Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, as Trump's "senior counselor and strategist." This year, Breitbart hosted stories with titles such as "1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016," despite the fact that 2016 is now overwhelmingly on track to be the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2013. Such stories do more than spread disinformation. Their purpose is the creation of an alternative reality--one in which scientific evidence is a sham--so that hyperbole and fearmongering can divide and conquer the public.
Bannon isn't the only propagandist in the new Administration: Myron Ebell, who heads the transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency, is another. In the aughts, as a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he worked to kill a cap-and-trade bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; in 2012, when the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a meeting about the economics of a possible carbon tax, he asked donors to defund it. It's possible, of course, to oppose cap-and-trade or carbon taxes in good faith--and yet, in recent years, Ebell's work has come to center on lies about science and scientists. Today, as the leader of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-climate-science group, Ebell denies the veracity and methodology of science itself. He dismisses complex computer models that have been developed by hundreds of researchers by saying that they "don't even pass the laugh test." If Ebell's methods seem similar to those used by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health effects of smoking in the nineteen-nineties, that's because he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.
When Ebell's appointment was announced, Jeremy Symons, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said, "I got a sick feeling in my gut.... I can't believe we got to the point when someone who is as unqualified and intellectually dishonest as Myron Ebell has been put in a position of trust for the future of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we are going to leave our kids." Symons was right to be apprehensive: on Wednesday, word came that Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma's attorney general, will be named the head of the E.P.A. As Jane Mayer has written, it would be hard to find a public official in the United States who is more closely tied to the oil-and-gas industry and who has been more actively opposed to the efforts of the E.P.A. to regulate the environment. In a recent piece for National Review, Pruitt denied the veracity of climate science; he has led the effort among Republican attorneys general to work directly with the fossil-fuel industry in resisting the Clean Air Act. In 2014, a Times investigation found that letters from Pruitt's office to the E.P.A. and other government agencies had been drafted by energy lobbyists; right now, he is involved in a twenty-eight-state lawsuit against the very agency that he has been chosen to head...
And the Trump Administration is on course to undermine science in another way: through education. Educators have various concerns about Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education--they object to her efforts to shield charter schools from government regulation, for example--but one issue stands above the rest: DeVos is a fundamentalist Christian with a long history of opposition to science. If her faith shapes her policies--and there is evidence that it will--she could shape science education decisively for the worse, by systematically depriving young people, in an era where biotechnology will play a key economic and health role worldwide, of a proper understanding of the very basis of modern biology: evolution....
Taken singly, Trump's appointments are alarming. But taken as a whole they can be seen as part of a larger effort to undermine the institution of science, and to deprive it of its role in the public-policy debate. Just as Steve Bannon undermines the institution of a fact-based news media, so appointments like Ebell, Pruitt, McMorris Rodgers, Walker, and DeVos advance the false perception that science is just a politicized tool of "the elites."
...It is not only scientists who should actively fight against this dangerous trend. It is everyone who is concerned about our freedom, health, welfare, and security as a nation--and everyone who is concerned about the planetary legacy we leave for our children.
To read the whole article go here .
Mormon Church Members Protest Mormon Tabernacle Choir Singing at Trump's Inauguration
Some members of the Mormon church are protesting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing at Trump's inauguration. A petition saying "Mormon Tabernacle Choir Should NOT Perform at Trump Inauguration" has now been signed by close to 19,000 people. It says in part: "As members and friends of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we strongly urge the Church to stop this practice and especially for an incoming president who has demonstrated sexist, racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic behavior that does not align with the principles and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." The online petition can be found here .
Law Students Speak Out Against Trump's Attorney General Nominee: "Sessions stated that he believed the Ku Klux Klan was okay"
After Trump nominated Alabama white supremacist and Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the American Constitution Society (ACS) at Harvard Law School--one of the most prestigious law schools in the world--wrote a letter to Trump opposing the nomination and began distributing it for signatures through ACS chapters across the country. As of December 22, it was signed by 1,060 law students from many different schools.
The letter points at some of Sessions's outrageous record:
*"As a four-term member of the U.S. Senate, former Alabama Attorney General and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, Senator Sessions consistently opposed laws advancing civil rights, environmental protections, reproductive rights, criminal justice, voting rights, immigration and marriage equality."
*"During the unsuccessful confirmation hearing [for federal judgeship in 1986], witnesses testified under oath that Sessions described a white civil rights attorney as a 'race traitor'; referred to a black attorney as 'boy'; and called the ACLU, NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Council of Churches and other groups 'un-American organizations.'"
*"During the 1986 hearing, a former colleague also testified that Sessions stated that he believed the Ku Klux Klan was okay, until he learned its members smoked marijuana."
The letter and signatories are online here .
National Nurses United: Trump pick for Health and Human Services would throw "our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans at the mercy of the healthcare industry"
National Nurses United (NNU) is the largest union of registered nurses in the United States. It recently organized a national network of volunteer RNs to go to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to meet the first aid needs of thousands who were there to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline. On December 22, the NNU sent a letter calling on the Senate to reject Trump's nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tom Price.
According to a NNU press release, the letter says in part: "If confirmed, it is clear that Rep. Price will pursue policies that substantially erode our nation's health and security--eliminating health coverage, reducing access, shifting more costs to working people and their families, and throwing our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans at the mercy of the healthcare industry."
Price has played a major role in attempts by Republicans to undercut or repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obama's healthcare law (see " Tom Price, Trump's Pick for Health and Human Services: A Slasher of Healthcare for the Poor and Women "). The NNU letter says: "Even today, four years after enactment of the Affordable Care Act, we have seen a drop in U.S. life expectancy rates for the first time in decades, millions of people who self-ration prescription medications or other critical medical treatment due to the high out-of-pocket costs, and continuing disparities in our health care system based on race, gender, age, socio-economic status, or where you live.
"While our organization repeatedly voiced concerns that the ACA did not go far enough, repealing the law, especially the expansion of Medicaid which extended health care coverage to millions of low and moderate income adults, and limits on some of the most chronicled abuses in our present insurance based system, would only exacerbate a healthcare crisis many Americans continue to experience..."
Read the NNU press release here .
Thousands of Doctors Speak Out Against Trump's Pick to Head Health and Human Services
On November 29, the American Medical Association (AMA), which represents about a quarter of doctors in the U.S., issued a statement saying that it "strongly supports" Trump's nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tom Price, and calling on the Senate to "promptly consider and confirm" him for the position.
In response, three physicians from the University of Pennsylvania--Drs. Manik Chhabra, Navin Vij and Jane Zhu--posted a statement online opposing the Trump nominee. The statement has been signed by over 5,500 doctors as of December 16.
Their statement, "The AMA Does Not Speak for Us," says in part:
We are practicing physicians who deliver healthcare in hospitals and clinics, in cities and rural towns; we are specialists and generalists, and we care for the poor and the rich, the young and the elderly. We see firsthand the difficulties that Americans face daily in accessing affordable, quality healthcare. We believe that in issuing this statement of support for Dr. Price, the AMA has reneged on a fundamental pledge that we as physicians have taken -- to protect and advance care for our patients.
We support patient choice. But Dr. Price's proposed policies threaten to harm our most vulnerable patients and limit their access to healthcare. We cannot support the dismantling of Medicaid, which has helped 15 million Americans gain health coverage since 2014. We oppose Dr. Price's proposals to reduce funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a critical mechanism by which poor children access preventative care. We wish to protect essential health benefits like treatment for opioid use disorder, prenatal care, and access to contraception.
We see benefits in market-based solutions to some of our healthcare system's challenges. Like many others, we advocate for improvements in the way healthcare is delivered. But Dr. Price purports to care about efficiency, while opposing innovations by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to improve value and eliminate waste in healthcare. He supports plans to privatize Medicare, a critical program which covers 44 million of our elderly patients.
The AMA's vision statement includes "improving health outcomes" and "better health for all," and yet by supporting Dr. Price's candidacy -- and therefore, his views -- the AMA has not aligned itself with the well-being of patients.
For the complete statement and list of signatories, go here .
Merrill Miller, Associate Editor of TheHumanist.com: "Now is the time for us to stand in solidarity with those who face oppression"
Merrill Miller is associate editor of TheHumanist.com and Communications Associate at the American Humanist Association. The January/February 2017 issue of the Humanist includes an article by Miller titled, "Who Will We Speak For? Humanism's Role in Defending Human Rights and Civil Liberties." The piece starts with the famous quote from Protestant pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent seven years in one of Hitler's concentration camps, about how he had not spoken out when the Nazis attacked different sections of the people until there was no one left to speak for him.
Miller writes: "For many humanists and those in the progressive community at large, these past weeks have, in some ways, felt like decades. We've seen Hillary Clinton win the popular vote for president by an enormous margin and still lose the Electoral College to Donald Trump, who is now president-elect. We've seen Stephen Bannon, who fueled the fires of racism, sexism, and bigotry in his time at Breitbart News, named as a chief strategist for the Trump administration, as climate change deniers and individuals with no respect for church-state separation (Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, for one) are being nominated or considered for other top positions. We've heard talk of legislation that would chip away at our constitutional right to free, peaceable assembly, such as Washington State Senator Doug Ericksen's bill to classify street protests as a form of 'economic terrorism'...
"Humanists are in a unique position to demonstrate outrage...We must harness that capacity for outrage now--not just to defend church-state separation but to protect all of our basic human rights and civil liberties.
"We can start by directing that outrage at the notion that the government would profile and register people based on their race and religion, as the Muslim registry would do. While current discussions of this registry would focus on immigrants, Trump said during his campaign that he would require all Muslims to register, presumably including US citizens. Humanist groups should reach out to their local mosques and Islamic community centers and ask them what their community needs are and how to help...
"Now is the time for us to stand in solidarity with those who face oppression, whether they are undocumented immigrants in danger of losing their basic human dignity or women in danger of losing their hard-won reproductive rights. We must stand up for all people of color and LGBTQ individuals, who are terrified by the bigotry unleashed by Trump's campaign and his coming presidency. We must stand up for healthcare for the elderly and for everyone in our nation or else more than 22 million people (as estimated by Vox) will be without it, even though a national, single-payer healthcare system should be considered a human right. We must stand with the labor movement to fight for economic justice for all low-wage workers, whose rights will be threatened by Republican-controlled executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government. We must do all that we can to protect these and other vulnerable communities and individuals, because the very foundations of our democracy, our civil liberties, and our human rights are at stake. If humanists and nontheists don't speak up for these marginalized groups while we can, there is a distinct possibility that when we're specifically threatened, there will be no one left to speak for us."
To read the full article go here .
Andrea Bocelli Fans Raise Uproar to Stop Him from Singing at Trump Inauguration
Apparently Donald Trump is a fan of the famous Italian opera tenor Andrea Bocelli. When word went out that Trump had approached Bocelli to perform at his inauguration, and there were reports that Bocelli had tentatively agreed (which, if true, is utterly shameful), there was a huge uproar of protest from Bocelli's fans. Some threatened to #BoycottBocelli if he decided to sing on January 20. Here are a few tweets, among many: "Dumped @AndreaBocelli CD's in trash, won't be buying tickets to Feb. Orlando concert after all. DONE with him. Will #boycottBocelli forever." "Please accept the inauguration offer because the Klu Klux Klan makes great fans!" "Contact @AndreaBocelli's booking agent & manager to warn of #BoycottBocelli if he sings for fascist Trump." One fan wrote on Facebook: "Mr Bocelli, please do not sing for Donald Trump. He stands for racism, misogyny, and hatred of others. Music is beautiful, sacred. Don't let this man buy you and desecrate art, hope, and beauty."
In the face of the outrage from so many of his fans, Bocelli announced he would not be performing at the inauguration. Trump's people claimed that they had rescinded the invitation.
Earlier, in the summer, the widow and daughters of another famous Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, asked Trump to stop using his recording of Puccini's aria "Nessun Dorma" at his campaign events. They said that "the values of brotherhood and solidarity which Luciano Pavarotti expressed throughout the course of his artistic career are entirely incompatible with the worldview offered by the candidate Donald Trump."
Hollywood PR Agency Cancels Parties to "defend the values we hold dear"
Sunshine Sachs is a PR agency that represents stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Natalie Portman. Every year they usually hold a big holiday party, on both the East and West coasts. But this year they didn't feel the usual "holiday cheer." CEO Shawn Sachs said, "However I felt the morning after [Trump was elected] was nothing compared to how I felt talking to people in this office, those who felt their citizenship--in a matter of moments--was gone or had been lessened... Being the diverse workplace we are, many of us felt under assault." So Sunshine Sachs cancelled its annual bicoastal holiday celebrations, and will donate the money that would have been spent for the lavish galas to 16 different organizations, including the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, the Environmental Defense Fund and Planned Parenthood. The agency sent out an email saying their decision was a gesture to "defend the values we hold dear."
George Takei Speaks Out Against Trump on Nuclear Weapons and Registry for Muslims
Responding to Trump saying he wants to "strengthen and expand" the nuclear capabilities of the U.S., actor George Takei tweeted on Thursday, December 22: "Trump wants to expand our nuclear arsenal. I think of my aunt and baby cousin, found burnt in a ditch in Hiroshima. These weapons must go."
Takei and his family spent years in one of the U.S. concentration ("internment") camps for people of Japanese descent during World War 2. In his November 18 op-ed for the Washington Post titled, " They interned my family. Don't let them do it to Muslims ," Takei wrote:
"During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community necessitate draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security....
"Let us all be clear: 'National security' must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.
"Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security...."
In a December 8 interview on CNN, Takei said that during World War 2, before they were sent to an internment camp, his family was placed on a registry of Japanese Americans and subjected to a curfew: "We were confined to our homes from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the morning, imprisoned in our homes at night. Then they froze our bank accounts. We were economically paralyzed. Then the soldiers came... I remember the two soldiers walking up our driveway, marching up our driveway, shiny bayonets on the rifle, stopping at the front porch and with their fists started banging on the front door and that sound resonated throughout the house...."
Takei connected that history to what is happening today: "It is an echo of what we heard from World War II coming from Trump himself. That sweeping statement characterizing all Muslims. There are more than a billion Muslims in this world. To infer they are all terrorists with that kind of sweeping statement is outrageous, in the same way that they characterized all Japanese Americans as enemy aliens."
Patti Smith's rendition of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" at Nobel Prize ceremony resonates powerfully today
At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, singer Patti Smith performed a moving tribute to Bob Dylan, the winner of this year's laureate for literature. She chose to sing one of Dylan's songs--"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," released in 1963, a time when the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests were a sign of the times.
Check out the performance here:
The final stanza, especially, resonates very powerfully today:
"And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son? And what'll you do now, my darling young one? I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin' I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest Where the people are many and their hands are all empty Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison And the executioner's face is always well hidden Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten Where black is the color, where none is the number And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin' But I'll know my song well before I start singin' And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."
Danny Glover: "We have to fight him every inch"
At a December 7 rally in Washington, DC, to support striking federal workers, actor Danny Glover criticized people who say Trump should be given "a chance." Glover said, "Give him a chance what? We know who he is. We know exactly who he is. We have to accept that. But we have to fight him every inch. We have to fight him every moment."
Time magazine had just come with their annual "Person of the Year" issue with Trump on the cover. Glover said, "It's irresponsible to make him Person of the Year. Based on what? Based on the fact that he won the Electoral College? Based on the fact that he lied to people? Based on the fact that all the stories of all he's done to women and what he thinks about women? Based on his racism? A racist as Person of the Year? I'm appalled, I'm appalled. I'm angry now that Time magazine would name this person Person of the Year. It's incredible." He said this was a "slap in our face" and "the most disrespectful thing."
Rosie O'Donnell: "Not My President"
Actor and TV personality Rosie O'Donnell has been calling on people to stand up against Trump in a number of recent tweets. In response to someone who tweeted, "we need to organize an anti-Trump inauguration," O'Donnell tweeted: "no one go - film urself - periscope STANDING keep saying 'NOT MY PRESIDENT - LIFE - WITH MILLIONS OF OTHERS." She also wrote "its called STAY HOME - DO NOT WATCH IT." And she quoted from writer and journalist Norman Cousins: "There is nothing more powerful than an individual acting out of conscience."
IBM Employees Denounce CEO's Collaboration with Trump
On November 15, IBM Corporation CEO, Ginni Rometty, published an open letter to Donald Trump, offering the tech giant's cooperation to "advance a national agenda" and offering "ideas that I believe will help achieve the aspiration you articulated" in his Election-night acceptance speech.
The following week, Elizabeth Wood, a senior content specialist in IBM Marketing, wrote her own open letter, denouncing Rometty's shameless offer to collaborate with the new fascist regime, and resigning from her position.
Wood's letter said (all emphasis in original):
" Your letter offered the backing of IBM's global workforce in support of his agenda that preys on marginalized people and threatens my well-being as a woman, a Latina and a concerned citizen. The company's hurry to do this was a tacit endorsement of his position. ...
"The president-elect has demonstrated contempt for immigrants, veterans, people with disabilities, Black, Latinx, Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ communities. These groups comprise a growing portion of the company you lead, Ms. Rometty. ...
" When the president-elect follows through on his repeated threats to create a public database of Muslims, what will IBM do? Your letter neglects to mention. 1
Read Wood's entire letter here .
Wood's action inspired others at IBM to stand up. In early December, 10 current IBM employees started a petition to Rometty insisting that IBM has "a moral and business imperative to uphold the pillars of a free society by declining any projects which undermine liberty, such as surveillance tools threatening freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure," and that "history teach[es] us that accommodating those who unleash forces of aggressive nationalism, bigotry, racism, fear, and exclusion inevitably yields devastating outcomes for millions of innocents." 2 And they specifically demand that IBM execs respect the right of individual employees to "refuse participation in any U.S. contracts that violate constitutional and civil liberties."
The petition circulated privately at first, and went public on December 19. It now has at least 500 signatories--employees, former employees, IBM stockholders and others in the tech community. The petition is available online here .
1. On December 16, after Wood's letter was published, as well as a statement from at least 800 tech workers saying they would refuse to work on such a Muslim registry, IBM, as well as Google, Apple and Uber, all told BuzzFeed that they also would refuse. [ back ]
2. This history includes the fact that IBM put its precursor to the computer--the IBM punch card sorter system--at the service of Hitler's genocide of Jewish people. In IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black writes: "IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before--the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting machines were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation." [ back ]
Writers Resist NYC: Louder Together for Free Expression
On January 15, writers across the U.S. and other countries are holding Writers Resist events to "focus public attention on the ideals of a free, just, and compassionate society." The "flagship" event on that day is slated for New York City and is co-sponsored by the writers' group PEN America. It is described on the PEN America website as a "literary protest" that will be held on the steps of the New York City Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan "to defend free expression, reject hate crimes and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation."
The protest "will bring together hundreds of writers and artists and thousands of New Yorkers on the birthday of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. American poet laureates Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove will each offer hope and inspiration with original 'inaugural' poems written for the occasion."
And, "After the readings and performances, a group of PEN America leaders and any who wish to join will walk the blocks to Trump Tower together to present PEN America's free expression pledge on the First Amendment signed by over 110,000 individuals to a member of the President-elect's team. We are confident the reading at the library and the subsequent march, as two distinct but powerful events to uphold free expression and human rights for all, will be powerful."
According to Writers Resist organizers, in addition to NYC, January15 events are planned for "Houston, Austin, New Orleans, Seattle, Spokane, Los Angeles, London, Zurich, Boston, Omaha, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Madison, Milwaukee, Bloomington, Baltimore, Oakland, Tallahassee, Newport, Santa Fe, Salt Lake, and Portland (Oregon AND Maine) and many other cities."
For more on the protest and participants, go here .
500 Women Scientists: "We reject the hateful rhetoric that was given a voice during the U.S. presidential election..."
An online letter by a group of women scientists against Trump's attacks on science and on his hateful poison directed at different sections of the people has gathered over 11,000 signatures from around the world as of December 23. In an article published by Scientific American, ecologist Kelly Ramirez said that, after the Trump-Pence victory, she and a small group of scientist friends began discussing "how can we take action?" On November 17, they posted their letter with signatures of 500 women scientists.
The letter begins: "Science is foundational in a progressive society, fuels innovation, and touches the lives of every person on this planet. The anti-knowledge and anti-science sentiments expressed repeatedly during the U.S. presidential election threaten the very foundations of our society. Our work as scientists and our values as human beings are under attack. We fear that the scientific progress and momentum in tackling our biggest challenges, including staving off the worst impacts of climate change, will be severely hindered under this next U.S. administration. Our planet cannot afford to lose any time.
"In this new era of anti-science and misinformation, we as women scientists re-affirm our commitment to build a more inclusive society and scientific enterprise. We reject the hateful rhetoric that was given a voice during the U.S. presidential election and which targeted minority groups, women, LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual], immigrants, and people with disabilities, and attempted to discredit the role of science in our society. Many of us feel personally threatened by this divisive and destructive rhetoric and have turned to each other for understanding, strength, and a path forward. We are members of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. We are immigrants. We are people with disabilities. We are LGBTQIA. We are scientists. We are women."
The letter outlines a number of actions that the signers pledge to take "to increase diversity in science and other disciplines." The complete letter (available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch, and Farsi), signatories, and other related information is available online here .
Mystery Writer Elizabeth George: "I will not ever accept what's going on right now in the US as the new normal"
Elizabeth George is a U.S.-based writer of mystery novels set in Great Britain. She is widely known for her series of books featuring Inspector Thomas Lynley. In a recent post titled "Mea Culpa" on her website, part of a series of essays on the 2016 elections, George wrote in part: "...what I cannot forgive is the effort being made on all sides to normalize what is going on, to say 'let's give him a chance.' To this I say that, for me, what's going on is not the new normal. So far and at the time of my writing this, Donald Trump has given cabinet positions to two of his billionaire friends, has chosen a Wall Street bigwig from Goldman Sachs to head the Treasury Department, has selected a foe not only of women's rights to choose but also of insurance supplied contraception as his head of Health and Human Services, has chosen a racist as his attorney general, has chosen a climate-change denying non-scientist to head the EPA, has chosen a woman who sank the educational system in Detroit to be the head of the Department of Education.... If at some horrible point in the future, Muslims are told that they must register, I intend to register as a Muslim and I encourage everyone else to do the same. I will not ever accept what's going on right now in the US as the new normal."
She closes the essay with: "Normal is actually standing for something and drawing a line in the sand across which racial hatred, religious intolerance, sexual aggression, misogyny, fascism, Nazism, white supremacy, Hitler salutes, the Ku Klux Klan, and LGBTQ persecution dare not cross.
"That's the new normal, that's the old normal, and that's the only normal that I will ever accept or support."
Read the whole piece by Elizabeth George here .
Playwright and Literature Professor Ariel Dorfman: "Now America Knows How Chile Felt"
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American playwright, novelist, human rights activist and an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University. In an op-ed titled "Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt" that appeared in the New York Times on December 17, Dorfman describes how after Salvador Allende had won the presidential election in 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon and the CIA worked to undermine the results, including the assassination of a general who stood in the way of the U.S. plans. When the U.S. was not able to block Allende's inauguration, "American intelligence services, at Henry A. Kissinger's behest, continued to assail our sovereignty, sabotaging our prosperity ('make the economy scream,' Nixon ordered) and fostering military unrest. Finally, on Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was ousted, replaced by a vicious dictatorship that lasted nearly 17 years. Years of torture, executions, disappearances and exile."
Dorfman notes the irony of the CIA "now crying foul because its tactics have been imitated by a powerful international rival," referring to allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections. He writes that when Donald Trump dismisses those allegations, "he is bizarrely echoing the very responses that so many Chileans got in the early '70s when we accused the C.I.A. of illegal intervention in our internal affairs." And Dorman writes, "The United States cannot in good faith decry what has been done to its citizens until it is ready to face what it did so often to the equally decent citizens of other nations. And it must resolve never to engage in such imperious activities again."
Ariel Dorfman's piece is online here .
Neveragain.tech: "We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable"
On December 13, a group of people who work in tech organizations and companies based in the U.S. issued a strong statement pledging "solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration's proposed data collection policies." They said they refuse to build databases of people based on their religious beliefs and to facilitate mass deportations. Their statement was also in defiance of top execs from major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, and Alphabet (Google), who a day earlier met with Trump, adding to the efforts to normalize fascism.
The statement says: "We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust , contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past--among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.
"Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again."
As of the evening of December 14 the statement has close to 800 signers. The statement and other resources are available here .
In a piece titled "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" in Monthly Review , Susie Day writes:
"People often compare the ascendance of Trump and his cabinet of deplorables to the rise of the Nazis --taking momentary refuge in the fact that 1933 Germany didn't have the nuclear option. Apropos of Trump's take on flag burning, one of the first things Hitler did as chancellor was to rescind freedom of speech, assembly, the press. . . Then the arrest of political opponents, the forcing of Jews to register their property , wear Stars of David . Remember those "good" Germans, who may have lamented, but went along because they could--because they still fit in to what remained normal?'
Read the entire article here
Cornel West: "Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here"
...In this bleak moment, we must inspire each other driven by a democratic soulcraft of integrity, courage, empathy and a mature sense of history - even as it seems our democracy is slipping away.
We must not turn away from the forgotten people of US foreign policy - such as Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Yemen's civilians killed by US-sponsored Saudi troops or Africans subject to expanding US military presence.
As one whose great family and people survived and thrived through slavery, Jim Crow and lynching, Trump's neofascist rhetoric and predictable authoritarian reign is just another ugly moment that calls forth the best of who we are and what we can do.
For us in these times, to even have hope is too abstract, too detached, too spectatorial. Instead we must be a hope, a participant and a force for good as we face this catastrophe.
Read entire statement here
Guns N' Roses Invites Mexico Fans Onstage to Destroy Trump Pinata
On November 30, in the middle of a song they were performing at Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City, the band Guns N' Roses cut the music and brought a giant pinata of Donald Trump onstage. According to an online TIME magazine report, Axl Rose, the band's front man, said, "Let's bring up some people and give them a fucking stick... Express yourselves however you feel." Fans got up on the stage and began swinging at the pinata.
Undocumented in Trump's America By Jose Antonio Vargas, November 20
On election night, while making my way through a crowd gathered outside the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, a white man wearing a Mets cap patted my back and said through the noise: "Get ready to be deported." Rattled, I made it inside the green room and waited to go on the air.
I am an undocumented immigrant. I outed myself in a very public way in The New York Times in 2011, and since then have appeared regularly on cable news programs, especially on Fox, to humanize the very political and polarizing issue of immigration ...
What will you do when they start rounding us up?
Read entire article here
An abortion doctor on Trump's win: "I fear for my life. I fear for my patients." By Warren M. Hern, November 11
As I've headed to work in recent days to see abortion patients in my office, I have felt bereft: All the premises of my life, work, education, and future were gone. Something very profound in the meaning of the America I know has been destroyed with the election of Donald J. Trump as president ...
Under an unrestrained Donald Trump and this Republican Congress, I fear for my life, I fear for my family, and I fear for my future. I fear for my staff and my patients.
Even more, I fear for my country, and I fear for the world.
Read entire article here
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: "We cannot let justice be denied by waiting. History has shown us over and over what horrors that leads to."
In a December 1 article for the Washington Post online edition, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calls for resistance against Trump. Writing from his viewpoint of protecting this country's "most sacred values," Abdul-Jabbar criticizes others and their "hide-beneath-the-bed tactic"--like Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, who says "we should take a look-and-see approach" and Black Entertainment Television founder and Hillary Clinton supporter Bob Johnson who said African Americans should give Trump "the benefit of the doubt." He writes that the appointments Trump has been making already show that "these people and their contra-constitutional view are a clear and present danger" and calls for civil disobedience in different forms.
See Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's article here .
In a November 10 speech in the Irish Parliament, Senator Aodhan O Riordain made a strong speech denouncing Donald Trump as a fascist--and condemning the Irish government's conciliatory response.
After the election of Trump, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny called to congratulate him and ask whether the annual White House celebration of St. Patrick's Day was still on. Irish Senator Aodhan O'Riordain, fired off this response in the Irish Seanad (Senate):
Edmund Burke once said the only way evil can prosper is for good men to do nothing. American has just elected a fascist and the best thing that good people in Ireland can do is to ring him up and ask him if they can still bring the Shamrock on St. Patrick's Day. I'm embarrassed about what the Irish government has done I can't believe the reaction from the government. And I don't use the word fascist lightly. What else would you call somebody threatens to imprison his political opponents? What else would you call somebody who threatens to not allow people of a certain religious faith into their country? What would you say, or how would you describe somebody who is threatening to deport 10 million people. What would you say about somebody who says that the media is rigged, the judiciary is rigged, the political system is rigged. And then he wins the election and the best we can come out with is a call to say is it still ok to bring the shamrock...I am frightened. I am frightened for what is happening in this world and in our inability to stand up to it. I want to ask you, leader, to ask the Minister of Foreign of Affairs into this house and ask him how we are supposed to deal with this monster who has just been elected president of America because I don't think any of us in years to come should look back on this period and say we didn't do everything in our power to call it out for what it is.
See the whole speech below.
This Irish politician just said what many American leaders are too scared to say about Trump pic.twitter.com/Q2MeB815jz -- NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 17, 2016
Andrew Sullivan: "The Republic Repeals Itself"
Andrew Sullivan is a well-known conservative writer and online commentator, currently a contributing editor to the New York magazine. We want to bring to our readers' attention a November 9 online article by Sullivan titled " The Republic Repeals Itself ." While we have differences with Sullivan overall and with this particular article in certain dimensions, we think he makes important points that are worthy of reflection.
Read Andrew Sullivan's piece here . |
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Kolkata: Terming the killing of five farmers in 6 June police firing in Madhya Pradesh as "unfortunate", Union agriculture and farmers welfare minister Radha Mohan Singh on Tuesday alleged the Congress was politicising the issue and provoking farmers in that state.
"The incident was unfortunate. But provoking farmers and politicising such issues is absolutely incorrect," the minister said on the sidelines of 'Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas' event organised in Kolkata to celebrate three years of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre.
File image of Radha Mohan Singh. PTI
He also accused the Congress leadership in Madhya Pradesh of instigating violence by torching police stations in Mandsaur district.
"Three Congress MPs guided their activists to torch the police stations there. The video is out for everyone to see."
Responding to Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's tweet about travelling to Italy to meet his maternal grandmother, Radha Mohan Singh said: "While some Congress leaders are torching police stations, others are going abroad to their grandmother's house. There is no doubt that the country's people will unite to obliterate the Congress."
As for the Centre's initiatives for farmers' welfare, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Bihar said the government is focused on farmers' empowerment and has come up with several beneficial schemes for peasants in three years.
"We are heavily investing in several pro-farmer schemes so that they benefit from the agricultural field to the market. The government is taking initiatives to improve farm production and prepare a better market for produce," he said.
BJP Spokesperson Syed Shahnawaz Hussain also accused the Congress of provoking the farmers in Madhya Pradesh.
"He (Rahul Gandhi) went there to provoke the farmers. And now he is planning to go to his grandmother's house (in Italy). It is his decision to visit a relative, but what was the reason behind provoking the farmers?" he asked.
Earlier duing the day, Rahul Gandhi tweeted about taking a break from politics and going to Italy to meet his maternal grandmother.
Will be travelling to meet my grandmother & family for a few days. Looking forward to spending some time with them!
-- Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) June 13, 2017 |
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Revolution #284 November 4, 2012
October 22, 2012: The National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and Criminalization of a Generation
October 28, 2012 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revolution received the following initial reports of protests on October 22, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and Criminalization of a Generation. Check back for additional reports which will be posted as we receive them.
Updated October 28, 2012, with reports for Greensboro and San Francisco Bay Area, and photos from New York.
Los Angeles Area
Anaheim, California, friends and families of Manuel Diaz, Joel Acevedo, Cesar Cruz, Joe Whitehouse, Andres Avila were present.
In Los Angeles, people and families who have been targets of police brutality, murder, and incarceration came together with others who refuse to condone this injustice. About 35 people from Las Vegas, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Los Angeles rallied at the Twin Towers/Men's Central Jail at noon. A huge banner that read "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide," signed by people from the Crenshaw area in LA and Cal State Northridge, was held up facing the street. The Cuauhtemoc Aztec Dancers brought a spirited cultural participation to the action.
Wayne Kramer, of Jail Guitar Doors, a Unitarian Universalist minister, and Keith James of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network spoke at the rally. By joining together to "break the silence" people found a way to do something about the horrors of mass incarceration. Yolanda Trotter, whose 96-year-old mother died after being tased by the police who had been called to help her, came all the way from Vegas to LA to tell her story to the world and cry out for justice. Visitors to the jail and people going to the nearby court joined the protest and shared their stories. One of them, a woman who had come to the jail that morning to tell her incarcerated husband that their son had died in police custody that Saturday because, out of fear, he had swallowed the drugs he was carrying when the police stopped him, stayed for a while by the banner. "I felt so happy when I came out and saw this here," she said. In an embryonic way, collectively breaking the silence transformed people's outrage and pain into strength and resistance.
A spirited march of about 300 people, led by a truck decorated with pictures of people killed by police, went from Pershing Square in downtown LA through Skid Row to police headquarters. On Skid Row, people welcomed the marchers; many took flyers, and people enthusiastically took up whistles (building on the Stop Mass Incarceration Network's "Blow the Whistle" campaign). Some of the homeless joined the march, vigorously blowing their whistles. At 5th and Spring Streets, in the downtown arts district, where Dale Garrett, a 51-year-old Black man was shot down by an undercover LAPD detective in broad daylight, the march defiantly stopped. A die-in covered the intersection. Body outlines were chalked in the street.
Black stickers reading "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide! October 22nd. Break the Silence!" were widely taken up, as well as "Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution!" At police headquarters, friends and relatives of people killed by police and representatives of various organizations spoke to the crowd.
In Anaheim, California, friends and families of Manuel Diaz, Joel Acevedo, Cesar Cruz, Joe Whitehouse, Andres Avila, and others killed by police, and 16-year-old Jesus Aguirre, sentenced to life in prison, held a march and rally on Sunday, October 21, as part of the National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation.
Chicago rallies were held in various neighborhoods throughout the day and came together at the main city-wide event in the evening, a march around the walls and barbed wire fences that surround the massive county jail complex.
Despite a morning of pouring rain people chanted, blew whistles, and called on the public to stand up and stand together against police brutality and mass incarceration at rallies that were held in various neighborhoods throughout the day. At one community college people were called on to get handfuls of flyers and whistles and take the protest inside the school (because of the rain).
People involved in forming Revolution Clubs together with family members of people shot and/or killed by the police were at the center of some of the neighborhood rallies. Where family members spoke it gave powerful testimony to the impact of the outrage of police brutality.
These rallies unleashed people to tell their own stories of police brutality and abuse, as well as to dig into the overall impact of mass incarceration. One person encouraged people to reach out to those who were formerly incarcerated, talking about how they are the constant target and victim of police harassment. He knows because he, himself is one. Another person described how a friend received a call from his wife saying she was being set upon by men down the block from his house. He rushed from his house to the scene--where he was shot to death by an undercover cop.
People at the neighborhood rallies recalled the "Blow the Whistle on Stop-and-Frisk, Police Brutality, Racial Profiling and Mass Incarceration" day on September 13 and saw the October 22nd actions as part of a growing movement of resistance. Revolutionary communists described how they saw this resistance as part of building a movement for revolution in which "Fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution" is a central part. And Revolution newspaper was in the mix. Hundreds of whistles and flyers got out, with people joining on the spot to distribute them at some of the rallies.
In Chicago, youth formed the core at various neighborhood rallies.
One feature of the rallies were banners reading "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide" which people were encouraged to sign. These banners were brought from the neighborhood rallies to a citywide gathering the evening of October 22nd at the County Courthouse/County Jail complex.
The evening citywide gathering brought out some of the people who had been at the earlier neighborhood events, an anarchist drum corps, "punks against apartheid," people who are part of the Occupy movement, victims of police torture and others. Members of the group Rebel Diaz dropped by the event at the end of the evening. Speakers addressed the question of mass incarceration, its origins in the workings of the system and the conscious policies of the ruling class. The situation with stop-and-frisk in New York City and the resistance to it were described. And a call was put out for people to support those facing trial for that resistance.
The highlight and main event of the citywide gathering was a march around the walls and barbed wire fences that surround the massive county jail complex. Marchers carried a banner announcing the "October 22nd National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation," 20 feet long by 6 feet high. The "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide" banners were bright yellow with big black lettering standing out starkly. Among the chants were "We don't want a Prison Nation--Stop Mass Incarceration" and "Mass Incarceration IS the Crime." Visiting hours stretch until 9 pm and the marchers were able to connect with many family members who had come to visit loved ones. The message of October 22nd struck a chord and the resistance was welcomed.
The county sheriff's deputies, on the other hand, were anything but welcoming. They grew increasingly tense as the marchers message received support from family members and long lines of traffic backed up because of the increasing number of sheriff cars.
When prisoners crowded the galleries to watch and when the prisoners' fists went up in the air, the sheriff's deputies started blaring their sirens to drown out the chanting from the marchers. This drew even more attention to the marchers and their message.
Throughout the march there was an exuberance as people stood up right in the face of the state authority to get their message out.
In Atlanta, protesters gathered in Troy Davis Park. The demonstration opened with drummers and a brief speakout that included Nicholas Heyward, whose 13-year-old son was killed by the NYPD.
On Saturday, October 20, at the historic Auburn Research Library, several activist groups worked together to organize two events to address police brutality. The first event, called "Break the Chains," was an open forum calling on the audience to speak bitterness about their encounters with police or to recount the circumstances surrounding the murder of their relatives, as well as a platform for the resisters in Georgia who are part of the undocumented youth movement. They even had the testimony from a former corrections officer who detailed the attitudes and vicious culture of hatred among prison guards towards the prisoners, collaborating on how to make life more miserable and tortuous for targeted prisoners. The second program, called "Every 36 Hours: Extrajudicial Violence in the Black Community," was sponsored by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Ariston Waiters Foundation, and the October 22nd Coalition. There were a number of cultural presentations, from several dozen children from a local Black Liberation School marching in the auditorium to perform, to prominent local hip hop artists. The first panel featured several parents of children whose lives have been stolen: Nicholas Heyward, Freda Waiters, Missy Stafford and Joe Harris, as well as a close relative of Troy Davis. All of their testimony was riveting, making clear with substance not only how their loved ones were deliberately murdered, but how they feel the pain like it was yesterday. While some still held out hope to pressure those in power or even use the ballot box to get justice, Nicholas Heyward from New York City's Parents Against Police Brutality explained why he was part of the October 22nd Coalition, and why we must not rely on the system. He explained that over many years he had found that his time spent in the courts and in politicians' offices had gotten him nowhere... appealing to the audience to cast aside such illusions and go directly to the people to mobilize ever greater resistance that cannot be ignored. The second panel featured activists from Copwatch, Nation of Islam, October 22nd Coalition, and National Action Network, and Mawuli Davis, a defense lawyer known for taking on the cases of victims of police murder, and Vincent Fort, a politician who has stood with the families and got arrested in defense of the Occupy movement.
Revolution Books got a lot of attention with big display boards featuring different quotes from the book BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian , as well as an enlarged image of him. A huge hit was a banner, "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide" which was signed all day.
On October 22, protesters gathered in a downtown park called Troy Davis Park (renamed by the people during the Occupy days). The park has an interesting mix of homeless people (mostly playing chess), students from Georgia State University and Atlanta Metropolitan College, vendors, and office workers. In a sea of people wearing black, the demonstration opened with drummers and a brief speak-out including Nicholas Heyward, whose 13-year-old son, Nicholas Jr,. was killed by the NYPD, and civil rights attorney Mawuli Davis, before stepping off for a very lively march that took Peachtree Street to the Atlanta Detention Center. Piercing the air were the sound of whistles blowing and loud chanting as the march snaked through the downtown traffic. The October 22nd banner led the way with people holding signs with the names of those killed by the police followed by "The Whole System Is Guilty!," a banner that said "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide," and the most popular banner was "Fuck the Police." As the march passed by the MARTA transit station, lots of Black youth joyously joined in the demonstration. They were really attracted to the "Fuck the Police" banner. By the time the march arrived at the detention center there were about 120 people. To the dismay of the jail guards, the demonstrators took the front stairs and had another speak-out. There was a continuous stream of harrowing stories by those whose loved ones were murdered by the police: Freda Waiters spoke about her son Ariston Waiters, who was shot in the back by the Union City police a year ago; Mary Neal spoke about her mentally ill brother Larry Neal, who was murdered in a Tennessee jail by the guards; a Vietnamese mother spoke about her son who was shot by the police and left to bleed to death; a teenage boy spoke about his brother who was killed in an Atlanta jail by the prison guards. And going through the crowd, you could hear outrageous story after outrageous story of those who were either brutalized by the police or jacked up by the "injustice" system. A middle-aged Black man who came over to see what the demonstration was about said he just walked out of jail after doing 60 days for littering (!) and lost his job. Following the families, several organizations made statements: Revolution Books Atlanta, National Action Network, FTP Movement, and others. After the speak-out, the march took off through the streets once again, this time winding its way through the MARTA station plaza and back to the park. The day really captured the anger and anguish of all the lives devastated by this system on the one hand, and on the other tapped into the feeling of joy and liberation in standing up and fighting back, and the need for revolution.
During the course of the afternoon, Revolution Books distributed very widely a palm card with the BAsics quote 1:13, "No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that." They also distributed a flyer for an open house at Revolution Books including the URL for the Cornel West interview with Bob Avakian and sold 60+ copies of Revolution newspaper.
One focus of the Seattle protest was the police murder of six people in the last three months alone.
On the evening of October 22 a mixed crowd of family members who have had their loved ones murdered by the police; revolutionaries; proletarian and middle strata youth; Veterans For Peace activists; and Occupy people braved the cold and drizzly evening to show their opposition to the epidemic of police brutality in Seattle and around the country. There were large posters that read "Stolen Lives" that had the pictures of people who had been murdered by the police. One of the images was of Henry Lee, an elderly Black man with dementia who was recently shot by the police in the doorway of his home in south Seattle. Friends and family members of Jedidiah Waters, Prince Gavin, and Victor Duffy Jr. courageously spoke out about the injustices and shared their stories of loss and pain. Waters, Gavin and Duffy were some of the most recent Seattle-area young people wantonly murdered by police this year. There have been six people murdered in the last three months alone in the region. One of the things about October 22nd is that every year, there are always new families who show up who have had their loved ones murdered by the police. Friends of Jedidiah Waters described how they found out at the inquest hearing that Jedidiah had been shot 11 times, five in his head, mutilating his body. After hearing this at the inquest, they ran into the hall screaming and crying. All this for "allegedly shoplifting" from Walmart. Marie Young, whose son, 23-year-old David, was murdered last year by the same cop, Matthew Leitgeb, who murdered Waters, also spoke. Pointing to the Stolen Lives posters, she said, "This is just getting ridiculous. We have to do something. This has to end." She said the inquest hearings were ridiculous and weren't set up to get any kind of justice for the people. A Native woman whose nephew was found dead in a juvenile detention facility spoke out about the daily police brutality and intimidation inflicted upon Native youth and the fear that this instilled in her and her son. The family members of John T. Williams and Victor Duffy Jr. took the stage holding pictures of their loved ones, and spoke through their tears and anger with a spirit of determination to keep up the fight for justice in memory of them. To be there in the crowd and listen to these stories was completely heartbreaking but also inspiring. Many in the audience were emotionally moved and responded with shouts of encouragement and agreement.
The president of the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild spoke about mass incarceration and repression, remembering how the system murdered revolutionaries like Fred Hampton and other Black Panther Party leaders.
A volunteer with Revolution Books spoke about the nature of this system we live under, the scope of police brutality, mass incarceration and repression, and saluted people who have participated in the righteous resistance that has taken place this year and called for others to build off of it and take it further. The statement also told how within this situation there lies the possibility and basis for a radically different world through revolution, and Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism. Some greeted this speech with exclamations of "right on" and a former prisoner said this spoke to everything that he had wanted to say.
Whistles were passed out and it was announced how these whistles were about everyone standing up to police brutality by blowing this whistle if they see or are being harassed by the police. People donated money in the donation bin that was passed around to support the work of O22.
The march set off for the Cinerama theater, where Chris Harris had his head rammed into a brick wall by the police, and is now unable to feed or dress himself because this caused a traumatic brain injury. The police presence was huge: motorcycles, cars, vans, and bicycles. A long row of bicycle cops lined up against the brick wall where Chris had his head smashed, as if they were proud of the fear and violence it represented. The people called this out, telling these cowards how much they hated them and the system of terror they represent. The march went into populated and visible areas of downtown and the protest was covered by at least two major mainstream news stations. People chanted, "Mass Incarceration: We Say No More! Police Brutality: We Say No More! Racial Profiling: We Say No More!" and added the names of people unjustly murdered like "Troy Davis: We Say No More!" Some people off of the sidewalk joined in the march and whistles were going off all throughout downtown. As the march continued, people along the way got copies of Revolution , O22 palm cards that had the faces of those who had been recently murdered, and BAsics cards with the "No more generations..." quote. There was intense anger, a resolve to get justice, and a determination to put an END to all this!
A group of about 50 people gathered at Market Square: several organizations fighting mass incarceration and police brutality were represented, as well as prison rights, LGBT rights, and anti-drug war activists, students, a group of homeless people, and artists. People penned their outrage on a banner reading "MASS INCARCERATION + SILENCE = SLOW GENOCIDE" that had been taken out to housing projects, stores, outside a county jail, and different neighborhoods the weekend before. Many comments described set-ups, victimization and murder by cops and the "criminal justice system."
An Occupy activist wrote in large letters, "Free Eric Marquez," a young man incarcerated and awaiting trial on felony charges, set up by an undercover cop for Occupy Houston's port protest last year--an example of how political dissent, too, is being criminalized.
A hallmark of O22, 2012 was the passion and participation of those whose lives have been directly and horribly impacted by police brutality and murder. Arlene Kelly spoke about her mentally ill daughter, Colleen, who HPD shot and let bleed to death in 1999. A woman people met at the jail came down with her sister, who got on the mic to tell her story. One after the other, people testified.
As the march stepped onto the street, whistles and chants reverberated across train stops and skyscrapers and people along the way grabbed flyers and copies of Revolution newspaper. Several people joined along the way. At the police station a couple joined in, one of them saying, "The words of people speaking out rang so true with me." Another joined because "this situation with the police is out of control and it affects the whole community, no matter where you live."
A Black veteran carrying a Stop Mass Incarceration sign recounted how he got arrested for arguing with a friend. Because he had a knife on him--one that he carried every day for use at his job--they hit him with a felony weapons possession charge. He subsequently lost his job and is now homeless. He marched because "I'm one of those persons that's fed up with this type of brutality... I've been everything in the book--I've been tased, I've been pepper-sprayed--for no reason--I've been falsely arrested, several times... Somebody got to start stepping up...I got some friends, they're like, 'Oh, it'll go away'. No it won't go away."
He agreed with the quote from BA about how the police "serve and protect" the system not the people. He added, "Like you said, it's an emergency, and it's something that is needed right now, very much needed right now, not later. Every day it's destroying people's lives; innocent children being murdered, handicapped people being murdered. They're not stopping. So it should be other people coming up and making aware of what they're doing that won't stop either. And eventually it will bring about change."
A cousin of Chad Holly, a 15-year-old whose brutal beating by HPD cops drew national attention and protest, remarked, "I'm so glad to see you out here because this has to stop."
Later, some of the participants got together with the revolutionaries to reflect on the day. Several said that this protest helped open people's eyes, especially about the link between the system and the police, and were struck by the unity expressed among people coming from different directions, and among different nationalities. One immigrant referred to a palm card she had recently gotten, with the quote from Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:3 , which she said "got right to the point--that yes, this is not a democracy--this is imperialism."
Several youth joined the march in Cleveland and went by the county jail, where many inmates showed solidarity by raising their fists.
On October 22, there was a real swirl of curiosity, excitement, and engaging even before the rally started. People were moved and riveted by the stark, enlarged photos of people who had been killed by the police in Cleveland. Many stopped in their tracks, and just tried to take it all in, with reverence, shock and anger. One woman said she knew one of the victims pictured there, that he was full of love and potential never to be realized.
People testified to Revolution sellers about their experiences with police brutality and murder. A middle-aged Black woman who worked for the transit company talked about her nephew who has repeatedly faced police harassment. A white woman from a small town in Ohio where a young woman had been killed by the police told people the details of the police murder. A Black man in his 20's, who at first seemed apathetic, had a lot to say--including how police brutality and mass incarceration is all linked to the history of slavery in this country. When he saw the first quote in BAsics , it immediately resonated with him: " There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth."
With djembe drumming in the background, the MC called on people to join the movement of resistance against the horrors of police brutality and murder, the degrading practice of stop-and-frisk, and the massive incarceration especially of Black and brown people. He spoke about a Black homeless man in Saginaw, Michigan, Milton Hall, who was shot 48 times and killed, and that is only one of hundreds every year. He called on people to "Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution."
A Black student from Cleveland State University's African American Cultural Center spoke about how he was arrested and convicted of three felonies for having some marijuana on him, and now can't get a job. He said, "We need to take revolution to the youth, got to get to the youth with that message." A Black woman said, "We all need to take a stand on the police brutality: Black, white, everyone." Members of the New Black Panther Party spoke about the need to fight the police who are an occupying army in the Black community. A 25-year-old woman who just met up with the protest that day spoke about how she was abused in jail, strip-searched and degraded, and she called on people to continue to fight back.
Several youth jumped into the march to the "Justice" Center, blowing whistles, chanting "ICE, FBI/No more detentions, no more lies," "Stop the killing, stop the lies/NO MORE STOLEN LIVES," and more. At the "Justice" Center, suddenly about 50 cops in formation came marching right by the protest, yelling their reactionary grunts, trying to intimidate people and block out the message of the march. That didn't happen. Whistles blew loudly, and people yelled "Fuck the Police" at them. Then the family of Guy Wills (killed by an off-duty cop) came along. As the march went by the County jail, many inmates raised fists and the V-sign at the windows and people in the march raised their fists in response, whistled and chanted.
With deep passion and conviction, a Black youth said, "WE ARE SLAVES. I stand for my people, like Tupac and others did. FIGHT THE POWER." Afterwards, some people finished off the day by going to Revolution Books to watch the BA Everywhere DVD and listen to Cornel West's interview with Bob Avakian.
On October 22, one person went down to the Frank J. Murphy Hall of Injustice. This is the site of the courthouse where countless people, mainly Black and Latinos, are sent off to prison. This is also the site of a scheduled hearing on the criminal trial of the cop who shot and killed 7-year-old Aiyana Jones as she slept on the sofa. Officer Weekly has filed a motion to dismiss the charges and some say his attorney, the prosecutor and judge are colluding to find a way to grant this motion.
With all of this going on at the Hall of Injustice, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation was met with a lot of enthusiasm. A young Arab guy said that he was down at the courthouse because of racial profiling. He pointed to the part of the flyer about discrimination against Arabs and told about how the police confiscated his $60,000 truck because he is Arab. An older, well-dressed Black man paused, looking at the flyer, and finally said, "I didn't know anyone else thought about this the way I do." A lot of younger people took the flyer and agreed that police are constantly harassing, brutalizing, and arresting people for bullshit.
After the person distributing flyers had been there for a while, a county deputy came out to the courthouse plaza and ordered him off "their" property. Immediately they threatened to arrest him for failure to obey a lawful order by a police officer, a felony in Michigan. A crowd gathered around as the distributor asked what law prohibits distributing literature on public property. Rather than answer the question, three more deputies and a city cop with a dog appeared. After the confrontation ended, some people came up to the distributor and expressed appreciation for what he was doing to stop police brutality.
Later that afternoon a small group of people went downtown to an area where there is city bus traffic. Again the response was enthusiastic and a number of people took flyers to give to people on the bus, in their neighborhood, or to friends. Person after person spoke with anger and disgust about the abuse they've suffered at the hands of the cops. An older white man said the cops have always brutalized people. He told of a beating he received at the hands of the cops in his youth. A young Black man pointed to an unhealed wound on his face. He had received it at the hands of a cop after he objected to an overly intimate pat-down. He was beaten unconscious for this "crime." He said when he regained consciousness he was in a cell in a pool of his own blood. No charges were ever pressed against him. A well-dressed middle-aged woman from India told about how the police everywhere do this, it's not just in Detroit. An older Black man spoke with bitterness about how many young people are being sent to prison. He spoke about grandsons and nephews who were all locked up. He said he thought this was being done because there are no jobs for youth so they just lock them up.
New Orleans
Community activists held a protest rally in front of the New Orleans city hall on October 22nd: "We were demanding an end to police brutality and the decriminalization of a generation," said Rev. Brown, who joined thousands of protesters across the country demanding justice for innocent people killed and arrested by law enforcement. Speaker after speaker denounced racism in the criminal (so-called) justice system and will continue to fight for justice.
Greensboro, North Carolina
October 22nd in Greensboro, NC was marked by a spirited march through the Smith Homes housing project and was preceded by a rally/picket at the newly opened $114 million, 1032-bed Guilford ("Guilty") County Jail where banners, signs and drummers lined the street. An activist for immigrants' rights noted that the new jail "has made room in the old jail [next door] for immigrants awaiting deportation. It is now becoming a new regional detention center."
In the housing project, people were waiting for the march and some readily joined, including quite a few youth who were encouraged by their parents. One mother in a motorized wheel chair beamed as she joined the march: "My kids do this every year and they bring their friends. This is important." Another wheelchair-bound resident joined. The Cakalak Thunder drummers provided a loud pulsating beat that got people's attention and was hard to resist.
The march easily tripled in size as spectators were now discussing and debating with each other whether or not to join in or just wave support from their porches. Some people walked along the sidelines. Others took O22 Calls and revolutionary literature.
Significantly, Bob Avakian's name is beginning to be known to people here and some in the march (particularly young folks) took multiple copies of BA cards to distribute to others stating, "No more generations of our youth..." ( BAsics 1:13) One man who had bought BAsics last year approached a person selling Revolution saying that "That first sentence in the book [about the exploitation of slave labor as central to the "wealth" of the U.S.] says it all!" The BA quote about the role of the police was distributed and discussed.
After the march, people gathered to talk about the police and their tactics, like arbitrarily "banning" residents (especially young males) from all public housing in Greensboro. One man spoke to the rally stating, "This tactic (banning) breaks up families, keeping men from their children and loved ones. It breaks your support, for instance, if you've just gotten out of prison, you often can't stay with your family if a cop decides you are 'undesirable.' There is no recourse and the 'banning' can last for years."
A "Blow the Whistle on Police Brutality" campaign was announced at the rally and young people got or signed up to receive whistles. At the end of the rally, the Stolen Lives Pledge was read by the mother of another Black man killed. Names were read from the Stolen Lives banner and the crowd shouted "Presente!"
SF Bay Area
Downtown Oakland on October 22nd a hundred people rallied, marched, and blew their whistles against police murder and mass incarceration. Called jointly by Cephus Johnson (the uncle of Oscar Grant) and the Bay Area Stop Mass Incarceration Network, the rally brought together many families of young men recently killed by police in Oakland and neighboring cities, high school and university students, people from the neighborhoods, revolutionaries, and activists from Occupy Oakland.
San Francisco, at a wall listing people killed by police.
This was the first demonstration for one high school youth. He was challenged by one of the speakers in his class to step forward, and said he was amazed that there were so many different kinds of people standing up together. In fact, hundreds of students were part of raising the issue of mass incarceration to another level. At one high school, classroom doors were thrown wide open to speakers against police murder and mass incarceration. A teacher there told us how when one speaker asked how many knew someone in prison, every single student in a class of 40 raised their hand. Over 300 students (all the 9th and 10th graders in the school) heard from Cephus Johnson, Adam Blueford (whose son Alan, was killed by Oakland police only days before his high school graduation) and a youth from the Revolution Club. Cephus spoke to the epidemic proportions of police brutality and murder, from New York's Stop and Frisk, to Trayvon Martin and thousands of others; and how it's increasing. He spoke bluntly, "If you think it's bad now, just think what it will be like in a few years--unless you come out and stop it now. You are the future." The youth from the Revolution Club told the students that the situation they face of mass incarceration and police brutality is not their fault. In fact, they are the answer to this horror. Their stepping forward now to be part of this fight to end mass incarceration and police brutality is a very important part of changing what people are facing here and all over the world.
At the end of the day, students grabbed up hundred of whistles to blow against police brutality and mass incarceration, as well as copies of Revolution , stickers and leaflets to get out everywhere.
The use of BAsics 1:24 in the schools and more broadly has been both controversial and provoking--going up against the mantra of a "few bad cops spoiling the barrel." We challenged one family member on that. She admitted that "I kind of felt that unless I say that 'not all cops are bad, there are some good ones too,' I would come off as sounding too biased against the cops--too radical. But what he [BA] says is really true. We can't be lying to people."
At the rally, many spoke bitterness and outrage, both to the crowd and to the press-- the mother and family of Mario Romero (one of the six people killed by Vallejo police since May), who was executed while sitting in his car in front of his house; the father of Alan Blueford, chased down and killed while lying on his back, unarmed; Denika Chapman, mother of Kenneth Harding Jr., gunned down by San Francisco police for not paying a $2 bus fare. At the end of the rally, the Pakistani/American family of 21-year-old Mohammed Shah--killed only days earlier in Hayward--bravely stepped forward to join in expressing both their pain and their determination to fight for justice.
Students from U.C. Berkeley brought a banner against police brutality they had made and signed. One older man from Egypt, after viewing photos of conditions of prisoners at Pelican Bay Prison, commented, "If this was in Libya, or some other country, this government would be screaming about it. But it's not there. It's here in the U.S.A." Many passersby were attracted to the Stolen Lives Wall, listing some of the names and photos of the thousands who have been killed by law enforcement across the country. Others came up to the table to get their whistles, stickers, copies of Revolution , and to look through and buy a copy of BAsics .
Carl Dix's call "All Out for October 22nd" in Revolution newspaper was a crucial part in building for the day. What he said about this being an "emergency situation" really resonated with people--how "the powers-that-be have unleashed their whole criminal 'injustice' system to carry out intensifying murderous assault on oppressed people across the country."
People got a sense of a new movement of mass resistance against the whole system of mass incarceration as a powerful march, led by the families of the "Stolen Lives," took to the streets and marched to the jail--the Alameda County "pipeline to prison." We pledged to continue to stand with those incarcerated, and to spread the word of the courage of the hunger strikers and the call by the leaders of the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike for "peace between different nationalities in prisons and jails" (reprinted in Revolution #282). The rally ended with a call to blow the whistle here from this day forward, to have each other's back, to build the spirit of resistance against all of mass incarceration. Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide!
New York City
Carl Dix speaks to the rally in Union Square, New York City.
New York City
Sisters (two women on the left) of 23-year-old Shantel Davis who was murdered by the NYPD in Brooklyn on June 15, 2012 after she ran some red lights and crashed into a car; Constance Malcolm (at the mic), the mother and Franclot Graham, the father (far right) of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, who was murdered by the NYPD in their Bronx apartment on February 2, 2012. |
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In the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy, Black Lives Matter Louisville co-founder Chanelle Helm has helpfully listed a few ways white people can do better when it comes to race relations.
. @ChanelleHelm , cofounder and core organizer of @BLMLouisville , has a few requests for white people. https://t.co/0XZNh71MD1
-- Leo Weekly (@leoweekly) August 18, 2017
Call them "requests," because that's what she calls them as she proceeds to brazenly ask for the moon and more in her "Southern, black grandmamma voice."
The first few involve direct transfers of property, reparations, if you will. Things like willing "your property to a black or brown family" that "preferably ... lives in generational poverty."
"Preferably," we suppose, because if it's a RICH "black or brown family" apparently that would work too. Hey, we're talking about putting wealth in the hands of the good guys, right?
Helm's "requests" also include donations to "black funds for land purchasing," developers and realty owners building "in a black or brown blighted neighborhood and let black and brown people live in it for free," downsizing and giving up your old home "to a black or brown family - again "preferably" one from "generational poverty" - and changing your will to leave your property to people of color if your current inheritors are "racist assholes."
Three of Helm's requests involve getting various "they asses fired," or something. We'll quote the whole thing because you can't leave before getting a taste of Helm's "Southern, black grandmamma voice," especially when she's trying to ruin people's lives and even commit violence against them for disagreeing with her on the issue of race.
7. White people, especially white women (because this is yaw specialty -- Nosey Jenny and Meddling Kathy), get a racist fired. Yaw know what the fuck they be saying. You are complicit when you ignore them. Get your boss fired cause they racist too.
8. Backing up No. 7, this should be easy but all those sheetless Klan, Nazi's and Other lil' dick-white men will all be returning to work. Get they ass fired. Call the police even: they look suspicious.
9. OK, backing up No. 8, if any white person at your work, or as you enter in spaces and you overhear a white person praising the actions from yesterday, first, get a pic. Get their name and more info. Hell, find out where they work -- Get Them Fired. But certainly address them, and, if you need to, you got hands: use them.
Twitter reaction to Helm's "requests" were particularly strong:
If this doesn't show that #BLM is all about the almighty dollar & reparations, then nothing will. All they want is white people bankrupted
This is a troll account right? these arent legitimate? Demanding things be given to you based on race is the definition of racial privilege
-- Brazen (@Brazen2014) August 20, 2017
There is literally 0% chance of me doing this. When I die, I will leave everything to my children. If not them, then to my church.
-- Tiffany Marin Jones (@Tiffers919) August 21, 2017
Bahahahahahaha, good one. Yaw funny.
I prefer donating $ to @UNCF @NAACP and other worthy causes. Please excuse me if I find your suggestions ridiculous.
-- Matthew Matheny (@MatthewMatheny4) August 22, 2017
-- Tiffany Smith (@booperdakitty) August 22, 2017
More free handouts for doing nothing. Work hard and you will get what you want, plenty blacks do.
-- Tammy Pelc (@Germanengel81) August 22, 2017
wow so this is definitely stupid.
-- Chloe Simone Valdary (@cvaldary) August 20, 2017
10 requests from a black nazi
-- WonderUK (@8thWonderUK) August 19, 2017
Op-ed v iews and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.
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Black Lives Matter Louisville co-founder Chanelle Helm has helpfully listed a few ways white people can do better when it comes to race relations |
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Interview with Hany Abu-Assad, director of Omar
By David Walsh 27 September 2013
David Walsh spoke to Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, director of Omar , at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
David Walsh: I write for the World Socialist Web Site .
Hany Abu-Assad: Yes, I know it. What it does is good.
DW: Can you tell me what the significance of the Israeli-built wall is in Omar ? I was under the general impression that it divided Palestinian from Israeli areas, but this is obviously not true.
Hany Abu-Assad
HA-A: No, the Israelis are creating ghettos within the Palestinian areas. They are dividing cities in the middle, they are dividing refugee camps and villages. Suddenly, Palestinians are separated from their friends and family. This is why I deliberately didn't make clear which side of the wall the characters are on, because there is no difference.
DW: The personal situation for these characters seems almost impossible, living under these incredible external pressures of occupation, war, repression, poverty. What would you like an audience member to conclude about their behavior?
HA-A: Over the last 20 years or so, especially since September 11, I've always felt I should do something about trust. The whole capitalist system is trying to create mistrust among people, to set them against each other. Because when you don't trust each other, you think you need people to protect you, you need cameras to protect you, you need weapons to protect you.
I thought, I don't want to give a lecture. How can I find a simple, vivid story that shows that without trust among human beings there is no friendship, no love, no society? In love, when you start to doubt, the love will die. I have experienced this in the past. I killed the love between myself and another person. You want signs from her, you demand more and you kill it.
DW: I understand, but when you get into more complicated, geopolitical territory, however, trust also has a social and political content. For example, if I say I don't trust the Palestinian Authority or the Egyptian government, that's a different matter, it seems to me. Because, while trust is important, distrust is also important. I think in regard to the history of the Palestinian people, I can see why trust is such a big question ... because they have been betrayed by everybody.
HA-A: Yes, the trust between Rami [the Israeli policeman] and Omar is completely different than the trust between Omar and Nadia, and his friends. There is a completely different level of trust between you and the people above you in society, who have different interests, than among the people themselves. All of Nadia's friends stop trusting each other because the bigger, influential power manipulates them. When Omar trusts Rami for a moment, he comes back and tells Omar, "You are screwed for the rest of your life, you have to work for us."
The situation is complicated. Today you have so much ... let's call it greed for simplicity's sake. There are people who can't get enough, even though they are full. And there's us, who want to lead normal, decent lives, be happy and spend our time doing something other than consuming. There's a complete difference of interests between us and these greedy ones, whose only goal is how they can become richer and richer.
DW: Can you speak a little about Amjad?
HA-A: If you take the three types in the film. There's Omar, who's the brave one. And Tarek is adventurous. Amjad is the opportunist. The adventurer will start the war, the brave one will do the fighting and the one who reaps the spoils is the opportunist.
We have a negative view of Amjad, but I don't like to dehumanize any characters, even the Israeli policeman. He's a human being too. This doesn't mean you are forgiven. I think if you are a human being, your crimes are even worse. How could he, the policeman, do this to Omar, when he has his own kid he cares about, who's in school? You make your characters human, you show them to an audience who experiences their situation, but their deeds are still ugly. Circumstances made them ...
DW: ... But to understand people is not to excuse them.
HA-A: Exactly.
DW: Is it easier or more difficult in the Middle East at the moment to be an artist who tells the truth?
HA-A: It's more difficult. Or perhaps it's the case in the whole world. Capitalism is becoming more and more aggressive. They are controlling opinions, including opinions about art--who's in and who's out. This is the case even in the alternative cinema, where there were always movements in the past saying [to filmmakers of a certain type], "To hell with you, you are corrupt, you are helping impose the vision of the powerful, you are not faithful to your own cause," and they created something in the margins.
Capitalism has even started to control those margins. When you become important, when you have 10 readers [laughs] ... as soon as you become influential, they will buy you and corrupt you. I feel so many artists around me, from the West and from the East, gradually becoming corrupt.
Artists apparently need to consume things. For some reason, they need to live in luxury. I am outside this to a certain extent. But if I don't compromise, I will not have enough money to eat. I don't have a big house, but still I need to pay the bills, I need this and that. I am 51 and I am worrying about how I can survive another three months, for example, with the money I have. I need more work. If I want to make bold movies, honest movies, I know no one wants to ...
I am so depressed now. Everyone is demanding that I make more "uplifting" stories. "You are an incredible filmmaker," they tell me, "but why don't you make more cheerful films?"
And, I swear, I might have to do it the next time. I have to survive. The next film might be lighter. I will do a dark comedy. Omar is not going to make money.
DW: But the opposite is also true. There are great difficulties, but there are big social movements coming. Look at the millions in the streets in Egypt this summer. It's a transitional movement. The old is discredited, parties, unions, artists too, but the new allegiances have not emerged yet. There is not yet a new, big audience. It's difficult. But I would not be pessimistic. There's a huge audience coming. These films will endure, they mean something to people. That's the only thing that counts. They will find their audience, maybe not this year.
HA-A: I hope you are right. We need people like you, giving hope.
DW: What about the threat of war against Syria?
HA-A: It's not coming, in my opinion. The US wants a war, but they won't be able to do it. Not just because of the opposition of the people, but there is a real danger now that this war might escalate into something much bigger than they can control. The outcome might not be in the favor of the US. This is why they are very nervous. The army is telling them, this is not Iraq, where we lost, but it was controllable. Libya was controllable. But Syria might turn into something global, with Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia.
DW: I think perhaps you underestimate the crisis of American imperialism. They are driven to war by powerful contradictions. On that score, I think you are being naive.
HA-A: In the beginning, I had illusions in Barack Obama ... Not now. When there was the financial crisis, Obama could have solved it by making "real change," like his slogan, but instead he invested billions, no, trillions, in the same corrupt system. And this is money that could solve the problems of the whole world economy!
DW: Why do you make films?
HA-A: Of course, there is the element of doing this because it's the only thing you can do to survive, it's your profession, you need the money. But this is banal. Let's not speak about that. I think my artistic motivation is to be a witness to history. One hundred years from now, people will still look back on movies that are not just great stories, but also showed what happened in that period of time. To witness history, from my point of view. History is something we all write together.
DW: This is why your movies are interesting, and there are so many movies that are not interesting. Does art change the world?
HA-A: No, I wish it did! The most influential power now is money. And, let's say, capitalism. They are changing everything. Well, art might be the seed that will create hope and change. We might be that. So, yes and no. Films I saw when I was young taught me about my own power. They changed my life. But in terms of global change ... We are the small seeds whose results you might see in 20 years.
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The headlines are worth scratching your head over: "Five white men are suing Diddy, for discriminating against white men."
Um, ok.
Dig a little deeper, get to the specifics and the story still seems a little odd.
It seems five white men are suing Sean "Diddy" Combs' media company, Revolt, alleging they were discriminated against for not being young, black men.
That news was reported on Tuesday by the New York Post, which says it obtained a copy of the lawsuit, which apparently was filed at the Manhattan Supreme Court.
The men say they were fired while working for the TV version of Power 105.1's morning show, "The Breakfast Club."
Obviously, discrimination at the workplace is wrong; there's no debating that. Plus, it remains to be scene how the actual lawsuit plays out.
That being said, it's fair to say this looks as ridiculous as any instance of "reverse racism" sounds.
Mind you, the lawsuit doesn't actually use those words, at least not according to the New York Post's report. But because the topic of this lawsuit is being discussed as an accusation of reverse racism, we should point out a few things.
Reverse racisms is a myth.
As PBS' Mychal Denzel Smith noted , 'Reverse racism' only makes sense through the erasure of the power dynamics of racism, which has been accomplished through the teaching of racism as a strictly interpersonal issue of hatred and intolerance.
In other words, reverse racism only makes sense if you're delusional about how actual, pervasive, systemic racism works. "Reverse racism" is essentially used the way the president talks about "fake news."
It's seldom actually what it purports itself to be.
Now that we're past that, we can just treat this as an accusation of bias or discrimination. But even then, the lawsuit just seems so strange.
First off, the suit alleges that Revolt TV treated them "worse than other employees who were younger and African-American," an idea which will sound foreign to any employee who's actually younger and African-American.
Secondly, the suit supports its claims that black employees were favored over the white, more experienced, producers by accusing executive producer Anthony Boreland of saying "Caucasians harbored racism against African-Americans," which is unimpressive, at best.
Speaking of unimpressive, here's another doozy: One manager was accused of responding to a producer's complaint of show guests being late by saying, "he [the producer] just did not understand the 'culture' of the show's guests and on-air personalities."
There are more quotes of course, but none come anywhere close to being damning. Now add in the fact that Revolt released this statement, saying, These claims are without merit and have previously been dismissed by the EEOC. Revolt Media and TV, LLC has always been committed to diversity in the workplace and is an equal opportunity employer.
By EEOC, the company means the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the body which aims to protect employees from the type of discrimination the suit alleges.
Now, to be fair, there haven't been any reports that confirmed whether the EEOC formally took a stance on the plaintiff's complaints.
On the other hand, Revolt has been able to give its side of the story on the reasons why the five producers were let go. Both of those fact could change how we look at Diddy and his company in this matter.
As of right now, though, the lawsuit seems frivolous and flimsy. In other words, it seems just as a ridiculous as any accusation that pretends "reverse racism" is a thing.
Surprise, surprise. |
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"Five white men are suing Diddy, for discriminating against white men. |
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Protesters at Claremont McKenna College partially shut down a talk by Heather Mac Donald, author of the book The War on Cops Thursday evening. Mac Donald was forced to speak to a nearly empty auditorium and then had her talk, which was being live-streamed, cut short by police who were concerned the crowd outside was getting rowdy. The College Fix reports :
"The protesters surrounded all the doors to the Atheneum where I was supposed to speak, so none of the students who had signed up to attend my lecture could get in," Mac Donald (pictured) told The Fix . "I was hustled from my guest suite by several police officers from Claremont PD into the lecture hall. It was decided that I would give the speech for live streaming to a largely empty hall. The organizers moved the podium so that it would not be visible through the windows to the students surrounding the building once night fell. We jumpstarted the timing of my talk as the crowd seemed to be getting more unruly."...
"During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking," Mac Donald said. "An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them."
The two hundred or so protesters spent their time chanting various slogans including "Black Lives Matter," "Shut it down!" and "From Oakland to Greece, f**k the police." Incidentally, for anyone wondering why the Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner went over like a lead balloon this week, it's partly because the ad ended with Jenner giving a Pepsi to a police officer . You can imagine how well that minimal sign of mutual respect would go over with the people who, in real life, are chanting "F**k the police!" Here's video of the protest. (The College Fix has more video of the protest here .)
This semi-successful attempt to silence Mac Donald was organized on a Facebook page titled, "Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald." The Claremont Independent has more :
"Heather Mac Donald has been vocally against the Black Lives Matter movement and pro-police, both of which show her fascist ideologies and blatant anti-Blackness and white supremacy," the Facebook page adds. "Let's show CMC that having this speaker is an attack on marginalized communities both on campus and off. Together, we can hold CMC accountable and prevent Mac Donald from spewing her racist, anti-Black, capitalist, imperialist, fascist agenda."
The page also included a photo of Mac Donald with devil horns. So in addition to all the usual leftist tropes--those who disagree are racist, speech is "an attack"--the page used literal demonization to rally people.
There was a similar protest a day earlier when Mac Donald spoke at UCLA. However, protesters at UCLA actually were quiet for most of Mac Donald's actual talk, though they shouted frequently throughout the Q&A that followed. From UCLA, here's the speech protesters at Claremont McKenna didn't want people to hear:
Heather Mac Donald, "Blue Lives Matter - Cops: The Real Victims" LIVE
Posted by Bruin Republicans at UCLA on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 |
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the daily shoah the right stuff
Keith Preston recently issued a response to a short letter we wrote a while back asking him to stop calling himself an anarchist because of his racism, misogyny, and support for libertarian variants. In what is probably the most anarchist thing he could do, he responded with a letter defending his pan-anarchism and associating us with totalitarian elements of the left. This accusation is a go-to for fascist organizers shut down by anti-fascist movements, as if the freedom for loud and angry loud men to rant and rave is what liberation is really all about. The issue with Preston as an associate and supporter of the far-right is an important reason to isolate his website, Attack the System, from having any association with anarchism, as is his idea that he can reconcile completely disparate philosophical tendencies that have literally no association with one another other than the "anarcho" prefix. Preston himself mentions this after citing John Zube's bizarre dialogue on anarchism.
There are indeed many readily identifiable traditions within anarchism, some of which maintain a paradoxical relationship to each other.
He goes on to mention that anarchists are like divisions in the Christian church that refuse to recognize each other as being appropriately Christian.
What Preston hopes is that his critique will allow him to ride the wave of critiques that his title suggests, that we are being "More Anarchistic Than Thou." This is a very real response that began in the 1990s where deconstruction and a "culture of critique" formed around post-left anarchism where by people began a "one-upmanship" of who could be more "radical" or attack oppression at more "systemic" levels. This can lead to some destructive behavior as small disagreements become overpowering and destroy even fleeting unity, but this is not what is happening with Preston. While disagreements over lifestyle choices or the specifics of anti-capitalist economics are applied are completely within the realm of disagreement between associated ideologues, arguing over racial nationalism, gender essentialism, and whether or not capitalism is acceptable is simply not. No person inside of anarchist anti-oppression politics, where the "More Anarchistic Than Thou" situation often arises, would extend this anarchist umbrella to Keith Preston as the different cultural elements he celebrates (racism and capitalism) are opposed at the foundation of the anarchist project. As was said in the original article, anarchists oppose the State not out of some revulsion to organization, but because it serves a class and hierarchy. A pan-secessionist movement that Preston advocates means empowering movements that seek to crystalize the elements of the State and general social system that motivate anarchism's revolutionary potential.
Plainly put: Anarchism is founded on the desire to smash capitalism, racism, sexism, and the like, so you cannot make friends out of movements that seek to celebrate those tyrannies.
While Attack the System is more known for its National Anarchism than its Anarcho-Capitalism, the libertarian traditions are well represented on the site. Capitalism is not "a central project" of anarchism, but, in a lot of ways, the central project that began the movement. Anarchism comes out of the socialist tradition, yet a libertarian version of this as opposed to Marx's conception of revolutionary socialism developing out of Proletarian Dictatorship through a Worker's State. Anarcho-capitalism is an idea that really did not become apparent until the 1970s-80s, and comes not from the liberatory movements associated with the anarchist tradition, but for the deregulation of capitalism for completely different motivations. There were socially "left" people associated with disparate strains of Anarcho-capitalism, but that does not make them any more associated with the tradition than liberals who share the anarchist disdain for sexism. The question of Anarcho-capitalism, which is a strong part of the synthesis that Preston attempts, is brought up into the massive FAQ project that Ian McKay as put together.
While "anarcho"-capitalists obviously try to associate themselves with the anarchist tradition by using the word "anarcho" or by calling themselves "anarchists" their ideas are distinctly at odds with those associated with anarchism. As a result, any claims that their ideas are anarchist or that they are part of the anarchist tradition or movement are false.
"Anarcho"-capitalists claim to be anarchists because they say that they oppose government. As noted in the last section , they use a dictionary definition of anarchism. However, this fails to appreciate that anarchism is a political theory . As dictionaries are rarely politically sophisticated things, this means that they fail to recognise that anarchism is more than just opposition to government, it is also marked a opposition to capitalism (i.e. exploitation and private property). Thus, opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist -- you also need to be opposed to exploitation and capitalist private property. As "anarcho"-capitalists do not consider interest, rent and profits (i.e. capitalism) to be exploitative nor oppose capitalist property rights, they are not anarchists.
Part of the problem is that Marxists, like many academics, also tend to assert that anarchists are simply against the state. It is significant that both Marxists and "anarcho"-capitalists tend to define anarchism as purely opposition to government. This is no co-incidence, as both seek to exclude anarchism from its place in the wider socialist movement. This makes perfect sense from the Marxist perspective as it allows them to present their ideology as the only serious anti-capitalist one around (not to mention associating anarchism with "anarcho"-capitalism is an excellent way of discrediting our ideas in the wider radical movement). It should go without saying that this is an obvious and serious misrepresentation of the anarchist position as even a superficial glance at anarchist theory and history shows that no anarchist limited their critique of society simply at the state.
McKay goes on to deconstruct allegations that Individualist anarchists that some anarchists claim affinity with are capitalist, who have a much different conception of property than people like Hayek or Rothbard.
The question comes up of exactly what totalitarianism is as it is the "totalitarian humanism" that Preston talks about is a problem of the left and distracts the left's claims of liberation. Preston's critique is especially precious given his belief that completely deregulated capitalism is acceptable in his "liberated" society. As Daibhidh points out in Anarcho-Hucksters , to allow a "Boss" to take place in an "anarchist" society, which is unequivocally necessary in any form of capitalism, undermines the basic assumptions of the anarchist project.
"Anarcho" capitalists talk of freedom as a negative, in a (Ayn) Randian definition of: "the absence of physical violence" . They see capitalism as the epitome of this ethic, and the State as the antithesis of it (defining the State as "the institution with a monopoly of force") .
This is the cornerstone of their professed anarchism. They say, "we oppose the State; anarchists oppose government; ergo, we are anarchists."
But anarchists look at that statement and ask: What of the boss in the workplace? What of the wealthy owner of property? What of the capitalist industrialist? What of the church elder? What of the judge? What of the patriarch of a family?
Don't these people have very real authority over others' lives? Haven't each of these, in their way, brought shame, misery, and degradation to those under their control?
The "anarcho" capitalist has no problem with rulers below State level, so long as they don't impinge on profit and property! So, if your boss eavesdropped on your calls, the "anarcho" capitalist would say, "hey, you can always get a new job" rather than taking the anarchist stance of "how dare X boss eavesdrop on their employees?! We must work to end workplace tyranny!"
In fact, to the "anarcho" capitalist, being able to work for whomever you want (including working for clients [e.g., "self"-employment) is what they consider "freedom". This amounts to choosing who gets to be your boss! Some choice, huh?
Anarchists, in contrast, don't think there should BE any bosses. Everyone pulls their fair share of the collective social burden of day-to-day living. And, while everyone works, the distinction between this and typical capitalist drudgery is that, in anarchy, you'd be working for your own needs, rather than for the profit of another! As such, you wouldn't have to put in 40+ hour weeks lining the pockets of whoever owns the company you work for (or servicing your clients' needs).
The tyranny that people experience is rooted in fundamental inequalities, both social and systemic. Without the ability to challenge those dynamics then there is no liberation, and to allow wage-slave systems in other "city-states" (or whatever Preston thinks his ideological enclaves would be called) would be the opposite of the ongoing revolutionary transformation of anarchism.
Attack the System itself has a banner at the top of the website that shows images of some of the famous anarchists of the past that Preston respects and says is a part of his own tradition. If we look at their own work, it is pretty clear that their opinions about capitalism do not for allow for Preston's idea that anarchism can collaborate with capitalism. According to Mikhail Bakunin, capitalism undermined any sense of freedom for the vast majority of humanity.
Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person ant his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer.... The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.
The worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom. lacking any means for its possible realization. ant consequently it is only a fictitious liberty. an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom-"voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense-broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.
Alexander Berkman, the author of the ABC's of Anarchism, is known for outlining many of the ideas that brought anarchism into the 20 th Century. He noted that capitalism represented the foundations of a society that had to be torn apart.
If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters. If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.
Even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a person who shared some of Preston's bigotries and was more of a proto-anarchist than the anarchism we would call today said that "property is theft." We could really go down the line on this, but what we would find is not just that these anarchists have a different opinion about capitalism, they find anti-capitalism foundational. What Preston attempts to do though is to say that anarchism naturally has the ability to take on fully contradictory ideas, as he mentions also with religious anarchism. There certainly is a broad anarchist movement with many colliding ideas, but the fundamental values do remain the same. No one in the broad anarchist movement, even on the primitivism or post-leftist fringes would accept capitalism or racial nationalism. Even the more nuanced anarchists from fringe traditions, like Max Stirner and Hakim Bey, seem to be little understood by Preston and his writers, though they pull at anyone vaguely associated with the anarchist tradition to give relevance to their absurdity. It is like someone who thinks a political movement can be summed up by describing its members clothing and hair styles: he seems to know nothing about the fundamental values and motivating factors of the revolutionary anarchist movement.
For Attack the System, and Preston personally, the real issue is of this new concept of National Anarchism. When stripped of its pseudo-mystical tracts and overly jargon filled double speak, the notion here is almost identical to Preston's idea of pan-secessionism. Groups, known as tribes, would create separate enclave based either on identity, such as race, or on social choice, such as economic system. The NA's themselves focus on racial identity as they are essentially anti-State nationalists, who maintain the same violent racism and misogyny that most neo-Nazis do. Troy Southgate, former organizer with the National Front and some even more unsavory and violent white nationalist groups, is the ideological frontrunner of the NA theory, and has written most of their few works of theory. Spencer Sunshine outlines this beautifully as you can see where their true allegiances are.
The National Anarchists claim they are not "fascist." Still, Troy Southgate looks to lesser known fascists such as Romanian Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu, and lesser light Nazis like Otto Strasser and Walter Darre. Part of Southgate's sleight of hand is to claim to be 'against fascism' by claiming he is socialist (as did Nazis such as Strasser) and by supporting political decentralization (as do contemporary European fascists such as Alain de Benoist). Sometimes he proclaims fascism to be equivalent to the capitalism he opposes, or promoting a centralized state, which he also opposes.
Southgate is undoubtedly sincere in his aversion to the classical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, and has cited this as a reason for his break from one of the National Front splinter groups. He sees the old fascism as discredited, and an abandonment of the true values of revolutionary nationalism. But his ultimate goal, shared with the European New Right, is to create a new form of fascism, with the same core values of a revitalized community that withstands the decadence of cosmopolitan liberal capitalism. This cannot be done as long as his views are linked in the popular mind to the older tradition.
Spencer Sunshine attempts to look a little closer at the ideas of NA to see if they are aligned with anarchism on any fundamental level, yet sees instead the same kinds of deeply run bigotries you find on Stormfront.org.
The National-Anarchists are quite open about their antifeminism and desire to exile queer people into separate spaces, but tend to hide their deeply antisemitic worldview. Troy Southgate says of feminism, "Feminism is dangerous and unnatural... because it ignores the complimentary relationship between the sexes and encourages women to rebel against their inherent feminine instincts."
The stance on homophobia is more interesting. Southgate said:
Homosexuality is contrary to the Natural Order because sodomy is quite undeniably an unnatural act. Groups such as Outrage are not campaigning for love between males -- which has always existed in a brotherly or fatherly form -- but have created a vast cult which has led to a rise in cottaging, male-rape and child sex attacks... But we are not trying to stop homosexuals engaging in this kind of activity like the Christian moralists or bigoted denizens of censorship are doing, on the contrary, as long as this behaviour does not affect the forthcoming National-Anarchist communities then we have no interest in what people get up to elsewhere.
What this means in his schema is that queer people will be given their own separate "villages." The recent National-Anarchist demonstrations in San Francisco were against two majority-queer events, the Folsom Street Fair and the related fair Up Your Alley. Their orchestrator, "Andy," declares that he is a "racist" who hates queer people.
Andy also denies the charge of antisemitism against National-Anarchists, claiming that they merely engage in a "continuous criticism of Israel and its supporters," 53 as do the majority of Leftists and anarchists. Once again, this is a typical disingenuous attempt by National-Anarchists to duck criticism. Antisemitism is an important element of the political world views of Southgate and Herferth.
Southgate actively promotes the work of Holocaust deniers, including the Institute for Historical Review, and holds party line antisemitic beliefs about the role of the international Jewish conspiracy. As a dodge, he sometimes uses the euphemism "Zionist"; for instance, he says "Zionists are well known for their cosmopolitan perspective upon life, not least because those who rally to this nefarious cause have no organic roots of their own."54 In another interview he says that, "there is no question that the world is being ruthlessly directed (but perhaps not completely controlled) by International Zionism. This has been achieved through the rise of the usurious banking system." And he describes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forgery which is the world's most popular antisemitic text) as a book which "although still unproven, accordswith the main events in modern world history."
Meanwhile, his Australian counterpart Welf Herferth is even more explicit in his neo-Nazi antisemitic views. In one speech, he describes the Holocaust as an "extrapolation" that "has been an enormously profitable one for the Jews, and one which has brought post-war Germany and Europe to its knees," before referring to Israel as "the most powerful state in the Western world." Herferth concludes that "by liberating Germany from the bondage to Israel and restructuring a new Germany on the basis of a new 'volksgemeinschaft,' the German nationalists will liberate Europe, and the West as well."
Preston would have us believe that since anarchists of the left and post-left variety share anti-capitalism and opposition to the State with them that we should ally with them even though they represent a complete break from all of our motivating ideas.
Preston goes on to make some claims that are bizarre on their surface since their refutation is really implicit. First he says:
Attack the System does not oppose the maintenance of identity politics by African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, the LGBTQ umbrella, feminists, atheists, vegetarians, vegans, immigrants, environmentalists, the elderly, young people, disabled people, fat people, ugly people, students, gamers, drug users, sex workers, slut walkers, street gangs, prison inmates, or Star Wars fans. Likewise, Attack the System does not oppose the maintenance of identity politics by Protestant evangelicals, Catholic traditionalists, adherents of Eastern Orthodoxy, Mormons, Europeans, Caucasian-Americans, Southerners, Midwesterners, Catalans, Scots, Basques, Russians, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scientologists, Moonies, the white working class, WASPs, yuppies, men, social conservatives, cultural traditionalists, ethnic preservationists, Euro-pagan tribalists, gun owners, meat eaters, tobacco smokers, rednecks, military veterans, motorcycle gangs, survivalists, metal heads, or aficionados of classical music.
Let's think about this for just a second. The first on the list are racial groups who have been historically oppressed by white majorities that use both unregulated social systems and the State to oppress them. Later there are groups that also could fit under the oppressed banner: fat people, disabled people, Jews, Muslims, sex workers, etc. The point here is that this identity means something in that the identity is a point of resistance to oppression, not identity for identity's sake. This "identity politics" (though it is clear he does not understand what identity politics are and why most anarchists oppose them) is something that the radical right often highlights since they want to compare their "white nationalism" with "black nationalism" as if they are both equally movements towards racial identity and the advocacy of an ethnic identity. The difference is that black nationalism is a response to white oppression and an identity use only as a tool to resist that historic oppression. For white nationalists to say that they are the same project is to deny the fact that the purpose is fundamentally different. White nationalists seek to double down on their perceived identity, essentializing their racial characteristics. This is fundamentally a different project, for a different purpose, and a radically different politic. Preston goes on to identity feminists in his list, which he has to understand is not an "identity" as much as a movement to overhaul society and dethrone patriarchy. To list this as an "identity" is again a sign that he doesn't clearly understand why identities are used in anti-oppression politics.
It is not that "identity" is something that the left wants to create dividing lines around, but instead, for some people, a piece of their lives through which they have been oppressed, and therefore need to create solidarity with others who share the same background of oppression. To say that white people are in the same boat as people of color in terms of racially defined oppression is offensive right from the start.
Preston often likes to cite obscure pseudo-anarchists from history, while ignoring ninety-five percent of anarchist history and theory. The best example of anarchist social organization existed in response to the rise of the Fallange fascist party in Catalonia, and were eventually crushed fighting for survival against the Catholic nationalists. Anarchists rose up as primary actors in fighting the fascist party machine in Italy, Romania, Austria, and Germany, all of which show the history of the radical right as being the direct inverse of anarchism and dedicated to its destruction. As you prance around the National Policy Institute and promote your Americanized pan-libertarianism, you are celebrating the forces that have been the historic enemy of the anarchist movement and who have murdered anarchists by the thousands.
Preston also lists a number of often considered right-wing political issues that he says anarchists are not vocal on. These include gun control, home schooling, and alternative medicine. This is a red herring as he is again looking for surface politics while failing to go deeper. Most anarchists do oppose bourgeois gun control, yet the politics motivating that movement are xenophobic and reactionary. To join that movement in equal parts is to undermine our founding purpose, even if there is tacit support. The rest of the list has disparate political ideas that would be boring to go through point by point, but needless to say there are left-anarchists associated with most of those projects. They certainly are not primary political issues because they are incredibly marginal and many of the motivating factors would not be shared by anarchists, but that is certainly an individual's choice as to whether or not to support home schooling or zoning regulations.
Preston himself now has zero connection to larger anarchist movements and seems to have been deemed persona non grata from all political arenas except the far-right. At the National Policy Institute "Become Who We Are" conference , the last that Preston spoke at as of this writing, there were speakers advocating for whites to have their own state, claiming that Jews control world affairs, and that there are racial differences in intelligence. NPI, Radix, the Daily Shoah, American Renaissance, and the Occidental Observer were all represented organizations there right along Attack the System, which puts Keith and his website firmly in the camp associated with neo-Nazis and Klan supporters. Preston will likely put out a response to the response (we are sincere when we say this behavior is the closest you have come to contemporary anarchist conduct), in which he will quote his own cadre of unknown authors to try and justify his racist connections, but luckily his backward jargon works on no actual anarchist communities. We could go on a detailed analysis of what "is" and what "is not" anarchism, but the reality is that there are dozens of books available that do this wonderfully and do not include you are any of your ideas. This notion that anarchism is just anything anyone says it is, that its opposition to authority means that no one can define it, is a-historical and non-useful to those who actually try to utilize anarchism as a revolutionary idea.
Keith himself has not actually organized in a couple decades, and has resigned himself to racist conferences and internet blogs. You may want to criticize Antifa organizers for what you see as censorship (Angry white men always scream censorship when their bullshit is disallowed by the community, usually because they have never been told "no" before in their lives.), but we are out in the streets and fighting in solidarity with movements across the world to bring together a liberated society. We are not sure what part of standing with Richard Spencer as he argues for a White European Empire, but since "anarchism" is just a t-shirt you like to wear on top of your opportunistic Third Positionism, you try to make yourself immune to common sense and reason. |
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Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther changed the course of human history by attaching his 95 Theses to the door of a German church. Today, the church in China is undergoing its own reformation--of a kind.
Chat with Chinese Christians in major cities and the buzzword is gaige zong , or "Reformed theology." Type "Tim Keller" into Baidu Video (China's version of YouTube) and more than 400 video clips pop up, showing the popular Presbyterian preacher's sermons subtitled in Chinese. Chengdu's Early Rain Reformed Church even wrote its own "95 theses" of the Chinese house church, reaffirming God's sovereignty, Biblical authority, and proper church-state relations while rebuking the "Sinicization of Christianity" and the government-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches.
Reformed theology, a branch of Biblical teaching developed by John Calvin and other early Reformers, emphasizes God's sovereignty, man's fallenness, and covenantal theology. In China, pastors and parishioners in urban centers are now embracing Reformed theology as it speaks to the unique needs in Chinese Christianity: For intellectuals, it provides a comprehensive worldview for individuals deeply disillusioned by the Communist Party. For first-generation Christians looking for guidance in organizing and running their churches, it provides a time-tested church structure and polity. Although no one knows the exact number of theologically Reformed churches in China, interest in them is growing--evidenced by the teachings of prominent indigenous church leaders, the interest in Reformed seminaries, and the WeChat chatter among Chinese Christians.
REFORMED THEOLOGY ENTERED CHINA in 1807 with the first Protestant missionary, a Presbyterian named Robert Morrison who translated the Bible, along with portions of the Westminster Catechism, into Chinese. Many subsequent American, British, and Korean missionaries also evangelized from a Reformed perspective, influencing the early Chinese converts.
As liberal theology took hold in the United States in the late 1800s, liberal missionaries had little time to spread their beliefs among the Chinese, with the Communist Party shutting the doors on all foreign missionaries in 1949. Thus Chinese churches today tend to be more theologically conservative compared with the rest of the world. Because of this, Chinese congregants more readily accept Reformed teaching, according to Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Church. "If you want to understand the 19th-century American church, you should come to China," said Wang. "Obviously the culture is different, but the spiritual condition is more similar than that of the modern American church."
Under Communist rule, Christians who did not join government-sanctioned churches faced torture and death, yet Christianity grew more quickly than ever before. Because Christians needed to keep their faith hidden, churches were small, isolated, and led by preachers without training. Some churches had Bibles, while others had only portions of Scripture that they would commit to memory.
Many Chinese came to profess Christ after witnessing the miraculous healing of loved ones, so their theology fell in line with charismatic beliefs, said Tim Conkling, a former missionary whose published doctoral dissertation, Mobilized Merchants-Patriotic Martyrs , examined the house church movement in China. Because of past persecution, the Chinese church largely focused on the practical matters of faith--like how to deal with hardship--rather than theology or ideas.
Yet once China's doors opened in the 1980s, Chinese Christians began learning about Reformed theology from overseas Chinese. One major influencer: Jonathan Chao, a Chinese-American who returned to his Chinese homeland to conduct research on the church. Once there, he befriended major house church leaders. His father, Charles Chao, had founded the Reformation Translation Fellowship, and the younger Chao followed in his father's footsteps by setting up underground seminaries and bringing together network leaders to create a statement of faith for the Chinese house church. His organization, China Ministries International, also smuggled into China the first book of Reformed creeds.
Another big influence is Stephen Tong, a Reformed preacher in Indonesia who has reached Billy Graham-level fame through his large evangelistic meetings throughout Asia. In his sermons, Tong, who is ethnically Chinese, emphasizes the doctrine of sola scriptura while angrily criticizing liberal theology and the charismatic movement. Although Tong isn't allowed in mainland China, his DVDs, CDs, and online sermons have spread widely among Chinese house churches.
TONG ESPECIALLY ATTRACTED the attention of China's Christian intellectuals, who believe Reformed theology reconciles their rational and spiritual sides and fills the moral void they see in modern Chinese society. For instance, Paul Peng, a pastor at Enfu Church in Chengdu, said that after professing Christ, he felt he had to "sacrifice my head" to be a Christian. Whenever he asked Christians how to examine issues from a Biblical worldview, they responded with pat answers: "Just pray and depend on the Lord."
While attending seminary in California, his professors introduced him to Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin. He began to realize "the Christian faith does not just help us go to heaven, but also allows us to have a kingdom perspective. ... It can influence every aspect of life." Christianity suddenly became deeper and wider than he previously imagined.
Pastor Wang, a former constitutional law professor, remembers learning about the Protestant Reformation as an unbeliever, but it always left him with questions: "How is the Christian faith related to Western development in the past 500 years? What do 'God-given rights' have to do with Christianity? And how does all this relate to me personally?"
As he read Tong's writings, he found that Reformed theology answered his intellectual questions. Not only was there a God, Wang realized, but He was sovereign over individual lives and the world around him. This attracted Wang: "Reformed theology is a complete moral system created for a world in crisis, especially one in which there are no values, like China."
Still, some intellectuals have read Reformed books only for knowledge, without allowing the truth to penetrate their lives. Often referred to as "cultural Christians," these converts did not attend church themselves, but criticized those within the church. According to Peng, they gave rise to the impression that Reformed theology was elitist and divisive within the church.
WANG POINTS TO THE YEAR 2000 as a turning point for Reformed theology in China. With the advent of the internet, ideas could now spread quickly among house churches all over China. Books once smuggled across the border or printed in secret could now be accessed with the click of a mouse. Communication with overseas churches became easier, and relaxed travel restrictions meant anyone could leave the country.
Pastors started taking trips to Hong Kong to visit established churches and see how they ran. They observed how churches conducted services, held meetings, led small groups, and even printed bulletins, then returned home to copy them. It was a new stage in the Chinese church, as leaders desired to move beyond a simple gathering in an apartment.
Some leaders were attracted to Reformed ecclesiology, which they felt provided a church structure that kept pastors accountable, gave the congregation a say in electing elders, and spread power among a group rather than concentrating it on one leader. They also liked the idea of organizing churches into a unified institution.
Yet Chinese churches face unique challenges in implementing such changes. Wang said the easy part is agreeing to nominate and elect elders. The difficult part is creating a church culture where elders truly have an equal say in decisions. Because Chinese churches traditionally have functioned in a top-down, authoritarian manner, Wang believes it could take a few generations to change these habits.
The small size of many house churches complicates setting up an elder board, as some churches don't even have their own pastor. Creating a presbytery, a church government involving multiple congregations, requires working with other like-minded churches, yet the isolated nature of house churches makes communication difficult. Government pressure is also a concern since creating a presbytery pushes against the power of the official China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. In recent years, officials have largely allowed house churches to gather as long as they stay small and don't collaborate with other churches. |
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Books trying to explain Red America are flying off the shelves, particularly to shell-shocked Democrats. As we hear in the opening sound bites of this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, JFK (and later Lyndon B. Johnson and Bobby Kennedy) made the personal and policy connection to working-class white America. So how did the party lose touch?
Journalist Sarah Jones tells Jeff Schechtman that she is afraid that Democrats and others may be learning the wrong lessons. While people like J.D. Vance argue that the answer is to promote conservative culture and respond to the "crisis of masculinity" and Horatio Alger mythology, the problem is that taking the cultural perspective may be playing directly into the liberal elitist view of a region of "deplorables."
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Full Text Transcript:
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy , I'm Jeff Schechtman.
There are billions of dollars of contracts being led on all occasions but there are very few of them being sent to those areas where the eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve percent of the population is unemployed. I think federal aid to education, I think the passage of the [?] Bill which provides medical assistance to those over 65, is an effective minimum wage bill which I'm now sponsoring in the senate, federal minimum standards for the payment of unemployment compensation. I think vigorous action by the federal government can make a great difference to West Virginia. In the final analysis, what happens in this state depends in part on the vigor of the citizens but I must say we can do far better than we have done in last year by this administration, which has vetoed and held back all the action which is needed if West Virginia is going to move ahead.
That was John F. Kennedy campaigning in the West Virginia primary in 1960. It's amazing how many of those same ideas and issues are still haunting us today. Then it was the Republicans who didn't seem to understand the plight of Appalachia and of working America. Democrats, in the person of JFK, and later Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, made the personal and policy connection. So what happened? How did their party lose touch with that part of America? The answers are complicated and probably best left to historians. However, how the party reconnects is a very contemporary political issue. Books are flying off the shelf trying to explain flyover country to Democrats. Books like Arlie Russell Hochchild's Strangers in Their Own Land , Tyler Cowen's The Complacent Class , and most notably J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy . But is it possible that some of these books, particularly Vance's, teach the wrong lesson. That, just like 1960, the lesson is not one of promulgating conservative culture and Horatio Alger attitudes, but of the failure of government to do the right thing? Take a listen to Bobby Kennedy campaigning in Kentucky in 1968.
People are still having a very, very difficult time. There is considerable hunger in this part of the country. There's no real hope for the future amongst many of these people who worked hard in the coal mines. And now that the coal mines shut down, they have no place to go. There is no hope for the future, there is no industry moving in. The men are trained in government programs. There's no jobs at the end of the training program because of the cut back, because of the demands on the federal budget in Washington. People are being cut off and they have no place to turn, and so they're desperate, and filled with despair. It seems to me that this country's wealth, as wealthy as we are, that this is an intolerable condition. It reflects on all of us. We can do things all over the rest of the world, but I think we should do something for our people here in our own country.
To talk about and to examine all of this, I am joined by Sarah Jones, who's the social media editor at The New Republic and whose article, "J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America," appears in The New Republic . It is my pleasure to welcome Sarah Jones Sarah. Thanks so much for joining us.
Sarah Jones: Thanks for having me.
Jeff: It is so remarkable that given the history of the Democratic Party in understanding these issues, of working-class America and Appalachia, and listening to those clips from Bobby Kennedy and JFK, that the party at the moment seems so desperate to try and understand that part of the country.
Sarah: I agree and I think it's the result of years of neglect, moving away from progressive populism, and neglecting politics at the state level which is really a good way to reach out to these people.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about as you look at it, what you were beginning to see as you set about writing this article and looking at Vance's Hillbilly Elegy the way in which that desperation is really creating the wrong message, the wrong ideas that seem to be filtering into the party.
Sarah: From my perspective, just as someone who grew up in this area and has kind of moved away from it and is now looking kind of from the outside, it just seems to me that the Democratic Party kind of just wrote this voter base off. "Okay, we're not going to win them, we can still win national elections without them now." We can see that that was kind of an egregious miscalculation this time around. And I think books like Hillbilly Elegy , they kind of confirm stereotypes of people already have about white working class voters, especially white working class people and Appalachia. So I wasn't particularly surprised to see that his book has been so popular, even amongst some liberals, but it was very concerning and indicative to me a broader problem within the Democratic establishment.
Jeff: Talk about the conservative message, the kind of "bring yourself up by the bootstraps" message that's so much a part of what Vance writes about, and really, the disconnect from public policy.
Sarah: Right, so Vance to his credit, he had a very chaotic dysfunctional childhood. He's managed to achieve a lot and that took hard work, a lot of effort. He deserves credit for that. His having grown up in a similar region and trying to make it on my own - it is difficult. He seems to have looked at his individual experience and projected it on the region-at-large, and I think that's a very dangerous thing to do. The way he was able to make out was join the Marine Corps for example, or avenues that are not necessarily going to be open to everyone. Furthermore, do we really want a country where you have to join the Marine Corps and get deployed to Iraq in order to get into Ohio State and then Yale Law? You know, it should be easier than that. So as a memoir, the book is interesting and it would've been fine if he just left it as a memoir. Instead, it's kind of presented as an explainer on hillbilly culture and here's what needs to s a result, it's very limited and very flawed. You know, if you just worked a little bit harder, pray a little bit harder, you know, fix this crisis of masculinity which he never really quite explains, then things will be at least better, if not fine. And that's very unusual to me. There's a lot of public policy that you're leaving out of that analysis.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about the fact that he looks at it and presents it as a cultural problem more than an economic problem in many respects.
Sarah: Right, which is also a bit strange to me. I don't know a great deal about Vance's religious behavior and so I really don't want to rush to any assumptions here. But I do know that he identifies as a religious conservative, and I do see that as indicative of conservativism based on my experience with it. You know, it's a problem of the heart from Christians who call it the sin [agent?]. And if you get right with God, if you live a godly life, and things will be better, and I see it. You know, he doesn't quite say it that explicitly, but I see it as being related to this idea - if you fix cultural problems, if you fix these problems of the heart, then things will get better. But of course nothing is ever that simplistic.
Jeff: And with respect to the public-policy aspect, in many ways the book is a kind of screed against, against welfare, against public policy and government, really having an important role to play.
Sarah: Yeah, it's very odd to me and very surreal actually [?] that, you know, there were sufficient services available for people, and it's very clear that there are not sufficient services available for people, you know. In my part of Southwest Virginia, people will start getting up at four in the morning to start accessing... accessing Medical, which is a rural clinic. It offers free medical services and that didn't change after Obamacare. People still need these services and these are people who aren't able to access basic healthcare. Now that's clearly a failing of the welfare state. You look at our public schools. I don't know what his public school was like, but mine certainly didn't have enough equipment, textbooks, or advanced classes in case you wanted to go to college. Again, that's an issue of government funding not being distributed properly. So there are very clearly policy problems. And when you look at the problem of Appalachia now, and you look at the problem of declining coal jobs, and manufacturing jobs, the solutions to these include the policy aspect. Do we talk about raising the minimum wage for service jobs? Do we talk about universal basic income? What's the solution? Instead, we just kind of focus on this cultural issue and it's very reminiscent, and several people not just myself has made this point, of the welfare [agreements? ]. It was simplistic the first time it was proposed, and it's simplistic now, applied to white working class people in Appalachia.
Jeff: It's also interesting to look at this in this broader historical context, that many of these issues, and many of these problems, have been festering for 60, 70+ years.
Sarah: Yeah, very much so. When you're looking at economic decline, specifically mining and manufacturing jobs have been declining for decades. This often [?] to the Obama administration, the EPA, and environmentalism - the truth is, this is more a story about automation, just natural changes to the industry. So it's weeping, kind of getting to this point of economic crisis in Appalachia for a long time now. The area, like even when these industries were [?], obviously the [?] were wealthy. So this isn't new, this has been around a long, long time, and I see it as a [?] decades of government, and the ability to address it the way that it needs to be addressed. And despite this general reluctance, the tendency to connect, you know, do you deserve welfare instead of viewing things like healthcare and education, and having that food or roof over your head, just basic human rights
Jeff: Certainly what it goes to, and what's been a big discussion in coming out of this recent election, and where so much of this goes, is whether or not voters in these places are really clearly voting against their own economic self-interest.
Sarah: That's a really interesting question because in a sense that is the true thing to say. Like I don't think anyone reasonable anyway, can say, can look at Donald Trump and say that his administration is going to be better for these people. You know, I don't buy it for a single second that Donald Trump really actually cares about the plight of the white working class, or that as president his priority's going to be fixing Appalachia. That's simply not true. They don't see it this way, so they don't see it as voting against their interests. They really do believe that he's going to bring the jobs back, and they're not wrong to be suspicious of promises from the Democratic Party necessarily because Appalachia... People made a lot of promises to Appalachia and the poverty is still that it is.
Jeff: One of the points that you make in your piece in The New Republic is that while Democrats may not understand what's really going on there, there are a lot of other groups even beyond Donald Trump, a lot of other groups that really do seem to understand and are trying to exploit and take advantage.
Sarah: Right, the Democratic Party in my opinion has failed to connect with people on a local level party. My colleague [?] and [?] just had a piece in The New Republic about the Democratic Party's failure at the state level, and how they currently don't control a single state legislature in the south, which is unprecedented. And that's a massive failure of leadership of the Democratic Party. So they've created a void. And the Tea Party wing of the GOP especially, has been very good at filling it. So now we see the results of that. You have these extremist groups. You have these white supremacist groups, like [?] groups who are at least saying, "You know, who knows what this will actually do." But they're saying that we're going to do voter outreach push now. Well actually they're doing that now because they see directly that there is a political void that exists.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the idea of looking at all of this, without the possibility, which is essentially what Vance does, without the possibility of government solutions, and where he thinks the answer will come from other than just "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps."
Sarah: You know, that's one major criticism of the book is that it's never really clear where he thinks these solutions are going to come from, except if you ruled out the possibility of them coming from the government. So what does that leave us with? It leaves us with private entities. I don't think that's the answer, because private entities are not answerable to the people the way the government ostensibly is supposed to be. It just doesn't leave you much room to actually think of solutions, or the government's role in any of this.
Jeff: Part of the other issue with these places, and you can speak about it from your own experience, is the way in which they have been hollowed out in so many respects, not only in terms of jobs, not only in terms of the economy, but even in terms of media, even in terms of local newspapers or the local opportunities for people to communicate in these places.
Sarah: Yeah, one of my very first jobs in journalism was working writing little freelance stories for the Bristol Herald Courier down in Bristol, Virginia. And these little local papers - I shouldn't call them little because they do play such an important role in bringing communities together, and educating communities - and the Bristol Herald even won a Pulitzer a few years ago for its work. They're doing important work and they have a really important role to play, but [the] journalism industry is suffering difficulties and I think that affects these little papers a lot. And that's unfortunate, especially as we're considering the rise of issues like fake news trending on Facebook. Again, you see people exploiting the void.
Jeff: What do you see, both from the things that Vance writes about, and from your own experience, in terms of the generational change in these places? Because certainly some of these issues seem to pass from generation to generation really without any change.
Sarah: That's a really interesting question. Mining jobs specifically were kind of viewed as generational jobs. So the same thing with, you know, a factory job, so they could be passed from generation to generation, that was a way for a person to have a fairly comfortable living without a college education, and now that's not happening. So that's an interesting thing to consider. You do have generational cycles of poverty as well. [?] Culturally, it's a very, your family is very important. It's very difficult if your family has been living in the same place, doing the same work for generation upon generation. You know, to just up and leave, it's very difficult.
Jeff: How hard is it for young people to get out?
Sarah: It's very difficult overall, I would say. Again you have certain family pressures again your whole family, your extended family has lived in this place for centuries in some cases and so being maybe the first person to break out of that is very difficult. But also because the region is so impoverished overall, that makes it much more difficult for people to save, to be the first one in their families to go to college. And then maybe you do go to college. Maybe, maybe you can make it that far. And then maybe you won't be able to find work in your area. So where does that leave you?
Jeff: Talk about the state of education in this part of the country.
Sarah: You know, it's difficult. I graduated from a public high school. For the most part I had teachers who tried very hard but they just didn't have a lot of resources. And that means kids are kind of at a disadvantage from the very beginning. It makes them less likely to be able to go to college and maybe go on to careers later on. I think education is very important. I think investing in education properly in colleges and universities that exist in the area, community colleges that specialize in vocational training - that is one way to help revitalize the area, maybe bring some economic growth. But unfortunately given the way the state legislatures are stacked right now it just seems unlikely that this is going to happen the way that it needs to.
Jeff: Of course the elephant in the room with all of this is the degree to which, as you write about, racism and misogyny are really so caught up in, so interwoven with, so many of these other issues
Sarah: Right, I mean, we're really talking about the stuff, so you really can't have a conversation without factoring racism into it. And it is a very racist place and it is a very sexist place. Of course a lot of places in America that are not in the south are also racist and sexist. But I think that absolutely plays a part in this and it can't be overstated too much, I think. You know, this is also very, it's less racially homogenous than it used to be, that's beginning to change but it has, it is at least somewhat racially homogenous. I think that's also a factor, to be that isolated from the rest of the world. There's less excuse for that then there used to be, [Because they were not] exposed to different cultures and ways of looking at the world that the older generations especially, I feel like, have been a bit less tolerant.
Jeff: The other point of this as you point out is that so much of this plays into liberal stereotypes of this part of the country.
Sarah: Oh, absolutely! I know what people think about white trash. I've encountered it before, and that stereotype about white trash, liberals have plenty of them themselves. Again, you can count the times I've heard liberal people that joke about flyover country, or, you know, people kind of getting what they deserve because they vote the way that they do, all the redneck jokes, the hillbilly jokes. People just make these observations and jokes, really unthinkingly, but they don't pass without notice in my part of the world and it does build resentment.
Jeff: And is that resentment pretty much the expression of what we have seen take place in this election?
Sarah: I think that it's part of it. I don't want to discount how it kind of feeds racism and misogyny which is a brew that Trump exploited so skillfully during the election. But that is part of it. You're not really going to believe that the Democratic Party, just as an example, is looking out for your best interest if you kind of associate them as a political and media establishment that is constantly making jokes at your expense, or at the very least just hasn't really fought for your vote, and hasn't invested in your area, and doesn't seem to be in touch with the issues that you care about. You have to make the case, and Trump made the case at the very least. He's kind of failed them later, but at least he bothered to make the case. I really think that the Democratic Party needs to take that lesson away from the election.
Jeff: Sarah Jones, her article in The New Republic is "J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America." Sarah, thank you so much for spending time with us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy .
Sarah: Thanks for having me. Thanks.
Jeff: Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy . I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast, I'm Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org /donate
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Posted by b on May 31, 2013 at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (67)
May 30, 2013
Syria: Assad's Al-Manar Interview Just listened to Bashar Assads's interview with Hizbullah's TV station Al-Manar in the English language live translation by Press TV. Some points from my notes:
The interviewer asked why the recent more offensive reaction against the foreign supported insurgents only came so late.
Assad responded that there first had to be a change in public opinion. Many people first believed that this was a "revolution". They took time to understand that this was a foreign assault. Now many of the Syrian fighters have stopped to fight and the balance of power has changed. There are now mostly tens of thousands of foreign fighters against our troops.
Q: Is the action in Qusayr to connect to a Damascus connection to the Alawi land on the coast.
A: That is nonsense. There are no road connections there [we pointed this out in an earlier post - b]. The purpose is to cut the insurgents off from the borders to diminish their supplies.
Q: S-300?
A: Russia is committed to our contracts and those will will be fulfilled. Parts of the contracts have been fulfilled [no direct confirmation that S-300 are already in Syria -b].
Q: Geneva conference?
A: We will ask who the SNC represents. Who are the people on the other side? What is their legitimation? Who do they represent? They are just slaves of foreign powers.
Q: Conditions for Geneva?
A: No preconditions. Results will have to go to a referendum for the Syrian people to decide. Constitution says the president stays on. The government (prime minister etc.) may change while president stays on.
Q: Change of position in Arab League or Turkey?
A: No detectable change. Just rhetoric. They still support insurgents with money and weapons. They receive orders from outside.
Q: What if Geneva fails?
A: That is possible. Some try to make it fail. Russia plays down expectations. Would not change things on the ground.
Q: What do you say to our friends.
A: We confront a campaign against the resistance. This is a World War against us and the resistance.
The above is just from my shortened notes. I will link to transcript as soon as one is available.
UPDATE: The official English transcript posted by the Syrian news agency SANA: Interview Given by President al-Assad to Lebanese Al-Manar TV . I have not read it yet (and have no time to do so now) and therefor have not yet corrected any of my impressions posted above.
Posted by b on May 30, 2013 at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (99)
May 29, 2013
Syria: The Deadbeat Opposition And A Russian Checkmate The Syrian exile opposition is becoming irrelevant. It has been destroyed due to the rivalities between Saudi Arabia and Qatar and is now denounced by all other parts of the Syrian opposition. The U.S. has thereby lost one of its key political instruments to drive the Syrian government out. It now has no one to present as negotiating partner opposed to the Syrian government side in the planned Geneva II conference.
Hassan Hassan writes from Istanbul about the failed "western" attempt, with Saudi support, to make the exile opposition more relevant and to dislodge the Muslim Brotherhood from the leading role in the Syrian National Coalition: The Syrian political opposition, in its current form, is a hopeless case. ... One member of the coalition told me Mr Al Sabbagh has been pushed by Doha to block any changes to "give the impression that the new sponsors of the Syrian dossier have failed". By new sponsors, he meant Saudi Arabia, which has assumed responsibilities of sponsoring the Syrian opposition, pushing Qatar aside. ... It is time for Syrians to realise that the political opposition is an important factor behind the stalemate. The Syrians have realized that. Michael Kilo (a secular Marxist(!)) the U.S./Saudis alliance wanted to push into a leadership role is rather scathing : "The real, real, real problem is in the Coalition," Kilo told Saudi-owned broadcaster Al-Arabiya, after some dissidents accused Riyadh of imposing his entry into the warring country's main opposition group. ... Though still in Istanbul, it was unclear early Wednesday whether Kilo would stay on in the Coalition. ... The opposition has long been marred by internal divisions and bickering, giving rise to doubts over its ability to present a united front with the proposed peace talks ahead. The Local Coordination Committee as well as some other opposition groups inside Syria join the criticism and demand a place at the table for themselves: The revolutionary forces that have signed this statement will no longer bestow legitimacy upon any political body that subverts the revolution or fails to take into account the sacrifices of the Syrian people or adequately represent them.
We consider this statement to be a final warning to the SC, for the Syrian people have spoken. Edward Dark (a nom de guerre) was one of the original organizers of opposition demonstrations in Aleppo. He witnessed the destruction the armed insurgents waged in his city and has given up on his hopes: To us, a rebel fighting against tyranny doesn't commit the same sort of crimes as the regime he's supposed to be fighting against. He doesn't loot the homes, businesses and communities of the people he's supposed to be fighting for. Yet, as the weeks went by in Aleppo, it became increasingly clear that this was exactly what was happening.
Rebels would systematically loot the neighborhoods they entered. They had very little regard for the lives and property of the people, and would even kidnap for ransom and execute anyone they pleased with little recourse to any form of judicial process. They would deliberately vandalize and destroy ancient and historical landmarks and icons of the city. They would strip factories and industrial zones bare, even down to the electrical wiring, hauling their loot of expensive industrial machinery and infrastructure off across the border to Turkey to be sold at a fraction of its price. Shopping malls were emptied, warehouses, too. They stole the grain in storage silos, creating a crisis and a sharp rise in staple food costs. They would incessantly shell residential civilian neighborhoods under regime control with mortars, rocket fire and car bombs, causing death and injury to countless innocent people, their snipers routinely killing in cold blood unsuspecting passersby. As a consequence, tens of thousands became destitute and homeless in this once bustling, thriving and rich commercial metropolis.
But why was this so? Why were they doing it? It became apparent soon enough, that it was simply a case of us versus them. They were the underprivileged rural class who took up arms and stormed the city, and they were out for revenge against the perceived injustices of years past. Their motivation wasn't like ours, it was not to seek freedom, democracy or justice for the entire nation, it was simply unbridled hatred and vengeance for themselves. ... Whatever is left of Syria at the end will be carved out between the wolves and vultures that fought over its bleeding and dying corpse, leaving us, the Syrian people to pick up the shattered pieces of our nation and our futures. The original "democratic protesters" like Edward Dark have had enough. They never understood that the role their original sponsor had planned for them was only to be a diversion for the all out armed assault on the Syrian state. They have been abused. They wanted freedom but received anarchy. They will now rather support the Syrian government than support any further strife.
The military leader whom the U.S. supports but who has little control over any units on the ground demands that the war be widened: "What we want from the U.S. government is to take the decision to support the Syrian revolution with weapons and ammunition, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons," Idris said. "Of course we want a no-fly zone and we ask for strategic strikes against Hezbollah both inside Lebanon and inside Syria. I doubt that any of Idris' sponsors will support an escalation into Lebanon. But some in the "west" are still dreaming of implementing an illegal "no-fly zone" over Syria. They do not believe the Russian commitment to prevent such by sending S-300 air defense systems to Syria: "Does Russia have S-300 batteries ready to go?" said Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain. "I'm not sure that it does. Is it going to send engineers to integrate it with existing [air defence] architecture? Will they send trainers for the one to two years it takes to train people to use it? This seems more like an exercise in political signalling to me, saying: 'Hands off Syria.'" This is misreading the Russian plans. I suggested that Russia could move its own fighter planes to Syria to protect the Syrian air-space. This though suggests that Russia will instead move its own S-300 air-defense mssiles: Four regiments of S-300 air defense systems have been deployed at the Ashuluk firing range in southern Russia as part of another snap combat readiness check of the Russian armed forces, the Defense Ministry said.
The regiments were airlifted on Thursday by military transport planes to designated drop zones where they will carry out a variety of missions simulating the defense of the Russian airspace from massive attacks by "enemy" missiles and aircraft.
"The missions will be carried out in conditions of heavy electronic warfare to test the capabilities of the air defense units to the highest limit," the ministry said. The "western" air-forces do know the older export versions of the S-300 that Russia sold to Greece and the ones the U.S. bought from Croatia. They know how to defeat those. But the systems the Russians use themselves have had several upgrades in their radars, electronic systems and have new missiles. If Russia moves those, as it is now training to do, any "no-fly zone" attempt is likely to start with lots of downed "western" jets and a high casualty count. It would be a checkmate move.
The U.S. has no "Syrian opposition" to support in Geneva. The exiles are totally discredited. The unarmed opposition in Syria has given up. The armed opposition in Syria is collection of disunited thieves and takfiris. Russia has the checkmate chance of deploying its S-300PM2 and may well use it.
What is the U.S. to do now? Escalate further and risk an ever widening war throughout the Middle East with heavy Russian involvement? Or will it get off its high horse and agree to Russia's demand to actively stop any additional Libyan weapon supply through Turkey and any other support for the violence in Syria? Are there other alternatives?
Posted by b on May 29, 2013 at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (137)
WaPo Claims "Liberal Hawks" Are Quiet While Describing The Opposite The Washington Post claims: Liberal hawks were vocal on involvement in Iraq but have been quiet on Syria [A]mid the burst in outside engagement, one influential group seems noticeably silent. The liberal hawks, a cast of prominent left-leaning intellectuals, played high-profile roles in advocating for American military intervention on foreign soil ... [E]ven as the body count edges toward 100,000 in Syria and reports of apparent chemical-weapons use by Assad, liberal advocates for interceding have been rare, spooked perhaps by the traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clear reluctance of a Democratic president to get mired in the Middle East. Call them Syria's mourning doves. The piece than names eight "liberal hawks" who argue for intervention in Syria (Vali Nasr, Bill Keller, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Paul Berman, Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer) and two "liberal hawks" who argue against it (Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria).
How can the central thesis of the piece be true when the author finds four times as many pro-war as anti-war "liberal hawks"?
Fact is that the "liberal hawks", like their fellow neoconservatives, have been quite noisy arguing for intervention in Syria. Fact is also that the U.S. has intervened from the very beginning of the "revolution" and continued to do so by providing thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition, foodstuff as well as other secret support to the insurgents. It is also managing, not successful though, the exile opposition.
What then is the purpose of a page 1 piece in the Washington Post pushing the obviously false claim that "liberal hawks" are quiet?
Posted by b on May 29, 2013 at 02:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)
May 27, 2013
Unsophisticated Reporting so*phis*ti*cat*ed
Adjective (of a person or their thoughts, reactions, and understanding)
"Aware of and able to interpret complex issues; subtle." -----
According to a writer at the Washington Post the level of sophistication of an election campaign in Iran is measured by its numbers of English language spokespersons: With fluent English speakers on staff available to address media requests, Rouhani's campaign team is also more sophisticated than those of his competitors. That sentence (and the whole report) is stupid on various levels.
1. English is taught as mandatory second language in all pubic and many private schools in Iran. About everyone who finishes at highschool level in Iran will have had at least 5 years of English language education. All candidates for the presidential election will have capable English speakers on their staff.
2. Any election campaign's aim is to maximize the number of voters that will choose it. One probably could measure a campaigns sophistication by its ability to get the votes. To use the existence of English capable spokesperson in a Farsi speaking country as a measurement of sophistication is just nuts. While Americans might like to believe otherwise fact is that English language capabilities in non-English speaking countries have zero effect on a local candidates capability to attract the local vote.
3. By writing that sentence the author shows his own lack of sophistication. Reporting from Tehran on elections while emphasizing English campaign spokesperson seems to be a confession that the reporters capabilities in understanding Farsi are less than those spokespersons' English capabilities. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in anything else that author may write.
Posted by b on May 27, 2013 at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (61)
May 26, 2013
Syria: Hizbullah Joins The Fight Hassan Nasrallah announcement to use Hizbullah's full power on the side of the Syrian government brings a new quality to the fight. Hizbullah has a record of successful military operations against the most powerful and brutal enemies. When Nasrallah promises victory, as he yesterday did, the odds are that he will deliver. In his speech he justified Hizbullah's intervention by the danger the "western" supported takfiris pose to the resistance against Israel.
That Nasrallah defined the insurgents as takfiris is important. A takfiri is one who declares everyone who does not strictly follow his version of believe an unbeliever that should be punished and killed. As one of the Jabhat al-Nusra guys asserted in an interview: There is a difference between the basic kuffar [infidels] and those who converted from Islam. If the latter, we must punish them. Alawites are included. Even Sunnis who want democracy are kuffar as are all Shia. It's not about who is loyal and who isn't to the regime; it's about their religion. Sharia says there can be no punishment of the innocent and there must be punishment of the bad; that's what we follow. By defining the enemy solely as takfiris Nasrallah can justify his call to arms as a non-sectarian fight. Not every Sunni will buy it but many likely will. Following that announcement attacks were and will be mounted against Hizbullah in Lebanon but those will be more of a nuisance than a real danger.
The fight in Qasayr is ongoing. The Syrian military had some successes but the urban combat proves again to be a hard slog. Several of the opposition leaders have urged insurgents from other areas to join the fight in Qasayr. That was a mistake. Few of the reinforcements seem to have reached their target but were caught in the Syrian army cordon around Qasayr. Many of them (video) were killed. For some weeks now the Syrian Observatory's casualty count shows that about double as many insurgents are getting killed than troops on the government side. Some of the insurgents are killed in unnecessary conflicts with Kurds or other groups, some of them by missile fire and many in street combat. I doubt that the killing of 11 Chechen in Syria will lead to more Chechen joining the fight. The takfiris are training kids (video) but those will have little chance against Hizbullah's or the Syrian army's seasoned troops. At a certain point the general insurgency will die down for lack of manpower. When the Syrian government regains full control of the country a terrorist element will likely continue to exist. But it will no longer be an existential danger to the Syrian state.
Senator McCain claimed that the U.S. will create a no fly zone should, as is likely, the Geneva talks fail. I doubt this very much. It is just one of the scare points brought up by the U.S. to increase pressure on the Syrian government. Other such points are Jordan's request for Patriot missiles deployment and the announcement of a large scale multinational maneuver in Jordan.
Under international pressure to join the Geneva talks the exile opposition is in Istanbul again trying to unite but, like in every one of these events before, this attempt is likely to fail. The Muslim Brotherhood, supported by Turkey and Qatar, is unwilling to give up its (somewhat hidden) majority, does not stick to its earlier commitments and inserts new demands: When [Al Sabbagh] was asked in front of the foreign ambassadors: "What is your priority? Especially that we are facing the challenges of Geneva 2. These demands will lead to the failure of the plan or even the fracture of the coalition which might consequently lead to Bashar Al Assad staying in power". He answered with this (literally): "My conditions are more important and urgent". These are the people the U.S. wants to install in Syria? Do these exiles look like they would gain control of the takfiris? No and no.
The U.S may soon recognize that its Syria project has come to a dead end. There is no viable replacement for the Syrian government and the takfiris are a serious danger . If the U.S. were sure about a positive outcome should the insurgency win it would certainly do more to help them. Instead it presses European countries to deliver weapons to them. If one, like Nasrallah, is convinced of ones case, one will use all ones own might to win and not ask proxies for help. That the U.S. is doing such is telling
Posted by b on May 26, 2013 at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (91)
Open Thread 2013-10 News & views ...
Posted by b on May 25, 2013 at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (62)
May 24, 2013
Obama: Expect More Drone Strikes Only one of the following headlines is mostly correct. Guess which one.
As usual McClatchy comes nearest to the truth. Here is the White House "Factsheet" on the "new" policies: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities (pdf).
One can easily fly dozens of drones through the obvious holes in those "new" rules. I for one can think of no past drone strike Obama ordered that would not be allowed under these "new" policies.
By now everyone should know that when Obama says "A" the people will hear their preferred "B" while what Obama will be doing is "C". "A" is great rhetoric, "B" is vague content and the wish to believe while "C" will be a bad policy. Why do most media still fall for this?
Posted by b on May 24, 2013 at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)
May 23, 2013
The Difference? A 75-year-old man stabbed to death yards from his home may have been targeted in a racially motivated attack, according to police.
Mohammed Saleem, who used a walking stick, was stabbed three times in the back as he returned home from prayers at his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, on Monday night.
The blows were struck with such violence they penetrated to the front of his body.
The father of seven also had no defensive wounds in what has been described as a swift, vicious and cowardly attack by the man leading the murder investigation, Detective Superintendent Mark Payne of West Midlands police. Birmingham murder may have been racially motivated , say police - 2 May 2013
--- Dramatic footage has emerged of the suspected terrorist attack near the London barracks that left one man dead, showing a suspect with blood-covered hands using jihadist rhetoric to justify the violence.
On Wednesday night the prime minister, David Cameron, vowed that Britain will "never buckle" in the face of terrorist incidents, and condemned the "absolutely sickening" killing in Woolwich. Man killed in deadly terror attack in London street - 22 May 2013
Posted by b on May 23, 2013 at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)
May 22, 2013
Syria: The Messed Up Neighborhood The recent bombing that killed 51 in the Turkish town Reyhanli received only scant coverage in the local media. While the Turkish president Erdogan accused the Syrian government of committing the crime he did not want the facts to be out in the public. But he is not the only one to have power in Turkey.
The Turkish hacker collective RedHack liberated several documents from the Turkish gendarmerie intelligence. The documents mention that Turkish intelligence had since April 25 information that the Jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria was preparing three car bombs for attacks in Turkey. If these documents are as genuine as they look the Turkish press will hardly ignore them and Erdogan will have to do some explaining.
The Reyhanli cover up and this leak point to a growing spat between the Erdogan followers and the followers of his former allies in the Gulen movement: Beyond such arguments that there might be a cover-up in the establishment, there are even bigger mysteries. For instance, nobody explained yet why a corpse was tied to one of the car bombs with copper wires, even though this photo was in almost all newspapers in Turkey including Hurriyet, Milliyet, Sabah and Aksam just after the bombing.
In the end, fifty people died, Turkish society is even more divided and many people don't have any trust for the official investigation. The only indisputable outcome of this process is how the crime scene became another arena in the silent fight between the Gulenist-dominated police force and the Erdoganist-dominated national intelligence service (MIT). The other countries in Syria's a neighborhood also experience related interior trouble. In Lebanon the issue has turned bloody and the northern city of Tripoli has seen several days of now heavy fighting including mortar barrages: Around 4:30 a.m., a 300-strong force of Salafist fighters from the mainly Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh neighborhood, which backs the uprising in Syria, tried to launch an offensive against gunmen loyal to President Bashar Assad in the opposite area of Jabal Mohsen.
They were repelled by Lebanese soldiers, who opened fire with heavy machine guns.
The complicate relationships between various religious trends in Lebanon is well describe with this report of clashes over where a Sunni turned Shia and Hizbullah fighter who died in fighting in Qusayr should be buried.
Iraq has seen many serious bombings in recent weeks against various sides and against different population groups. These seem to be calculated to induce a new sectarian war. Reidar Visser finds that Iraq can pull back from the brink and avoid another civil war. The leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Massoud Barzani closed the border with Syria after the PYD which rules in the Kurdish parts of Syria detained some people belonging to his Kurdistan Democratic Party. In Israel a commentator warns prime minister Netanyahoo of reckless behavior especially toward the Russians. He mentions that in one of Israel's wars some planes on the other side where actually flown by Russian pilots. The writer, as I did earlier , seems to think that a further Russian intervention on the Syrian government side is possible. Should the Syrian government fall the military situation for Israel would be even more complicate .
For the Jordan king Abdullah the political problems over nearly half a million Syrian refugees are getting bigger. Jordan now closed its border for any new refugees coming from Syria. But traffic in the other direction still seem to flow : A good summary of the rebels' conditions for Geneva came in a telephone interview Monday with Gen. Salim Idriss, the commander of the rebels' Supreme Military Council. He spoke from Jordan, where his forces had just received a new shipment of 35 tons of weapons from Saudi Arabia ; Idriss said these weapons will help, but they aren't advanced enough to combat Assad's tanks and planes in Qusair.
Idriss said he would not attend the Geneva talks unless the United States and its allies establish "military balance" by giving him modern anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. "It's not valuable to go to negotiations when we are weak on the ground," he said. ... Rebel forces are chronically short of ammunition, Idriss said. According to one rebel source, he has privately asked the United States for 700 tons of ammunition each week over the next month to help strengthen the rebels' hand and provide leverage before Geneva. King Abdullah is openly arguing for negotiations over Syria. He fears that a victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria would cost him his throne. But one wonders how that fits with weapon deliveries through Jordan's borders. When he recently was in Washington his escorts leaked what might be future U.S. plans. [S]ources from the king's escorts in Washington confirmed to Al-Monitor that the Americans informed him that attempts at a peaceful political solution will not last beyond the end of this year. If these efforts were to fail, Jordanian diplomatic sources told Al-Monitor that they expect the Americans will resort to powerful military intervention in Syria, either with extensive logistical support for the armed opposition or what has been dubbed the "Serbia scenario," in which air strikes would weaken Assad and lead to a final shift in the balance of the forces. Having again messed up the whole neighborhood the colonial "friends of Syria", now shrunk down to a mere 11 countries, are today meeting in Jordan. This is the first time that no one from their sponsored exile Syrian opposition is attending such a meeting. Those SNC folks will meet tomorrow in Istanbul to quibble again and to receive the new orders of their colonial masters. The SNC still demands that Assad must go before they can agree to any serious negotiations. As this does not fit the current "western" plan for negotiations the group, already in terminal crisis , will fall even further apart.
I do expect that today's meeting in Jordan will here some arguing for more weapons to flow to the foreign supported insurgency in Syria during the time the sham Geneva negotiations take place. Even the German intelligence service, after predicting Assad would soon fall, now believes that the Syrian government is likely to win. Without more supplies the insurgents will continue to lose their hold on the Syrian countrysides and with each town that falls back to the government the "western" parts of the Geneva negotiations will lose leverage. But the problem of who should receive those weapons is still not solved. Even " suck on this " Thomas Friedman is now warning against arming the insurgency without further deeper thought.
Meanwhile the fighting in Syria continues. The insurgents have send some convoys from Aleppo and Homs to reinforce their colleagues in Qusayr. They threaten to wipe out Shia and Alawite towns should Qusayr fall to the government. The town is now the propaganda Schwerpunkt for both sides.
Posted by b on May 22, 2013 at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (84)
May 21, 2013
Syria: Obama Expresses Concern About Some Foreign Fighters Lebanese youth from the city of Saida, south of Beirut, began Wednesday signing up for armed Jihad in Syria, responding to a call yesterday by firebrand Sunni cleric Ahmad Assir.
Individuals in charge of enlisting Jihadists at Bilal Bin Rabah mosque told Al Arabiya that "hundreds" have signed up so far and that the number is expected to reach thousands . Lebanese Sunni youth sign up for holy war
... Following a circuitous route from Saudi Arabia up through Turkey or Jordan and then crossing a lawless border, hundreds of young Saudis are secretly making their way into Syria to join groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, GlobalPost has learned. With Official Wink And Nod, Young Saudis Join Syria's Rebels
... Veteran fighters of last year's civil war in Libya have come to the front-line in Syria, helping to train and organise rebels under conditions far more dire than those in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan-Irish fighter has told Reuters. EXCLUSIVE-Libyan fighters join Syrian revolt against Assad
... Tunisia 's government says that some 800 of its citizens are fighting alongside Islamist rebels in Syria, although some estimates put the figure much higher . Syria conflict: Why did my Tunisian son join the rebels?
... Fighters from across the globe have joined the war against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including hundreds of Egyptians who have completed their engagement in their own revolution and turned toward the "holy war" in Syria. Egyptian Fighters Join 'Lesser Jihad' in Syria
... Dozens of Kuwaitis are fighting with the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) after crossing from Turkey, Al-Qabas newspaper reported yesterday, citing the fighters' relatives. Fighters from Kuwait joining Syrian rebels
... A U.S. Army veteran says he has joined an offshoot of al Qaeda after spending several months fighting alongside Syrian rebel forces. U.S. Army veteran joins al Qaeda-linked group after months of fighting with rebel forces in Syria
... The EU's anti-terrorist chief Gilles de Kerchove estimates that around 500 Europeans are now fighting with rebel forces in Syria against Bashar al-Assad's regime. Syria crisis: EU says 500 Europeans have joined fight
... More than 20 Lebanese extremists were killed Saturday in an ambush by the Syrian army in the Syrian town of Tal Kalakh. ... It further mentioned that "the number of Lebanese who were killed in Syria during the fighting along with the armed opposition exceeded two hundred . However, no media fuss was raised around them, because they were killed individually or in small numbers." Joining Syria Rebels, 20 Lebanese Killed in Tal Kalakh So many foreign fighters have joined the Syrian insurgency that one wonders if their is role left for any indigenous Syrian insurgent. We have yet to see any comment from the White House or the State Department that warns against these foreign fighters joining the conflict in Syria.
But now, as a handful of additional foreign fighters join the Syrian government side, the Obama administration is deeply concerned : "President Obama stressed his concern about Hezbollah's active and growing role in Syria, fighting on behalf of the Assad regime, which is counter to the Lebanese government's policies," said a White House statement. ... Earlier, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell condemned "Hezbollah's direct intervention and assault on Qusayr where its fighters are playing a significant role in the regime's offensive."
"Hezbollah's occupation of villages along the Lebanese-Syrian border and its support for the regime and pro-Assad militias exacerbate and inflame regional sectarian tensions and perpetuate the regime's campaign of terror." And those thousands of foreign Jihadis do what?
Posted by b on May 21, 2013 at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (56)
Syria: Journalists Are Misreading The Map
The New York Times : Mr. Assad could probably take Qusayr, a crucial area because it lies near the border and links Damascus with the rebel-held north and the government-held coast .
The Wall Street Journal : The bloody battle over the city of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, has the potential to transform Syria's conflict, say fighters, diplomats and analysts. A government victory there could give the regime of President Bashar al-Assad a corridor of territory connecting Damascus to Syria's pro-Assad coastline and to Lebanese territory controlled by Iran-backed Hezbollah. The Globe & Mail : The small city, about 100 miles northwest of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is crucial to supply routes for both sides. Qusair is a conduit for rebel supplies and fighters from Lebanon, and it links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland for Mr. al-Assad's minority Alawite sect . A map of south-west Syria shows Damascus at the bottom, Homs in the upper right and Tartus at the cost in the upper-left. The marker "A" points to the city of Qusayr. It lies across road number 4 which runs from the north-east to the south-west connecting Homs with Baalbek in Lebanon.
Notice that there is no road through Qusayr running from the south-east to north-west. There is not even a minor connection from Damascus to Tartus that runs through the town. If you were planning a trip from Damascus to Tartus would you consider passing through Qusayr? Unless you would want to walk you likely would not do so. Why then are journalists asserting that the Syrian government would do so? Qusayr does not "links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast" unless you want to walk the direct line through the fields. Its sole military value is its position across the insurgency's supply line from Lebanon to Homs. The insurgents know that very well: "To lose Qusair would be a disaster; we will lose the whole city of Homs," said Fadi al-Issa, a fighter with the opposition Farouq Brigade But why are the above quoted news sources falsely insisting that Qusayr is a link between Damascus and Tartus?
These journalist try to insert an official "western" narrative of an Alawite regime ruling over a majority Sunni land. The sole purpose to connect the fighting in Qasayr to some route between Damascus and the Syrian coast is to introduce and narrate the supposedly sectarian fighting. This despite the facts that the Syrian government includes many Sunnis, that the Syrian army troops are mainly Sunnis and the inhabitants of the big harbor cities in the alleged "Alawite heartland" at the coast are also mainly Sunni. The whole idea of some "Alawite state" at the Syrian coast is therefor pretty stupid but the media keep inserting that over and over.
The fighting in Syria is not about Sunnis versus Alawite. The fighting is rather between those who favor to live in a secular republic versus those who want a Sunni Islamic regime in one form or another.
Misreading the map and thereby inserting a sectarian view of the conflict is contrary to the facts and serious journalistic malpractice.
Posted by b on May 21, 2013 at 04:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)
May 20, 2013
Syria: Disunited Insurgents Lose Qusayr The Syrian army seems to be successful in capturing Qusayr. It has thereby opened the transport routebetween Damascus and Lebanon while denying it as a resupply line for the insurgents in Homs governate. Within Qusayr an old armored Israeli Jeep (video) that had been used by the insurgents was found. There must be an interesting story behind this find.
There was a lot of twittering today between pro-insurgency folks about this or that insurgent group that had allegedly sold out or skipped away from the battle in Qusayr. The hundreds of insurgency "brigades" are disunited. The do not have the same motives and aims and therefor lack cooperation. That is one of the reasons why they get beaten back : Abu Akram, a rebel commander in the city of Maaret al-Numan from the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham brigades who was part of an operations team planning the battle, was a little clearer about the disputes: "The main reason was the lack of supplies, and we started blaming each other and saying 'so-and-so has more than me, you pledged to work, why aren't you?' until it reached the point that Ahrar al-Sham wouldn't work with the Martyrs of Syria [brigade], and the Martyrs of Syria wouldn't work except with so-and-so. So we had to end the battle, and plan for a new one." While the insurgency continues to retreat, Russia's maneuvering is successful in deterring any chance of outright "western" intervention. Israel remains the wild card. Should Netanyahoo miscalculate and order another Israeli air raid on Syria the local conflict in Syria will escalated into a much greater confrontation .
Posted by b on May 20, 2013 at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (45)
May 19, 2013
Doug Saunders Is Wrong On Iran
Doug Saunders writes for the Globe & Mail. His book Arrival City takes a somewhat contrarian view of the migration into city and is pretty good. I found it therefore pretty disgusting to read his recent totally conventional and uniformed missive on Iran: The Iranian threat isn't nuclear - it's political
The openeing graphs: During the eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, Iran has become an increasingly dangerous place. That danger, however, is not posed by nuclear weapons - which remain an uncertain and, at worst, long-term threat - but more urgently from Iran's own self-imposed collapse.
Far worse than Mr. Ahmadinejad's comic-book sabre-rattling at Israel and the West, worse than his increasingly ineffective support of extremists and demagogues, has been his effect on his own country. A decade ago, Iran was a hopeful place, moving away from the excesses of its theocratic revolution and into the outer edges of normalcy and co-operative relations with the world. The Ahmadinejad era reversed that, plunging the country into self-isolation, poverty, mismanagement and paranoia. Where to begin?
Was it Ahmedinejad that made Iran internationally more isolated than a decade ago? Iran had cooperated with the United States to kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan and to install the Karzai government. The U.S. not-so-grateful response was to name Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil and soon to introduce sanctions and more sanctions. That happened on January 29 2002. Ahmedinejad came to office only in August 2005.
Is it really then, as Saunders says, Ahmedinejad who reversed co-operative relations with the world? Did Ahmedinejad impose sanctions on Iran?
The nonsense continues: Every Iranian feels the pain of the Ahmadinejad years. Inflation is out of control, with basic staple foods and vegetables unaffordable to many working families. The rial, Iran's currency, has plummeted in value. Unemployment is the norm, with little economic activity beyond the dysfunctional state - and army-controlled enterprises. Every sentence in the above paragraph is factually wrong. During the Ahmedinejad years the purchase power parity GPD of Iran has increased through every year. The subsidized gas and oil prices in Iran were best for those who used the most energy, the rich. When Ahmedinejad cut those subsidize and replaced them with direct payments the poor Iranians gained a lot despite an increase in inflation. That is why they would likely vote for anyone he will support : "A pro-Ahmadinejad candidate will have a good number of votes," said Abolfazl Zahei, a proreform activist. "There are 2,000 villages in South Khorasan province, and most people in those villages have benefited from Ahmadinejad's government. People care about making their ends meet and welfare, not politics. While inflation in Iran is high, staple prices are price controlled and have not increased that much. They are surly not unaffordable for working families. Yes, the rial has plummeted. As it should. Japan under prime minister Abe just willfully devalued the Yen and revived Japan's lagging export industry. A plunging Rial will have exactly the same result for Iran. Imports of luxury goods will be more expensive but many people will now find work in growing export businesses. While unemployment in Iran is likely higher that the official 8% . compared to say Spain it is rather benign. Private economic activity in Iran is not low and the economy is not army-controlled. Those companies in semi public hands are owned by various insurance like pension funds that have their own interests divergent from the army or the revolutionary guards.
One wonders how Doug Saunders could come up with so much nonsense. But he also seems to believe that former president Rafsanjani can win in the upcoming presidential election in Iran. Rafsanjani is a neoliberal ultra-rich cleric who was trounced by Ahmedinejad in the 2005 presidential election. He may get, like the "reformers" in 2005, the votes from the upper middle-class people in north Tehran. But as the 2005 election proved any election in Iran is decided by the votes of rural and poor masses. They will vote for the candidate that has the support of the rather social-democratic president Ahmedinejad.
Posted by b on May 19, 2013 at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (47)
May 18, 2013
Syria: The Turning International Tide There is a change in the global political position towards Syria. Here are three recent indicators. Via FLC we learn of a significant position change in Tunisia: Tunisia wants to reopen its embassy in Syria which has been closed for more than two years and has sent a request in this vein to the government in Damascus. Tunis is yet to receive a reply from Syria's foreign ministry and a diplomatic source said that the letter has been sent to the foreign ministry since "last week." ... Tunisia quickly closed its embassy when the uprising against the Assad regime began in 2011. It will become the first country to reopen its diplomatic office in Syria if its request receives a positive response from the foreign ministry. Tunisia is especially significant as it is part of the Arab League and its government is led by the Ennahda party which is ideological affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Tunisia is threatened by the Ansar al-Sharia Salafist movement, some of who's supporters are fighting on the Syrian insurgency side, and the Ennahda government recently moved against that group.
Another sign that the international wind is changing was last weeks United Nation General Assembly vote on a nonbinding Qatari resolution against Syria. The resolution itself had to be rewritten some six times and while it gained the vote of 107 states a similar resolution last year was favored by 130 states.
A third sign is the seemingly changing position in Israel where a political mood is turning towards keeping the Syrian president Bashar Assad in power: "Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there," one senior Israeli intelligence officer was quoted as saying.
A weakened, but intact Assad regime would be preferable for Syria and the Middle East, the Times reported intelligence sources as saying. That view will likely later be reflected in Washington where the "Assad must go" crowd has yet to weaken its position.
While the above three indicators point to a change in position the Israeli change adds what can be understood as a new demand: The situation that Assad survives, maintaining power in Damascus and in the corridors to the large coastal cities, would entail the breaking up of Syria into three separate states. The Zionist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy have propagandized for such a breakup for quite some time: [T]hree Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.
"It is not that Syria is melting down -- it has melted down," said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of "In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria."
"So much has changed between the different parties that I can't imagine it all going back into one piece," Mr. Tabler said. I do not believe that a split of Syria is going to happen. The Kurds in Syria may gain some additional cultural autonomy but they will not join any other state or create one of their own. The Jihadist insurgency will be beaten and most Sunnis in Syria, as well as the minority Alawite and Christians, will not want their state to split but want to rebuild it.
Israel does not have the power to break Syria into weak statelets and other states have no interest to do so. It would only invite more trouble.
In this recent interview Bashar Assad presents himself again as a self secure statesman. There is no way that man would let Syria get chopped up though he is still expecting some additional outright intervention: "[Intervention] is a clear probability, especially after we've managed to beat back armed groups in many areas of Syria. Then these countries sent Israel to do this to raise the morale of the terrorist groups. We expect that an intervention will occur at some point although it may be limited in nature." Any further intervention will only come after the Geneva conference fails as it will because the disunited Syrian opposition will not be able to guarantee that its side will adhere to any negotiated clause.
But that failure is still many weeks away and meanwhile the trend towards more international support of Syria and against the insurgency will gain speed. Without broad international support a U.S. or Israeli intervention is likely to fail.
Posted by b on May 18, 2013 at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (50)
May 17, 2013
Syria: News Roundup Back from traveling here are some links to recent developments around Syria.
There is some background on a video that shows a Saudi al-Nusra fighter executing 12 captured and bound men. There is also new information on al-Mesreb village where locals clashed with al-Nusra terrorists who killed villagers and burned down houses.
Two suicide bombers opened an all out attack on the central prison in Aleppo which houses some 4,000 prisoners. I interpret this attack as an attempt to free prisoners to urgently get more personal for the insurgency. The attack was repelled by prison guards with significant losses for the attackers.
There are more reports of civilians clashing with insurgents as well as of fighting between various insurgency groups.
The Syrian army is still preparing to liberate the city of Qusayr which is situated on one of the main supply routes for both the insurgency as well as for the army. Civilians fleeing the surrounded city report that about a thousand insurgents in the city are digging in but are low on ammunition.
Anonymous U.S. intelligence people claim that Russia delivered a new version of anti-ship missiles to Syria. There is no mentioning of when exactly that is supposed to have happened. Last month, last year or three years ago? It also not clear why that is supposed to be a change. Syria already has able coast defense forces that would make a supply of the insurgents via a sea route quite dangerous. Additionally, as U.S. media only now note , there is new permanent Russian navy force in the Mediterranean that could challenge any attempts of a coastal siege or even a no-fly zone. The "new weapons" story seems to be a plant (to "Iraqi WMD" reporter Michael Gordon) to allege recent Russian delivery of arms to Syria even if there is no proof for such. But the claim can be used to justify the delivery of U.S. weapons to the insurgents.
The exiled Syrian opposition is now demanding new arms as a condition for agreeing to peace talks. The seem to understand that the current losing state of the insurgency does not give them any leverage in negotiations.
For the third time insurgents have abducted UN observers in the Golan height zone and looted their observation post. The Syrian government claims to have an email that prove contacts between the Qatari government and the UN kidnappers in one of the earlier cases. Qatar is said to have invested about $3 billion to keep the insurgency in Syria going and to be disliked by every side.
"Western" pro-insurgents "experts" claim that Syria is breaking up into various parts. As the facts on the ground would not yet agree to that, this campaign suggest that such a breakup is the aim of the "expert's" sponsors.
Obama met with the Turkish sultan Erdogan. There seems to be no agreement between them on how to continue their onslaught on Syria. The only point they agree on is a meaningless "Assad has to go" which would then be a starting point for "something". Zionist lobby "experts" urge the U.S. to further intervene with a no fly zone to save Erdogan's endangered political position and U.S. "credibility". In the run up to World War I it was Germany's "credibility" towards a misbehaving ally that had to be saved. That did not end well.
Posted by b on May 17, 2013 at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (53)
Posted by b on May 15, 2013 at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (52)
May 13, 2013
Syria: The Casualty Count Time magazine has a piece about a video which shows a Syrian insurgency fighter cutting the heart and liver from a man and then eating it. I swear by God, we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog! Takbeer! Heroes of Baba 'Amr, [inaudible] cut out their hearts to eat them! The man has been seen in other videos. He is known as Abu Sakkar of Baba Amro, Homs, also known as Khaled Al Hamad. He was a senior commander of the "moderate" Al Farouq brigade. "Was" because he is now dead . And no, he did not die of food poisoning. The Farouq brigade is part of the Free Syrian Army which is supported by the United States.
The British intelligence operation known as Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has put up new numbers of the allegedly total killed in Syria (it is certainly not incidentally that these numbers are put out the day Cameron meets Obama): More than 80 thousand people killed since the beginning of the Syrian uprising
As of 11/5/2013, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the deaths of 70,257 people since the beginning of the Syrian revolt (in 18/3/2011), with the first martyr falling in Der'a that day.
The dead: 34,473 civilians, including: 4,788 children and 3,048 women. 2,368 unidentified persons (individually archived with pictures and video). 12,916 rebel fighters. 1,847 unidentified rebel fighters. 1,924 defectors. 16,729 regular soldiers.
The SOHR estimates that more than 12,000 pro-regime militia, Shabiha, and "informants" were killed by rebels. First notice the weird "civilian" numbers. If the Syrian government is "indiscriminate" in killing "its own civilians" why is it that nine times more men have died than women? Were these really "civilians"?
Second: By this count the total number of killed insurgents (rebel fighters + unidentified rebel fighters + defectors) is about equal the number of regular soldiers killed.
Third: How come the number of civilians, insurgents and regular soldiers are counted exactly while the 12,000 allegedly killed "Shabiah" are only estimated? What is the difference between a "civilian" and an "informer"? Or is this new addition to the estimate just a Cameron-sees-Obama bonus?
But as unreliable these numbers may be it is still interesting to look at changes within these numbers.
Looking at some of the daily data the SOHR is putting out we find that a significant trend change has taken place. While the total numbers of dead soldiers and insurgents listed by the SOHR in this conflict is nearly equal, the daily reports over the last weeks show that now more than double as many insurgents die as regular soldiers.
Yesterday : 35 civilians, 25 rebel fighters, 2 defected soldiers, a defected officer, 8 unidentified rebel fighters and at least 17 regular soldiers. Disregarding the "civilians" 36 fell on the insurgency side while 17 fell on the government side.
Friday (Saturday data is missing): 38 civilians, 36 rebel fighters, 1 defected captain, 2 defected soldiers, 8 unidentified rebel fighters and at least 18 regular soldiers. 47 insurgents versus 18 regular soldiers.
Thursday 27 civilians (including 12 children), 20 rebel fighters, 9 unidentified rebels, 18 regular soldiers, 5 defected soldiers. 34 insurgents versus 18 regular soldiers.
The trend of twice the casualties rate on the insurgency side than on the government side has been holding for some weeks now. As I noted earlier this changed ratio, as well as some other factors like their savage behavior, is likely diminishing the insurgency's personal capacity faster than it can attract and integrate new fighters.
Posted by b on May 13, 2013 at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (100)
May 11, 2013
WaPo Fudges Libyan Protests The Washington Post lauded the intervention in Libya. The demise of Gaddhafi threw the country into deep chaos. The Washington Post is now working to instigate a like intervention in Syria. To be able to do so it has to hide the chaos in Libya. Thus we get this news report : Growing concerns over protests roiling Libya prompted the State Department to begin evacuating some diplomats from Tripoli, as the Pentagon put troops stationed at nearby European bases on high alert. The U.S. is evacuating diplomats and alarming troops because of some protests? Aren't their protests in many countries all the times without such measures taken? What are these protests about? The protests that have spread in Libya over the past week stem largely from the passage of a law that bars from public office officials who served in key roles under the deposed Libyan regime of Moammar Gaddafi. ... The unrest worsened after the country's new legislature last weekend overwhelmingly passed the bill barring certain figures from serving in government. It could unseat officials who currently hold important jobs. That is all you will learn from the Washington Post news report. Some law was passed, with an overwhelming majority we are told, that threatens some bureaucrats with being fired. Someone is protesting about that.
Except, of course, that is NOT what happened.
For over a week some unidentified heavily armed gangs had set siege onto the Foreign Ministry in Libya. They also occupied the Justice Ministry: The armed protesters have said their main goal was to push the General National Congress to pass a proposed law that would ban Gadhafi-era officials from holding government posts. ... Last month, armed protesters besieged the General National Congress for several hours in an attempt to force its members to pass the political isolation law. Gunmen later opened fire on the vehicle of the parliament speaker, who escaped unharmed. There was more : It has emerged that militiamen tried to intimidate Prime Minister Ali Zeidan when he met and negotiated with them. He said today that they had brandished a grenade and a gun at him. He did not say when this happened.
"The rebels unlocked the grenade in front of me but no one was hurt because the grenade did not explode and it was taken quickly outside the Prime Ministry headquarters," he stated today at a press conference. There was shooting at the parliament, armed gangs seized ministries and put guns to the prime minister's head. This to push for the law that the Washington Post writes was "passed overwhelmingly". Wouldn't it be more correct to say that the law was passed by very frightened parliamentarians only under very heavy duress?
There is still more that the Washington Post will not let you know: Militiamen who have been besieging the Foreign Ministry this evening fled when hundreds of pro-democracy supporters arrived at the building to demonstrate their support for the government.
Around 200 demonstrators had marched from Algeria Square along the Corniche to the Ministry but were quickly joined by others along the way, overwhelming the couple of dozen or so militiamen who were still mounting their siege outside the Ministry buildings. These protests, much bigger than the armed gangs, are against the new law. They are also defenders of democracy: Earlier in Algeria Square, around 400 anti-militia protesters brought traffic to a halt. Placards read: "With our blood we will defence the legitimacy of the government", "No to bringing down the government with arms" and "Get rid of the guns in your hands and start building Libya".
"I don't like Zeidan", said a protestor, "but he was appointed by a democratically-elected Congresss. "We must support him".
Does the Washington Post believe that these protests that pushed out the militants led to the diplomatic and military high alarm? That does not sound reasonable but from reading the WaPo piece is the only item one is led to believe. Or has the threatening diplomatic atmosphere to do with this issue: The crowd roared anti-militia chants interspersed with takbeers ("Allahu Akbar") and occasional barbs at Qatar.
"We don't want to be ruled by Mozah and Hamid," they shouted - a reference to the Emir of Qatar, Hamid bin Khalifa Al-Thani and his wife, Sheikha Mozah, who was brought up in Libya. Qatar is accused by many of interfering in Libya by funding Salafists and other Islamists. Is this attitude of the protesters or are the heavily armed gangs the reason for diplomats fleeing and military alerts? Whatever. The Washington Post will not let you know. It fudges the issue. Throwing Syria into chaos is too important to let people have second thoughts about the chaos following similar interventions .
Posted by b on May 11, 2013 at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
The Reyhanli Explosions As I wrote yesterday: But don't bet on a turn around yet. I expect some nefarious things are being cooked up right now. There are lots of talks of "massacres" without any evidence that such happen. We may soon see one with "evidence" and then should be careful when attributing that to the responsible side. Now here is a "massacre" as tweeted by the BBC's Jon Williams: Reports up to 25 dead after explosions in Turkish town of #Reyhanli on #Syria border. Transit point for rebels going in, refugees coming out. Here is a first gruesome video of the incident. Looks like a big one went off. Some gunfire can be heard in the background.
We can expect the Turkish prime minister to accuse the Syrian government over this incident and to demand at least retaliation if not outright war.
But we do not know yet how those explosions happened. There is talk of Scud missile but that seems unlikely. As I said we have to very careful with attributions.
This tweet by the Turkish journalist Mahir Zeynalov may help with assessing the incident: Two explosions outside Reyhanli municipality and post office, many wounded. This place is predominantly populated by pro-Assad Alawites.
Update: The Turkish interior minister claims a "car bomb" exploded. At least 4 dead and 18 wounded.
Update: Up to 4 carbombs, 18 dead, 22+ injuried. Some harsh words towards Erdogan from people interviewed on Turkish TV.
Update: In this video one can see the damage of the first explosion and then hear/see a second (smaller?) one aimed at first responders. Typical "double tap"?
Update: 40+ dead, 100+ wounded 30+ seriously No direct blame on Syria yet from the Turkish government but this could get serious: Turkey sends military reinforcements to Syrian border after blast The Turkish military dispatched additional troops to the Syrian border after car bombs killed at least 40 people in the Reyhanli district of Hatay on Saturday.
The Cihan news agency said the military began deploying huge number of air and ground military reinforcements to Reyhanli on the Syrian border after the blasts.
Update: Why is this guy looking so satisfied?
Posted by b on May 11, 2013 at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (110)
May 10, 2013
Syria: Short Roundup As I am busy so here are just some recommendations to read on Syria.
America's hidden agenda in Syria's war "The US intelligence officer said, 'We can train 30 of your fighters a month, and we want you to fight Al Nusra'," the rebel commander recalled.
Opposition forces should be uniting against Mr Al Assad's more powerful and better-equipped army, not waging war among themselves, the rebel commander replied. The response from a senior US intelligence officer was blunt.
"I'm not going to lie to you. We'd prefer you fight Al Nusra now, and then fight Assad's army. You should kill these Nusra people. We'll do it if you don't," the rebel leader quoted the officer as saying. Syria's protracted conflict shows no sign of abating Firstly, the FSA - that you have been hearing so much about - does not exist.
A better title would be MWG, or men with guns, because having guns and firing them in the same direction is the only thing that unites them. Wise man Zbig: Syria: Intervention Will Only Make it Worse The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict--no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth--would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario. The Syrian army continues its successful offensive. The insurgents seem to be losing on all active fronts. There seem to be lots of problems with their logistics. The arms flow has somewhat turned into a trickle. Following the U.S., France and Britain have agreed to the Geneva terms.
But don't bet on a turn around yet. I expect some nefarious things are being cooked up right now. There are lots of talks of "massacres" without any evidence that such happen. We may soon see one with "evidence" and then should be careful when attributing that to the responsible side.
Posted by b on May 10, 2013 at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (37)
May 09, 2013
Open Thread 2013-08 News & views ...
Posted by b on May 9, 2013 at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (88)
May 08, 2013
Syria: Al-Nusra With "Chemical Weapons" Sourced From Turkey One of the three alleged "chemical weapon" attacks in Syria was done by chlorine on a checkpoint of the Syrian army. Fifteen soldiers died.
Two other attacks which Israel, Britain and France alleged were done by the Syrian army were somewhat mysterious. With collaboration of two bloggers and a photographer the incidents are now likely to be interpreted very different than Israel, Britain and France alleged.
Eliot Higgins, who blogs as Brown Moses, analyzed pictures of ammunition debris found at the two alleged attack sites.
The photographer Jeffry Ruigendijk photographed a salafist Al-Nusra fighter carrying a riot control gas canister that looks very similar to the ammunition debris found at the attacked places.
Small arms expert N.R. Jenzen-Jones identified the producer of these canisters and the likely way they found their way into Al-Nusra hands: [T]he munitions do appear quite similar to those produced by the Indian Border Security Force's Tear Smoke Unit (TSU), at their plant in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Several of their production items appear to share physical similarities with the unidentified grenade, but the closest visual match is their 'Tear Smoke Chilli Grenade', seen below. This grenade contains a combination of CS gas ( 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) and 'synthetic chilli' (likely a synthetic capsaicin, such as nonivamide) - both common riot control agents. Riot control agents like tear gas or pepper spray can be deadly when, for example, used in closed rooms. The symptoms vary (pdf) but there are usually respiratory problems just as those described by the people who were under the alleged "chemical weapons" attack.
So how did the Al-Nusra fighters get their hands on a Indian Border Security Force's Tear Smoke Unit grenade? This Indian news article notes that Turkey purchased 10,025 munitions from TSU in 2007, which may indicate a possible avenue of supply, particularly if the grenades were in the hands of rebel forces, as the image at top appears to indicate. The "chemical weapon" attacks were not done by the Syrian army. They were done by so called "rebels" with chlorine and with riot control agents by jihadist insurgencies who sourced the chlorine gas by stealing it from a Syrian factory and somehow obtained riot control agents from official Turkish state stocks.
The Israeli, the British and the French government tried to instigate a wider war on Syria by making false allegations about "chemical weapon" attacks by the Syrian army. The U.S. nearly joined them in their allegations. Will all those op-ed writers that tried to use the "fact" of chemical weapon usage now call for all out war on Al-Nusra?
Don't bet on it.
Posted by b on May 8, 2013 at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)
Syria: The U.S. Has No Leverage Secretary of State Kerry's talk with Putin and Lavrov yesterday brought back the Geneva consensus from last June which then Secretary of State Clinton had thrown out of the window immediately after she had agreed to it.
According to the Geneva plan the United States and Russia will convene a conference with the aim to find some consensual new Syrian government with each side promising to bring its supported party to the table.
For Russia that will be easy to do. The Syrian government has always agreed to such talks and is willing to send a delegation that will be able to discuss the various issues and to compromise.
But the United States now has a huge problem. It itself has little leverage over the various parts of the Syrian opposition. How can it then deliver on the promises it made?
There are two identified groups the U.S. is interacting with. The Syrian National Coalition (or whatever its latest name is) and the Free Syrian Army through General Idriss. To these groups the U.S. can give money or withhold money. It can give arms or withhold arms.
Giving arms would intensify the conflict and the created the bigger problems that come with escalated fighting. Those problems can not be kept contained in Syria and there are good reasons for the U.S. to avoid such an escalation. Withholding arms does obviously not give leverage over the fighters on the ground. It condemns them to lose.
Giving money or non-military goods to the FSA does not help either. General Idriss himself admits that despite a recent $123 million the U.S. funneled through him he still has no leverage over any forces on the ground: The defected Syrian general whom the United States has tapped as its conduit for aid to the rebels has acknowledged in an interview with McClatchy that his movement is badly fragmented and lacks the military skill needed to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
Gen. Salim Idriss, who leads what's known as the Supreme Military Command, also admitted that he faces difficulty in creating a chain of command in Syria's highly localized rebellion .. ... [Idriss] acknowledged that he has little influence over what the rebels do in Syria and no direct authority over some of the largest factions, including the Farouq Brigade, whose forces control key parts of the countryside from Homs to the Turkish border. The U.S. can give or withhold money to the SNC but what is the SNC's leverage on the ground and who, except the Muslim Brotherhood, does it really represent? And if the U.S. withholds money from them will Qatar and other source do the same?
The view of the Syrian opposition on renewed Geneva terms has so far been negative . Without any leverage to change that view the U.S. will not be able to deliver on what Kerry promised in Moscow.
When the U.S. instigated the "Syrian revolution" it had planned for a short conflict and a fast fall of the Syrian government. When that did not happen it escalated by delivering communications equipment, intelligence and weapons to the insurgency and trained some of the insurgency forces.
It can now escalate again by throwing itself deeper into the fight but the risk is enormous. Countries next to Syria would likely be seriously effected and in the end the U.S. would be the one to hold the Syrian tar baby at great cost and with a severe loss of international standing.
The Obama administration has probably found that the Geneva consensus may be its only way out. But as that way will likely be blocked by a Syrian opposition over which the U.S. has little leverage the only other alternative may be a total retreat.
That still has not registered with the Obama administration.
Posted by b on May 8, 2013 at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)
May 07, 2013
Syria: A Possible Russian Move There is a currently flurry of diplomacy with regards to Syria. The Iranian Foreign Minister Salehi just visited Jordan. Salehi will next fly to Damascus. Next week the Qatari foreign minister will visit Tehran. U.S. Secretary of State Kerry just talked with the Turkish Foreign Minister Dovatoglu. Kerry is now in Moscow for a talk with the Russian president Putin (The talk starts at least three hours late. Was Putin making a point with this?) Putin recently talked on the phone with the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahoo. On May 10 the British Prime Minister Cameron will also have a talk with Putin in the southern Russian resort Sochi.
The U.S. still demands that Moscow gives up on Syria and presses for Assad to leave. Moscow will, I believe, not agree to that.
In this diplomatic context Sunday's Israeli airstrikes near Damascus were a message to Putin, certainly coordinated with Washington. "Look what we will do if you don't give in. Next time we will bomb the Syrian air fields. Then their troops." At the same time the flurry of unfounded "chemical weapon" allegations are used to prepare the "western" public for a military intervention.
The big question is of course what Obama will do after Kerry and Cameron fail to change Putin's stand. There is a risk that Obama will decide to overthrow Assad by overt military means. He committed himself to that when he demanded that "Assad must go." It will be hard, if not impossible for him, to retreat from that. Military means would include a "no-fly zone" which would start to be implemented by destroying whatever is left of Syria's air defenses. Naturally with lots of collateral casualties.
Putin should plan on how to counter that. He should send a signal that can only be understood as "Up to here and no further." He should announce it on May 9, the 68th anniversary of Russia's victory over Nazi Germany.
On request of the Syrian government a squadron of 24 Russian fighter jets could be dispatched to Syria. They would be stationed at two Syrian airports. At each airport a battalion of Russian paratroopers would take care of the local security. Some long range early warning radar and some command and control elements would also be needed.
Supplies would come through Iranian and Iraqi airspace as well as though the port of Tartus where Russia's new permanent Mediterranean fleet is just arriving.
The declared sole and exclusive task of the Russian squadron would be to defend sovereign Syria's airspace from any outer interference. The message to Washington (and Tel Aviv) would be clear. Attacking Syria means attacking the Russian air force. Might you want to think twice about that?
Such a Russian move would be a heavens gift for Obama. He could back down from his demand that Assad has to go without losing much face. He could join everyone else in Washington in blaming Putin while appearing reasonable in not risking a wider war.
There is precedence for such a Russian move: A contingent of 200 Russian troops deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina then crossed into Kosovo and occupied Pristina International Airport in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo.
Upon hearing of the deployment, American NATO commander Wesley Clark called NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, and was told "you have to transfer authority" in the area. Clark then ordered a contingent of 500 British and French paratroopers to seize the airport by force, an order that is still debated. British officer James Blunt, who commanded the contingent, questioned and did not carry out this order. His delay was sanctioned by British General Mike Jackson. Jackson refused to enforce Clark's orders, reportedly telling him "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you". The U.S. and NATO eventually backed down because they did not want to risk a wider war.
A Russian air force capability in Syria would up the risk for any outright attack to a very high level. Even if Obama believes that his "credibility" demands a regime change no-fly zone in Syria, Russian air defense of Syrian airspace would likely make him change his mind.
Posted by b on May 7, 2013 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (105)
May 06, 2013
Syria: The Feckless Left
by Malooga lifted from a comment
One must not forget the disgraceful petition put out by what calls itself the "Left" in the name of "dignity and freedom" last week, the so-called "Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution". The geo-political analysis of the screed would not pass the muster of a child, and the empty verbiage comes straight out of a George W. Bush or Barak Obama speech -- without exaggeration. In any event, don't mislead yourself into thinking the timing was accidental in the face of the collapse of the mercenary Takfiri front. Because it wasn't. When the empire finds its back against wall, it will not hesitate in pulling out all stops -- even if it means trotting out a brigade of tired old leftists in its dirty service.
And if ever there was evidence that the entire moribund left intellectual class is bought and sold, this is surely it. One should carefully examine the list of names and publicly excoriate them for their now public complicity in international war crimes and the use of chemical weaponry. Tariq Ali, Norman Finkelstein!, Richard Seymour (author of "The Liberal Defence of Murder," "tracing the descent of liberal supporters of war..."), Anthony Arnove (Howard Zinn's boy), Fredric Jameson, Vijay Prasad, Ilan Pappe, Stephen R. Shalom, Alice Walker and so on down the line, over 220 Benedict Arnolds in all. Laudable behavior in the past is no excuse for lying while supporting Takfiri murderers in the present. May every single one of them know what it is like to be exposed to DU -- in the name of freedom and democracy, of course!
According to these house puppets, "The revolution in Syria (sic) is ... also an extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation", and every other emotional struggle for justice that these betrayers can throw against the wall and hope it sticks, while, like a virus, they live off the suffering of others, with their pompous pontificating and venal obfuscating, as their salaries and position are paid for by the big boys.
I am sorry that do to personal problems I am not at present able to take the time to deconstruct the empty verbiage of that embarrassing petition line by line as I have done with others in the past (The Euston Manifesto). This document's vacuous invocation of democracy, freedom and the Geneva Convention, its selective one-sided claims bereft of any factual evidence whatsoever , its twisting of truth on its head and its transparent Orwellism against "Asad's regime" should be a deep and enduring embarrassment for any signatory of the document.
In ostensibly "hop(ing) for a free, unified, and independent Syria," (Didn't that exist, albeit with blemishes, as all power structures exhibit, until a few years ago? The same hope was evinced for Iraq after the nation was first destroyed, but why should a few well trained house lackeys quibble over cause and effect?) while "confront(ing) a world upside down" consisting of "Russia, China, and Iran," (the bad guys) and in throwing in their lot and supporting "the US and their Gulf allies" (the good guys -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar for hummus sake!) these ahistorical ignoramuses not only have the blood of innocent Syrians on their heads, but that of the multi-million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Libyans, Afghanis, Yemeni, Sudanese and many other nations killed, injured, displaced and dispossessed by the time honored imperial strategy of divide et impera , divide and conquer. Apparently, those who refuse to study the bloody history of the West's destabilization campaigns are consigned (perhaps enlisted?) to support them.
As the election of Barak Obama, supported by similar empty-headed intellectual idealists, has proved, "Hope," in the absence of an honest and rigorous economic and power analysis, a realistic and workable political strategy of opposition, and the building of a viable alternative power structure, is even more destructive than surly apathy. These intellectuals' piteous petition evinces none of the above minimal requirements for successful activism -- except, of course, for Hope, the Orwellian trope of our decade. Their elitist Hope , is misplaced from the get go, of course -- for there is no attempt in the petition to address or assay the hopes and desires of the majority of the Syrian people. Instead, it is all about their precious hope. When your car careens off the road, you momentarily "hope" you won't be killed, although you know it is too late for hope; Intellectual study, attainment and popular acclaim is supposed to provide more effective tools than hope. In this case, like petition signing, apparently.
It simply beggars belief that the Left -- which claims to pride itself on solid structural analysis as opposed to groupcentric conspiracy theory -- betrays its utter ignorance of its purported forte (the former) while buying whole hog into the later, namely into the magical conspiracy theory that the removal of an individual, Assad, rather than the democratic restructuring of a power structure and national political economy, will in any way help solve the Syrians' problems. The undemocratic abdication of the duly elected "Bashar al-Asad," as called for by the petitioners, would clearly leave a prolonged bloody power vacuum, with every interested external and internal party vying in the darkest of ways for support, thereby inaugurating in a reign of terror even worse than at present and destroying the state. The recent bloody examples of Iraq and Libya should be obvious even to the purblind pusillanimous petitioners. One might think... An honest leftist, Stephen Gowans once described this type of thinking among the left as the "Rogue's Gallery" syndrome: the demonization of individual "monsters" like Saddam Hussein, Qaddaffi, Chavez, Castro. As the noted political thinker Noam Chomsky notoriously and repeatedly opined a decade ago, (paraphrased), "Iraqis, and the world, would be much better off without Saddam Hussein." So much for the vaunted structural analysis of the left. But who, especially the tenured left, has time for historical memory in an age of evanescent tweets?
To even imagine that one could throw one's hat in with the US, Zionist Israel, bought off and dying NATO, Saudi Arabian, and Qatari interests and end up with some type of leftist anti-globalist democracy movement complying with the will of the Syrian people is absolutely and utterly laughable. The destruction of Sirte and the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha, as well as the confessional partition of Iraq, come to mind as case examples of more likely consequences, especially for a multi-confessional state such as Syria. Do these people really have academic degrees; do they study history; are they in any way capable of critical thinking? They betray the rankest of historical ignorance, and to my mind, these moronic intellectuals demonstrate the far-sighted perspective of an ostrich with its head in the sand. It is truly a left gone mad.
***2
Of more serious import, is these morons' ignorance of, and complicity in, the process of shock doctrine globalization: How are nations dragooned into debt servitude, the Washington Consensus, by the bankers, the IMF, the WTO, while a few dozens walk away with billions? The destabilization of Iceland, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, a veritable rampage of county after country demonstrates that military means need not be necessary. Politicians are bought, laws are changed without fanfare or understanding by the masses, globalist media lies, populations are mislead, non-democratic agreements are passed, and fewer and fewer corporations run by an interlocking directorate of hundreds gets stronger and stronger. The commons is privatized, safety nets are cut, and unemployment, a form of soft genocide, is abetted. Everything is privatized and centralized into non-accountable, non-democratic global corporatist hands. The entire world has become just one big "externality" for the globalized military to handle. For holdouts, stronger means are necessary: Markets, commodity prices, interest rates, etc. are manipulated by the market makers. Ethnic and confessional destabilization campaigns are funded and fomented. Anger is channeled through unaccountable foreign NGOs, globalist funded faux-democracy movements, neo-liberal and powerless placeholders for the big boys all, but with catchy brands and great graphics, led by cult-like charismatic leaders whose radiant clothes cover their programmatic nakedness: This charade is what the aforementioned signatories, without a trace of awareness or irony refer to in their petition as "civic society," a faux society of profession technicians who manage the now crumbling societies "unrealistic expectations" and resistance. George Soros would be proud!
Peaceful protests against the hapless leader who initially attempted to placate the Globalist neo-liberal order by privatizing the commanding heights of the economy, by providing rent-a-torture services to the empire, are organized by the same globalist powers who forced or bribed the nation's venal leaders into neo-liberal contortions in the first place. It is never enough for the ghouls. Once the International order has their eyes on your country, you're damned if you attempt to comply and damned if you attempt to resist. False flag attacks destabilize, and then the hired hands come in -- in Syria's case, the Takfiris. Apparently, these esteemed intellectuals, so concerned with democracy and dignity, have never read John Perkins, Naomi Klein, or the blog LandDestroyer, among others. The entire process is, as Hannah Arendt might say, banally ordinary. And the feckless left happily signs on to the banality.
Iraq, Libya, Indonesia, Panama, the Philippines, and a dozen other countries. The feckless left should have a grip on the storyline, or what they like to call "the narrative" by now. But no, like the Keystone Cops, they fall for it every time.
And yet, despite the violence and destabilization that is taking down the world, one nation at a time, in a mad, mad race to the bottom -- might one think that this is cause to organize and petition for the feckless structural left. Nay, they say! All problems will be solved once Assad goes, declares the feckless structural, magical thinking left! Get on the bus, sign the magical petition, and go Further!
***3
In 1940, the astrophysicist George Gamow published "The Birth And Death Of The Sun." In it, he described the evolutionary tracks of stars. Stars differ by mass, and composition, and thereby final fate, but their evolutionary sequences, their life paths, could now be reliably predicted, he stated. Without an intelligent, informed, organized global resistance, we are now in the same place with nations within the global world order or more accurately, world system. If they resist, they can be a Haiti, a Honduras, a Yugoslavia, an Iraq, a Libya, a Syria, perhaps even a Soviet Union. Depending on their "mass," the composition of their industries, their constituent ethnicities and religions, and the strength of their resistance to Globalism, their fate can be reliably predicted.
Its nice to talk about dignity and democracy and freedom as the wealthy petition signers do. But the reality is that there is none of that without jobs and economic security for all. And the neo-liberalism of centrally controlled Globalism that is rapidly being rolled out around the world is all about destroying that for everyone (including the petition signatories), in the name of "workplace flexibility." Corporations have freedom and dignity and democracy within globalized trade organizations, not people, these days. That is to say, they now have the legal standing and rights which people once had, no matter how much the petition's signatories may wish or bleat otherwise. To blame Assad for this globalized transfer -- theft, really -- of rights is naive and misplaced, and to expect a seriously destabilized society to provide what their own relatively more stable societies cannot is both illogical and deeply patronizing of the Syrian people.
At the present juncture, the only force strong enough to resist this shock doctrine globalism-at-gunpoint crisis methodology is economic nationalism. Sure, nationalism is a drag, outmoded, and overly narrow in perspective. Many historical complaints can be legitimately set against it. In the long run, it is not the way to go for the planet or its inhabitants. But right now it is the only force strong enough to stand up to neo-liberal globalism. At the moment, as that wicked witch Maggie famously said, "There is no alternative." A movement of a few naive students have not been able to stand up to globalism, and neither have 1 million people occupying a nation's central square. Effective resistance to this global process -- an intentional run-down to the lowest common denominator of wealth, health, security, etc., and a run-up to the highest common denominator of pollution and ecological destruction, all in favor of corporate rights owned by a few people and enforced at the end of a gun -- without an effective global strategy and sustained global support, is merely wishful thinking, i.e., hope. Yet, we are are nowhere near that point of resistance yet, and with the aid of these moribund intellectuals, fecklessly yet sanctimoniously targeting one "monster" at a time, we may never get there. In my humble opinion, economic nationalism must be seen as a stepping stone away from centralized unaccountable globalism towards a more decentralized, economically just world. If I should be mistaken, I welcome any viable alternative strategies. Perhaps the feckless left will invite me to sign their petition!
These great vaunted intellectuals have not come up with an education program of resistance to globalism for their own countries, or one for Syria. Neither have they come up with a game-plan, a strategy for resistance. They lead no great movements of resistance in their own countries. they speak not to the masses, but to other intellectuals, a privileged 10%, if that. Like ostriches all, they deny and ignore the problem. Worse, they misdiagnose it: The problem is Assad (Hussein, Qaddaffi, Aristede, Chavez wasn't good enough) -- whatever -- it is an individual problem, not a systemic and global one. He, (whomever) is a bad leader; he made concessions to the globalists; he made deals with his national elite, whatever. In the end, for these utopians, Castro was not good enough for them, and neither was Chavez. They are all "problematic." In a world with virtually no left, the existing left, such as it is, warts and all, is not worth supporting when one can idealistically envision a Platonic left. Go figure. This is a solipsistic, deeply nihilistic politics of self-absorption. And because they see the problem to be an individual one, rather than a systemic one, they call for individual solutions to the wrong problem -- which clearly will never work. But perhaps that's what these moral geniuses are paid to do: Provide unworkable solutions to fictitious problems. To monkeywrench the resistance. And to do so in a non-holistic manner. Ad hoc -- sort of like Bush v. Gore. Remove the monsters one by one and stand up in feckless disbelief when they are each replaced in turn with worse monsters and worse bloodshed. "Don't blame me, I stood up to the monster," they bleat in astonished sheep-like unison. The feckless left. The non-structural, magical left. What can one expect of a group who supported Obama, because he was marketed as "Hope?"
***4
In examining the behavior of the feckless left, it might help to focus in on one specific example -- in this case, Michael Alpert, not a signatory to this document, but an intellectual of much the same ilk -- and examine how his behavior during the Libyan intervention mirrors that of the feckless left now. Dr. Alpert, a former member of SDS, a co-founder of the well known leftist publisher, South End Press, with a doctorate in economics, is proprietor of the ZNET community, a well known group who generally consider themselves far-left political radicals in the Chomskian mold. There is a high representation of young intellectuals. ZNET has extensive source material, topical articles, blogs and discussion groups, like many other sites. In addition to this bread and butter work, Dr. Alpert fancies himself as a political theorist, particularly as the developer of an idealistic economic vision called participatory economics or parecon. I have spent a fair amount of time studying parecon, and related participatory structures, and, in my opinion, they have a lot to say for themselves in an ideal world.
With that type of background, top-notch intellectual credentials and a life spent in radical politics, along with a doctorate in economics, one might expect Dr. Alpert to understand the processes of globalization. And in theory, he might. But when the rubber hits the road, as it did in with Libya, where I tracked his site closely, he transforms into a card-carrying member of the feckless left.
In other words, he abandoned all pretense of structural analysis. Further, he abandoned any accurate historical discourse: The roots of Qaddafi's politics in nationalism, pan-africanism and socialism, his accomplishments in 42 years of guiding his nation, the war the west has fought against Libya without respite for over 30 years, how his family was bombed and killed, how Libya was falsely blamed for both the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing and the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, how Qaddaffi was finally worn down resisting and began a program of neo-liberal privatization in a country of vast wealth and resources.
At this point, as I described above, a leader is in a lose-lose position. If he neo-liberalizes he loses the support of his people, yet it will never be enough for the globalists. And if he doesn't, his nation is worn down by endless destabilization campaigns. Destabilization is almost assured at this point. This is the ubiquitous pattern which should be the basis for any thinking persons analysis of the political situation.
But not for Dr. Alpert, who came down with a bad case of "Rogue's Gallery" syndrome. Qaddafi, he declared, based upon unsubstantiated reports in western corporate media, was killing his own people. It was a close call, he stated, but like the blind umpire, he was assured of getting it wrong. We must support intervention. And what was most striking was that his language was almost exactly, to the word, the language the current petitioners employ: The empire is bad and it acts in "cynical self interest." But in this one case, that cynical self interest magically coincides with the needs of the innocent people to not be slaughtered. So, in this one case, we should support the empire in stopping the monster, but no more. We should not support the empire in intervening militarily.
All of which serves to derail any structural analysis of the left in favor of ad hoc limited complicity based upon a western created crisis designed to appeal to the emotions, and to disarm, or at least divide any leftist resistance, which, as usual, opens the door to western intervention, which magically, never foreseen by the feckless left, always causes more killing and destruction and destabilization, which to any sentient being was the point in the first place. Wash, rinse, repeat.
These are the processes of the feckless left: historically created problem not analyzed, emotional reaction, pre-engineered ad-hoc solution, short-circuiting rational analysis, which are repeated every time. But, to their credit, they always stand firm against the monster du jour.
Here is the Orwellian position of the current petition: "one where states that were allegedly friends of the Arabs such as Russia, China, and Iran have stood in support of the slaughter of people, while states that never supported democracy or independence, especially the US and their Gulf allies, have intervened in support of the revolutionaries. They have done so with clear cynical self interest. In fact, their intervention tried to crush and subvert the uprising, while selling illusions and deceptive lies.
Given that regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone, we ask you to lend your support to those Syrians still fighting for justice, dignity, and freedom, and who have withstood the deafening sounds of the battle, as well as rejected the illusions sold by the enemies of freedom."
Russia, China and Iran (the bad guys) support the slaughter of people. The US and their gulf allies (the good guys, whose very names are carefully omitted as they have no credibility whatsoever) support the revolutionaries (hurray!), but only after trying to crush -- not support -- them. Got it? But the good guys don't really support the revolutionaries enough because "regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone" an Orwellian lie on par with one of Hitler's big lies. And the bad guys are responsible for "the illusions sold by the enemies of freedom," a line which apparently fell out of a Reagan speech from 1981.
We are never told exactly how supporting leftist revolutionaries falls within the cynical self interests of the empire, but by then no one is capable of critical thinking anyway.
It is simply impossible to follow this hollywood gobly gook and maintain a rational, historical, and structural analysis of events.
***5
In a sane world, the left would first provide us with honest analysis: Foreign countries are arming, training, infiltrating and paying for an armed mercenary force to destabilize Syria. Honest leftists would call for the cutting off of all support for this foreign destabilization before all else. Until all foreigners are removed from the destabilization scene, stopped from blowing up civilians, mosques and churches, businesses, the industrial infrastructure of the country, how can anyone, in their right mind, talk of dignity, freedom and democracy? What world do these signatories live in?
In a sane world, the left would stand against Israel and the US, attacking other nations unprovoked, dropping depleted uranium on defenseless people to cause injuries and defects for all of future history, perhaps. In this world, the feckless, magical thinking left, petition against Assad.
Finally, the word "revolution" has been bandied about as a propaganda word, preventing meaningful discourse and analysis of the political economic structure of the nation being analyzed. It has all the meaning of "swish!", "goal!", or "home run!" these days; it is fashionable. It has become a media term and stripped of a meaningful descriptive role. And the feckless left promotes this meaningless glamorization: The wanton destruction of a nation through age-old divide and conquer tactics has magically morphed into "the revolution in Syria." What is happening in Syria is as much a revolution as the self-serving, sanctimonious, feckless left is a force for good in the world, that is to say zilch.
***6
As far as the Angry Arab goes, the anger over events from his childhood might be real, but he has generally comes across as a petulant, overstuffed humus eater. He is not known for presenting any viable analysis of the process of globalization, and how it effects the Arab world, nor current day real geo-political possibilities of resistance in a very bleak era, although to his credit, he is excellent at the much easier task of pointing out ever-present political hypocrisy, commentary on long past events and actors, translations of beautiful poetry, and indulging in Utopian dreams. With his position and contacts, it is inconceivable that his stance could have been anything but willful ignorance over the mercenary, mendacious, and intentionally violent and destructive of life forces nature of the Takfiri "revolution." His public mea culpa, while laudable in theory, must be viewed as a rear guard action to preserve any street cred he has left with his audience so that he may mislead them again in the future. If he is not a member of the feckless left, he is still a member of the unprogrammatic, magical left.
If you want to be looked at as a leader and teacher of human beings, a credible human rights advocate or a credible intellectual analyst, you must make the crucial calls correctly when it counts , not two years later. The Angry Arab, by his conscious actions, has condemned tens of thousands of Syrians of all confessions to the fate of his own people in Lebanon a generation ago - the crucible which supposedly formed his moral spine - and that is unforgivable. It is incumbent upon one to learn the lessons of one's own life. His, albeit small, responsibility will be on his head forever, and he will never escape the judgment of it by humane people the world over for the rest of his life. He will never be thought of seriously by any thinking person as a political force for good, a member of a programmatic resistance, and his blog will be considered a mere curiosity, querulous and quixotic, not deeply insightful or moral, more along the lines of titillating political entertainment, like Jon Stewart. There is a difference being "mistaken" and refusing to read the accounts and understand the processes (processes, as I make clear above, which have changed little in intent since time immemorial and which are repeated quite regularly the world over) which every reader of this humble blog has been aware of for well over a year. A very big difference.
***7
What can we do? It is incumbent upon us that the list of petitioner's names and the empty verbiage and puerile analysis should be deconstructed and spread far and wide to discredit these puppets. Their empty program should be exposed for the nihilism that it is and replaced with a viable program of education and resistance.
As has been well documented, for instance at Landdestroyer , geo-political plans are devised years, if not decades, into the future. What has been transpiring in Syria is no surprise to any serious student of geo-politics, and was planned and publicized long ago. The feckless left has no excuse for ignorance if they expect to be a geo-political force for good.
What, one may reasonably ask, is to be the role of intellectuals? (No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky gained renown addressing this question.) Intellectuals are presumably given a voice and widespread exposure and the following and trust of people as leaders so that they can tell the truth to us while confronting those in power. They should take the time and effort to unravel the tortuous and purposely opaque mechanisms of power and explain the process to us mere mortals in simple terms which we can understand. One might expect them to elucidate how the west and its ZATO and Arab puppets has, over several decades, created a world of artificial austerity without meaningful work for millions, a network of fundamentalist schools spitting out nihilistic fanatics devoid of humanism or critical thinking, a pipeline of illegal arms, armies of brainwashed mercenaries provided jobs and cult-like group identity, all focused on destroying nation states one by one -- Syria being the current focus of destabilization. One might expect them to line out this process to those of us who are burdened by simply getting by day-to-day and putting food on our table, a roof over our heads, taking care of our cratering health, so that we can understand and follow them. One might, at the very least, expect them to tell us what Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard) and Wesley Clark (The US will destabilize seven countries...), partisan political players both, have let on. That is the very least one might expect of a public intellectual, even if they are a member of the feckless left.
However, in these extremely bleak days it seems the so-called "opposition" is given voice, funding, positions of authority and following so that the global mafia can call in their chits when it really counts. They can lie to us and spin meaningless confections of freedom, dignity, and a democratic future for Syria. (What hopes for freedom, dignity, and a democratic future do the unemployed, the underemployed, the great mass of flexible labor have in their own countries these days?) They can lie to us and turn cause and effect on its head: "the regime has pushed for the militarization of the Syrian nonviolent movement", and by implication somehow now has responsibility for the completely unmentioned mercenary Takfiri opposition, as if a non-violent movement could be forced into violence -- sell that analysis to real leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, neither a showboat intellectual.
Real leaders, from Martin Luther King to Hugo Chavez to Gary Webb risked their life to reveal the truth instead of gallivanting with the Rolling Stones, or being feted by some astroturf group, or funded by some globalist foundation or tenured by some pseudo-intellectual organization (university) held afloat by government and corporate contracts in killingry and global domination. These chickenshit, pathetic signatories, as well as other well known "leftists" such as Amy Goodman, Juan Cole, Josh Landis, Michael Alpert, Stephen Zunes, and others, are case examples of weak, pathetic traitors to humanity worldwide. They have willfully traded honest systematic analysis for emotional string pulling -- only real lives (not theirs) are involved. Nobody forced these people to become public intellectuals; they could be greeters at Walmart nation, like the rest of us shmoos.
Those who consciously through their words and actions seek positions of power and privilege within the left are all well aware, as are all activists, union organizers, journalists, etc. of the danger this entails and the courage involved in being a real leader in a land of the deepest imperial and neoliberal reaction, while living in countries which make no pretense whatsoever these days of providing for even the most basic welfare of their own people when it stands in opposition to the needs of multi-national capital. Therefore, these house intellectuals, these whitewashers of extremism, murder and mayhem -- are as guilty as traitors, for when the chit from on high gets called in by those who supported their rise to prominence, they cravenly put their own safety and privilege over the quest for intellectual rigor, truth and justice and the trust put in them by people who only want justice and peace in the world.
Truth is hard-won in times of universal propaganda and deceit, and one must think for oneself, and not blindly follow leftist, or any other, gurus. Rather, one must ruthlessly tear down, expose and destroy the propagandists, the cloaked aiders and abettors of empire. Its the least we can do.
Posted by b on May 6, 2013 at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (118)
May 05, 2013
The Angry Arabs Will No Longer Fight Against Syria It took As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab , two years to come to his senses and to acknowledge his errors: This was never a "revolution". I among other leftists in Lebanon signed a petition early on after the events in Deraa in which we denounced the regime and mocked and dismissed its narrative of armed groups roaming the country and shooting at people. I now figure that I was dead wrong : I do believe that armed groups were pre-prepared and armed to strike when orders (from Israel and GCC countries) arrive. They had a mission and it had nothing to do with the cause of liberation of Syria from a tyrannical regime. It was quite obvious that the insurgency in Syria was preplanned and managed from professional outside forces. Why did it take so long to recognize that?
It seems that the Israeli air attacks yesterday were many and severe. They hit several Syrian army installations and units and are obvious outright acts of a war of aggression. The attacks Thursday or Friday on alleged "weapon transports to Hizbullah" were only a diversion to set a propaganda picture for today's air campaign. The U.S. will at least have known of this plan. It is likely that it helped to develop the target list.
A response will come, either through Lebanon or at sea, but not immediately. Five days ago Israel called up reservists for a surprise live fire training maneuver in the north. This supposedly to hold of an immediate retaliation for the long planned attack. But it can not keep reservist in the field for long. The economic impact is too big.
This air attack happened after the Syrian army's offense against the foreign sponsored insurgents showed some serious progress. Israel and the U.S. want to prolong the fighting. To achieve that they hit the Syrian army to "level the playing field". As even As'ad AbuKhalil finally acknowledges their aim is to destroy Syria. Not Bashar Assad, not the government but Syria the country. Their aim has not yet been achieved.
The Israeli attack and its now obvious cooperation with the so called Free Syrian Army will have a significant negative impact on the insurgency . In the early phase many Jihadist from other countries came to Syria because they believed in the propagandized cause of overthrowing an, in their view, un-islamic regime. That early flood has already changed to a trickle. It will now run dry. Likewise many Syrian patriots who had joined the insurgency will now change their mind. Defections from the army to the insurgency had already stopped. We will now see defectors from the insurgents who will be willing to (re-)join the army. They will have valuable intelligence.
In my estimate, gained from hundreds of videos and reports, the total number of insurgents has never been above 30,000. Early on casualties were compensated for by new recruitment. But the recent gains of the Syrian army already had me guessing that the number of insurgents was in decline. Either through defections, people being just tired of it and going home or due to weapon impacts. This process will now accelerate.
This hemorrhage of personal is something neither the U.S. nor Israel can compensate for without putting boots on the ground. Something neither wants to do. A dwindling number of insurgents and the drying up of their recruitment pools, while the Syrian army can still replenish its ranks (if needed from outside the country) makes it certain that the insurgency will lose. The larger formations that currently hold territory will diminish in strength and melt away into a underground terror campaign that will be more of a nuisance than a real national danger. The Angry Arabs now more and more understand what this war is really about. They will no longer fight against Syria. Israel's attack accelerated that process.
Posted by b on May 5, 2013 at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (101)
May 04, 2013
Under Pressure Insurgents Up "Massacre" Campaign The Syrian opposition is currently promoting a "massacre" that allegedly happened in the village Bayda near Banias at the Mediterranean coast. The Hariri/Sunni aligned Daily Start headlines it as Images of Sabra and Shatila in Banias where up to 3,500 Palestinians were killed by rightwing Phalange hordes under Israeli supervision.
The number of those killed in Bayda is dubious and even the propagandized numbers are much smaller than the Sbara and Shatila ones.. The insurgent supporters claim "50", "more than 100" and "hundreds" were killed. The exiting evidence does not support that: Amateur video showed the bodies of at least seven men and boys lying in pools of blood on the pavement in front of a house as women wept around them. Why does the video only show seven men when "hundreds" are supposed to have died?
There is also context missing in the English agencies reports. The German news agency DPA reported this : Activists said troops attacked al-Bayda after a bus carrying pro-regime militants, known as Shabiha, was attacked, killing at least seven and wounding more than 30. We know that the opposition calls any civilians that support the Syrian government "Shabiha".
The current evidence then is this. A bus full of presumably government supporters was attacked and seven were killed and 30 wounded. Government troops then raided a nearby village to find the perpetrators. Seven men were killed in that village, probably by the government troops.
The might have been an ugly revenge killing by the government troops or they might have fought and killed the perpetrators guilty of the earlier incident. But this was, at least according to the available evidence, not a "massacre" or a willful mass killing of women and children like in the Sabra and Shatila camps.
We can assume that there will be more propaganda "masscre" reports as part of yet another campaign to press the U.S. into an open war on Syria. The more the insurgency is under pressure and in retreat, the louder this and other campaigns will become.
Posted by b on May 4, 2013 at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (83)
U.S. Financed Independent Polls Are Not Independent Final Push Made Ahead of Tight Malaysia Vote KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Malaysian politicians are making a final push on the last day of campaigning as an independent survey showed Prime Minister Najib Razak's long-ruling coalition running neck and neck with the opposition alliance ahead of Sunday's general elections.
A survey released by polling house Merdeka Center predicted Najib's National Front coalition will win 85 Parliamentary seats, while a three-member opposition alliance led by former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim will take 89 seats. It says 46 seats are too close to call and that two seats will go to smaller parties. Such tight independent polls usually carry the smell of U.S. interference.
A tight independent poll will show the U.S. favorite candidate may win. When the election then goes against the U.S. favorite the tight independent poll will be used to claim election fraud and to instigate riots to then somehow wrestle the U.S. favorite into power.
We have seen this scheme in various color revolutions in eastern Europe, in Thailand and recently also in Venezuela.
Indeed a short search for "Merdeka Center NED" immediately brings up data that lets one doubt the independence of that polling outfit. It is the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy is financing the Merdeka Center poll: Merdeka Center for Opinion Research $60,000 To provide policy makers and civil society representatives with public opinion research that can be used to formulate policies and programs in Malaysia. The Merdeka Center for Opinion Research will conduct four public opinion surveys across peninsular Malaysia in an effort to gauge the Malaysian public's opinion on a variety of public policy issues. The NED is funding several other so called Non-Government Organizations to push for its policy objectives onto the Malaysian public. The openly admitted total of U.S. money to U.S. friendly NGO's is over $1 million. It is likely that is more money behind this.
Part of such fraud is do saw doubt about the integrity of the election commission as is already happening in Malaysia.
Malaysia will have to brace itself for some unruly weeks to come. It should, as soon as possible, push out such foreign financed political influence.
Posted by b on May 4, 2013 at 03:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
May 03, 2013
Groundhog Day Iraq The New York Times prints an OpEd, together with a specially made graphic, in which an Iraqi exile tries to compel the United States to "save Iraq" by forming a coalition of the willing to take down an Iraq strongman.
No, it is not 2002/3. Its 2013. And some people never learn. Why Maliki Must Go : Getting Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to cooperate with the United States on a new political bargain there, with Mr. Maliki out of the picture, won't be easy, but it's essential to save Iraq.
Posted by b on May 3, 2013 at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)
May 01, 2013
More Arms For Destroying Syria
As I wrote on September 30 2012 on the foreign supported insurgents in Syria:
Syria: Destruction Is Their Aim ... Destruction of the infrastructure, economy and social fabric of Syria is their and their supporters aim. Hizbullah's Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has come to the same conclusion (as translated by @Amani_Lebanon ): 10:56 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: When we look at the whole picture on Syria, israel's position, and the recent happenings, we come to come conclusion:
10:57 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: The aim is not just to get Syria out of the resistance axis, it's not just about the Arab struggle against israel
10:58 AM - 30 Apr 13- #Nasrallah: Their aim is to completely destroy Syria, all of Syria, their aim is to make sure Syria becomes unable to stand on its feet.
10:59 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: They want to destroy Syria as a people, an army, a whole nation
10:59 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: They want to turn Syria into a starved, destroyed and torn one. Today "officials" are telling U.S. papers that Obama is " moving toward sending lethal arms to Syrian rebels ".
This is just political theater. These papers are conveniently forgetting their own reporting on Syria. The destruction of Syria with the help of jihadist groups has been planned since 2007 . The U.S. has been sending arms to the insurgents from the very beginning. It has also run an extensive media campaign to support the insurgency. The U.S. exports grain and other food as "aid" to Syria which is then distributed by extreme radical al-Nusra cells . The first arms to Syria came from the black market, then from Libyan stockpiles, then arms were flown in from Croatia. All by or through U.S. secret services. The deliveries were made by the CIA from its large station in Benghazi, as well as through its stations in Turkey and Jordan. The groups those arms went to were vetted by the CIA and there is evidence that these weapons have also gone to takfiri jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusra. There is definitely no reluctance in official U.S. circles to arm anyone, no matter how radical there polices are, who is willing to destroy Syria.
In the end it does not matter whether the arms the CIA delivers are coming from Libyan, Croatian or U.S. stocks. It does not matter to which groups these arms are flowing to. More arms will only have one effect. The further destruction of Syria which the U.S. had planned for from the very beginning of its campaign.
Posted by b on May 1, 2013 at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (114) |
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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009, 7:01 am * By Lindsay Beyerstein
On paper, the worst recession in 70 years came to an end in the third quarter of 2009. On the streets, things are as bad as ever. Unemployment rose from 9.8% to 10.2% in October, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday.
The economy lost 190,000 jobs in last month. So, on the bright side we've "only" been losing an average of 188,000 jobs per month for the past three months, compared to an average of 357,000 jobs per month for the three months before that.
Wall Street sees progress: Stocks went up on Friday. Financial journalists said it was because everyone was so upbeat about only losing 190,000 jobs. But averages can be misleading. October's numbers still represent the biggest payroll drop in four months.
SEPTA workers on strike at the Frankford Transportation Center on November 3 in Philadelphia. (Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images) PHILADELPHIA, PA.--Trains, buses and trolleys are moving again here after transit workers ended a six-day strike late Sunday. Members of the Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 234 are expected to ratify an agreement in the coming week, ending a dispute that had centered on pension issues. The union demanded that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) pay more money into the underfunded pension, but as of Monday morning it was unclear what pension concessions the union succeeded in winning from management. Under the new contract, workers will increase their contribution to the pension fund to 3 percent of their salaries from the current two percent, and maximum pensions will be increased by $3,000, to $30,000 a year. The five-year contract also stipulates a 2.5-percent raise in the second year, and a 3-percent raise each year thereafter. Media coverage of the strike has been marked by hostility to strikers--and a scarcity of reliable information.
Monday, Nov 9, 2009, 9:29 am * By Art Levine
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House Democrats gather for a press conference after the House of Representatives passed the healthcare reform bill 220 to 215 late Saturday night. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Union leaders joined President Obama in hailing the historic, if narrow, passage of major health reform legislation in the House this weekend.
The bill "is a fiscally responsible bill that will cover 96 percent of Americans, end insurance company discrimination and denials of care and equip health care providers with the tools they need to lower costs for families and the country as a whole," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. "The bill...does not attempt to finance reform on the backs of the working middle class. .. But we still have a long way to go."
Indeed, as this blog and other observers point out, the real sticking point in the Senate probably won't be the public option or even the extreme anti-abortion language passed in the House, but the critical issue of how to pay for the legislation. Will it be by taxing the rich, as the House does, or burdening the middle-class with new taxes and costs? That's what union advocates and the Congerssional Joint Committee on Taxation say will happen as a result of the Senate's tax on insurers that offer high-cost plans.
ATLANTA, GA.--The Fort Hood shooting has once again focused national attention on the various and often violent ripple effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the "home front." Michelle Chen's Saturday pos t examined the severe economic challenges facing vets, including unemployment and foreclosure.
In Atlanta, where thousands of mental health professionals from around the world gathered for the annual International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies conference from Thursday to Saturday, a few days ahead of Veterans Day, the Fort Hood shooting became a possible example of the subject under discussion: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Could the Fort Hood shooter have suffered from PTSD given his work experience so far? Evidence and research discussed at the conference show how the triggering and manifestation of PTSD as an occupational hazard can be much more complicated than people might realize.
(Image courtesy IAVA)
The tragedy at Fort Hood may strike Americans as a singular, incomprehensible horror. But the shock of the killings may recenter Americans' perspectives on the quieter challenges that befall military men and women every day, even when they're stateside. Countless soldiers are returning from the battlefield to a world that seems alien to them, and a hostile economy often impedes their reintegration into civilian life . According to federal data, unemployment for post-9/11 era veterans in the past year has surged past of the national rate, to over 11 percent.
Despite the military's promises of upward mobility , unexpected hardships pushes many vets into a devastating downard spiral. For some, being back home doesn't mean having one . The Washington Post reports that, according to federal data, "Roughly 131,000 of the nation's 24 million veterans may be homeless on any given night, and about twice as many are homeless each year."
Friday, Nov 6, 2009, 12:59 pm * By Art Levine
Yesterday's rally of rabid "Tea Baggers" denounced health care reform with venomous attacks on President Obama, complete with a prominent sign of dead concentration camp victims likening the plan to Dachau , just the latest sign of a GOP surrendering to its fringe elements. At the same time, the GOP has offered a new so-called alternative health plan that cannot be taken seriously: it continues to allow insurers to deny those with pre-existing conditions and would likely offer insurance to only three million uninsured Americans, leaving 52 million uninsured.
If that's what Republicans are for, yesterday's rally showed just how much extremism is driving what they're against. As David Corn reported in Politics Daily :
The angry folks at the protest -- which attracted several thousand conservatives -- held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust . A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" -- a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.
Friday, Nov 6, 2009, 12:07 pm * By Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President
Taking candy from a baby: A consortium of Chinese and American companies goes to Washington and announces plans to build a $1.5 billion windmill farm in West Texas using $450 million in U.S. Stimulus funds, which will create 2,330 jobs - 2,000 of them in China.
The baby - Washington -- doesn't cry or whine or spit in the consortium's face. That's what's really wrong with this story.
So accustomed to being bought and sold, Washington simply begins processing forms so it can hand over your tax dollars to create jobs in a turbine factory in the city of Shenyang, China at a subsidy of $193,133 each.
It's like these bureaucrats live in Wonderland. Or an America where the unemployment rate isn't 10.2 percent. Or where 40,000 American manufacturing facilities didn't disappear in the past decade. Or where banks didn't repossess nearly a quarter million American homes in the past three months.
The recovery must be here. After all, what more proof is needed than the fact that Goldman Sachs is setting aside $ 16 billion for bonuses for 2009?
Of course, conditions are not quite so swell at the bottom of the economic pyramid, as unemployment moves past the dreaded 10% level and wage cuts spread throughout the workforce. "[P]ay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression ," reports Louis Uchitelle, author of The Disposable American.
Moreover, this trend follows directly after an extended period in which American workers' real wages stood at 18 percent less in 2007 than they were in 1973 . And foreclosures are at 10 times their daily rate during the Depression, according to Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage: Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals .
Democrats are not offering solid solutions to these huge, systemic problems, even as Wednesday's defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia indicate that Democrats need to get moving on jobs.
Breaking News Breaking Down , a film by journalist Mike Walter, explores how journalists are affected by reporting in danger zones like lower Manhattan on 9/11, pictured above. (Photo courtesy BreakingNewsBreakingDown.com ) John McCusker was living his dream as a photojournalist covering his beloved and colorful hometown of New Orleans. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which put McCusker in the dual role of victim and journalist, one of the relatively few journalists who understood the city better than the hordes of reporters who soon flocked in from around the world. He worked tirelessly throughout the storm, part of the team that later won the Pulitzer Prize for the New Orleans Times-Picayune . He lost his home, nearly all his belongings and his long-time neighbors, who scattered across the country. During the flooding and immediate aftermath he managed to keep the stress and trauma at bay enough to focus on his job, shooting photos seen around the world. But as the anniversary of Katrina approached, he couldn't hold it together any longer. Having struggled to access quality mental healthcare, one day he took two anti-anxiety pill...and woke up in the Orleans Parish prison in shackles.
Big news from last week largely overlooked by the mainstream media: The United Steelworkers will join forces with MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A., the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, to start worker-owned factories in Canada and the United States.
"We see today's agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada," USW International President Leo W. Gerard said. "We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities."
Under the historic agreement, signed October 27, USW and Mondragon will try to integrate collective bargaining with Mondragon's collective practices. The two sides have also pledged to explore new approaches to bargaining in order to encourage worker participation and labor/management cooperation. |
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump is falsely claiming that "bad legislation passed by the Democrats" has forced his administration to separate children from their families at the border, even though no such law exists.
TRUMP'S TWEET
Trump tweeted Tuesday: "Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can't get their act together! Started the Wall."
THE FACTS
No law mandates that parents must be separated from their children at the border, and it's not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress.
Children are probably being separated from the parents at the border at an accelerated rate because of a new "zero tolerance policy" being implemented by Trump's own administration. Announced April 6 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the policy directs authorities to prosecute all instances of illegal border crossings, even against people with few or no previous offenses.
Administration officials are quick to note that Sessions' policy makes no mention of separating families. That is correct. But under U.S. protocol, if parents are jailed, their children are separated from them because the children aren't charged with a crime.
So while separating families might not be official U.S. policy, it is a direct consequence of Sessions' zero-tolerance approach. (Worth noting too is that John Kelly, now Trump's chief of staff, spoke in 2017 about possibly separating parents from children as a way to dissuade parents from trying to cross the border.)
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 650 children were separated from parents at the border during a two-week period in May.
Jeff Crouere
The U.N. human rights office has called on the Trump administration to "immediately halt" the separations, saying "detention is never in the best interests of the child and always constitutes a child rights violation."
Trump might be referring to a 2008 law passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush, but that legislation is focused on children who illegally cross the border without a guardian, known as unaccompanied minors. That law calls for releasing children into the "least restrictive setting" -- often to family or a government-run shelter -- while their cases slowly wind through immigration court.
Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck |
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, sighting down the barrel of an AK-47 machine gun looking toward Afghanistan, in the Khyber Pass.
The recent film "War Machine," made by Brad Pitt and released by Netflix, centers around an egotistical general commanding U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Its message boils down to this one truth: If you invade someone's country, they're going to shoot at you and tell you to get out.
A whole generation has grown up since the U.S. CIA first began training and arming a covert opposition force in Afghanistan in 1979. The first regular U.S. armed forces were sent there in 2001. Since then, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan, allegedly to "help" a succession of Afghan governments that were put in place by the occupiers.
This war began under Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and has continued throughout the terms of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Now Donald Trump is considering an increase in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 50,000. (bloomberg.com, May 17)
It is the longest U.S. war ever. Why?
Today, it is supposedly a war against the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaida. But these groups are descended from the "warlords" that the CIA first turned into fighting units against a government led by the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which had taken power in 1978.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died last month at the ripe old age of 89, was the foremost architect of that vicious war as Carter's national security adviser. Once it became known that the CIA had created a covert army in Afghanistan, the story given out by the U.S. government was that it was helping the Afghan people resist a Soviet invasion. This became the rationale for an increasingly bloody and expensive war that eventually overthrew the progressive government of Afghanistan.
But Brzezinski himself later bragged that the CIA operation had begun six months before the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan. In fact, the Soviet intervention was not an "invasion." It had been requested by the Afghan government to defend it against the CIA's covert war.
Brzezinski bragged the truth
Brzezinski revealed the truth to the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998: "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."
Asked by the interviewer if he now regretted anything, Brzezinski replied, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" (Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 15-21, 1998)
The timing of the covert CIA operation had already been revealed by former CIA Director Robert M. Gates in his book "From the Shadows" (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Gates wrote: "The Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to the insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet, Marxist government of President Taraki at the beginning of 1979. On March 5, 1979, CIA sent several covert action options relating to Afghanistan to the SCC [Special Coordination Committee]." A meeting of the SCC "was finally held on July 3, 1979, and -- almost six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan -- Jimmy Carter signed the first finding to help the Mujahedin covertly."
Yet, despite these admissions by top government officials, the narrative in the U.S. media continues to be that the U.S. set up, armed and trained the "Mujahedin" to counter a Soviet "invasion." So that was just a cover story. What were the real reasons for the U.S. spending billions of dollars and destroying half the country in an effort to bring down the government of Afghanistan?
To answer that question, it helps to know a little about Afghanistan's history and how it had remained independent for more than a century, even as the European and U.S. imperialist powers seized much of Asia, Africa and Latin America as their colonies or neocolonies.
1839-1919: Three British invasions fail to conquer Afghanistan
Britain, which controlled neighboring India, invaded Afghanistan three times -- in 1839, 1879 and 1919 -- but could not keep a puppet colonial regime in power there. Each time, popular uprisings drove out the British troops. However, London did force the Afghan government to accept British influence over its foreign policy, and in 1893 the British drew up the Durand line. This supposedly temporary division became the border between Afghanistan and British India -- the part that today is Pakistan.
The last invasion, in 1919, provoked an uprising that overthrew the government of Habibollah, who had capitulated to the British. Inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution, the new regime of Amanollah then signed a treaty of friendship with the Bolshevik government, being one of the first countries to do so. From then until the 1970s, Afghanistan would not join any military alliance against the USSR.
1965: PDPA launched to end feudalism, gain women's rights
The Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan was formed in 1965. Its program was anti-feudal and included land reform, canceling the debts of the peasants and democratic rights for women, including an end to the dowry and establishing education and health care open to all women and men.
By the 1970s, the Afghan government of Mohammad Daoud was moving to the right in its domestic policy and toward NATO in its foreign policy. The vast and mountainous countryside was under the iron grip of feudal landlords. In Kabul and a few other cities, however, the PDPA had developed much support among students, especially young women, as well as low-paid civil servants and soldiers.
On April 26, 1978, even as the arch-imperialist and billionaire Nelson Rockefeller was on his way to visit Daoud in Kabul, the government launched an assault on the PDPA, arresting almost its entire leadership. This came right after a massive funeral for members of the PDPA who had been killed by Daoud's police. Clearly, Daoud meant to assure the U.S. that his regime could repress any opposition that might arise to its pivot toward imperialism.
Within a day, however, army units had mutinied and liberated the PDPA leaders from their prison cells. In one case, soldiers used a tank to break down the walls of the jail where PDPA leader Nur Mohammad Taraki was being held. Taraki went on to become head of what was known as the Saur Revolution.
1978: Revolution begins land reform, ends bride-price
The U.S. Department of Defense has published "Country Study" books about countries around the world. They contain useful information meant for U.S. government employees sent abroad and can be more truthful than the propaganda put out by other government bodies, because the people using these books need to know what conditions are really like in the countries they are being sent to.
The version of "Afghanistan -- A Country Study" that was published in 1986 contains startling admissions that go against the established government narrative about Afghanistan. For example, it says that "when the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both landownership inequalities and usury." The book added that the PDPA also canceled mortgage debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners. It set up extensive literacy programs, especially for women, and printed textbooks in many languages spoken in different parts of Afghanistan.
Said the Pentagon book, "The government trained many more teachers, built additional schools and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans." Among the very first decrees of the revolution were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice in marriage.
This should be kept in mind today, when the propaganda machine prettifying U.S. imperialism's long war of oppression in Afghanistan makes it seem that defending women's rights is among Washington's top priorities.
But in 1978, when Brzezinski and the Carter regime launched the war against the Afghan revolution, they knew it was a progressive regime trying to move this very underdeveloped country out of feudal oppression. That didn't stop them from arming and financing a counterrevolution.
Within a few years, the contras who had been armed, trained and financed by the CIA were assassinating idealistic young teachers, women and men, who had gone to the countryside to teach literacy to the people.
One of these contras was Osama bin Laden. Under the excuse that it was defending "freedom of religion," the U.S. undermined the secular government of the PDPA by creating an army that opposed the PDPA's progressive reforms in the name of fighting for an Islamic state.
At the same time, however, U.S. imperialism was trying to undermine the Islamic republic in Iran, which took power in 1979 after a huge revolution there against the Shah, a puppet who had been put in power by the U.S. and British oil companies. That revolution also encompassed many progressive, secular fighters, but the Islamic leaders had the strongest organization among the masses and proved capable of driving out the Shah and his grouping.
Religion is not the real issue
Clearly, the issue of religion is not what motivates the imperialists. Nor do they care about women's rights. They will use any excuse and make any temporary alliances as they try to reassert their economic domination of the region. What motivates them is their need to plunder the world, especially the areas rich in oil, for the benefit of the billionaire U.S. ruling class.
But when you invade a country, the people will shoot at you and tell you to get out.
That is what has happened in Afghanistan. Once the progressive forces were destroyed, there was a vacuum of leadership to resist the imperialists, who still occupy the country and hand pick its government officials. The armed resistance to this has, for now, coalesced around forces organized on a religious basis, some of whom espouse an extremely reactionary agenda. Nevertheless, they have won many recruits who are even willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to get the U.S. out.
No amount of escalating the supposed "war on terror" can erase this terrible situation. On the contrary. Every bomb dropped on villages in Afghanistan only intensifies the hatred of imperialism, no matter what form it takes. Every political attack on Muslims by Trump or his counterparts in Europe only deepens the anger of those who are oppressed.
In any kind of war, it is the ordinary people, whether soldiers or civilians, who bear the brunt of the suffering. It is the wealthy who have the means to protect themselves even as they profit from a victory.
The "war on terror" has taken its toll not only on the people of Afghanistan but also on people just walking the streets of major Western cities, who are made to pay for the crimes of the ruling classes. It has taken its toll on young soldiers who are told nothing about Afghanistan's history and who, if they survive deployment to that war zone, have to fight just for decent medical care back in the U.S.
This war is not in the headlines, even when the blowback from it is. It will go on forever -- unless the people stop it. U.S. out of Afghanistan! |
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, sighting down the barrel of an AK-47 machine gun looking toward Afghanistan |
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The Council of Canadians is Canada's largest citizens' organization, with members and chapters across the country. We work to protect Canadian independence by promoting progressive policies on fair trade, clean water, energy security, public health care, and other issues of social and economic concern to Canadians.
Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 24
Barlow speaks at 'Defend The Coast' protest outside environment minister's office Brent Patterson | Kamloops This Week reports, "Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, was among the speakers at a rally outside the Kamloops office of Environment Minister Terry Lake." Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 24
Barlow to speak at B.C. environment minister's office in Kamloops Brent Patterson | Hundreds are gathered outside of B.C. premier Christy Clark's constituency office. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 24
Jim Manly returns to Canada, greeted by Council of Canadians Brent Patterson | Council of Canadians organizing assistant Ailish Morgan went to the Toronto's Pearson International Airport to welcome Jim Manly after his release from custody after the Estelle was boarded Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 24
'System Change' grant to Hub City Cycles Community Co-op Brent Patterson | The Council of Canadians wants to support community-based 'system change' alternatives that challenge the fossil-fuel economy, climate change and so-called market-based 'solutions'. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 24
Unions and environmental groups denounce preliminary WTO ruling against Ontario renewable energy policy Stuart Trew | You might have seen news that the WTO will soon declare that the local content rules in Ontario's Green Energy Act are an illegal barrier to trade and investment. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 23
Federal NDP wants China investment treaty postponed and studied by Parliament Stuart Trew | Opposition continues to build against the Canada-China Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement (FIPA), which could become law as early as November 1. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 23
Water privatization, Internet restrictions a trans-Atlantic concern in Canada-EU trade talks Stuart Trew | The Trade Justice Network and Reseau quebecois sur l'integration continentale (RQIC) co-hosted a media teleconference on parts of the Canada-EU trade deal that have become controversial in Europe. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 19
We stand with the ACFN to stop pipelines at the source Maryam Adrangi | The Council of Canadians begins their six-city speaking tour about pipeline opposition by supporting the ACFN as they challenge Shell's tar sands mining expansion. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 16
Awkward! Federal stats confirm $2-billion extra for drugs under Canada-EU trade deal Stuart Trew | "Confidential federal research on free-trade talks with Europe shows that giving the European Union just one part of what it wants on drug patents would cost Canadians up to $2 billion a year." Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 4
Quebec trade activists land consultation on Canada-EU trade deal Stuart Trew | Quebec's offer to shed light on CETA negotiations, as modest as it might be, is an example other provinces should be required to follow. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog October 2
Council of Canadians urges premiers to insist on a national pharmacare plan Adrienne Silnicki | While we applaud the Council of the Federation for taking the first steps towards a national pharmacare plan, we are disappointed with the federal government's plan to continue rewarding big pharma. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 27
Fracking in South Africa: Replacing one problem with another Mary Galvin | Earthlife Africa and other groups organized South African protests on September 22 as part of "Global Frackdown- Ban Fracking" day in response to recent developments around fracking in South Africa. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 26
U.S. industry groups, labour, comment on Canada's entry to Trans-Pacific Partnership Stuart Trew | U.S. industry groups complained about Canada's supply management policies and intellectual property regime during a hearing on Canada's entry to Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 25
ACTION ALERT: Stop the tar sands at their source, Say NO to Shell Maryam Adrangi | Until October 1st you can make a written submission or sign up to make a presentation submission to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency about the Shell Jackpine Mine Expansion. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 25
Town crier announces the will of the people for a 2014 health accord Adrienne Silnicki | Using a town crier to announce the will of the people for a 2014 health accord, the Council of Canadians brought attention to the meeting of Canada's health ministers in Halifax later this week. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 25
Canada's WTO challenge to European seal product ban moves ahead despite real threat to free trade talks Stuart Trew | Canada and Norway are moving ahead with their joint disputes at the World Trade Organization against a popular European Union ban on importing seal products. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 24
'Global Frackdown' in Auld's Cove, Nova Scotia Angela Giles | This weekend, hundreds of people in Nova Scotia were greeted by a large gathering as part of 'Global Frackdown' -- a worldwide day of action and solidarity against fracking. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 21
Disregard and contempt for environmental rules in Ontario Mark Calzavara | This week, the Environment Commissioner of Ontario issued the most scathing criticism I have ever seen from a government watchdog. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 19
Election fraud update: Conservative MPs seek 'modest' 3620 per cent increase Maude Barlow | "Modest" is the term Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton used in court today to characterize the 3620 per cent increase being sought in their motion. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 18
Strong majority of Canadians oppose drug patent extension in Canada-EU trade deal: poll Emma Lui | Patent term extension and other new monopoly rights in CETA for brand name pharmaceutical companies are among the most controversial aspects of the Canada-EU trade deal. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 18
Protests greet another Trans-Pacific Partnership round Stuart Trew | Trade justice activists in the United States greeted a 14th round of Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations in Leesburg, Virginia this week with calls to release the TPP text. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 10
Few fans of U.S. intellectual property proposals in Trans-Pacific Partnership Stuart Trew | A 14th round of Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade and investment negotiations begins in Virginia, U.S.A. this week as scorn for the agreement's proposed intellectual property chapter piles up. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog September 6
Unis'tot'en action camp shows clear opposition to Pacific Trails Pipeline Maryam Adrangi | B.C. approved the Pacific Trails Pipeline this past April to be built through Unis'tot'en territory. The Unis'tot'en have never ceded nor surrendered their territories through the treaty process. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog August 27
Trade activists grill Quebec election candidates on Canada-EU trade deal Stuart Trew | The Reseau quebecois sur l'integration continentale (RQIC) has sent a questionnaire on the Canada-EU trade negotiations to political parties competing in the Quebec election. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog August 21
Canada-EU free trade and the Quebec election: The view from ATTAC-Quebec Stuart Trew | Claude Vaillancourt, president of ATTAC-Quebec, writes that the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, is not but should be an important issue in the provincial election. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog August 16
Is Canada close to ratifying the ICSID Convention? Here's why we hope not Stuart Trew | The elimination of judicial reviews of arbitral awards tilts the balance even further in favour of corporate interests in the already problematic investor-state dispute settlement process. Blog - Council of Canadians' blog August 14
Thunder Bay request for Canada-EU trade deal exemption gives Harper, Merkel something to chew on The Council of Canadians | The Council of Canadians celebrates last night's decision by Thunder Bay city council to seek an exemption from the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). |
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Twelve days later, Australia's government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.
At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a "genuine reason" for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.
That's certainly how things looked after the Aurora shooting. But after Sandy Hook, with the nation shocked and groping for answers once again, I wonder if Americans are still so sure that we have nothing to learn from Australia's example.
On Dec. 24, in Webster, New York, an ex-con named William Spengler set fire to his house and then shot and killed two responding firefighters before taking his own life. He shot them with a Bushmaster AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle--the same weapon that Adam Lanza used 10 days earlier when he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary. James Holmes used an AR-15-style rifle with a detachable 100-round magazine this past summer when he shot up a movie theater in Colorado. (Though the AR-15 is a specific model of rifle made by Colt, the term has come to generically refer to the many other rifles built to similar specifications.)
I generally consider myself a Second Amendment supporter, and I haven't yet decided where I stand on post-Newtown gun control. I would own a gun if New York City laws didn't make it extremely difficult to do so. But I nevertheless find Keene's arguments disingenuous. It's odd to cite hunting and home defense as reasons to keep selling a rifle that's not particularly well suited, and definitely not necessary, for either. Bolt-action rifles and shotguns can also be used for hunting and home defense. Unfortunately, those guns aren't particularly lucrative for gunmakers. The lobby's fervent defense of military-style semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 seems motivated primarily by a desire to protect the profits in the rapidly growing "modern sporting rifle" segment of the industry.
But the AR-15 is not ideal for the hunting and home-defense uses that the NRA's Keene cited today. Though it can be used for hunting, the AR-15 isn't really a hunting rifle. Its standard .223 caliber ammunition doesn't offer much stopping power for anything other than small game. Hunters themselves find the rifle controversial, with some arguing AR-15-style rifles empower sloppy, "spray and pray" hunters to waste ammunition. (The official Bushmaster XM15 manual lists the maximum effective rate of fire at 45 rounds per minute.) As one hunter put it in the comments section of an article on americanhunter.org, "I served in the military and the M16A2/M4 was the weapon I used for 20 years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games. I see more men running around the bush all cammo'd up with assault vests and face paint with tricked out AR's. These are not hunters but wannabe weekend warriors."
AR-15-style rifles are very useful, however, if what you're trying to do is sell guns. In a recent Forbes article, Abram Brown reported that "gun ownership is at a near 20-year high, generating $4 billion in commercial gun and ammunition sales." But that money's not coming from selling shotguns and bolt-action rifles to pheasant hunters. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation announced that bolt-action hunting rifles accounted for 6.6 percent of its net sales in 2011 (down from 2010 and 2009), while modern sporting rifles (like AR-15-style weapons) accounted for 18.2 percent of its net sales. The Freedom Group's 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a 3 percent rate.
As the NRA's David Keene notes, a lot of people do use modern sporting rifles for target shooting and in marksmanship competitions. But the guns also appeal to another demographic that doesn't get nearly as much press--paranoid survivalists who worry about having to fend off thieves and trespassers in the event of disaster. Online shooting message boards are rife with references to potential "SHTF scenarios," where SHTF stands for "shit hits the fan"--governmental collapse, societal breakdown. (Adam Lanza's mother, Nancy Lanza, has been described as "a gun-hoarding survivalist who was stockpiling weapons in preparation for an economic collapse.") An article on ar15.com titled "The Ideal Rifle" notes that "the threats from crime, terrorism, natural disaster, and weapons of mass destruction are real. If something were to happen today, you would need to have made a decision about the rifle you would select and be prepared for such an event. So the need to select a 'survival' rifle is real. Selecting a single 'ideal rifle' is not easy. The AR-15 series of rifles comes out ahead when compared to everything else." Depending on where you live, it's perfectly legal to stockpile weapons to use in the event of Armageddon. But that's a far different argument than the ones firearms advocates have been using since the Newtown shootings.
As I said, I generally think of myself as a Second Amendment supporter, and a month ago, I would've probably agreed with the NRA's position. But the Newtown shooting caused me to re-examine my stance--as is, I think, fitting--and to question some of the rhetoric advocates use to defend weapons like this. In his piece at Human Events, Keene ridiculed the notion that AR-15-style rifles ought to be banned just because "a half dozen [AR-15s] out of more than three million have been misused after illegally falling into the hands of crazed killers." But the AR-15 is very good at one thing: engaging the enemy at a rapid rate of fire. When someone like Adam Lanza uses it to take out 26 people in a matter of minutes, he's committing a crime, but he isn't misusing the rifle. That's exactly what it was engineered to do.
On Jan. 18, 2013, one week after Aaron Swartz committed suicide, a group of his friends and admirers gathered in the lobby of the MIT Media Lab to commemorate Swartz's life and mourn his death. On one side of the room, the event's organizers had unfurled a homemade banner. For about an hour that night, I watched people approach the banner, grab a marker, and scribble their thoughts. The most memorable was a skinny kid in a sweatshirt and ugly sneakers, who scrawled, "We will continue."
Continue with what, exactly? That's been the question that Swartz's colleagues and acolytes have been trying to answer in the year since his death. Swartz's busy, complicated life defied easy categorization. He was a programmer who didn't like to be called a programmer, an Internet millionaire who was deeply ambivalent about Silicon Valley. People called him an "Internet activist," but he was becoming less interested in "Internet issues" with every passing year. He jumped from project to project, cause to cause, and while this restlessness is part of what makes him such a widely heralded figure--so many groups are able to claim him as their own--it also makes his life difficult to distill into bullet points.
Nobody really knows why Swartz decided to kill himself on Jan. 11, 2013, but those closest to him believe that the criminal charges against him had a lot to do with it. For almost two years, Swartz had been in trouble for accessing the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--where he was neither enrolled nor employed--and downloading almost 5 million journal articles from the online database JSTOR. When he hanged himself in the small Brooklyn apartment he shared with his girlfriend, he was facing charges that theoretically could have brought him 50 years in prison.
Swartz's lawyers were prepared to argue that Swartz had committed no crime and done no lasting damage, and that his use of the MIT network had been tacitly authorized, thanks to the school's "extraordinarily open" computer network. Even if you disagree with this argument, it is hard to argue that any of Swartz's actions merited prison time. But the DoJ has not wavered from its contention that the charges were appropriate. In an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last March, Attorney General Eric Holder called the Swartz case "a good use of prosecutorial discretion." Neither U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz nor her associate Stephen Heymann have faced any sort of public reprimand for their handling of the Swartz case--and why would they? Ortiz and Heymann were doing nothing different than what federal prosecutors have done for decades: threatening alleged criminals with disproportionately large sentences in hopes of securing a plea bargain, thus avoiding the expense and effort of a full-fledged trial. These 50-year threats are all part of the game that prosecutors play.
The CFAA became law in the 1980s in the days before the World Wide Web and widespread personal computing, and was meant to deter hacking into systems maintained by the government or financial institutions. The legislation has not kept pace with the times. Today the CFAA allows prosecutors to charge defendants for "exceeding authorized access"--a vague term that could be defined as something as benign as violating a website's terms of service--to "protected computers," which essentially means any computer with an Internet connection. It is ripe for prosecutorial abuse.
After Swartz died, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., announced that she would introduce a bill called " Aaron's Law ," which would reform the CFAA. Among other things, the bill would clarify the definition of "authorized access" and impose some limits on the CFAA. Aaron's Law would also make it more difficult for prosecutors to threaten CFAA violators with excessive felony sentences, which would be a welcome development.
While Aaron's Law has stalled, thanks to standard Washington inertia and a general political reluctance to appear soft on crime, Swartz's friends and supporters remain intent on legislative reform, either through Lofgren's bill or some other measure. Such a move would be a fine way to honor Swartz's memory. Because Aaron Swartz was a lot of things, but a "computer criminal" was not one of them.
For my last Crime post of 2013, I thought I'd highlight some of my favorite Crime posts of 2013. These aren't necessarily the best stories I wrote this year--and they certainly aren't the most popular--but, for whatever reason, I liked all of these an awful lot.
" Hold Parents Accountable ." I've been writing about unintentional child shooting deaths since May, and this long essay from December--about child access prevention laws, and why they're the best legislative option for reducing the number of child shooting deaths--was the culmination of all my reporting.
Welcome to the first annual Slate Crime Blog Crime Awards, honoring the year's most notable achievements in the field of crime, or, at least, the most notable criminal achievements that I have noticed. Fair warning: I am not very attentive, so if this list seems incomplete, it's not you, it's me. I'm only one man!
Dumbest Criminal: Was there ever any doubt that the year's dumbest criminal would be Derrick Mosley , the guy who tried to rob a gun store armed only with a baseball bat? When I first wrote about Mosley in August, I suggested that he might be "the dumbest dumb criminal of them all." Now, I give him that title with confidence. Congratulations?
Most Valuable Cop: This one goes to Constable Derek Chesney, the kindly Canadian police officer who wrote this heartfelt tribute to Alvin Cote, Saskatoon's town drunk, who died in April . "I found out today that Alvin passed away a few days ago and, I admit, I feel an emptiness," wrote Chesney. "It will be different as I walk my downtown beat knowing that he will not be in one of the banks and I won't have to make a special trip to go check on him. As an officer, you encounter many individuals, but you remember certain people because they are special, and Alvin was one such special person." Three cheers to Chesney for reminding us that cops can be as soft-hearted as anyone else.
Least Valuable Cop: Undercover NYPD detective Wojciech Braszczok was riding with the Hollywood Stuntz motorcyclists this fall when they attacked motorist Alexian Lien on Manhattan's West Side. Not only did Braszczok allegedly fail to intervene to stop the attack, he allegedly failed to tell his superiors about his involvement until days later, when a video of the attack had already gone viral. I know, I know, he was undercover, but if there's ever a time when a cop should break his cover, it's when a motorist is being beaten with a motorcycle helmet.
Best Exculpation: There were a lot of people freed from prison this year after serving time for crimes they didn't commit. But I'd especially like to remember Olutosin Oduwole , an Illinois college student who was convicted in 2011 of attempting to make a terrorist threat after police found a threatening note in Oduwole's car. But the car was locked. The note was facedown. And the "threatening note" was apparently just a draft of some rap lyrics. Oduwole never tried to threaten anyone, and although he was freed this spring, it's shameful that it took the state of Illinois that long to realize it.
Worst Excuse : I am a connoisseur of lame criminal excuses, and this year there was none lamer than the one offered by Kenneth Webster Enlow , an Oklahoma man charged with "peeping Tom" crimes after authorities found him hiding in the depths of a public toilet in the women's restroom at a Tulsa-area park. Enlow claimed that his girlfriend had knocked him unconscious with a tire iron and dropped him inside the toilet for some reason. This excuse was implausible for many, many reasons, but primarily because his girlfriend had died in 2012.
Lowest-Stakes Robbery: This prestigious award goes to Kevin Grinnell , an upstate New York man who allegedly smashed the door of a convenience store cooler in order to steal a Bud Light Lime Straw-Ber-Rita, a disgusting and inexpensive malt beverage favored by underage girls and sugar junkies. There's no reason to drink something that costs so little and tastes so terrible, let alone steal it.
Most Valuable Criminal: To qualify as Slate 's Most Valuable Criminal, your crime has to be great and you need to make an enormous contribution to the broader criminal community. With that in mind, there's no better choice for 2013's MVC than Annie Dookhan , the Boston-area crime lab technician who recently pleaded guilty to tampering with or mishandling evidence in nine years' worth of drug cases. Some have suggested that fixing Dookhan's mistakes might cost Massachusetts up to $100 million. In the meantime, thanks to Dookhan, hundreds of prisoners have been freed and the state has declined to prosecute more than 1,000 others. In November,the New York Times wrote about a "Dookhan defendant" named Jamell Spurill, "who had been jailed on drug charges. He was quickly rearrested for possession of a stolen gun. When he was picked up, prosecutors say, he told the police: 'I just got out thanks to Annie Dookhan. I love that lady.' "
The judge has one nerve left, and your stupid shirt is getting on it. "My wife was a child abuse prosecutor in Baltimore. I once went to a sentencing in one of her cases. The very large woman who was being sentenced after pleading guilty to child abuse wore a T-shirt that read, 'Sex Is a Misdemeanor. The More I Miss, the Meaner I Get.' While her attorney tried to find another shirt, her size precluded him from doing so. The judge assured that the client would be missing for several years."
Too late for that, pal. "When I was clerking 11 years ago for a district court judge, a defendant was brought in for an initial hearing who was high on meth and violent--eight lawmen (sheriffs and troopers and city officers) had been detailed to control him while he screamed and howled in the hallway in front of the courtroom. He was wearing the full cuffs and manacles and belt, but he looked like he was a hair away from breaking out of that. The shirt he wore said: 'Don't piss me off, I don't need another f@#king felony conviction.' "
Never wear your "crime clothes" to court. "Former public defender here. Had a client show up for jury selection in the exact same clothes that he was identified in during the robbery. The defense was mistaken identity. The victim and one witness described jeans with gold patches on the rear and an oversized white T-shirt with FUBU on the front. His choice of dress for jury selection? The same threads. Jury convicted in 30 minutes."
The Honorable Judge Ford Boy presiding. "I watched a proceeding where the defendant wore a T-shirt to court that said 'Bite Me Ford Boy.' I don't know if he was aware that the judge he was appearing before had a mint 1965 Ford Mustang convertible that he loved. Luckily, the judge was a good sport."
And yet he wore it anyway. " I work as a domestic violence advocate. When supporting a survivor at domestic violence court, there was a man pleading not guilty to DV wearing a T-shirt with a huge handgun across the chest. When he approached, the judge asked him if he thought that wearing the shirt was appropriate for court. The man said, 'No, I guess not.' "
A lesson for us all. "I am a prosecutor and one time a defendant came into court wearing a hoodie for a hearing with (I presume) his girlfriend by his side. This defendant had an outstanding bench warrant on another case, though, and when we called his case, the judge informed him that he was going to be taken into custody. The defendant had a surprised look on his face and hurriedly took off his sweatshirt, handed it to his girlfriend, and she quickly shuffled out of the courtroom.
"Since he knew he was going to be arrested and searched, he had to unload whatever drugs were in his pocket. But when he removed his sweatshirt, he revealed to the court (and the attorneys) a T-shirt that had a picture of a marijuana leaf on it that said 'Pimps smoke blunts.' The judge just shook his head in disgust and we all laughed. As always, the lesson is: Don't take your drugs with you to court so you don't have to reveal your hideously offensive T-shirt."
The circumstances: There is absolutely nothing good about losing your hair. Premature baldness can affect your self-esteem and your romantic prospects. It can lead to unflattering nicknames like "Cueball" and "Hairless Pete." Whatever money you save on shampoo, you'll end up spending on tonics and lotions that promise to regrow your hair, or baseball caps to cover the shame. And, if you are a dumb criminal, your receding hairline can be the sort of thing that will get you arrested.
The Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat brings us the story of a Petaluma-area resident who reported that her debit card had been stolen and used at a local Target. When a cop went down to Target to review some security camera footage, he noticed something helpful: The woman using the stolen card "definitely showed a high hairline, like a pattern of balding or something." This was a clue, but not a great one. The cop still had no idea who this balding woman was, or where to find her.
What happened next is called "dumb luck." When the cop went to another store in the same shopping center to review its security footage, who did he see working behind the store's register? You guessed it: the same woman from the Target tape. "Hanging around the scene of the crime so that the cops can notice my distinctive hairline" is a classic dumb-criminal mistake. The woman was questioned and arrested.
How she could have been a little smarter: Used the debit card in a shopping center other than the one where she worked. It's California, for Pete's sake! An entire state of nothing but shopping centers! There's no reason to commit a crime in the one center where you are most likely to be inadvertently discovered by investigating officers.
Ultimate Dumbness Ranking (UDR): This is less dumb than sloppy. If you know that you are somehow distinctive-looking, it's your responsibility to conceal those distinctive features when you are committing a crime. Noticeably balding criminals must take care to wear a hat, or a wig, or one of those hats with a wig inside. Jennifer N. Winters' alleged failure to do so led directly to her downfall. 4 out of 10 for her.
One of the best things about writing Slate 's crime blog has been the opportunity to become familiar with the work of North America's best crime reporters. There are a lot of great ones out there working the crime beat, and I asked a few to name their favorite stories of 2013. Here are their responses:
Nationally, the best crime story, I think, is " Two Gunshots on a Summer Night " by Walt Bogdanich and Glenn Silber in the New York Times , about the suspicious death of the girlfriend of a sheriff's deputy in St. Augustine, Fla. The reporting is so thorough, the online presentation is so crisp and clean, the themes highlight such important but underreported topics, and the story as a whole exemplifies the kind of public service work that can be done when states have (relatively) open public records laws and so many documents can be analyzed by reporters. It's one of those stories that took such a long time to do, and you can just appreciate the trust the paper had in those two reporters to spend so much time and resources working on a single story. They got it right, and I just appreciate everything involved in making that happen in every level of the organization: the reporters, the editors, the designers, the people who sign off on the expense reports.
Overall, the Boston Globe did an amazing job with its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. Boston.com was constantly buzzing with live updates and there were some really great full-length articles that captured the fear and heroism that pervaded the city throughout that week--from the initial bombings to the manhunt that followed. Then, there were powerful stories about recovery. But I was particularly impressed by this piece by Eric Moskowitz, who obtained an exclusive interview with a man who endured a harrowing ride with the bombing suspects after a carjacking. You couldn't help but sit on the edge of your seat while reading it. It was packed with detail and the first glimpse at the personalities of the two suspects. In managing to outsmart the Tsarnaev brothers, Danny was an unexpected bright spot in the horror of the week.
But as a good, old-fashioned crime story, I really loved this one: " Fear on the Family Farm ," by crime reporter Jana G. Pruden at the Edmonton Journal , in Alberta. I just started following Pruden's work earlier this year, and I find a lot to admire. She's a terrific writer, with a novelistic style to her longform stories. This story is about a man who murders his brutish father. I thought it was compelling. She brings you into the lives of this family and gives such a sense of foreboding and tragedy. What's it like to live in a family gripped by domestic violence? Here's your example. Plus, I loved the sense of place, the descriptions of the beautiful and windswept prairie. I've never been, but the writing took me there. This is what we should aspire to do as crime reporters--tell what happened and put it into a context that helps you relate to the people in the story.
Joel Rubin , Los Angeles Times . After scrolling though crime clips in search of something odd, absurd, idiotic, I've decided to play it straight and offer up the recent series we ran on Christopher Dorner , the disgraced LAPD cop who was fired and then resurfaced earlier this year with a vendetta. We covered the surreal story best we could as it unfolded and, when it was over, five of us set off to fill in as many of the blanks as possible. 400-plus interviews later, the result, I think, is a pretty compelling story that ran in five parts. A colleague, Chris Goffard, who wrote it, deserves much of the credit.
Born in 1919, Mikhail Kalashnikov spent much of his boyhood in Siberian exile before he was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1938. Injured in the Battle of Bryansk in 1941, Kalashnikov spent months convalescing in a military hospital. Though he had little formal education, Kalashnikov had an innate talent for tinkering, and spent his days lying in bed and pondering the Nazi forces' superior firepower. He would later say that "here, in spite of the pain of my injury, I was obsessed night and day by a single thought: inventing a weapon to beat the fascists."
The AK-47 was that weapon. (Though Kalashnikov was always credited as the sole designer of the AK-47, this may have been Soviet propaganda--an effort to make a hero out of an individual who had done great things in service of the state.) "I designed a machine gun for a soldier," Kalashnikov said years later. While the AK-47 wasn't the first "assault rifle," it was certainly the most simple. It was light. It did not jam. It was easy to understand and inexpensive to manufacture. As John Forge wrote in 2012's Designed to Kill , "Compared to any similar weapon, the AK is very easy to use, and thus, even a poorly or barely trained soldier--or one wearing gloves in Siberia--or, sadly, even a child, can use one effectively at close range."
Reliable and simple, the AK-47 allowed an inexperienced fighter to match up against a better-trained opponent. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the Vietcong used AK-47s to repel American forces, equipped with inferior M-16s. As such, the gun became immensely popular among guerrillas and rebels worldwide. But it would be naive to think of the gun as an unalloyed symbol of liberation. As C.J. Chivers wrote in his book The Gun , the AK-47 "was repression's chosen gun, the rifle of the occupier and the police state." The gun was put into service in Prague, in East Germany, at Tiananmen Square: "almost any place where a government resorted to shooting citizens to try to keep citizens in check. It would be used by Baathists to execute Kurds in the holes that served as their mass graves. It would shoot the men and boys who were herded to execution in Srebrenica in 1995."
The gun became popular among terrorist groups, too, and this bothered Kalashnikov. In a 2002 interview with a German newspaper, he expressed regret over the weapon that made him famous. "I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists," he said. "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work--for example a lawnmower."
In October, I wrote about Herman Wallace , a prisoner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary who had been kept in solitary confinement for an astounding 41 years. Now, a new story shows that there's more than one way to torment an inmate at the prison known as Angola. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Angola officials subjected death row prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment by heating their cells to unbearably high temperatures.
Lauren McGaughy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that prisoners were kept in unventilated cells and had limited access to cold water, even in the middle of the summer. As a result, the cell block "felt like a sauna in the morning and an oven in the afternoon," according to one prisoner; the heat made prisoners dizzy and disoriented, and intensified existing health problems. Now, Judge Brian A. Jackson has ruled that Angola officials must take steps to ensure that the cell block heat index does not exceed 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Prison officials will likely appeal the decision.
One of the most disturbing things about America's prison system is the way that so many stakeholders insist on adding insult to injury as a matter of policy. It isn't enough to lock convicts up--they must also be degraded and made to suffer.
I loathe this type of thinking. Citizens in a free society ought to believe that the loss of liberty is punishment enough, that it is unnecessary to also impose some ad hoc regimen of corporal degradations. Petty torments like the Angola hothouse strategy have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with abuse of power. And there's no place for them in a democratic society.
I am not so naive to think that our prisons are filled with fallen angels. There are a lot of incorrigibly violent men who should not be out on the streets. While I understand why people might have little sympathy for prisoners who have been convicted of violent crimes, it serves no social purpose to keep grinding prisoners down even after they've been incarcerated. They might be convicts, but they are still men, and it does real harm to our justice system when we fail to treat them as such.
And while I'm on the topic of prisons, I'd like to take a moment to mention Just Detention International's annual Words of Hope project, which invites random people on the Internet to send holiday cards to survivors of prison rape. Every year, thousands of American prisoners are sexually assaulted behind bars. Though the attack might be over in minutes, the subsequent shame can last a lifetime. By inviting strangers to send messages of support to prison-rape survivors, the Words of Hope project seeks to remind these men and women that the attack wasn't their fault, and that they are not alone. I wrote about this project last year , and a lot of you decided to participate. If you have a spare minute today or tomorrow, why not consider doing so again ? I did. |
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Trash from Perry Street in the West Village.
(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine)
Illustration by Peter Arkle
Fridges and air conditioners Call 311 to make a Freon-removal appointment, then place the rubbish curbside the night before your special date. The DSNY will remove the gases and place a bright-orange sticker on the item, which gives sanitation workers the green light to cart it off. With fridges, don't forget to take off the door, which is required by law so that no kiddies get stuck inside.
Ovens and dishwashers Just boot them to the curb the night before metals-collection day; doing it any other time could result in a $100 fine for the building owner.
Electronics The city suggests trucking a retired computer, TV, or VCR back to its original retailer, which is required by law to take it back. Alternatively, contact 4th Bin (855-329-2531; 4thbin.com ) , a local electronics-recycling service that'll not only come to you but also wipe your hard drive before hauling it off. CDs and DVDs, meanwhile, may be thrown out with regular garbage.
Tips From a Trash-Picker Befriend the super: At apartment complexes, the supers take stuff that's cool and store it in the basement. They get overcrowded though, so ask what's available. You'd be amazed at what's down there. Nick DiMola, owner of DiMola Bros. Rubbish Removal and avid trash collector Odor eaters: Old wives agree: You can quell just about any stink by lining the bottom of your garbage can with one of these tried-and-true nostril savers. * One cup baking soda plus one tsp. tea-tree oil. * Used dryer sheets. * Pulverized lumps of charcoal. * Kitty litter.
Paint and other toxins The DSNY has a household Special Waste Drop-Off Site in each borough open either Friday or Saturday of every week (check nyc.gov for a schedule). Take leftover paint, paint thinner, and turpentine there for safe disposal, along with batteries, mercury thermometers, tires, fluorescent lightbulbs, and even nail polish and polish remover.
Couches Just park it on the sidewalk the night before your regularly scheduled refuse-collection day. Same goes for other large pieces of furniture, like armoires and bookshelves. If the pieces are in good condition, consider Housing Works (888-493-6628; housingworks.org ) , which will schedule a pickup, refurbish it, resell it, and donate proceeds to New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.
Mattresses Because of the risk of bedbugs, mattresses must be placed in plastic sheeting or specially designed bags (available for purchase at any mattress or hardware store) before being plopped curbside. Without the proper bagging, building owners can be fined $100.
Dirty diapers They're free to go in the regular trash, but if you're concerned about paper waste, consider Diaperkind (718-965-9555; diaperkind.com ) . Run out of a Gowanus warehouse, the cloth-diaper service (from $35 per week) includes weekly pickup and washing, as well as a mentoring service for new parents who are still getting the hang of it.
Muffy and Fido So your pet died. You could (1) double-bag it, mark it dead animal, and leave it on the curb with the rest of your garbage; or (2) have a heart and call Pet Haven Services (917-608-9729; pethavenservices.com ) , which will pick up your friend within 24 hours and arrange a private cremation or proper burial at a pet cemetery in the Poconos (from $50). |
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ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that shines a light on "abuses of power and betrayals of public trust." They are investigating a new group of white supremacists in Southern California they say that law enforcement is paying little attention to, despite a growing threat. The group was at the center of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia - a day that lives in infamy for America. One young counter-protestor died, and Trump still claimed "very fine people" were among the neo-Nazis.
A California white supremacist group, R.A.M, is full of violent felons.
Law enforcement pays it little attention. https://t.co/eS0V5cVDXJ
-- ProPublica (@ProPublica) October 22, 2017
The Rise Above Movement, or RAM, is a group of 50 from Southern California who made their way across America to Charlottesville, after violent appearances in Huntington Beach, and Berkeley. The group's purpose is reported to be "physically attacking its ideological foes." They are an "alt-right street-fighting club," according to the director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
They adhere to the "14 words" white supremacist slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The slogan is a worldview that a "rising tide of color" believed to be controlled and manipulated by Jews threatens to doom the white race to extinction.
ProPublica has exposed the criminal histories of the members. One of the members is a 24-year-old man in Southern California who trims trees for a living. That man, Ben Daley, was involved in Charlottesville attacks and once served seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Daley claims to have signed up for the military recently.
Other members have convictions for stabbings, drugs, resisting arrest and assaulting officers, possessing switchblades and illegal guns, disturbing the peace, DUI, and felony robbery charges. They associate with larger and more organized groups like Hammerskins Nation, "the best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group known," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
These extremists see Trump as a validation of their belief systems. They have attacked journalists with shouts of "Fake news!" while punching and shoving, which is all something Trump himself has encouraged.
Even with ample video footage of violent clashes by the group, police haven't responded by bringing charges against RAM, and have claimed they lack resources to carry out thorough investigations.
Meanwhile, the group has a public image for white supremacist media outlets, wearing skull masks and goggles to prevent pepper spray, and appearing boxing and showing off physical fitness. They even have a logo derived from the crusades -a sword with a cross on it and an evergreen tree.
They portray their cause as defending Western civilization from Jews, Communists, Muslims, and brown-skinned immigrants. Their motto is "courage, identity, and virtue," which is of course entirely at odds with their bigotry and violence.
More paradox: Their leader also denies accusations of racism or fascism and claims not to know what the word "racism" means. Members use overtly racist and anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media. The use of social media allows them and other extremist groups to grow an audience quickly.
The group has a sense of victimization by leftist academics, politicians, and workforce standards and sees their movement as an "antidote to the 'complete degeneracy' of contemporary American life."
Hate groups today attempt to hide behind the term, "alt-right." Even our former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to Trump, Sebastian Gorka, aligned with the alt-right. Trump's current senior advisor for policy, Stephen Miller, still remains and is also reported to align with the views of the alt-right/neo-Nazi movement.
According to a former neo-Nazi, using the term "alt-right" "helps white supremacists to legitimise their hatred." It's a disguise that rapidly wore thin as the term rose to the level of a household name.
See the video about RAM from ProPublica below:
Featured image: Screenshot via YouTube |
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The Rise Above Movement, or RAM, is a group of 50 from Southern California who made their way across America to Charlottesville, after violent appearances in Huntington Beach, and Berkeley. The group's purpose is reported to be "physically attacking its ideological foes." They are an "alt-right street-fighting club," according to the director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
They adhere to the "14 words" white supremacist slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The slogan is a worldview that a "rising tide of color" believed to be controlled and manipulated by Jews threatens to doom the white race to extinction.
ProPublica has exposed the criminal histories of the members. One of the members is a 24-year-old man in Southern California who trims trees for a living. That man, Ben Daley, was involved in Charlottesville attacks and once served seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Daley claims to have signed up for the military recently.
Other members have convictions for stabbings, drugs, resisting arrest and assaulting officers, possessing switchblades and illegal guns, disturbing the peace, DUI, and felony robbery charges. They associate with larger and more organized groups like Hammerskins Nation, "the best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group known," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
These extremists see Trump as a validation of their belief systems. They have attacked journalists with shouts of "Fake news!" while punching and shoving, which is all something Trump himself has encouraged.
Even with ample video footage of violent clashes by the group, police haven't responded by bringing charges against RAM, and have claimed they lack resources to carry out thorough investigations.
Meanwhile, the group has a public image for white supremacist media outlets, wearing skull masks and goggles to prevent pepper spray, and appearing boxing and showing off physical fitness. They even have a logo derived from the crusades -a sword with a cross on it and an evergreen tree.
They portray their cause as defending Western civilization from Jews, Communists, Muslims, and brown-skinned immigrants. Their motto is "courage, identity, and virtue," which is of course entirely at odds with their bigotry and violence.
More paradox: Their leader also denies accusations of racism or fascism and claims not to know what the word "racism" means. Members use overtly racist and anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media. The use of social media allows them and other extremist groups to grow an audience quickly.
The group has a sense of victimization by leftist academics, politicians, and workforce standards and sees their movement as an "antidote to the 'complete degeneracy' of contemporary American life."
Hate groups today attempt to hide behind the term, "alt-right." Even our former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to Trump, Sebastian Gorka, aligned with the alt-right. Trump's current senior advisor for policy, Stephen Miller, still remains and is also reported to align with the views of the alt-right/neo-Nazi movement.
According to a former neo-Nazi, using the term "alt-right" "helps white supremacists to legitimise their hatred." It's a disguise that rapidly wore thin as the term rose to thelevel of a household name. |
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SOME 1,300 workers at five American Crystal Sugar Co. plants and warehouses across North Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota have been locked out since last August when they voted to reject management's contract proposal.
David Berg, the president and CEO of American Crystal, told a gathering of company shareholders: "We could give wonderful raises and unlimited health care benefits, bankrupt the company, and who benefits from that?"
Berg is a hypocrite. He has no problem giving himself a "wonderful" raise--his "compensation" jumped by 23 percent to $2.4 million in 2011. Brian Ingulsrud, American Crystal'a vice president of administration, saw his "earnings" increase from $700,000 to $809,000 last year.
As Kari Sorenson, who works in the Moorhouse, Minn., plant, said in a union statement:
We worked hard to produce a quality product until they locked us out...I'm angry that the board has rewarded CEO Dave Berg with a $2.4 million compensation package this year. And yet management are committed to taking away from the workers who've helped make this company such a success, no matter the cost to our communities.
Locked-out workers rally for support outside an American Crystal Sugar facility
American Crystal workers, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union, rejected the company's final offer in August by a 97 percent margin--and 92 percent of workers voted down a revised offer on November 1 because it failed to address their demands on job security and health care costs.
American Crystal is offering 17 percent pay increases over a five-year contract, but is proposing health insurance changes that would more than double workers' maximum out-of-pocket costs for family coverage. All told, this adds up to a wage cut.
In an interview, Carla Kennedy, a 30-year American Crystal veteran in Minnesota, said:
My last night of work was July 31. I was told to report at midnight. I was met by a plant manager, and he took my arm and said, "You no longer have a job here."
The bottom line is they're out to break the union. They've gotten greedy. It's happening all over America, and it's all about corporate greed. People have bent over backwards for the company. A lot of people don't want to go back, but a lot of people have to go back.
What you can do
Sign a petition calling on American Crystal CEO Dave Berg to provide a fair deal to workers.
Support the call to the United Way to pressure Berg to end the lockout or ask him to leave its Board of Trustees.
Find out more about the struggle at the American Crystal Sugar Workers Lockout website. You support workers and their families by donating to the BCTGM ACS Lockout Fund--mail checks to BCTGM International Union, Attn: ACS Lockout Fund, 4th Floor, 10401 Connecticut Avenue, Kensington, MD 20895.
The issues in this fight are all too familiar. American Crystal is the largest producer of beet sugar in the U.S. Workers slice and refine beets grown by 2,800 shareholding farmers. Between 2009 and 2011, American Crystal revenues grew by 28 percent, and the company turned an $800 million profit in 2010. That triggered big increases in compensation for Berg and other top Crystal executives.
Yet despite these tremendous gains, management is demanding that workers accept concessions. As BCTGM Local 167G President John Riskey told a reporter:
We were the ones who were responsible for helping them make those record profits. We worked our tails off to make sure that they got every beet sliced...The company is profitable, and when a company is profitable, they should share that with their employees--their hard-working employees. Why use that money to lock us out?
TO KEEP up production, the company has used a Twin Cities-based company, Strom Engineering, to recruit scabs to replace locked-out workers at all of the plants and warehouses. Workers are maintaining pickets at all five facilities between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m., but several hundred scabs are continuing limited production.
Compounding the crisis caused by the lockout, American Crystal workers in North Dakota are being denied unemployment benefits. Kim Jacobson, director of Traill County Social Services in North Dakota reported that the lockout is responsible for a 20 percent increase social work caseloads. "There's been a lot of tears shed in our offices," Jacobson said. "People who have worked their entire life. They've never once thought they would ever be in the situation that they would have to be looking for public assistance."
Thirty-year-old American Crystal worker Nathan Rahm was forced to apply for help when his savings ran out. "Your back's against the wall, and you can't get any help here, and you can't really find any good employment anywhere, so you're forced to do what you have to do to help yourself survive," he said.
Nathan's misery couldn't be more of a contrast to the high-rolling ways of Berg and the rest of Corporate America, where profits are reaching new highs. The struggle at American Crystal is a microcosm of what workers are facing across the U.S.--management has used the recession to lay off workers, pressure those remaining to work harder for less, and demand wage and benefit concessions.
At American Crystal, the attack on union power had been planned for a long time. When recordings of a November 7 shareholders' meeting became available, they revealed Berg, referring to the union, as saying, "At some point, that tumor has got to come out. That's what we're doing."
The recent big profits for American Crystal came on the back of a global spike in sugar prices and a series of strong harvests. To justify its demands for concessions, the company is claiming these conditions won't last. But workers aren't buying the scare tactics.
Management might be right in claiming that the price of sugar is due for a crash. It's also possible that Congress will eliminate or revise the federal program that props up domestic sugar prices. However, this means the time is now to strike hard at American Crystal. Company executives are banking on keeping production going while prices are still high. Workers would have tremendous leverage if they interrupted production now.
Our side needs strategies that can directly confront the employers' ability to set the terms of the struggle. With workers dispersed, looking for alternative jobs to get by, campaigning for legislation to grant unemployment benefits and applying for public assistance, the company hopes to weaken the morale and undercut support. Challenging the attempt to use "replacement workers" won't be easy, but it's the only effective means of limiting their ability to continue production.
The willingness of BCTGM members to fight for what they deserve and their refusal to allow Corporate America to get its way unopposed is an inspiration. They deserve our full solidarity in whatever ways we can provide it. |
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SOME 1,300 workers at five American Crystal Sugar Co. plants and warehouses across North Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota have been locked out |
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Spencer is famous for his heil Trump speech and his proud self-characterization as alt-right. Kessler is famous for being a long-time leftist who supported the Occupy communist/socialist movement and voted for Barack Obama. Jason Kessler
JASON KESSLER
Only a year ago, white supremacist and 'Unite the Right' leader, Jason Kessler, was said to be a supporter a former President Obama and the Occupy movement.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center , Kessler revealed his political transformation around November 2016, the same month then-candidate Donald Trump won the presidential election.
In November, 2016, Kessler displayed a rightward shift according to SPLC during an attack on Charlottesville vice mayor Wes Bellamy who posted racist and vulgar tweets in 2011 and 2012. Richard Spencer
RICHARD SPENCER
Richard Spencer, a co-leader of the group, is an Atheist who invites the Christian white to join his brigade to preserve the white race he sees as in imminent peril.
He appears to have popularized the term "alt-right" over the last nine years and is a white supremacist.
A left-wing former classmate of Spencer's, Graeme Wood, interviewed him for the Atlantic. In the piece, he described his distaste for Spencer and his views, backing up much of it with quotes.
"The concerns of conservative Christians don't interest him. He doesn't mind gay marriage, and he favors legal access to abortion--partly to reduce the number of blacks and Hispanics," Wood wrote. 'Smart people are not using abortion as birth control ... It is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control,' he said recently on AltRight.com's YouTube channel. 'This can be something that can be a great boon for our people, our race.'
Spencer's most offensive views as outlined by Wood concern race which demean the black race and elevate those of white European background.
Spencer is akin to the Nazis in much of his ideology if the interview in the Atlantic is accurate. The philosophers he admires are the same as those admired by the Nazis.
Neither Kessler nor Spencer represent the views of conservatives, Republicans, or libertarians. They are fascists with an opposing ideology on race to their fascist and communist kin in the Antifa and Black Lives Matter groups.
These people are the white supremacists giving everyone on the right a bad name. They must be disavowed so they can be relegated to ignominy. Some of what they say is accurate but don't be fooled.
Extremists can call themselves whatever they want but we need to unite and we can't do it if we follow either sides' extremists.
This 'Unite the Right' movement likely won't go anywhere but we should be concerned about the communist and socialist movement embraced by the Democratic Party.
They're all violent fascists.
Anti-Fascist, Trump protesters applaud speech comprised entirely of Hitler quotes.
This is the best thing on the internet today pic.twitter.com/HD2CPusckI
-- Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) July 8, 2017 |
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Some of our country's richest corporations have turned national wage laws into Swiss cheese, riddling them with special loopholes that let them escape paying even today's miserly minimum wage.
Reprinted with permission from AlterNet .
It doesn't take an IQ much higher than room temperature to realize that it's way past time to raise America's sub-poverty minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. But let's also pay attention to the millions of people trying to make ends meet on--believe it or not--America's sub-minimum wage.
Some of our country's richest corporations have turned national wage laws into Swiss cheese, riddling them with special loopholes that let them escape paying even today's miserly minimum wage. This amounts to wholesale daylight robbery of restaurant workers, farm workers, domestic workers, pro-football cheerleaders, taxi drivers, and ... wait a minute ... back up ... cheerleaders?
Give me an N! "Nnnnnn!" Give me an F! "Ffffff!" Give me an L! "Llllll!" What does it spell? Greeeeeddd!
The monster moneymaking machine known as the National Football League is continuing to run an off-field power play against its valuable and highly marketable female team players. Women on NFL teams? Yes--not running plays, but on the sidelines running the synchronized gymnastics and precision dance routines of professional cheerleaders. These women are an integral part of the spirit, entertainment, promotion and financial success of this $9 billion-a-year corporate enterprise.
Yes, super-rich NFL football teams, which sop up billions of dollars in subsidies from us taxpayers, pay peanuts to their highly publicized cheerleading squads. Widely assumed to be a glamour job, it's actually a poverty job that requires long hours of arduous practice, involves frequent travel (at their own expense) for media appearances and charity events, and subjects the women to abusive treatment by supervisors.
Members of the Oakland Raiders' squad calculate that their pay works out to less than $5 an hour, while the Cincinnati Bengals' cheerleaders (who bear the burden of being called "Ben-Gals") are paid about $2.85 an hour--far less than the federal minimum wage--to be worked like mules, constantly abused, cheated and disrespected. Astonishingly, though, a recent ruling by the U.S. Labor Department says that this does not violate federal law. Why? Because the macho sports industry got its cheerleaders categorized as "seasonal amusement"--a loophole that exempts them from our national pay rules. Side note: NFL's mascots are considered "employees" of the teams they represent, worthy of a salary between $23,000 and $60,000 plus benefits.
Finally fed up, members of the Oakland Raiderettes cheerleading squad have sued their team's corporate hierarchy for gross labor violations. You'd think the billionaire owners of these sports kingdoms would be embarrassed to be publicly exposed as cheapskate exploiters of women. I mean, why wouldn't they just pay $10 an hour, or--what the hell--$100? That's pocket change to them.
Instead, the Oakland Raiders have rolled out their army of lawyers armed with a legalistic bomb called "mandatory arbitration." The lawyers claim that, thanks to the sneaky arbitration proviso tucked into the ladies' employment contracts, the cheerleaders cannot go to court, but must submit any complaints to a private arbiter.
And who would that be? Why the NFL commissioner himself, whose $44-million-a-year salary is paid by the teams' owners! Why would he side with poverty-pay cheerleaders against the regal owners who feather his own nest? He won't, which is why these indefatigable women are not only challenging the NFL's abuse of them, but also the abuse we all suffer from the absurd corporate-rigged system of forced arbitration .
The Powers That Be are trying to transform our Land of Opportunity into their low-wage, plutocratic province. From farm workers to cheerleaders, we're all in this together--and it's time for us to get together to stop the plutocrats.
To keep up with the cheerleaders' case and see how they are standing up for us, go to levyvinick.com/blog/news .
Jim Hightower is the author of six books, including Thieves in High Places (Viking 2003). A well-known populist and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, he currently writes a nationally-syndicated column carried by 75 publications. He also writes a monthly newsletter titled The Hightower Lowdown, and contributes to the Progressive Populist.
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There's little doubt, outside circles filled with self-delusional reactionaries, that religion is probably the most important force in continuing the oppression of women worldwide. Around the world, various abuses from coerced marriage to domestic violence to restricting reproductive rights are all excused under the banner of religion. More to the point, women's rights have advanced more quickly in societies that put religion on the backburner, or like the United States, have strict laws separating church and state. But even in the U.S., the main result of the growing power of the religious right is the rollback of reproductive rights and other protections for women's equality.
Former president Jimmy Carter, who is probably the country's most prominent liberal Christian, is willing to set aside his enthusiasm for faith to admit this. While doing press promoting his new book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power , Carter told the Guardian that "women are treated more equally in some countries that are atheistic or where governments are strictly separated from religion."
This isn't because atheists and secularists have fewer people in their ranks that have ugly and backwards attitudes toward women. It's because, by never having religion in the discourse about women's rights in the first place, discourse in secular circles and societies never gets mired in endless, irresolvable debates about what God wants. Instead, secular societies can get straight to the facts and policy debate. When you stop worrying what God wants and start worrying about what people want, it's much easier to argue that women should have full human rights. After all, women are half the human race. When everyone is talking about what God supposedly wants, it becomes very easy to forget that ultimately, the issue of women's rights is about ordinary, everyday men and women and what goes on in their lives.
It's hard not to suggest that what you need is more religious people making full-throated religious arguments for women's equality, to counter the inevitable reactionaries that use religion to oppress women. It's clear that Carter thinks he can lead such a movement. He is an evangelical Baptist, albeit a fairly liberal one, and hopes this will help him reach audiences that perhaps would be less interested in this kind of pro-woman argument coming from, say, atheists and secular feminists.
It's certainly a breath of fresh air having Carter explain, in his patient and comforting way, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that religion mandates sexism. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to ignore the fact that religiosity and sexism go hand in hand, and the solution might need to be something more than simply demanding better, less sexist religions.
Carter, like many liberal Christians, is happy to criticize more conservative religious leaders who want to oppress women. Still, it's hard not to have doubts that Carter's own devout Christianity might make him less critical than he should be of the role religion plays in the oppression of women. The sticky point when it comes to advocating for a kind of Christian feminism is that the Bible is undeniably sexist. And it's not just the Old Testament, where women are told they were created from men and told, repeatedly, that they are basically property to be disposed of as men see fit. The New Testament has plenty of verses that should cause feminist eyebrows to shoot up.
Consider Ephesians 5:22-24, the verse that the Southern Baptist Convention upholds but Carter disagrees with:
"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."
There's not a lot of wiggle room around that, as Carter freely admits. The Bible is pretty straightforward in its description of women as inferiors who should treat their husbands like masters. Fundamentalists who cite this verse in order to justify the continued oppression of women have a pretty strong argument.
Jimmy Carter's rejoinder to this is that it's cherry-picking. He went on the Diane Rehm show and argued , "If you read the words and actions of Jesus Christ, he not only never discriminated, but he also exalted women far beyond any status they had ever enjoyed before that, and even since then. But there are some verses in the 36,000 or so in the Holy Bible that you can extract in their isolation, and you can prove almost anything you want." He also tried to sell audiences on the idea that Paul commanding women to be silent and submissive in church was somehow just a local issue and not somehow reflective of a broader view of women's roles, though he did not explain how on Earth it could ever be okay to tell women that they are to be silent and submissive "as the law says."
The problem is both Carter and the fundamentalists he denounces are cherry-picking Bible verses. Carter likes to cite Galatians 3:28, which states, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," as proof that the New Testament supports a view of female equality. But there's no real reason to think that verse "counts" more than the number of verses that are quite clearly stating that women are inferior to men.
Indeed, it's worth noting that it's not just liberal Christians that ignore Bible verses that are just too reactionary for our times. There's some parts of the Bible that are too conservatives or backwards for every stripe of conservative, no matter how conservative. Protestant fundamentalists ignore the parts of the Bible that instruct women to be silent in church, and even the Catholic church doesn't take that part so literally that nuns and female Sunday school teachers are not allowed to teach religion. And pretty much all stripes of Christian, from the most conservative to the most liberal, pointedly ignores the parts of the New Testament that endorse slavery and instruct slaves to obey their masters.
What we're left with is the unavoidable conclusion that both fundamentalist and liberal Christians have a tendency to decide first how they feel--do they believe women are equal to men or inferior to men?--and then they start mining the = Bible for verses to back up the point of view they've already decided on. Since there's no outside reference point to show which verses are the truest, best ones, this is the only way that it could work. All stripes of Christian, in addition, are happy to switch up what verses they believe "count" and what do not according to the changing tides of their time.
Carter touches on this briefly, writing, "There is no need to argue about such matters, because it is human nature to be both selective and subjective in deriving the most convenient meaning by careful choices from the thirty-one thousand or so verses in the modern Christian Bible." However, it's a brief thought, almost an aside. He is far more interested in playing the verse vs. verse game, even though he tacitly admits that it's a pointless game that no one will ever win because, as he says, religious authorities will always end up just accepting "the version they prefer."
It's a shame, really, because exploring this idea--that all religious people are, on some level, making it up as they go along--would be a lot better use of a liberal Christian's time than trying to match fundamentalists verse for verse, hoping your Galatians cancels out their Corinthians, all while knowing that no one is ever persuaded this way. What liberal Christians could do, instead of quibbling endlessly with conservatives over theology, is stand up and say, "No one knows either way what God wants or what Jesus would have wanted, so let's table the argument and start discussing the facts and evidence instead."
Jimmy Carter is running around doing press arguing that Jesus didn't want to oppress women. It's probably helpful for the press to remember that "religious" is not the same thing as "misogynist." But reminding people that liberal Christians exist does very little to convince them that liberal Christians somehow have a better read than fundamentalist Christians do when it comes to what God thinks about women's equality. What would be better is if Carter broke the mold and demanded a different debate between Christians about these issues? Carter has a unique opportunity to go on TV and ask his fellow Christians to stop trying to suss out what God wants when it comes to women.
The biggest fallacy in our modern political discourse is this belief that because one believes in God, one has to involve God's wishes in your decision-making. The problem with that, as Carter understands, is no one actually knows what God is thinking and so they are simply asserting what they believe and assuming God is along for the ride. The best thing Carter could do to advance the cause of a liberal, feminist Christianity is to challenge his fellow Christians to get past this endless loop of Bible-mining and instead to join the secular world in putting the real-world evidence first and seeing where it leads them. |
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A "dennis the menace" cartoon shows a little girl and her friend asking two little boys whether they want to play "primary health-care provider." This curious bit of insurance company jargon that has been substituted for "doctor" -- a phrase that internists and family physicians find so demeaning and depersonalizing -- has now reached the comics pages and become common parlance. In a way, the joke made about primary care is emblematic of the crisis in which primary care now finds itself. The issues are important not only to physicians. To the degree that people are patients or consumers (however the two may differ), the outcome of the turmoil in primary care will determine what to expect at the most basic level of health care in the future.
Stephen Schroeder, a recent president of the $ 8 billion Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, notes that primary care has been on a roller coaster. In the early 1990 s, managed care attempted to use primary physicians and nurse practitioners to improve access and quality while, at the same time, keeping costs down. There was talk of the primary physician as the coordinator of all medical care. It didn't work, and the backlash resulted in a decline in prestige, job satisfaction, and income for primary physicians. Many of the young physicians who flocked to the field felt cheated and misled. At the same time, the average medical student's educational debt has climbed to just under $ 110,000 today. More than 25 percent of students are burdened with a debt greater than $ 150,000 -- a figure that further affects career choice for the next generation of physicians.
Graduates of American medical schools filled only 47 percent of residency training positions in family practice in 2002 , a drop from 73 percent six years earlier. Similar trends are present in general internal medicine. The reduction in satisfaction that affects most branches of medicine is worst in primary care, according to Schroeder and others. Both the public and physicians in training are fascinated by new technology, and this is increasing interest in medical and surgical specialties at the expense of primary care. Income differentials are considerable and increasing.
These details are of more than academic interest, even though, as an editor once put it to me, "The public has trouble empathizing with physicians because it is difficult to identify with them." Nevertheless, walking the proverbial mile in the moccasins of both primary and specialty physicians can provide insights available no other way.
"Anatomy of an Internist"
S peaking of "my doctor" typically has meant a primary physician with generalist training. In the United States, however, patients with such diseases as arthritis, diabetes, lung disease, or heart disease would often choose corresponding medical specialists -- rheumatologists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists, or cardiologists -- as their principal physicians. Since all medical specialists have had training in internal medicine, they often came to fill the dual role of specialist and generalist, most often for patients with ongoing illnesses in their specialties. This brought considerable depth and expertise into primary care. It also narrowed the specialist/generalist divide that is characteristic of medicine in the rest of the world.
Managed care managed to disrupt this arrangement. Whereas specialists predominate in the United States by a margin of 2-1 (the reverse of the ratio in most other Western countries), managed care typically forced physicians to declare themselves either specialists or generalists, and it was easier and more lucrative to be a consultant rather than a jack-of-all-trades.
What began as a desire for administrative simplicity by health insurance carriers (and no doubt as a way to obtain care more cheaply, since specialists tend to use more resources) had the perverse effect of weakening primary care and contributing to a reduction in the work force. Patients were forced to change physicians without being entirely sure why. Some were dropped when their doctors decided to limit their practices to a specialty, but others with ongoing diseases had to find a different specialist when their doctor decided to register with a given hmo as a primary physician. Such decisions were, and continue to be, made specifically with each insurance carrier. Thus, where formerly the doctor filled both roles, a confusing matrix of practice limitations resulted. Sometimes physicians were in effect required to continue to do both jobs, but to be paid for only one.
The quest for price and volume efficiency by managed care has brought an increasing number of nurse practitioners and physician extenders into the role of "primary care providers." The three-way relationship between physicians, these non-physician providers of care, and patients is unusual. They are well-accepted by patients, and they help busy physicians. But they also create competition for physicians and probably lower their earnings to the degree that professionals with less expensive training can replace them. Though consumers surely appreciate a brake on fee increases, non-physician providers can't really offer the full range of services for which physicians are qualified. How this complicated relationship will work out over time is uncertain and not often discussed.
Another managed care anomaly is the assigning of a primary physician to all hmo patients. Traditionally, patients chose a physician on their own when they wished to. An entire popular literature developed in the 1970 s and 1980 s describing how to make that choice wisely. Patients who opted not to have a physician or who neglected to choose one often met their future primary physician upon their first need for care. It could have been for something as trivial as conjunctivitis or as serious as a myocardial infarction. (Both situations were common in my own experience in internal medicine and endocrinology.)
Alternatively, a clinic or an emergency room served the same function, but with the patient's loyalty attached to an institution rather than a particular physician. The distinction is not perfect; Kaiser Permanente patients often responded, when asked the name of their physician, "Kaiser," even when they had their own physician within the organization.
But being asked either to name a primary physician or to have one assigned is new. Doctors consequently become names arbitrarily printed on patients' insurance cards, a process that engenders little respect for the doctor. Furthermore, naming the primary physician as a "gatekeeper" whose approval is required by hmo s before patients can see a specialist suggests more of an obstacle than a caregiver. Personally, I have never encountered rudeness like I saw from hmo patients who came to see me because they were required to do so rather than because they wanted to. This is especially true when they had no interest beyond obtaining a referral slip to see a specialist whom they had already chosen themselves. It is difficult to know how to feel toward such patients and to function properly as a physician for them.
Blurred role definition affects internists in particular. For more than 50 years, internal medicine has struggled to define itself. The American Society of Internal Medicine, an organization created by practicing internists, coined the term "personal physician." But in reality, the internist was defined more by what he or she didn't do (no surgery, obstetrics, fracture-setting, or young children). A casualty of increasing fragmentation caused by the separation of medical sub-specialists into their own organizations, the asim merged with the American College of Physicians in 1998 .
The acp has also taken its turn at redefining the internist and in 2001 settled on "Doctors for Adults." Once again, it is hard to be sure what this means, because all other specialists except pediatricians also treat adults. And it still isn't clear how the internist can be involved in general medicine and still be a specialist. This is probably a legacy from pre-World War ii days when internists were often called "diagnosticians." The highly intelligent and knowledgeable medical sleuths of the past (and also recent years) now have to compete with more precise diagnostic tests such as ct , pet , and mri scanners -- to their disadvantage.
Nevertheless, the brilliant physicians who held forth in what doctors refer to as "The Days of the Giants" are sorely missed. No matter how precise our new machines are, they still lack perspective and the human dimension that were the hallmarks of the great physicians of the past. These skills are hard to define, harder to measure, and even harder to compensate in an age in which computers and statistic-generation seem to dominate policy. Perhaps this contributes to their apparent shortage nowadays.
I never could bring myself to display the wall chart that the acp created to make the meaning of "internist" clearer. "Anatomy of an Internist" portrays a sad, elderly female face atop a skeleton, surrounded by images of half a dozen internal organs and descriptions of 13 internal medicine sub-specialties. The composite effect is neither uplifting nor accessible. Though internal medicine is the largest primary care specialty in the United States, internists are still sometimes confused with interns -- doctors in the earliest phase of their hospital training.
Physicians and hospitalists
I nternal medicine arose at a time when general practitioners had only one year of training after medical school. The requirement that all physicians take a three-year internal medicine residency following a one-year internship contributed greatly to increasing the quality of medical care. And internal medicine was an integral part of the march of modern medicine into even the smallest towns in the years after World War ii -- something that many Americans take for granted, but which is hardly standard around the world.
In 1968 , traditional general practice was significantly upgraded when the American Academy of Family Physicians established its own three-year residency program plus a requirement of recertification every six years after entry into practice. The organization then embarked on a highly successful advertising campaign to market the new family practitioner. The appeal of the old general practitioner was brought up to date with the assurance of better and continuing scientific training.
The subsequent years have seen a steady convergence between internal medicine and family practice, particularly in urban and suburban areas. In more remote places, one is still able to find general internists who insert cardiac pacemakers and pass endoscopes into the stomach and beyond, functions that are performed in more populous areas by cardiologists and gastroenterologists. Rural family practitioners may do more surgery and orthopedics than their urban and suburban counterparts. In addition, pediatricians give primary care to children, and obstetrician-gynecologists frequently extend their focus on women's health to include other primary care services for women of childbearing age and older.
All these nuances are confusing to patients, and they continue to evolve. One unique feature of American medicine -- patient care by the same personal physician both in the office and in the hospital -- is slowly disappearing. New residency programs are turning out "hospitalists," and both private and community hospitals are seeking to employ them. These 7,000 to 8,000 physicians treat only hospital in-patients, and more than 80 percent have training in internal medicine. A few primary physicians who are tired of the pressures of running office practices also become hospitalists.
Primary physicians who remain in practice, but who believe they can no longer afford the inefficiency of working both in the office and in the hospital, are voluntarily turning regular patients over to hospitalists. This is especially prevalent in areas highly penetrated by managed care, where the economic pressures on physicians are greatest. Furthermore, some hospitals make such transfers mandatory. Hospitalists do tend to get patients out of the hospital sooner and to save money for the hospital. (This happens because Medicare and many hmo contracts pay a fixed amount for each diagnosis treated regardless of the length of patient stay.) Given present trends, having one's own doctor in attendance during a serious illness may become as much a luxury in the United States as it is in Europe, where physicians tend to work either in the hospital as specialists or in outpatient clinics and offices as generalists.
San Mateo County, California, is one place where portents of the future may be seen. Restructuring of health care is proceeding slowly but steadily in response to the economic pressures of managed care and the top-tier cost of living. There is a trend toward bigness. Mills-Peninsula Hospital in the northern part of the county has affiliated with Sutter Health, a network of more than two dozen northern California hospitals and other health facilities. The large multi-specialty Palo Alto Medical Clinic has also joined the network, presumably seeking both greater market share and a better bargaining position with large insurance carriers. "Bulking up" is being replicated elsewhere in the country.
Primary care is a necessary, but not dominant, activity in the health care institutions in San Mateo County. Greater size and resources and the promotion of state-of-the-art specialty care are important in competing with both the centralized Kaiser Permanente managed care system and university-based Stanford Medical Center. Primary care tends to get swept along, but there are intriguing eddies of smallness around the edges of growing bigness. Small office-based primary care practices stubbornly persist in the face of the high cost of regulatory compliance, office administration, and insurance, with only limited ability to adjust fees upward to offset rising expenses. A handful of physicians are even leaving the large institutions and setting up their own practices, desiring more influence over how they provide care and a more personal and less bureaucratic relationship with patients. (Kaiser Permanente has recognized this phenomenon and in response has embellished its amenities while putting an emphasis on patients building a relationship with the same physician rather than repeatedly using drop-in clinics.)
Many private physicians have begun to abandon the lowest-paying managed care contracts with insurers. This involves not only hmo s, where primary physicians are often paid a fixed monthly fee to care for their patients called "capitation," but also the Preferred Provider Organizations ( ppo s) that are fee discounters. So far, there has been little disaffection with Medicare, except for that portion which has fallen under the hmo umbrella and in high-fee areas with little managed care. A small number of primary physicians have established "boutique" (sometimes called "concierge") practices. These doctors promise ready access and more personal service in exchange for complete elimination of contracted third-party payment. Clients either pay a monthly retainer fee or make other arrangements based on the services they receive. Other physicians accept insurance as partial payment.
It is not simple to gather information on how these different arrangements, which appear to coexist uneasily, work in practice. I encountered considerable concern with being quoted and offending competitors, especially when now-independent physicians had formerly been members of institutional staffs. Even considering that doctors are generally very busy and unprepared to be observed in action, the institutional bureaucracies I approached were lackluster in their cooperation. Thus, learning what to expect when trying a new style of primary care practice remains, at least in my own experience, a matter of obtaining information by word of mouth -- possibly from advertising, but also by trial and error. Ironically, this is very far from the collusion that is often attributed to "the medical establishment."
The trends that are fragmenting the delivery of medical care outside integrated large clinics are increasing the professional isolation of primary physicians. Not going to the hospital to care for patients also means not meeting new physicians in the community, not catching up on local professional matters, and not buttonholing colleagues for the curbstone consultations that contribute to patient care without cost or requiring them to make an appointment. Isolation, in addition to the continuous pressure to do more, may well be a contributor to the burnout and declining morale reported among primary physicians.
Voicemail is a new kind of isolation that is familiar to non-doctors but has had a special impact on primary care. Voicemail frequently greets physician calls to other doctors or even the hospital laboratory. One physician who experienced this indignity once too often, orthopedist Ned Grove, avows, "Voicemail has killed civilization." He has a point. Too many people consider it demeaning to pick up the phone directly. But not doing so makes callers waste an enormous amount of time. For doctors under constant time pressure and for whom information and communication are essential to their work, voicemail can be especially frustrating. So too with being kept on hold. Grove found it quicker to locate and talk with a physician in New Zealand than to reach a doctor across the street.
Planned unavailability debases our lives. Patients may be surprised to learn that it may be as hard for doctors to find some doctors as it is for them. In addition, pharmacists may be too busy "counseling a patient" when physicians call with a prescription. Nurses no longer come to the bedside to jointly attend patients on rounds, and nursing home staff often don't know the patient we have come to see -- and often don't seem to care. Altogether, the effect on the primary physician, who depends on so many other people, is one of being left to do a tough job with nobody to help.
Perhaps the most irritating events are 4:00 and 5:00 am telephone calls from the nursing home informing the no-longer-sleeping physician that a patient has slipped to the floor but shows no signs of injury -- in other words, calls that are inconsiderate and pointless, other than to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement of California law that the doctor be contacted for any potential "injury" at any hour. These encounters are particularly alienating because yielding to the temptation to respond other than by saying "thank you" would unleash feelings that would prevent any chance of falling asleep again.
I dwell upon these details because they convey a flavor that could not be appreciated otherwise. It was not always thus. The past four decades have seen a transformation from a cooperative to an adversarial set of relationships in health care. According to health policy scholar Deborah Stone, insurance carriers, using financial carrots and sticks, blatantly manipulate physicians in order to reduce their own financial liability and to mold physician behavior. Until the late 1970 s, carriers would call physicians' offices to get missing information in order to pay insurance claims more quickly. Employers prized prompt and pleasant servicing of their employees' claims and might intercede with the insurer when there was a problem. Any such assistance would be surprising today.
Rising financial pressures
P robably the greatest factor to affect the availability, character, and quality of primary care will be the health benefit reform measures that Congress adopts in coming years. The wrangling over the $ 400 billion Medicare outpatient drug benefit of 2003 is illustrative. Intense lobbying by drug manufacturers has won a Medicare payment increase for more than 100 drugs used in hospital outpatient procedures while Medicare physician fees were scheduled to decrease by 4.2 percent in 2004 . A failure to keep up with rising practice expenses, now subject to political horse-trading, will disproportionately affect primary care. That is because its many low-dollar services still require expensive administration and are provided at the physician's own expense in the office rather than at the hospital.
Health care is also becoming something of a zero-sum game in which a benefit obtained here results in a loss somewhere else. In this, both patients and physicians are impinged upon. The technique of rationing expensive drug use through inconvenience, which has been perfected by managed care, is certain to extend to any Medicare drug benefit. Prior approvals, limitations, and queries over clinical justification are inevitable. Farsighted physicians, while happy that their patients stand to obtain help with drug bills, shudder at the daunting task of complying with the expected regulations. Once again, primary care will be hit the hardest because of the large number of prescriptions and wide variety of medications associated with primary care practice. As the lowest earners among physicians, and without access to capital for expensive technology and extra staff, this may even affect willingness to see Medicare patients.
Given rapidly rising health costs and the larger share of those costs that employers are transferring to employees in the form of higher deductibles and co-payments, the financial pressures facing physicians are certain to evoke more than the usual amount of skepticism. Protecting physician incomes is not a high priority for most people. Indeed, a Kaiser Family Foundation telephone poll found widespread concern over the cost and quality of health care over the next six months -- to a degree that exceeded fear of losing a job, losing money in the stock market, or becoming the victim of a terrorist attack.
Relevant details are therefore in order. Operating a primary care office is estimated to cost between $ 150 and $ 200 per hour per physician. In my own practice, with very careful attention to expenditures, I could not get below those numbers. Primary physician overhead -- the amount that must be collected to cover professional expenses -- has gone from one-third to two-thirds of revenue in the past two decades. The meter ticking -- the appetite of the office for staff, salaries, insurance, supplies, licenses, and the like -- whether I was there or not made me reluctant to attend medical meetings because there would be no revenue to offset expenses. My own net income fell from what seemed to be a good living in return for hard work to too little for even harder work. These sentiments are typical of physicians in high managed care areas, especially the West Coast and parts of the East Coast as well as scattered enclaves elsewhere.
Physicians leaving practice report amazement at the sense of release they experience. Typically, they say that they loved seeing patients but not practicing medicine. Volunteer clinics have consequently become popular with retired physicians -- whenever malpractice insurance can be provided to protect them. The physicians of Samaritan House in San Mateo, California, for example, are enthusiastic about treating patients who are too poor to afford regular care but too well-off to qualify for Medicaid. Working only part-time, they seem to find medicine a wonderful profession now that they are no longer trying to earn a living in practice.
Of course, unconcern with income is not a solid foundation for the future. The days of noblesse oblige and indifference to income that occurred when wealthy families supported their sons during long years of training and the early years in practice (or longer) are unlikely to return. Great Society thinking reduced charity medical care to a near-sin because it was thought to be demeaning to the poor. Consequently, a single payment scale was created for Medicare and Medicaid patients, and it was based on "usual, customary, and reasonable fees," a sum that was accepted by most physicians and private insurers.
Ultimately, this became unaffordable for the Mediplans. Fees were ratcheted down, and all pretense of keeping up with market rates ended during the Nixon administration with the imposition of a fee freeze. After 1991 , Medicare actually reduced physician fees four times, causing them to fall 14 percent below practice cost inflation. Commercial insurers found it advantageous to follow suit and, with both the private and governmental insurance sectors cutting back to arbitrary take-it-or-leave-it fee schedules, American medicine fell under the sway of third-party payers. No longer were doctors free to exploit paying patients. But neither did medicine remain a free and liberal profession. With constant haggling over fees and details of coverage, the sense of participating in a noble enterprise was clearly under assault. Altruism in primary care became especially difficult to maintain because primary care is not a matter of isolated selfless gestures but consists, rather, of repeated contacts with the same patients. One may donate an operation, which is complete once it is done, but a free visit to diagnose diabetes is of less benefit to the patient unless it includes lengthy follow-up.
The moral dimension
T here is a moral dimension here that has received insufficient attention in the mechanistic analyses that create deep gulfs between doctors and non-doctors. Commentators often portray medicine as a monopolistic system in which the American Medical Association deliberately used the report of Abraham Flexner in 1910 to close quack medical schools in order to limit the supply of physicians. Supposedly, this was an attempt to control the market and eliminate competitors exclusively for financial gain, and nothing has changed since then. Indeed, Milton Friedman has spoken of abolishing professional licensure in order to enhance competition. There is evidence to support these positions. Medical Economics income surveys showed that between 1930 and 1980 physicians increased their constant-dollar income enough to move collectively from the lower-middle into the upper-middle class.
Nevertheless, this physician recalls that in the 1960 s and 70 s, physicians who earned high salaries were not highly respected by their peers. Star surgeons and "society doctors" were not the objects of envy and emulation that celebrities have become today. In fact, there was something slightly disreputable about making too much money. A conscientious surgeon told me at the time, "A good doctor worries about his patients." The physicians I worked with in a suburban practice near San Francisco were cautious in raising prices and generally prized their reputations for professional excellence. Nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators, and the rank-and-file medical assistants and clerical personnel who staffed our clinics, hospitals, and offices mirrored this attitude. Self-interest was always present, but it did not run rampant.
The 1980 s introduced business into medicine. Cost-effectiveness and a "businesslike approach" were newly deemed appropriate, even essential, to health care. New financing schemes such as hmo s and ppo s combined with utilization review and other management tools to enhance productivity and control costs. Hospital administrators became executive vice presidents. Physicians formed new organizations to meet the new era, and doctors became their chief executive officers. Contracting for access to groups of patients replaced unorganized word-of-mouth referrals.
This legacy continues, and it has created severe strains within medicine. The business ethic and the medical ethic coexist most uncomfortably. Real-world financial considerations do allow the more businesslike actors in health care to abuse those who are less businesslike. The necessary delicate balance between humanism and rational economic behavior has yet to be achieved. I say this with full awareness that medicine was never totally blind to business considerations, nor were physicians saints. But joining management was not the road to professional success that it has become.
Moreover, patients sense that something is very wrong. Physicians are supposed to contract with insurers, whose job it is to enroll them into networks for the lowest price they will accept either individually or through organizations that evaluate the contracts on their behalf. Naturally, physicians are not happy with this arrangement, but in high managed care areas, few physicians can function entirely outside the prevailing structure. The initial idea was for physicians to drop their prices in exchange for an increased volume of patients attracted by the lower prices. In order to determine true market rates for reimbursement, however, physicians must reject contracts that they think are too onerous while insurers continuously test the market with lowball offers until it becomes hard to find takers. Patients benefit from the resulting lower prices, provided the prices are not so low that they drive the doctors away and restrict the availability of services. It's all gotten very complex. (So complex that a Harvard game theorist visiting the Hoover Institution told me there are too many variables to even try to model the process.)
In some ways, contracting for physician services resembles a labor negotiation, in which the doctors play the role of labor, but there is a crucial difference. Physicians who drop a contract drop the network connection they have with all the patients in that plan. It's an unintended consequence, but total loyalty to patients now means accepting any contract that's offered no matter how bad or unaffordable it is. Patients who lose their doctors -- or who lose the ability to see them for the most favorable "network" prices -- are not happy; they, or the news media acting on their behalf, may become abusive when this happens. In one instance, the Oregonian ran a front-page Sunday feature about Oregon doctors who drop out of hmo contracts. The newspaper accused these doctors of abandoning their patients. As one physician put it, "The concept that the docs did not leave the patients, they left the insurance . . . just didn't register." The option of continuing to see the same physician out of network for a higher fee was not promoted as an acceptable alternative.
This kind of relationship-destroying confrontation is most significant for primary care. Losing frontline doctors, who are patients' entry point into the health system, is an especially unwelcome surprise. Half of all outpatient visits are made to the one-third of doctors who practice primary care, according to the National Ambulatory Care Survey. When specialists decide not to renew contracts, fewer patients are immediately affected. Consequently, primary physicians must be prepared to confront significant anger when they leave health plans. It is a far cry from turning down a shipment of mattresses because of a price disagreement. The fiduciary relationship distorts the underlying economics.
Is the picture as uniformly bleak as I have painted it? Not entirely. The majority of new physicians opt for employment rather than establishing their own independent practices. This shields them from many of the difficulties facing medical practice today. And while medical school enrollment is dropping, there is no overall shortage of physicians or of qualified applicants to medical school so far.
Still, primary care does not repay the time and money invested in training in comparison to careers in law or architecture, and this is expected to impact future manpower. The Martin Fletcher 2003 Survey shows that a family physician can expect to earn from a low of $ 130,000 to an average of $ 155,000 . The corresponding figures for internists are $ 140,000 to $ 179,000 (though the latter numbers are inflated by the inclusion of some higher-paid medical specialists). Nevertheless, internist compensation in large medical groups fell by 2 percent in 2002 , and median pediatrician income dropped by 4 percent. Specialty training remains a good investment, however, and physicians, as a group, remain relatively high earners.
The bloom is off the rose for primary physicians in terms of prestige as managers of managed care services. While not eliminating primary physicians as "gatekeepers" whose approval is needed for hmo referrals to specialists, public backlash against the constraints imposed did reduce their prestige. At the same time, the gap in earnings between primary and specialty physicians has widened from 30 percent 40 years ago to more than double in many cases now. Fletcher reports average anesthesiology income at $ 282,000 . Average cardiology compensation is $ 325,000 , and orthopedic surgeons earn $ 387,000 . These discrepancies reinforce a long-held belief that simply seeing patients, the principal activity of primary physicians, does not pay for itself. Procedures and operations, whether low- or high-tech, are far more rewarding. This has been called the "cognitive-procedural" differential, and it has become more acute as the ready availability of medical information in the media and on the internet cheapens the value of medical advice, typically the purview of the primary physician, and enhances the relative value of "doing things."
In areas where there is a relative shortage of physicians, incentive bonuses and income guarantees have long been offered. Now, the same is true in places where managed care has made medical practice less desirable than elsewhere. Specialists are the most sought after and usually command the largest sums. However, primary care physicians are also being offered monetary inducements in the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the national survey results, general internists can expect offers of only about $ 80,000 to join private practices in San Francisco. This contrasts with $ 70,000 to $ 90,000 for physician assistants and $ 95,000 or more for beginning pharmacists. Hospitals and health systems in the surrounding communities offer better opportunities. However, not all primary physicians receive the support they request, and they then face a real struggle to establish themselves. Supply, demand, and political factors presumably make the difference.
Declining competition
I t is not clear that lower earnings are the principal problem in the falling popularity of primary care, particularly of internal medicine. Incomes for generalists have always been lower than incomes for specialists. In the early days of internal medicine, however, internists served as consultants for complex cases, gaining a little in income but much more in status as compared with family practitioners. More recently, various specialists have taken over most of the consultations, and the prestige of the internist has fallen along with earnings. To a lesser extent, the same has happened to pediatricians.
In my own practice, income fell 40 percent in the past five years (which is not unusual in the area in which I work), but this actually troubled me less than the fact that overhead has progressively risen to nearly two-thirds of earned income. Like high taxes, this leads to a sense of working for everyone but oneself. It also takes hard work to pay for $ 20,000 or more monthly in office expenses. Furthermore, financial pressures make other problems less tolerable. Conversations with colleagues from around the country and the correspondence sections of medical magazines suggest that this is more the rule than the exception.
Managed care has particularly hampered primary physicians by sharply curtailing internal subsidization. Traditionally, when an emergency room in the hospital, for example, was losing money, that loss might be made up in the laboratory. Something similar occurred with physicians. Extra time for complicated patients, time in the library and for other continuing education, care given at inconvenient times as well as to non-paying patients -- all were subsidized by more lucrative activities such as comprehensive examinations (annual physicals) and diagnostic tests. If the mix came out right, the internist was satisfied.
Currently, insurers and government seek the lowest price for every service. There have been drastic cuts of two-thirds or more for electrocardiograms, breathing and hearing tests, and blood and urine analysis. This is the supermarket equivalent of putting every item on sale at the same time -- highly unusual and probably unsustainable. Moreover, hmo s and some ppo s restrict physicians from performing any lab work (and sometimes other diagnostic testing) on patients they cover. Contracts are made with outside facilities based on competitive bidding. This lowers costs to the health plan, but it delays treatment and is inconvenient for patients as well as time-consuming and costly for physicians. In general, doctors do not have the option of either submitting bids of their own or offering to accept the negotiated rates paid to outside facilities.
Healthy medical competition in primary care has diminished as the opportunity to build better mousetraps has been seized by insurers. There is a reduced ability to find better ways to provide ordinary services and, instead, a temptation to add costly high-tech substitutes in the form of more complex diagnostic procedures to preserve revenue in the face of rising expenses. It also seems as if the locus of competition has shifted from physicians to insurance companies. Formerly, patients chose doctors based on availability, reputation, professional manner, and the amenities of their offices. Now insurance carriers exert considerable control over the provision of care. Lists of network physicians limit choice. Additions and subtractions are frequent. So are changes in insurers by employers, again changing the composition of lists of available physicians. Consequently, many patients choose their personal physicians at random from lists. In response, physicians feel less attachment to patients.
Insurers are attempting to counter this by keeping scorecards on doctors' performance in getting their patients to comply with accepted clinical guidelines. Sometimes, patient satisfaction is also monitored. But physicians resent being judged by computers and personnel with less understanding of medicine than their peers. The trivial (e.g., 5 percent) performance bonuses being offered by some carriers are as likely to offend as please the physicians who receive them. And given their history of dubious financial tactics in contracting with physicians, there is little trust that such "quality-enhancing" programs will be more than a shell game in which money is taken away from some doctors and given to others, sometimes unfairly.
As professional freedom and the confusion of dealing with the changing requirements of many insurance companies continue, there has been a role reversal between small-office and large-clinic physicians. Doctors in the Kaiser Permanente system sometimes chafed under the restrictions imposed by large group practice. Private physicians, in contrast, felt free because they set their own office policies. Now Permanente physicians have to deal with only one set of restrictions -- their own -- while community physicians must deal with as many restrictions as there are insurers with whom they contract. A survey of 1,000 physicians conducted by Stanford University and the San Mateo County Medical Association showed that the vast majority of doctors in the county are unhappy (independent of income considerations), but that Permanente physicians were less unhappy than physicians in private offices.
If physician individualism is now being battered, independent primary care physicians are at a special disadvantage in having to deal with many different taskmasters while still trying to please patients. Time and money constraints have dramatically degraded the ability to cope and the quality of professional life. Larger organizations have the advantage of being able to spread the cost of complex software and hardware and technical experts over a larger base. They can also do their own internal subsidization to keep the supply of internists, family practitioners, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants in balance with the corps of specialists. Thus, Kaiser Permanente now has a competitive edge by offering new primary physicians higher salaries than surrounding private practitioners can afford to pay their new associates. This is the reverse of the historic situation. It is also telling that the very large Veterans Administration and Kaiser Permanente systems are currently in the forefront of adopting the latest information technology.
Until now, Americans have had a wide selection of practice styles to choose from. Small, independent offices have created the image of the family doctor. Yet the powerful forces of managed care are predicted to spread further because the economic logic appeals to employers, who fund most non-governmental care. They can use insurance carriers (who must do their bidding or ultimately lose the employers' business) to alter physician behavior and lower costs. Individual practices and small partnerships are endangered species in this conflict, and where the conflict is intense, their number is shrinking. California, a bellwether state in social and economic trends, has been a leader in adopting managed care and is consequently a leader in experiencing the fallout from such "private regulation" of health care.
Lately, insurers have trimmed the heavy-handed and labyrinthine procedural controls that have saved money but interfered with care and infuriated patients. Instead, restricting utilization is being replaced by increasing the patient's share of the cost of care. Higher annual deductibles of $ 1,000 or more (triple the national average) and co-payments of $ 35 to $ 40 for office visits are becoming common. In addition, the availability of traditional "indemnity" coverage, based on what the physician actually charges rather than what the carrier chooses to pay, is shrinking rapidly. This move away from inflationary first-dollar coverage leaves patients surprised by unaccustomed financial liability despite controls on physician fees.
The effect on primary and specialist physicians is subtler. Specialists continue to find their expensive services largely covered by major medical insurance. This accords well with consumers' desire to be protected against the rapidly rising costs of catastrophic medical events. In contrast, primary care is being rendered, to a greater extent, in the window of deductibles and co-pays, leading primary physicians to seek an increased proportion of reimbursement from the patient rather than the insurer. The resulting (usually non-interest-bearing) bills must compete with expensive credit card debt for payment priority and will therefore tend to go to the bottom of the pile. Depending on how far this trend continues, the solvency of primary care will be further undermined.
This prospect leads some physician-managers to predict a coming split in American medicine. Frustrated primary physicians may well abandon the last vestiges of independence and join together with non-physicians and activist academic physicians in promoting single-payer national health insurance. (At present, there are only a few thousand physicians committed to this change.) Specialists will have no such compelling motivation. Neither will large health systems like Kaiser Permanente or the Mayo Clinic and other well-known institutional practices that have long thrived by charting their own destiny. It is telling that once go-it-alone Kaiser Permanente, the institution upon which the original hmo Act of 1973 was modeled, now actively promotes participation by its physicians in organized medicine because it sees its future linked to the viability of private health care alternatives.
Looking forward
T here seems little likelihood of passage of national health legislation now, but that could change. In that event, the freedom to innovate and the variety of health care choices that have been available to American consumers would be likely to diminish substantially.
Proponents claim that increased efficiencies will generate sufficient funds to cover the uninsured and that this alone justifies the adoption of a single-payer model of health care for the United States. National health insurance might serve to resurrect traditional primary care, restoring long-term relationships and decreasing the many complexities that bedevil current practice. But even that is far from certain. It would make sense, for example, to centralize preventive medicine such as mammography for breast cancer and colonoscopy for colon cancer. The same is true for immunizations. Reminders and follow-up are also done more efficiently in large numbers. Primary physicians could then focus on the treatment of illness and become more involved in the promotion rather than the delivery of preventive services. On the other hand, similar centralization of preventive services is also possible without national health insurance. For instance, Blue Cross has opened centers for periodic screening laboratory tests, and Aetna has sent out cards for checking the stools of new patients for occult blood. Insurers already keep track of the frequency of preventive services. There might be significant economies of scale in such ventures, but at the risk of loss of convenience for patients and a reduction in privacy.
Replacing (or resurrecting) the traditional internist's role as the coordinating physician for the care of patients with complex illnesses is also problematic. Hospitalists have had only limited success in fulfilling this need because they do not know the patients. If internists shun the hospital as unaffordable, then perhaps some hospitalists will become consultants who are hospital-based and who may even begin to see ambulatory patients in clinics. Internal medicine might then bifurcate into consultant and non-consultant branches. However this goes, some type of primary physician will remain essential to counterbalance specialists' inclination to perform more specialty care without necessarily considering the global needs of the patient. The cost of neglecting this aspect of the total picture could be very high.
Non-physicians as providers of primary care are sure to increase in number and in the scope of services that state governments, which license them, will permit them to offer. Physician assistants, who usually receive two to two and a half years of training after completing college, and nurse practitioners, who begin with a degree in nursing and then usually take an additional nine months to two years, should flourish regardless of how health care is financed. Patient acceptance and the allure of lower prices and more time during visits will remain attractive in any event. Expansion of an already existing movement to practice independently will ultimately lead to a turf war between physicians and non-physician providers.
While there is every likelihood that patients without chronic illnesses will receive more of their primary care from non-physicians, patients with chronic illnesses may fare somewhat differently. This is because the success of specialty care for ongoing medical problems is partly dependent on the quality of ancillary primary care. Should able general internists become less available or less interested in handling complex cases, specialists may have to return to their traditional role as the principal physicians for patients whose underlying chronic disease is within their purview.
There are suggestions of movement in these directions for both types of patients. First, some California medical groups already give independent billing to nurse practitioners as primary care providers alongside primary care physicians. Presumably, they will address the less complicated patients. Second, specialists are complaining that under managed care, many of their patients hardly ever see their primary physicians, whom they may not even know.
As specialists have, by default, consequently become principal physicians to patients with chronic illnesses, some have hired nurse practitioners and physician assistants to do something that comes close to primary care under their supervision. It would not be much of a leap for a group of specialists to go on to hire primary physicians to provide even more extended care within their own practices. The creation of integrated groups within medical specialty practices would facilitate professional synergy and enhance the overall quality of care. Patients would find care to be more convenient and better coordinated.
Entrapment upon entrapment
U nless national health insurance is adopted with a monolithic approach to care, there will be a need for continuing innovation to assure the availability of a variety of styles and prices in medical practice and to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions. Two decades ago, I wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the value of the nearby Kaiser Permanente hospital and clinic to me and the value of private practitioners, including me, to Kaiser Permanente as competitors. Both offered slightly different but overlapping products and served slightly different but overlapping clienteles. Our healthy competition kept either option from being the only game in town, and the public benefited as we competed on price and service.
Since that time, deliberate obstacles to free-market competition in medicine have been imposed. It is not the "medical establishment" that is creating them. Given the vehement support for national health insurance by some members of Congress, of whom Senator Ted Kennedy is most prominent, and a similar attitude among senior Medicare officials over the years, there is reason to believe that a succession of measures adopted have more than one goal. Regulatory hamstringing of private practice, while ostensibly aimed at protecting the public, also undermines rather than facilitates healthy growth of the existing system, thereby paving the way for national health insurance.
In 1981 , for example, Congress authorized civil monetary penalties ( cmp s) for Medicare fraud and abuse. Since then, according to a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services bulletin, "Congress has dramatically increased both the number and types of circumstances under which cmp s may be imposed." The secretary of health and human services has wide discretion to impose additional assessments to the mandated fines and to exclude offending physicians from participation in the Medicare program for significant periods of time.
The fines are massive: $ 10,000 per item or service in noncompliance and up to three times that amount for some violations. Aggregating many small items makes the fines potentially hundreds or thousands of times greater than the charges for the disputed services and far greater than penalties for nonmedical infractions. Physicians often feel singled out for special punishment, especially since some of the 35 reasons for prosecution involve matters of interpretation on which reasonable people may differ.
Few people are aware that their own civil liberties are also at issue. Currently, the circumstances are limited, but the courts have upheld the right of Medicare to restrict services, even if beneficial to the recipient, if there is a general advantage in doing so. So, based on federal law, a Medicare patient who requests an assistant surgeon during a cataract operation is participating in an illegal act, even if he is willing to pay out of pocket for the service. Medicare has a blanket prohibition against payments to assistant cataract surgeons (Section 1842 (k)), and the patient who desires the extra security of another person in attendance is simply out of luck. The request would be perfectly legal one day before age 65 , but once one is on Medicare that right is lost -- unless, that is, the patient is willing to give up all other Medicare benefits, a truly grisly penalty for noncompliance.
The physician version of this conundrum is deciding to "opt out" of Medicare. This involves a complex and hazardous procedure in which the physician agrees to exclusion from the Medicare program for no less than two years. Only then is he or she free to contract with patients, formally or informally, for services that are mutually agreed on but may not fit the web of Medicare criteria as spelled out in 125,000 pages of regulations.
A physician seeking such freedom, perhaps in order to charge more than Medicare allows, can expect close monitoring and severe punishment for infractions. But the same is true when independent-minded physicians wish to charge less than Medicare would pay and pass on the administrative savings to their patients. One doctor in the latter category points out the consequences of standing apart. Having voluntarily excluded himself, neither he nor his patients can submit bills to Medicare for his services, even if only to partially reimburse the patient. In addition, the doctor is not allowed to work for anyone who does any business with Medicare. Thus, he cannot legally help out in the emergency room of the nearby hospital to relieve a severe shortage of er doctors, as he would like, even though he has earned board certification in internal medicine and emergency medicine. Opting out makes a doctor virtually unemployable.
And as if that were not enough, doctors must remember to "re-opt out" every two years. Failure to do so automatically and involuntarily re-enrolls them in the Medicare program, subject to all its restrictions and sanctions. Forgetting to re-opt out criminalizes all the services the physician has billed to his willing patients thereafter. As usual with Medicare violations, physicians are subject to conviction without any need for the government to prove criminal intent. The fines collected are being used to hire more investigators: entrapment upon entrapment upon entrapment.
The creeping control of Medicare has found its latest expression in new proposals to criminalize charging Medicare more than the lowest price paid by anyone else. This would be added to current criminal penalties for providing free care to anyone covered by Medicare without adjusting downward what is charged for all other patients (on the grounds that any free care necessarily lowers the doctor's composite "real" fee and Medicare should therefore share in the "reduced rates" and pay other bills on a discounted basis). The inability to help a colleague or a relative without invoking legal jeopardy is so bizarre that it serves as the basis for considerable physician paranoia in dealing with Medicare.
The fetters placed on physicians who wish to offer services that are legal but who cannot escape the ever-constricting regulatory snare -- which is both private and public -- also impact patients. The restrictions decrease physicians' efficiency and sap their energy, quite beyond the awareness of patients, and quietly invite eventual surrender to total control. It is intriguing that civil libertarians do not appear to consider the compromising of physician rights to be of any concern or any threat to the civil liberties of others. It is also noteworthy that socialized medicine in multiple European countries permits private alternatives to national health systems to thrive side by side. This is quite unlike the situation in the United States, where Medicare exerts significant control over nearly all citizens over age 65 and virtually all patients with renal failure, the single disease state-covered by Medicare at all ages.
Seniors who are considering boutique care as a way to purchase primary care services that Medicare restricts may also fall into a regulatory trap. Representative Henry Waxman has asked for an investigation into the legality of providing increasingly popular boutique care to Medicare-covered patients, specifically with regard to violations of the False Claims Act. No clear guidelines have emerged after administrative review and a commentary by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. The legal complexities are exploding, and the long list of "questionable" or "dubious" services may well have a chilling effect on their availability. Medicare has done a great deal of good for the elderly. However, its regulatory history is a cautionary tale for what can be expected from any further extension of federal control over health care.
Even so, the struggle to integrate increasingly potent and costly scientific advances into affordable medical care is a worldwide problem. As more people become aware of the dilemmas that physicians face, the aggressive consumerism of recent years appears to be abating and is far less strident, but the view from the Capitol has not evolved apace. Medicine remains the focal point for a long list of societal conflicts.
Medicine and the American character
L ooking back, it is easy to wax sentimental about a time when all these concerns were unimaginable. That period includes patients and physicians who could relate the medicine of television's Marcus Welby, M.D. to their own doctor-patient relationships. Faith and strong personal bonds, while once the essence of primary care, may no longer be appropriate to our own era, with all its sophistication and its powerful centrifugal forces.
One of the penalties of losing the innocence of a time when "doctor knows best" is the need for much broader participation in health care policy development without the comfort and security (no matter how illusory) of a paternal figure. To replace the all-knowing physician without succumbing to the siren songs of quick fixes and inflexible ideology will be no small task. The scientific and humanitarian traditions of medicine together with the uniquely entrepreneurial and compassionate American character offer a template that should guide us.
The first principle is pluralism. Imposed one-size-fits-all and one-fee-fits-all solutions are incompatible with the American tradition and will not work. Choice and diversity must be maintained if American medicine is to remain vibrant, creative, and attractive as a career.
Second, the regulatory and legal distortions that run so counter to the American "can-do" spirit must be reversed; oppression is never healthy. Charitable impulses, on the other hand, are healthy and should be encouraged rather than scrutinized as potential violations of trade laws that were never intended to deal with charity.
Third, economic distortions must be addressed. Too much of the health dollar is spent on paperwork. Too many list prices have been inflated to joust with managed care and Medicare and are no longer real -- unless they are billed to the uninsured, who are then grossly overcharged. Insurance carriers and governments also impose too many administrative costs on the providers of care.
Finally, space for both small business and big business within medicine must be preserved and encouraged. Information technology that will allow even the solo physician to cope with medical and insurance complexities can be used to accomplish this, but the high costs of creating and maintaining information systems must not be allowed to price individual physicians and small groups of physicians out of the market. New ways of financing medical practice must be found if we are to maintain the diversity of choice on which American patients have come to rely.
All of this will take inspired political leadership. Otherwise, we will continue to drift and to tinker. |
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Events like May Day are a temperature check for the collective hive mind of the left reflecting on the year behind them. Because it is a tradition that skates back more than a hundred years, it rarely stands out as the most pressing of days, mainly because it is part of a regular organizing cycle. Good years or bad losses, May Day comes on the same day.
In Portland, Oregon, it was the obvious confluences of forces, the ongoing revolt happening in Trump's America, that helped to ignite the substantial growth around its activities. How the Portland May Day Coalition planned for this year's event was largely based around the practical work of the groups involved, how it tied into the ongoing projects of the component organizations. The Portland Committee for the Human Rights in the Philippines (PCHRP) held an earlier event in the day along with the Brown Berets and Gabriella outlining the JustPeacePH project, supporting the peace talks currently happening between the Government Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the People's Democratic Government of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). They were then leading the anti-imperialist contingent in the following march, linking together the struggles against colonialism in the Global South and the increased victimization of Latinx immigrants from the Southern U.S. border and the long-standing history of workplace organizing that May Day signifies.
The Burgerville Workers Union was celebrating the anniversary of its break-out campaign, one that went public in multiple shops a year ago, bringing with it one of the most dynamic and persistent struggles seen from a direct union shop in the Pacific Northwest. The showing from organized labor was large, as it usually is, and there was a clear openness to the growing linkages between social movements as the possibility of nationwide Right-to-Work and the further erosion of state programs lends urgency to an already dire attack on working people.
You wouldn't hear about any of this, however, because what came next was a full-frontal assault on the long-planned event, its organizers, and their neighbors.
From the march of almost a thousand people through the streets of the Southwest Downtown district came the militarized invasion of hundreds of police, letting loose with explosive weaponry and laying siege on a crowd comprised of families, people with disabilities, and many raising their voices for the first time. From many photos from that afternoon it is hard to see what happened, a haze that filled the gap between skyscrapers from the canisters of "tear gas" that were fired with only seconds in between. When the police forcefully rushed the crowd, which had already formally dispersed, they began a frightful chase through the streets of the commercial and financial territories. It would be obtuse to point out that the narrative that the police offered, which began even before the actual force was felt as they took to Twitter to premeditate the media stories, was dishonest. Instead, it showed a clear set of priorities, ones that double back on several decades of crowd control, ones that had evolved to avoid the kind of escalation that was doubled down on here.
The Cop in Our Heads
In Mike King's recent treatise on the repression of Occupy Oakland, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland (Rutgers University Press, 2017), he reflects on the way the repressive police measures evolved nationally to the more complex web they have today. During the wave of confrontations starting the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the urban uprisings that rocked urban areas in the 1960s, police used heavy handed dispersal tactics that were aggressive to forcefully put down that unrest. While some would argue they are tame by today's standards, they were an outgrowth of the institutionalized white supremacy that was holding on for dear life. Starting in the 1970s, police entered a new phase acknowledging that the "brute force" strategy they were employing was only escalating and mobilizing increased opposition, and it began radicalizing a generation of those injured in street fights. They began systems of negotiation and compromise with protest movements, offering up permits for demonstrations. This concept relied on the negotiating power of the state, and a large majority of American social movements have been brought in on these agreements, usually accepting some limitations in exchange for less direct police repression. A permit is much easier than going through a mass crackdown on a simple street march, so why not?
The effect of this change was, by and large, for the police to transfer their authority of containment from the station to the protesters themselves, turning the organizations and leadership themselves into the acting agents of the state's boundaries. If protesters were given legal leeway, they would then police themselves, and it could even hold a few people in leadership roles accountable for the actions of participants. This can and does have the effect of turning many in a project against other elements, where those engaging in certain tactics are necessarily blamed for putting others at risk, all outlined in the structures of the permitting system. This created a structure that, when mixed with a moderated police presence, would both contain the social movements and make sure that the effective repression came without social backlash. As the years went on and the war on drugs, gangs, and poor people broadly took shape, the structure of police engagements increased volatility across the board, until now the police that surround broad-based political rallies look liked they are armed to "liberate" Fallujah.
Since centrist Democrat Ted Wheeler took the reigns of the Portland Mayor's office, he has made the decisive move to crack down on the growing discontent in the city. The election of Trump, the organized resistance to gentrification and displacement from housing organizations, and the reaction to ongoing police killings of black and brown "suspects" has led to a climate of resistance that is growing exponentially. This hit a fever pitch in the days after the election where thousands flooded the streets, blocking every major highway and shutting down businesses. The direct action taken by some protesters, amounting to broken windows and other property destruction, was not out of bounds for the city's history, nor was it maliciously interpersonal as the police department persisted. Nonetheless, the police, under oversight from the mayor's office, went after suspects aggressively, charging some with compounded multiple felonies in stacked cases that shocked even the most jaded activists. In one case, a protester is facing upwards of thirty-months in prison for some broken car and bank windows, using riot charges to compound the offense and turn it into a veritable "anarchist scare." In another, they tried to charge different broken windows as separate offenses so as to make the case eligible for a state statute that allows excessive sentencing if the acts of property destruction are seen as separate incidents.
Wheeler's actual approach seems to be done within an amnesia of institutional memory, the lack of a known history. "Little Beirut," as Portland was named in the 1990s by George H.W. Bush, has always had a long history of militant street protests and projects, from the Earth First! and ELF campaigns of the 1990s to the more recent Black Lives Matter insurgencies. For Wheeler to lean on the side of aggressive policing, especially in situations where the police appear as the clear instigators, he is acting without a clear understanding of the role of police in the escalation of confrontation. The police were not there to quell unrest, they were the foundations of that unrest, and their presence, violent victimization of protesters, and unwillingness to even own up to their own "let them police themselves" idea has ended the specter of the police as an institution of "public safety."
What they destroyed with their flash grenades was the police in the protester's head, not the willingness of protest movements to take the streets.
So what happened?
Twenty minutes into the march on its negotiated route, as they went down 2nd Ave, the police summarily announced that the "permit for this march has now been revoked." This mid-march revocation is a new concept for the city, one more step in the extra normality the events took. This decision was allegedly because a window at the Federal Courthouse had been cracked and some in the Black Bloc had thrown Pepsis at the riot cops that were encroaching on the route, a reference to the disastrous recent Pepsi ad with Caitlin Jenner and the "peace" brought by handing the police soda. Apparently, that doesn't work in real life.
While some will see even that as an escalation, it comes after the police honed in on the rally park beforehand, confiscating mundane objects like flag poles and surrounding march attendants, often destroying materials. The conception of the permitted march as one that would be free of police intervention seemed dashed quickly, so the impetus to follow the narrowing constraints was compromised.
Within a few minutes of the first notifications an order of dispersal came that, because of their position at the back of the march, only a few people could hear. Many of the families, younger children, people with disabilities and special needs, and others were towards the front. The first they heard of this dispersal was when flash grenades started indiscriminately flying into the crowd. Dozens flowed in violent bursts in the next few minutes as protest goers frantically tried to figure out just what was happening. Security volunteers were ushering people to safety, yet there seemed to be no safe spot as flash grenades were going off in every corner and there was literally no sidewalk area that people could crowd into in compliance. Legal observers from the ACLU tried to document this in flurried rushes, but as full tear gas canisters began flowing into the streets, there was mass confusion, especially as people were collapsing, struggling to breathe in the chemical cloud.
The response from the Black Bloc came in kind, with debris being lit on fire in the area between the cops and the protesters, the windows being busted out at a Target location, and a police SUV vandalized. The police chased protesters around the city, bum rushing crowds with dozens of officers in formation, attacking those that appeared the most vulnerable. Many noticed riot police prioritizing a houseless woman in the area, while others saw that anyone in marked attire, whether or not they were a part of the Black Bloc, was suspect. By the time many arrived back at the park where the opening rally was the police were in tow behind, declaring that this was "now officially a riot," and promising the use of projectile weaponry.
Unity Through Struggle
While there are often disagreements over tactics and strategy, the May Day Coalition immediately placed the blame on the police, both for instigating violence and propping up false allegations on their social media and PR outlets.
Today the Portland police chose to violently escalate a peaceful march. The people asserted their (lawful) right to be in the street and express solidarity with immigrants, with workers, with Indigenous sovereignty, and against capitalism. The Portland Police Bureau responded by
1) Forcibly removing the accessibility vehicle, which was present to allow those with mobility issues to participate and raise their voices
2) Fabricating stories about "Molotov cocktails" being thrown at them, which thousands of eyewitness reports will refute
3) Trying at every step of the way to force themselves into a crowd that very clearly did not want them there
4) Arbitrarily revoking the march permit and informing only the rear of the march, while the elderly, youth, and folks with mobility issues were at the front
There will be a lot of articles about "the march turning violent" but make no mistake, the PPB attacked a permitted march whose only goal was to keep moving along its planned route because some noisemakers and name-calling were enough of an excuse for them to use their large surplus of explosives and chemical weapons against those who had committed to rise, resist, and unite, against fascism and capitalism.
In general, the local media parroted the police as well as they could. There was minor vandalism of the KOIN news truck while KGW did their best to turn the event into a veritable "car chase," complete with their helicopter live-streaming the protest locations. The Portland Mercury , which leans a little to the left of the rest of the regional outlets, did a large spread of photos and videos, indicating that the police charged after very minor vandalism and even went after a press photographer. Even in their photos you can see protesters flung to the ground as twenty-five were arrested, reporters being screamed at to walk away from their posts.
After the arrests were made and the streets cleared, mayor Wheeler eventually made a public statement echoing the kind of liberal non-committal signaling that many "progressive" Oregon politicians are known for.
In Portland we respect peaceful protest, but we do not and cannot support acts of violence and vandalism. That's not political speech. That's crime... Last night was another chapter in a story that has become all too familiar in Portland: Protests that began peacefully but devolve quickly due to the actions of those whose only desire is to damage people and property.
This "tough on crime" rhetoric seems perfectly in line with the language of Trump's administration, and it could be simply that Wheeler does not want to deal with what will likely be several years of escalating conflict as the austerity and white supremacist machinations of the political state unfold. He thinks that by demonizing protesters, using extreme acts of violence, and shifting the narrative, he will be able to create a ghost of fear in the collective left, and turn them in the direction of moderate parades like the Women's March instead of the more militant formations. The police have followed up with broad requests for information on protesters, and will likely do what they have done in the past: post pictures of people they are suspecting for different activities to try and get the community to turn them in.
This is not, however, the historical legacy of the city, nor the pattern that the growing revolutionary spirit has had over the past decade. Instead, the truth is that this will not actually stop the organizations from participating in growing demonstrations, but instead show them that the middle ground provided by state actors offer little comfort. Long-term movement building and organizing is what will actually create a force capable of resisting the mission of Trump and the profiteers in Portland, and even these kind of momentary showings of force from the police are not going to scare off those who have committed to confronting this terror. As Trump attempts to rename this as Loyalty Day, and the Alt Right and white nationalists acted as the strong-arm of the police in many cities, the flung Pepsi cans seem to fade in importance.
On May 2nd, the organizers in PCHRP, the AAPRP, the Burgerville Workers Union , and all the other organizations and projects continued their work. No matter how the police and mayor's office intend on reframing this work, the projects themselves have a life that goes far beyond one repressed event. The question is if the state will make it a priority to put down these social movements as the administration continue to speed to the right, and how we will respond. This highlights why the movement against police violence is at the critical intersection of all other struggles, but also why we need to make this a collective fight with our arms firmly linked together. The revolutionaries of the city are more unified than they were before the event, the realities of repression has a way of firming up alliances in defiance. The opinions about the efficacy of the Black Bloc are diverse(and principled), but an understanding was forged clearly, and the sight of the Black Bloc defending protesters and acting with conscious unity has bridged a divide that, at times, seemed unresolvable. Many in the Bloc brought in large Black Widow props, owing to the defensive actions that the spiders take in mutual aid and lending to the language of direct action.
When the grenades landed, we were seen as one large mass, all dangerous (though people of color and other marginalized identities took on a special focus from state actors). Our fate is firmly in the hands of each other since, as has been the record, the only way we are to continue is if we find solidarity even in these moments of repression. If the state wants to instigate violence, then they will see our numbers grow, our resistance mount, and our spirit firm up into the vocalized rage. The next time will be larger, permit or no permit. |
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Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay revealed she's engaged to one of the show's contestants last night in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel .
The new season of The Bachelorette premiered last night on ABC, and the Bachelorette herself was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! just after the show aired.
Jimmy Kimmel Live on YouTube
According to the 31-year-old, this is the first time a Bachelor or Bachelorette has announced they are engaged to one of the show's contestants before the show premiered.
In the video, Kimmel asks, "Has anyone ever announced this before the show started?" Lindsay responded, No, no, but we joke and say this is a season of firsts. And I think they were like, 'You know what, you're so excited, you're glowing, just do it.'
According to Lindsay, the show finished filming 10 days ago, so she and her mystery fiance have been officially engaged for a little over a week.
They apparently had "a couple of days together" post-engagement, but then went their separate ways. And according to Bachelorette rules, they won't be reunited until the entirety of the season is finished airing.
Don't worry, I'm sure it's not this weird-ass doll that made an appearance on the premiere.
In case you missed it, Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell recently broke off their engagement , like most Bachelor couples do.
Knowing that, Kimmel said, "So you haven't had a chance to reconnect, and then break up, and then be on the cover of US Weekly?"
She laughed and responded with, "I don't plan on a breakup."
Let's hope this season really is a "season of firsts" like Lindsay says, and they'll actually end up getting married and not breaking up, like, two hours after they get engaged.
Lindsay, who is a civil defense attorney, has a large pool of guys to choose from this season. One of them says his profession is "Tickle Monster," so I hope to dear god above that guy is not her fiance.
ABC/Paul Hebert
RACHEL, YOU ARE A LEARN-ED LAWYER. DO NOT MARRY SOMEONE WHO SAYS HIS JOB IN LIFE IS "TICKLE MONSTER."
Especially when there are other lawyers on the show to choose from!!!
Kimmel grilled her a little about her ability to keep secrets, but since she's a civil defense attorney, she feels like she's "groomed" for keeping things confidential. "I feel like I was groomed for this," she said.
She added that her family knows who her fiance is, but she's only worried about her sister revealing the news, saying, "She's the weakest link. She'll kill me for saying that."
Lindsay's pupper, Copper, was on the show last night as well and will apparently be making lots of appearances throughout this season.
If I were in the Bachelor Mansion, that dog would literally be the only thing I'd hang out with cause ~I wouldn't be there to make friends~.
Unless that friend is a dog, in which case, that dog is going to be my best f*cking friend on the planet.
You can watch The Bachelorette every Monday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC. |
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Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay revealed she's engaged to one of the show's contestants last night in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel |
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SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY
Changes in tax policy can influence economic incentives for households to work and save and for businesses to invest. Subsequent changes in employment, investment, and incomes can affect federal tax revenues. Dynamic analyses capturing such interactions between taxes and the economy are facilitated by integrating macroeconomic models of the economy and microsimulation models of taxation. An important part of that integration is calibrating both models to the same "baseline" forecast.
In this paper, we describe a process for calibrating a macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy and a microsimulation model of the federal individual income tax to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) January 2006 baseline projections. The microsimulation model is based on the Public Use Tax File produced by the Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The macroeconomic model, Global Insight's U.S. Macroeconomic Model, is based on Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) national income and product accounts (NIPA) data. [1] Once calibrated to the same official baseline, the two models can be used jointly to simulate the economic and budgetary effects of changes in tax policies. Direct comparisons can then be made between dynamic estimates from the macroeconomic model and conventional estimates from the microsimulation model.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produces biannual baseline projections of the U.S. economy and the federal budget (generally in January and August of each year). Those projections embody the rules and conventions governing a current-services federal budget. They project gross domestic product (GDP), prices, personal and corporate incomes, and federal receipts, expenditures, and net saving, among other economic and budgetary variables over 10 years assuming current-law tax (and non-tax) policies and the continuation of current levels of spending.
CBO's 10-year baseline projections serve as Congress's official starting point for gauging the budgetary effects of proposed changes in taxes and spending. For example, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimates the conventional revenue effects of tax proposals using CBO's economic and budgetary projections as a baseline. JCT's conventional revenue estimates may include some microeconomic behavioral effects of a change in tax policy. Thus, they may take into account shifts in the timing of transactions and income recognition. [2] But they generally exclude the economy-wide macroeconomic effects of changes in tax policy on federal receipts. Similarly, CBO uses its own economic and budgetary projections as a baseline when generating conventional estimates of the budgetary effects of spending proposals.
Simulation models meant to generate comparable "dynamic" estimates of the economic and budgetary effects of federal tax and spending proposals should also be calibrated to CBO's baseline projections. Dynamic estimates include the effects of changes in labor force participation, investment, and interest rates on federal tax policies. They can differ, sometimes significantly, from conventional revenue estimates. Dynamic estimates that are not made relative to the CBO baseline can provide a broad-brush analysis of a proposed tax policy's economic and budgetary effects. But they cannot be used as a dynamic alternative to a conventional estimate of the proposed policy's effects. At best, they can serve as a vehicle for ranking the relative strengths and weaknesses of alternative proposals. [3]
We calibrate two models to CBO's baseline economic and budgetary projections. We typically use both models to evaluate proposed changes in tax policy. The first model is the Global Insight (GI) short-term U.S. Macroeconomic Model. The second is a proprietary microsimulation model of individual income tax returns developed by analysts at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis.
A CBO-like baseline forecast is constructed using the Global Insight model and the details that CBO provides about its economic and budgetary projections. Using the GI model, we infer the implications of CBO's current-law assumptions for key macroeconomic variables, including personal consumption, investment, employment, and the components of NIPA personal income. In combination with SOI data, the microsimulation model uses the final CBO-like baseline forecast and estimated relationships between NIPA personal income and personal income reported to the IRS to project the characteristics of individual income tax records. The result is an integrated calibration of macroeconomic and microsimulation models that can be used for policy simulations.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 gives key facts about CBO's baseline economic and budgetary projections. We focus on CBO's current-law assumptions and the variables CBO publishes, and we use, in calibrating to CBO's baseline projections. Section 3 discusses our general approach to calibrating the GI and microsimulation models to CBO's published projections. Section 4 concludes by examining the implications of using the calibrated macroeconomic and microsimulation models for tax policy analysis. A separate appendix considers the implications of CBO's baseline projections for key measures of macroeconomic activity and incomes.
SECTION 2: AN OVERVIEW OF CBO'S BASELINE PROJECTIONS
CBO's biannual baseline projections play a dual policy role. They inform policymakers about the implications of current fiscal policies for federal budgetary aggregates, and they provide a common baseline for scoring the budgetary effects of proposed changes in taxes and spending. As a result, CBO's economic and budgetary projections are unique when compared with other -- particularly commercial -- forecasts. Specifically, they embody current law, and they explicitly assess the impact of current-law policies (fiscal and non-fiscal) on key indicators of economic activity.
CBO's Current-Policy Assumptions
A set of detailed rules govern the process by which CBO's economic and budgetary projections embody current law and policy. The Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and various other conventions for a federal baseline require CBO to produce a very specific kind of forecast. [4] CBO's baseline budgetary projections -- and, hence, the CBO-like forecast we construct to replicate them -- cannot anticipate changes in current law. Rather, they must assume that future taxes, spending, and other (non-fiscal) policy measures evolve as stipulated by previously enacted legislation.
This means that CBO's 10-year revenue projections assume no change in tax provisions or tax rates unless such a change is already included in current law. Thus, CBO's January 2006 baseline revenue projections assume the 2008 expiration (or "sunset") of the preferential capital gains and dividend tax rates enacted under the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) [5] and the 2010 expiration of tax relief provisions enacted under the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA). [6] Similarly, despite widespread discussion of the issue, CBO's revenue projections do not include any changes to the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Private sector forecasts typically anticipate some change in the current law governing the AMT -- if only because without some adjustment a growing number of taxpayers will see their tax burdens increase as a result of the AMT.
CBO's budgetary projections also exclude changes in federal spending not already set by current policies. Thus, CBO uses current-law eligibility and benefits criteria to project mandatory spending on entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid over the 10-year budget period. [7] Current law in the form of appropriations bills does not dictate a path for discretionary spending and supplemental budget authority beyond the current budget year. [8] However, the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 requires that CBO assume that both discretionary spending and supplemental appropriations in the most recent year's budget authority continue in each subsequent year of CBO's 10-year budgetary baseline. [9] In that baseline, projected current-services outlays keep pace with projected current-services budget authority. Both projected budget authority and outlays rise because CBO adjusts budget authority to offset projected inflation and cost-of-living adjustments.
CBO assesses the impact of GDP, prices, interest rates, incomes, and other economic variables on current-law revenues and spending over a 10-year period. CBO's baseline economic projections consist of two conceptually and analytically distinct components -- a two-year (short-term) forecast of cyclical fluctuations and a separate eight-year (medium-term) projection of potential output (GDP). [10] This split in the budget period determines how CBO assesses the economic implications of current-law fiscal policies.
In the short term, CBO allows the path of GDP to deviate from that of its underlying potential. [11] CBO gauges the impact of the gap between actual and potential GDP on a range of economic variables. Those variables include inflation, interest rates, employment, personal and corporate incomes, personal consumption and saving, and residential and business fixed investment. CBO also anticipates how monetary policy, exchange rates, and energy prices as well as recently enacted changes in current-law policies (fiscal and non-fiscal) are likely to affect fluctuations in aggregate demand. For example, the August update to CBO's January 2003 The Budget and Economic Outlook estimated the impact of JGTRRA's partial-expensing provisions on business fixed investment in 2003 and 2004. [12] It also discussed the effects of JGTRRA's accelerated tax cuts on personal saving. [13]
In the medium term, CBO does not project fluctuations in aggregate demand. Instead, it uses a growth model to estimate potential GDP and assumes that any gap between actual GDP and estimated potential GDP remaining at the end of the short-term forecast closes over the subsequent eight years. [14] Other key economic variables are similarly assumed to trend toward an estimated long-run average over the medium term. For example, CBO's projected rate of return on 10-year Treasury notes equals 5.2 percent from 2007, one-year prior to the start of CBO's medium-term projections. [15] CBO's projected unemployment rate attains its long-run natural rate (5.2 percent) only two years later, in 2009. In contrast, the unemployment rate in Global Insight's February 2006 short-term U.S. Macroeconomic forecast fluctuates around its long-run natural rate over much of GI's 10-year forecast horizon. [16]
As a result, CBO's medium-term projections are largely limited to assessing the impacts of current-law fiscal policies on potential GDP and related variables, notably potential labor hours and capital. For example, EGTRRA's expiring provisions and increasing taxpayer exposure to the AMT are likely to generate a steady rise in average marginal tax rates on wages. CBO adjusts potential labor hours for the anticipated disincentive effects, layering an estimated decline in the supply of labor hours onto a baseline projection that reflects long-run trends in demographics and labor force participation. [17] CBO also estimates the potential effects of rising federal deficits and debt on the capital stock. It includes some "crowding out" of private investment into its growth model, using projections of net foreign investment to gauge the extent to which increased capital inflows from abroad are likely to offset declines in national saving and domestic private investment. [18]
Federal Policy Assumptions Found in Other Macroeconomic Forecasts
Unlike CBO, other forecasters -- particularly commercial forecasters -- are not restricted by the rules and conventions governing a federal baseline. They can therefore build into their forecasts expected changes in taxes and spending that are inconsistent with a current-law baseline. They can also anticipate changes in other, non-fiscal current-law policies. Those expectations about future fiscal and non-fiscal policies can dramatically impact projected values of key economic and budgetary aggregates.
For example, GI's February 2006 U.S. Macroeconomic forecast assumes a partial extension of expiring tax relief provisions originally enacted under EGTRRA and JGTRRA. As a result, GI projects a far more gradual increase than does CBO in NIPA personal income tax revenues as a share of GDP (see Figure 1A). Unsurprisingly, GI also projects higher levels of NIPA personal disposable income as a share of GDP -- particularly after 2010 (see Figure 1B).
Commercial forecasts can also include expected changes in federal spending that are inconsistent with a current-services budget. [19] Both CBO's baseline budgetary projections and GI's February 2006 U.S. Macroeconomic forecast allow for growth in federal defense spending over the next 10 years. However, GI consistently projects higher levels of defense spending as a share of GDP (see Figure 2).
Initial differences between CBO's and GI's projections of defense spending seem in part explained by different assumptions about the rate of spending. Federal defense spending fell in the fourth quarter of 2005, after expanding at a double-digit rate in the third quarter of the same year. [20] It followed a similar pattern in the final two quarters of 2004 before bouncing back strongly in the first quarter of 2005. GI largely attributes both third-to-fourth quarter declines to delays in the passage of the current fiscal years' defense appropriations bill. [21] Using history as a guide, it assumes a strong rebound in defense spending in the first half of 2006. Such a strong rebound in federal defense spending is not as apparent in CBO's budgetary projections. [22]
After 2006, CBO projects current fiscal-year defense spending forward at the rate of inflation. GI is not restricted by such current-services budget requirements. Thus, through 2010, GI's standard forecast includes additional supplemental appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2011 to 2016, it includes a slightly higher deflator for military wages and salaries. The result is a persistent gap between CBO and GI projections of NIPA federal defense spending. [23]
Finally, commercial forecasts can anticipate changes in other (non-fiscal) current-law policies. The Pension Funding Equity Act of 2004 (PFEA) expired at the end of 2005. PFEA temporarily lowered firms' required contributions to defined-benefit (DB) pension plans. It did so by setting the maximum applicable discount rate used to calculate the present value of DB pension liabilities above the rate required by the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). In general, the higher the applicable discount rate, the lower the present value of pension liabilities and the lower required DB pension contributions. [24]
GI's February 2006 U.S. Macroeconomic forecast assumes a change in current law that extends PFEA's higher discounting through 2006. CBO's baseline economic and budgetary projections do not. [25] As a result, GI makes no specific adjustments to corporate (book) profits or to the corporate income tax base to reflect a jump in DB contributions. CBO includes such adjustments, dramatically lowering projected corporate profits as a share of GDP relative to the GI forecast (see Figure 3).
Limitations of Using CBO's Published Baseline Projections
We calibrate a commercial macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy and a proprietary microsimulation model of individual income tax returns to CBO's baseline projections. The challenges faced in calibrating the two models differ. However, for both models, a common factor complicates our work. CBO publishes only a small subset of the economic and budgetary variables making up its baseline projections (see Table 1). This limits the number of variables available as guides in adjusting the two models to reflect CBO's current-law assumptions.
Calibrating the Global Insight Model. We develop our CBO-like baseline forecast using GI's February 2006 U.S. Macroeconomic forecast as a starting point (or control). [26] GI's U.S. Macroeconomic forecasts typically include expected changes in fiscal and non-fiscal policies. The calibration procedure in part involves iteratively adjusting the control forecast to remove the effects of those expectations so that our CBO-like forecast is consistent with current law.
Adjusting the control forecast to match CBO's baseline budgetary projections is relatively straightforward. CBO publishes all but a handful of needed NIPA federal revenue and spending projections. It also provides a detailed crosswalk between its NIPA federal budget numbers and its projections of unified (budget) federal revenues and unified federal outlays. [27]
However, CBO does not publish its projections of a number of key macroeconomic and income variables. Those variables include the components of GDP, NIPA taxable personal income (with the exception of wage and salary income), and national saving (with the exception of NIPA net federal government saving). [28] They also include a number of miscellaneous items describing critical assumptions (policy and otherwise) underlying CBO's two-year forecast and medium-term projections.
For example, CBO does not typically describe in great detail its projections of the trade-weighted U.S. dollar exchange rate, the price of oil, and the federal funds rate. Rather, the economic outlook chapter of The Budget and Economic Outlook indicates CBO's expectations for their levels or movements in the short term. [29] When calibrating the GI model to CBO's baseline economic projections, we use such statements as guides in adjusting (if necessary) GI's projections of equivalent variables.
Thus, in August 2005, CBO indicated that it expected oil prices to stop rising -- but not to "retreat" to pre-2004 levels -- during 2005 and 2006. [30] In January 2006, CBO again indicated that it expected oil prices to stabilize in 2006. [31] We adjusted a weighted average price of imported crude in the GI model appropriately. Similarly, in August 2005, CBO anticipated that the Federal Reserve would continue to raise the target for the federal funds rate until it reached a neutral rate. CBO observed that the consensus of financial market participants was consistent with a neutral rate ranging between 4 and 5 percent. [32] In January 2006, CBO reconfirmed its outlook for monetary policy, specifying that the consensus of financial market participants put the expected federal funds target rate at 4.75 percent by mid-2006. [33]
More significantly, CBO does not typically provide sufficient detail to establish how it adjusts a number of key macroeconomic and income variables to reflect current law. Figures 4 and 5 reorganize NIPA data as a series of income and expenditure flows among institutional sectors of the economy (households, firms, government, rest of the world, etc.). [34] Moving across the columns gives an accounting of income flows among the sectors. Moving down the rows gives an accounting of expenditure flows.
Figure 4 broadly summarizes the level of detail we require for calibration of the microsimulation model and for policy analysis. For example, calibrating the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline budgetary projections of individual income tax receipts requires projections of the individual components of NIPA personal income. [35] Calculating the federal corporate income tax requires projections of both corporate profits and the corporate income tax base. Finally, doing dynamic analyses of fiscal policy requires the ability to quantify the effect of changes in taxes and spending on the components of GDP and personal income.
The Global Insight model, once calibrated to CBO's published baseline projections, provides this level of detail. A forecasting model like Global Insight provides unique advantages to analysts constructing a CBO-like baseline forecast. This is because it includes enough structural detail to fill in the blanks left by CBO. Figure 5 highlights the extent of those blanks. It shows the same reorganization of NIPA income and expenditure flows as Figure 4, but with identifiers only in the cells for which CBO publishes its baseline economic projections. We use the GI model to help us infer consistent approximations of CBO's projections of the missing income and expenditure flows (see Appendix A for additional details).
CBO's current-law assumptions complicate our efforts to infer those projections using the GI model. For example, the control forecast implicitly assumes some extension of EGTRRA's expiring provisions after 2010. It therefore includes levels of personal consumption and saving that are higher than those projected by CBO. The calibration procedure involves iteratively lowering the projected rate of growth in personal consumption implied by the control forecast so that the projected personal saving rate is not unreasonable. Unfortunately, CBO typically provides little or no detail on how it adjusts consumption and saving to reflect EGTRRA's sunset. As a result, we have only personal judgment and historical data to rely upon when determining an appropriate current-law level for the personal saving rate.
Similarly, CBO typically publishes only its projections of NIPA taxable personal income and wage and salary income. [36] Calibration requires allocating the difference between the two among personal dividend income, personal interest income, personal rental income, and proprietors' income (farm and non-farm). We can use information from the control forecast to do this. However, the control forecast implicitly assumes some extension of JGTRRA's preferential tax rates on dividend income. And CBO typically provides little or no additional detail to use in deriving an allocation that would be more consistent with current-law assumptions.
Calibrating the Microsimulation Model. The primary challenge we face in calibrating the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline projections is a bit different. The inputs into the calibration procedure for the microsimulation model already reflect current law. For example, we use a number of economic variables from the CBO-like forecast. We also use many of the federal revenue projections published in the revenue outlook chapter of CBO's The Budget and Economic Outlook .
However, economic inputs from the CBO-like forecast provide only a starting point. This is because they are expressed as NIPA values and not as amounts reported on tax returns. The microsimulation model simulates the effects of tax law changes on a representative sample of over 100,000 federal individual income tax returns based on the characteristics of the individuals and families associated with those returns. A crosswalk is therefore needed to reconcile the definitional and timing differences between NIPA personal income, the amount of income reported on income tax returns, and supplementary information obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Non-NIPA components of individual income such as capital gains, pensions, annuities, and individual retirement accounts must also be added. Data for tax return filers and non-filers must then be extrapolated ("aged") over the 10-year budget period.
As a result, a key part of our calibration procedure involves deriving detailed targets for the amount of tax-related income, the distribution of tax-related income, and the demographic characteristics of the U.S. population. These targets are then used to adjust data on records in the microsimulation model so that those records are in aggregate consistent with CBO's baseline economic and budgetary projections. Such information is not typically published by CBO and cannot generally be obtained directly from CBO or other sources. The exceptions are demographic projections, which are available from the Census Bureau, and projections of total individual capital gains realizations, which CBO publishes every January in The Budget and Economic Outlook . [37]
SECTION 3: CALIBRATING MACRO-ECONOMIC AND MICROSIMULATION MODELS TO CBO'S BASELINE PROJECTIONS
Calibration to CBO's baseline projections begins with the macroeconomic model. We first calibrate the Global Insight model to CBO's published economic projections and NIPA federal revenue and spending projections. We refer to output from the calibrated GI model as the final CBO-like forecast. The final CBO-like baseline forecast not only replicates the published details of CBO's current-law baseline but also includes projections of key macroeconomic and income variables excluded from them (see Appendix A for additional details).
We then calibrate the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline projections. In doing so, we use data from the SOI and the Census Bureau as well as economic variables from the final CBO-like forecast. Those economic variables include nominal GDP, corporate profits, the consumer price index (CPI) for all urban consumers, the components of NIPA taxable personal income, NIPA transfer payments to persons (federal as well as state and local), and NIPA state and local tax revenues. The calibrated microsimulation model that results approximates CBO's baseline projections of key economic and income variables and individual income tax revenues.
Calibrating the Global Insight Macroeconomic Model
Calibrating the Global Insight model to CBO's current-law baseline involves iteratively adjusting the control forecast so that, when solved, the Global Insight model endogenously reproduces all projections of economic and budgetary variables published by CBO. [38] This is a multi-step process. In each step, we replace variables in the GI model with CBO's projections. We then solve the GI model so that those variables that have not been targeted adjust. In essence, we are using econometrically estimated relationships and accounting identities within the GI model to create a forecast that is consistent with what we know about CBO's baseline economic and budgetary projections.
Step 1. We first set key economic assumptions and price levels. This process involves setting the price of oil and the trade-weighted U.S. dollar exchange rate so that they are consistent with what we know about CBO's baseline economic assumptions. It also involves setting some policy variables such as the statutory corporate income tax rate and the federal social insurance tax rate so that they are consistent with CBO's baseline revenue projections. Finally, it requires that we impose CBO's projections of certain key economic variables. Those variables include the unemployment rate, the 3-month Treasury bill rate, and the 10-year Treasury note rate.
The 3-month Treasury bill rate is also used to set the federal funds rate. The GI control forecast includes a projection of the federal funds rate that differs from what CBO describes as the consensus of financial market participants. We correct for this by imposing a target for the federal funds rate that is broadly consistent with not only CBO's description of financial market consensus but also CBO's projection of the 3-month Treasury bill rate. We obtain this target by first calculating the spread in the control forecast between the 3-month Treasury bill rate and the federal funds rate. We then apply this spread, with some adjustments, to CBO's projection of the 3-month Treasury bill rate.
We complete the first step by setting price levels for all components of GDP. CBO publishes 10-year projections of year-over-year percentage changes in an aggregate GDP price index. We use this along with information about the components of the GDP price deflator contained in the GI control forecast to set all underlying GDP price indices so that they are consistent with CBO's projection of GDP inflation.
Setting price levels early in the calibration procedure is critical. This is because many exogenous federal outlays variables in the Global Insight model are in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. We therefore require a price level variable to convert CBO's nominal baseline budgetary projections for those variables into consistent real targets.
Step 2. In the second step, we set federal spending (outlays) net of federal interest payments. [39] Federal spending broadly includes federal consumption spending, federal transfer payments, and other spending items in the federal government's budget.
CBO publishes its projections for most -- but not all -- of the Global Insight model's NIPA federal spending variables. For example, the federal government's budget includes federal social benefits to the rest of the world and federal subsidies. CBO publishes its projections of both aggregates. We replace GI's projections of these variables with CBO's published NIPA projections. Similarly, CBO publishes its projection of federal net investment. [40] We combine this with CBO's baseline projections of NIPA defense and non-defense consumption of fixed capital to obtain a NIPA target for federal gross investment.
However, CBO does not provide baseline projections for all NIPA federal spending variables. In some instances, we rely upon the GI control forecast to obtain needed targets. For example, federal consumption spending includes both defense and non-defense "other" purchases of goods and services and wages and salaries for personnel. CBO only publishes its projection of the sum of the two (labeled defense and non-defense "consumption"). In the absence of any additional information from CBO, we set "other" federal purchases of goods and services equal to the difference between CBO's projections of defense and non-defense "consumption" and GI's projections of defense and non-defense outlays for personnel.
In other instances, we derive needed targets from CBO's published projections of budget (unified) federal outlays. Federal transfer payments include both social benefits to persons and grants-in-aid to state and local governments. CBO publishes its NIPA projection of grants-in-aid to state and local governments. However, it publishes only budget projections of federal spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. To obtain equivalent NIPA targets, we use historical government social benefits data from CBO and BEA to adjust CBO's published projections of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending for administrative costs. [41]
Step 3. In the third step, we adjust the components of GDP so that they are consistent with not only CBO's projections of real GDP and real federal spending (on both current consumption and investment) but also current laws and policies. We follow a three-step procedure.
First, we adjust all components of GDP for which CBO's baseline projections are unavailable. Those components include personal consumption, gross private domestic investment, state and local government purchases of goods and services (including state and local investment), and net exports. We scale all four aggregates proportionately so that they are consistent with CBO's projections of real GDP and real federal spending. We do so using information from the control forecast about the allocation of GDP among its constituent components.
Second, we derive a target for personal consumption that is more in line with CBO's current-law assumptions. A target for real personal consumption obtained using information strictly from the control forecast is likely to be too high. This is because the control forecast does not assume current law. CBO does not describe in detail its baseline projections of personal consumption. However, the economic outlook chapter of The Budget and Economic Outlook typically gives annual rates of growth in personal consumption for the two years covered by CBO's short-term economic forecast. [42] We derive a target for real personal consumption using those growth rates and some judgment about the likely impacts on personal saving of not extending EGTRRA's and JGTRRA's expiring provisions after 2010.
Finally, we readjust all components of GDP for which we do not have published projections from CBO. At this stage, those components include gross private domestic investment, state and local government purchases of goods and services, and net exports. We scale all three aggregates proportionally so that they are jointly consistent with CBO's projections of real GDP and real federal spending and our target of real personal consumption. In doing so, we again rely primarily upon information from the control forecast.
Before continuing to step 4, we consider state and local government operating surpluses in our CBO-like forecast. At this point in the calibration, state and local government purchases of goods and services, when combined with all other state and local spending, could exceed state and local revenues by a wide margin (or vice versa). CBO does not typically describe in any great detail its baseline projections for state and local government budgets. However, we assume that those budgets are roughly in balance. We adjust components of state and local spending (other than purchases of goods and services) to put state and local budgets as close as possible to a slight surplus position in the final CBO-like baseline forecast.
Step 4. We next adjust potential (full-employment) GDP in the GI model to be consistent with CBO's medium-term projections of the rates of growth in potential GDP and the potential labor force. [43]
We use the GI control forecast as a starting point. CBO does not regularly publish levels-estimates of either potential GDP or the potential labor force. [44] We therefore adjust the projected levels of both variables in the control forecast to be consistent with CBO's published growth rate projections. We apply CBO's projections of the growth rate of the potential labor force directly, adjusting the projected level of the potential labor force in the control forecast. We target the growth rate of potential GDP only indirectly, adjusting among other variables the exogenous trend in total factor productivity in the control forecast.
Step 5. In the fifth step, we adjust the components of NIPA taxable personal income. CBO typically publishes its projections of NIPA taxable personal income only in the January release of The Budget and Economic Outlook . [45] CBO's NIPA taxable personal income includes wage and salary income (both private and government), personal interest income, personal dividend income, personal rental income, and proprietors' income (farm and non-farm). CBO publishes projections only of the wage and salary component of NIPA taxable personal income.
We rely primarily upon information from the control forecast when deriving targets for the remaining components of NIPA taxable personal income. We follow a two-step procedure. First, we set private wages and salaries by subtracting GI's projections of defense and non-defense outlays for personnel (government wages and salaries) from CBO's published projection of NIPA wage and salary income. Second, we allocate the difference between CBO's published projections of NIPA taxable personal income and NIPA wage and salary income among the remaining components of NIPA taxable personal income. In doing so, we apply information from the control forecast. To the extent possible, we also adjust any targets we derive for the components of NIPA taxable personal income so that they are more in line with CBO's current-law assumptions.
For example, at the time we constructed our January 2006 CBO-like forecast, current law stipulated the 2008 sunset of JGTRRA's preferential tax rates on dividend income. The control forecast assumed some extension of those preferential rates and, thus, in all likelihood, a different path for personal dividend income than would be included in CBO's baseline projections. In the past, we have attempted to adjust our target for personal dividend income accordingly. Unfortunately, we could not easily confirm the accuracy of our income target and, therefore, did not attempt to include an equivalent adjustment in our January 2006 CBO-like forecast.
Before continuing to step 6, we consider the personal saving rate in our CBO-like forecast. Personal saving is a residual variable in the GI model. This means that CBO's published projections of NIPA taxable personal income and our target for NIPA personal consumption jointly determine projected personal saving and, thus, the personal saving rate in the final CBO-like forecast.
The calibration procedure can yield what seems like an unrealistically negative personal saving rate if we do not adjust for the likely impact of EGTRRA's sunset on personal consumption. In the final CBO-like forecast, the personal saving rate averages roughly -0.1 percent between 2007 and 2010 and roughly -1.1 percent between 2011 and 2016. When initially constructing the final CBO-like forecast, we did not adjust personal consumption for an increase in personal income tax payments and, hence, a drop in personal disposable income after 2010. As a result, the personal saving rate averaged well above -1.1 percent in absolute value. This compares with a personal saving rate of about -0.5 percent in 2005. [46]
Step 6. We next adjust the CBO-like forecast to be consistent with CBO's baseline projections of NIPA federal tax receipts. NIPA federal tax receipts include taxes from the rest of the world, taxes on production and imports, taxes on personal income, and taxes on corporate income. [47] CBO publishes projections for all four. Setting federal taxes from the rest of the world and federal taxes on production and imports is relatively straightforward. We replace GI's projections with published projections from CBO's current-law baseline.
Setting federal taxes on personal and corporate incomes is more involved. This is because doing so requires that we separately target both average effective federal income tax rates and the GI model's federal personal and corporate income tax bases. For example, the GI model defines the federal personal income tax base as a function of both NIPA taxable personal income and individual capital gains. CBO publishes projections of individual capital gains realizations. [48] We must therefore adjust our target for the federal personal income tax base to reflect CBO's projections of capital gains.
The GI model also includes an approximation of the corporate income tax base. The Global Insight model defines the federal corporate income tax base as before-tax corporate (book) profits minus rest-of-world corporate profits and the profits of the Federal Reserve. [49] CBO publishes its projections of corporate (book) profits. However, targeting corporate profits is complicated because they are a residual of gross national product (GNP) in the GI model. [50] As such, they cannot simply be replaced in our CBO-like forecast with CBO's published projections.
Rather, we iteratively modify the statistical discrepancy in the CBO-like forecast to target corporate profits indirectly. The statistical discrepancy in the final CBO-like forecast generally exceeds the statistical discrepancy in the control forecast. This is in part because we adjust corporate profits in the CBO-like forecast to fall roughly in line with the jump in contributions to defined-benefit pension plans forecast by CBO. Thus, the statistical discrepancy averages just under 0.4 percent of GDP between 2007 and 2016 in the control forecast. It averages just over 0.7 percent of GDP over the same period in the final CBO-like forecast.
Before completing step 6, we calculate average effective federal tax rates on personal and corporate incomes. These average effective rates reconcile CBO's projections of federal personal and corporate income tax revenues with approximations of the federal personal and corporate income tax bases included in the final CBO-like baseline forecast. [51] We impose these average effective tax rates in the CBO-like forecast.
Step 7. In the final step, we complete calibration of the GI model to CBO's baseline projections. We begin by setting the levels of publicly held federal debt and net federal interest payments in the CBO-like forecast. [52]
We only indirectly impose CBO's projection of the stock of publicly held federal debt. A net change in publicly held federal debt is calculated using CBO's published projections of unified federal surpluses along with CBO's published projections of the federal government's other means of financing publicly held debt. That net change is used to make quarterly adjustments to the GI model's variable for publicly-held federal debt that are consistent with CBO's other published budgetary projections. After setting the stock of federal debt, we impose a target for net federal interest payments. That target is calculated using CBO's projections of gross federal interest payments and federal income on assets. [53]
After setting net federal interest payments, we make our final adjustments to the CBO-like forecast. These final adjustments include setting the level of the consumer price index (CPI) to be consistent with CBO's projections of CPI inflation. They also include fine-tuning average effective federal tax rates on personal and corporate incomes and for federal contributions to social insurance so that the final CBO-like forecast is consistent with CBO's published projections of federal tax receipts. Finally, they include slight adjustments to the statistical discrepancy to ensure that the GI model calibrated to the final CBO-like forecast reproduces CBO's published projection of corporate profits.
Calibrating the Microsimulation Model
We next calibrate the microsimulation model of individual income tax returns to CBO's baseline projections. Data produced by the SOI play a vital role in helping us develop a database for use in doing tax policy analysis. A base-year SOI sample of individual income tax returns is adjusted so that, when the model simulates current-law tax provisions, the results are consistent with CBO's baseline economic projections and approximate CBO's individual income tax revenue projections.
The final CBO-like baseline forecast provides a number of NIPA measures of personal and business income that we use in calibration. Those NIPA income measures include wage and salary income, investment income (personal interest and dividend income), proprietors' income (farm and non-farm), other business income (including personal rental income), transfer payments to persons (federal as well as state and local), and corporate profits. The final CBO-like forecast also provides price-level variables (the CPI for all urban consumers and the GDP deflator for medical goods and services) and some NIPA budgetary variables (state and local tax revenues) used in calibration.
The Public Use Tax File . The core data for the microsimulation model are derived from a comprehensive cross-sectional sample of individual income tax returns produced by the SOI. Analysts at the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis (OTA), JCT, and CBO use the records of individual income tax returns included in that sample to develop revenue estimates and to research tax policy issues.
The SOI also releases a sub-sample of those records of individual income tax returns through its Public Use Tax File. [54] The SOI takes a number of steps to modify those records that are released to protect the confidentiality of tax return filers. Those protections include dropping a large set of records that correspond to particularly high-income earners and removing all identifying information (names, Social Security numbers, etc.) from the records that remain in the public use file. They also include significantly reducing the number of data fields on the included returns and further "rounding and blurring" the data that remain to protect the identity of tax filers. [55]
The SOI designs its comprehensive cross-sectional sample of individual income tax returns to be an accurate statistical representation of all returns filed over a 12-month period. The public use version of this database has a long, established history of providing policy researchers outside the federal government with an invaluable tool for studying the federal individual income tax and the distribution of income. However, the public use file has important limitations for analysts projecting the effects of proposed changes in the individual income tax.
These limitations include: An absence of some key data fields needed to determine tax liability . The SOI includes the majority of data fields from Form 1040 (and equivalent forms) in the public use file. It also includes some of the most important data fields from the various schedules and forms supporting Form 1040. However, the public use file does not provide all (or even most) of the data from Form 1040's supporting schedules and forms that are needed to calculate federal tax liability. As a result, users of the public use file simulating the effects of changes in the individual income tax must sometimes make inferences about missing values.
For example, the public use file includes the "Other income" line on Form 1040. However, data on foreign-earned income, a component of "Other Income," is not provided in the public use file and cannot be calculated using data provided there. [56] Other examples of data fields excluded from the public use file are the division of wages and salaries between spouses from Form W-2, deductions for home mortgage interest from Schedule A, and amounts for prior-year business losses and capital losses that are carried forward from Schedule D. Not all records included in the public use file represent tax returns filed for a common base year . The vast majority of records in the public use file represent tax returns filed for a common tax liability year. However, the sample excludes some returns that will be filed in future years as late returns, and it includes other returns that are filed for future, or differently defined, liability years.
For example, numerous prior year returns are included because they were filed late. The dollar amounts on those prior year returns are not inflation-adjusted, and their tax calculations reflect tax laws applying in the tax year for which the return was filed. The public use file can also include a small number of returns that are filed by a decedent's estate for a subsequent tax year, and some tax returns that are filed on a fiscal-year, rather than a calendar-year, basis. Uncertainty about the family structure for a small number of married separate returns . Married separate returns are typically filed by individuals who are separated from their spouse. However, under certain circumstances, married couples can reduce their total tax liability by splitting their income and deductions and reporting them on separate returns. These tend to be cases where the couple can claim a large amount of itemized deductions relative to their income or where there are net tax losses.
The public use file does not indicate whether married separate returns are filed by individuals living with their spouse. However, married couples who are living together but filing separately often have very different characteristics from those couples with similar incomes who have separated and are now living and filing separately. Treating all married separate filers as individuals living on their own can produce misleading results. The limited amount of non-tax data included in the public use file . The public use file provides some information about family structure based on filing status (married joint, single, etc.) and the number and types of exemptions and credits. However, it provides no information on demographic variables such as age or gender or on non-taxable sources of income such as most transfer payments to persons. It also excludes information on certain household characteristics useful to analysts simulating the effects of a change in the individual income tax. Such information includes employment characteristics, health care coverage, and the amount of retirement savings.
We address these limitations of the public use file in various ways. For example, we impute missing values for itemized deductions, loss carry-forwards, and types of capital income using tabulated data (when available). We remove records for time periods other than the base year and adjust weights for the remaining records to compensate for tax returns that are filed for a different tax year. Some married separate returns for individuals living in the same household are statistically matched using information provided by statisticians at the SOI. [57]
Finally, we supplement tax return data with information on demographic variables and household characteristics. We do so by statistically matching the public use file with household and demographic survey data from the CPS. [58] The result is the core base-year matched file which is used in the microsimulation model.
Primary Components of the Microsimulation Model . The microsimulation model consists of three primary components -- the core base-year data, a federal income tax and payroll-tax calculator, and an optimizing routine that ages (extrapolates) the core base-year data. The first component consists of tax return data and demographic data in the base year. The second component reads a data file and replicates the process of calculating individual income and payroll taxes in the base year and future years. The third component adjusts the base-year matched file to reflect projected changes in not only key demographic and economic aggregates but also the distribution of income.
We construct the core base-year data by combining tax return data from the public use file with annual demographic survey data and household survey data from a special supplement of the March CPS [59] and other public-use microfiles. [60] The March CPS supplement includes additional detail about the amount and types of income flowing to households. In the March CPS, the Census Bureau also groups individuals into tax filing units and, for those it assumes file tax returns, imputes values for the federal AGI, the federal tax liability, the earned income credit (EITC), and other tax-related variables. All person-level records in the CPS are assigned to a tax filing unit or are identified as being a non-filer. We use these assignments to create synthetic CPS tax return records that include the imputed tax variables generated by the Census and other person-level data taken from the March CPS supplement. We also use information about the family structure to assign dependent filers to families.
Before conducting a statistical match of the SOI public use file and the synthetic CPS tax records, we equalize sample weights within families in the CPS and between the SOI and CPS samples of tax returns. We equalize weights between the SOI and CPS samples to equalize the number of tax returns.
We equalize sample weights within families because some person-level records within the same family will have different sample weights. Assigning a common weight for all family members ensures that weighted aggregates are the same regardless of how the data are stratified. Thus, the same aggregate will be generated for reports that stratify by tax return characteristics and reports that stratify by family and person characteristics. This is particularly important because there can be multiple tax returns within the same family. In some instances, individuals will file their own tax returns but will be claimed as a dependent on their parents' tax return. In other instances, individuals may live with other family members but claim themselves on their own tax return.
Once sample weights have been equalized, we produce an SOI and CPS matched file. That SOI and CPS matched file constitutes our core base-year data. CPS and SOI records are divided into partitions based on filing status, number of children at home, and types of income. Once each record is assigned to a partition, a constrained matching algorithm links each synthetic CPS tax return record to at least one record in the SOI public use file. The matching algorithm accomplishes this by finding the set of record linkages that minimizes the sum of the differences between the SOI and CPS records within each partition. [61]
The matched file is a hierarchically structured database. It contains both family and person level records populated with data from the CPS and tax return records populated with data from the SOI. The hierarchical file links persons to tax returns and tax returns to families. It also includes cross-links for individuals who file their own tax return and are claimed as a dependent on another return. The married separate tax returns that were combined for purposes of the match are divided, and persons in the family are assigned to one of the two tax returns.
The second component of the microsimulation model is a federal income tax and payroll-tax calculator. The federal tax calculator is one part of a three-part computer program that reads and links data into hierarchical units, computes tax liabilities, and generates output files. The first part of the program reads the matched file and stores data in a hierarchical memory structure. It can read and traverse the data structure for all the records for a single year. Alternatively, it can sequentially read data for each family (and the tax returns and persons in the family) for all years.
The second part of the program is the federal income tax and payroll tax calculator. The tax calculator replicates the process of computing current-law, individual income and payroll taxes in the base year and future years. It can also simulate the process of calculating individual taxes under different tax plans by changing year-specific input parameters used in the tax computations.
For example, the tax calculator parameters allow us to vary the tax rate applied to different types of taxable income. Individual income taxes are calculated using regular income tax rates, the AMT rates, and preferential rates on long-term net capital gains realizations and qualified dividend income (Schedule D). Projections of the wage-indexed maximum taxable income are used in conjunction with payroll tax rates to compute employment taxes on wages and salaries and self-employment income. The payroll tax rates include contributions for social insurance under both the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) and the Self-Employment Contributions Act (SECA). [62]
The third part of the tax calculator program reads a parameter file that specifies the column and row content of a report and accumulates and saves the output as a spreadsheet application. Spreadsheets are generated using a parameter input file and record-selection criteria. [63] An output routine produces separate worksheets documenting the economic and tax parameters used to produce the simulation.
The third major component of the microsimulation model is an optimizing routine that ages the core base year data. The effects of tax law changes can be estimated using only the tax calculator and base-year data in the matched file. However, policymakers are generally interested in estimates of the budgetary effects of changes in taxes over the standard 10-year budget period. Base year data in the matched file must therefore be extrapolated to represent data for future tax returns. This is done by adjusting the weights and values on the matched file to reflect projected changes in key demographic and economic aggregates and the distribution of income.
The matched file is aged over not just the 10-year budget period but also a historical period beginning in the base year. The length of the historical period over which the matched file must be aged can be substantial for several reasons. There is a multi-year lag between the time tax returns are filed and when they are processed by the SOI and released as a public use file. Statistically matching a newly released SOI public use file with CPS data to produce a matched file requires additional time. In principle, we could ignore the historical period and only age the base year data to reflect the budget period. However, in practice, we prefer to adjust weights and values on the matched file over the historical period to test and calibrate the parameters used in the model.
We use several sources of data when aging the matched file over the historical period and the 10-year budget period. In years where historical tax data are available, the calibration process depends critically on data provided in several SOI publications. [64] These publications give the total number of tax returns filed and aggregate values for most of the income, deduction, credit, and tax liability variables included in the public use file. The CPS in turn provides historical data on population growth, non-taxable income, and the number of non-filers. [65]
In years where historical tax data from the SOI are unavailable, we use NIPA data to help age the matched file. [66] In the current year and every year in the 10-year budget period, we obtain projections of personal income and other economic and budgetary aggregates from the final CBO-like forecast produced using the Global Insight model. Other sources of information include IRS projections of the number of individual income tax returns filed, [67] Department of Treasury estimates of revenue collections, [68] and Census Bureau projections of population by age and gender. [69]
Aging the Matched File to Reflect CBO's Baseline Projections . Aging the matched file involves four principal steps. In each, we use an optimization routine to adjust the weights on the matched file to target historical values for, and projections of, tax and non-tax variables in the microsimulation model. In the first step, we update all nominal income values on individual tax returns in the database. We also update all targets for demographic variables.
In the second step, we sequentially target four broad measures of individual income by percentile class. Total income is divided into wages and salaries, business income, non-capital gains investment income, and income from other sources. It encompasses both gross income reported on individual tax returns (gross tax return income) and non-taxable income reported on the CPS. [70] We base target values for both non-taxable income and the components of gross tax return income on NIPA measures of personal income from the final CBO-like forecast. For married couples, income from some sources is divided between spouses.
We use historical changes in incomes in the Panel Survey Income Dynamics (PSID) as the basis for aging total income for those taxpayers with positive incomes below the 95th percentile. [71] Specifically, longitudinal data from the PSID have been used to estimate the probability that income for persons with specific demographic and income characteristics will increase or decrease. PSID data are used to estimate the size of the relative change in income for each person. Equations used to calculate that relative change in total income include individual characteristics and key economic indicators. [72] They are applied to data at the individual level and aggregated to compute income targets by percentile. [73]
Unfortunately, the PSID cannot be used as a basis for reliably aging total income in the 95th percentile and higher. This is because the PSID sample does not include information for a sufficient number of individuals whose income places them in the upper 5 percent. Instead, we base targets for total incomes in the upper 5 percent on separate estimates of the income thresholds that define breakpoints for percentiles in the topmost income classes and the total amount of income in those classes. Those estimates use relationships between the topmost income classes and income data drawn from individual tax returns falling below the 95th percentile. [74]
In the third step, we target more detailed measures of the components of gross tax return income. Most of the targets are for components of NIPA personal income, with some important exceptions. [75] The sources of gross tax return income that are not included in NIPA personal income include: small business corporation (S-Corp) income, taxable pension and annuity income, net capital gains, and gains from the sale of other assets. [76] In 2003, income from sources not included in NIPA personal income accounted for over 14 percent of gross tax return income. [77] However, between 1990 and 2003, they were responsible for over 40 percent of the year-over-year variation, according to one measure of annual changes in the income components of AGI. [78]
NIPA wage and salary income is the only component of NIPA taxable personal income for which CBO regularly publishes its baseline projection. CBO does not provide its baseline projection of the amount of wage and salary income in AGI. [79] It also typically does not make available its baseline projections for any other component of the tax base or for the total amount of gross tax return income reported by individuals on their tax returns.
As a result, we estimate the income targets used in calibrating the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline projections. We base our estimates on data from the final CBO-like forecast and the historical relationship between the components of NIPA personal income and gross tax return income. However, NIPA personal income and gross tax return income are defined differently and are constructed using data from different sources. Differences between the two income measures can be substantial. They can also change over time due to factors that affect definitional and reporting differences.
The BEA produces annual tables that compare the components of NIPA personal income to tax return income. Specifically, the tables identify and provide estimates for the adjustments needed to reconcile the differences between NIPA personal income and AGI. Those reconciliation adjustments are used to calculate an "adjusted" personal income that approximates AGI.
The difference remaining between adjusted personal income and AGI is called the "AGI gap." The total AGI gap for real adjusted personal income and inflation-adjusted AGI increased gradually between 1960 and 2000 (see Figure 6). It increased more rapidly between 2000 and 2003. However, the BEA's estimate of adjusted personal income captures most of the turning points in AGI. And differences between adjusted personal income and AGI are within +- 1.7 percent of the 12.3 percent mean difference for about two-thirds of the 45-year period shown in Figure 6.
The total AGI gap has been relatively constant in large part because the AGI gap for wage and salary income, has been historically stable. The size of the total AGI gap is influenced by wage and salary income because wages and salaries account for the largest share of both personal income and AGI. In 2003, wages and salaries were over 53 percent of NIPA personal income before subtracting employee-paid social insurance contributions. They were almost 74 percent of gross tax return income in 2003 and over 86 percent of the components of NIPA personal income included in AGI.
The definitional differences between NIPA wage and salary income and wages and salaries included in gross tax return income are numerous (see Figure 7). The NIPA definition includes wages and salaries that are not taxable, such as (some or tax-exempt) payments to military personnel, employee contributions to retirement programs (401K accounts, 403B accounts, TSP plans, etc.), and imputed estimates for non-cash income. It also includes earnings for individuals who do not file tax returns. However, it excludes income from disability pension plans and other sources included in taxable wages.
A comparison of the wage and salary components of adjusted personal income and IRS-reported AGI shows trends that are similar to those found in a comparison of total income (see Figure 8). For most of the period between 1960 and 2003, adjusted personal income moved in lock step with AGI wage and salary income, with a real mean overstatement of about 3.3 percent. As with total income, the AGI gap for wages and salaries in recent years has grown, in this case since 1996. By 2003, the adjusted personal income measure of wages and salaries overestimated its AGI equivalent by almost 7.5 percent, more than double the historical average. Nevertheless, we can derive a reasonably close relationship between NIPA and AGI wage and salary income by developing separate estimates for the reconciliation adjustments and the remaining AGI gap. [80]
In addition to being the largest component of NIPA personal income and AGI, wages and salaries constitute the greatest source of year-to-year variation in the NIPA-based portion of gross tax return income. For example, between 1990 and 2003, inflation-adjusted wages and salaries accounted for over 60 percent of the sum of annual absolute value changes in the income components of AGI that are also included in NIPA personal income.
Interest income is the second largest source of variation in the NIPA-based portion of AGI. Taxable interest accounted for around 15 percent of the absolute value inflation-adjusted annual change between 1990 and 2003. Unlike wages and salaries, the trend in interest income as measured in NIPA personal income is substantially different from the trend in interest income as measured in AGI. A large part of that difference may be attributed to the inclusion of imputed income in the NIPA -- but not the AGI -- measure of interest income. Imputed income comprised over 60 percent of NIPA personal interest in 2003. [81]
Even after subtracting imputed income and making other adjustments, some significant differences remain between the adjusted personal income measure of interest income and the AGI measure (see Figure 9). In general, the components of adjusted personal income, including interest income, are usually larger than the components of AGI. However, adjusted personal interest fell below the IRS measure in 1997 and 2000.
Dividend income is the third largest source of annual variation in the NIPA-based income portion of AGI. Between 1990 and 2003, dividend income was responsible for over 6.5 percent of the absolute value inflation-adjusted annual change in the NIPA components of AGI. However, important differences exist between the NIPA and AGI definitions of dividend income. For example, some payments to the owners of small business corporations (S-Corporations) are included in personal dividend income but excluded from IRS dividends. Such definitional differences complicate estimation of the income targets needed to calibrate the microsimulation model.
Even after the reconciliation adjustments are taken into account, both the level and movement of dividends in gross tax return income and NIPA personal income are noticeably different (see Figure 10). For example, between 2001 and 2002, AGI dividends fell by over $18 billion while the adjusted personal income measure of dividends showed an increase of over $20 billion, in inflation-adjusted terms.
A comparison of wage and salaries in adjusted personal income and AGI suggests a much closer relationship than evidenced for either interest income or dividend income. As a result, income estimates based on NIPA values are likely to be less accurate for the interest and dividend components of gross tax return income than they are for wages and salaries. Contributing to any potential inaccuracies, the Global Insight model does not include variables that can be used to estimate the reconciliation adjustments made by BEA when comparing NIPA personal income and IRS-reported AGI.
The effect of these limitations can be seen by comparing the actual amounts of gross tax return income and the estimated amounts obtained using a regression based on the historical relationships between the NIPA and tax measures. Most of the predicted amounts are close to their actual values. However, there are noticeable exceptions. For example, between 1993 and 1994, AGI interest income (including the non-taxable portion) was estimated to increase by roughly $20 billion to $191 billion (see Figure 11). Instead, actual AGI interest income fell by around $4 billion to $174 billion. Estimated dividend income in AGI and actual dividend income in AGI likewise diverged for several years between 1990 and 2003 (see Figure 12).
The paragraphs above discuss how we use NIPA data to estimate the amount of wage and salary income, dividend income, and interest income reported on tax returns. We use similar techniques to estimate other NIPA-based components of gross tax return income. Those components include proprietors' (farm and non-farm) gains and net losses, income from rents and royalties, and income from trusts and estates. We also estimate pass-through income from S-Corporations that is included in NIPA corporate profits. [82] Social Security income is introduced as a separate target because a portion of Social Security benefits are included in taxable income.
The sum of our forecasts of the components of NIPA-based income and non-NIPA-based income approximates the taxable income base that CBO uses to project federal receipts from the individual income tax. CBO does not provide its projections for most of the components of gross tax return income. As a result, there can be differences between income amounts we use and those projected by CBO. We do not have any information about the size of those differences, or whether they even exist, until we calculate federal revenues in the final step of the calibration process.
In the final step, we adjust a set of non-income variables used to calculate taxes in the model and introduce additional distributional targets. The non-income variables include itemized deductions and some statutory adjustments. [83] We compare CBO's projections of individual income tax collections with estimates of tax liability that are calculated by the microsimulation model and adjusted to reflect the timing of tax payments. Tax payments are divided into withholding, estimated payments, and final payments. The payments are aggregated to estimate fiscal year revenue collections. An additional adjustment is made to reflect payments for fees, penalties, and other collections. When there are material differences in the revenue projections, we modify our targets for the distribution of gross tax return income by size of income by marital filing status.
Adjustments may be needed because a large proportion of the total federal income tax is paid by a relatively small proportion of taxpayers at the top end of the income distribution. Slight changes in assumptions about the number of tax returns in the top classes can produce significant changes in total revenue projections. We do not know CBO's projections for the distribution of income or tax collections by detailed income class. We therefore adjust targets for both distributional variables in the final stage of calibrating the model so that estimates of total income tax collections from the microsimulation model approximate CBO's published projections. [84]
SECTION 4: IMPLICATIONS FOR TAX POLICY SIMULATIONS
An integrated calibration of the macroeconomic and microsimulation models provides a consistent basis for conventional tax policy analysis. The final CBO-like forecast replicates CBO's published projections (see Appendix A for additional details). It also includes projections of key components of NIPA personal income not typically published by CBO. The microsimulation model uses the final CBO-like forecast to generate current-law estimates of the federal income tax over a 10-year period. It includes detailed estimates by income class of gross tax return income on individual tax returns and non-taxable income as reported on the CPS. Those estimates of taxable and non-taxable income are consistent with components of NIPA personal income obtained from the final CBO-like forecast.
Calibrating the Global Insight model and the microsimulation tax model to a common starting point also produces a consistent basis for dynamic policy analysis. This is because an integrated calibration allows us to make direct comparisons between dynamically and conventionally estimated changes in federal income tax revenues. It also assures us that dynamic revenue estimates from the Global Insight model are broadly consistent with the microsimulation model's conventional estimates of revenue and distributional effects.
Our tax policy simulations broadly proceed in three separate steps once we have calibrated the Global Insight model and the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline projections.
First, we use the microsimulation model to obtain a conventional estimate of the revenue effects of a proposed change in tax policy. That proposed tax policy can involve a change in current-law federal income tax rates or provisions or a change in the federal personal income tax base. The microsimulation model is used to make a conventional estimate of the implied change in federal income tax revenues. It also produces estimates of marginal tax rates on three types of income -- ordinary income, long-term capital gains realizations, and dividend income -- under the proposed policy.
Second, we use the Global Insight model to estimate the dynamic revenue effects of the same policy change. We use conventionally estimated changes in federal tax revenues and marginal tax rates under current law and the proposed policy as inputs in a simulation with the Global Insight model. That simulation produces an alternative to the CBO-like baseline forecast. The alternative (non-baseline) forecast includes the dynamic effects of the proposed policy on GDP, prices, interest rates, employment, and personal and corporate incomes, among other variables. Revenue feedbacks can be calculated as the difference between the dynamically estimated change in federal income tax revenues from the Global Insight model and the conventionally estimated change in the same from the microsimulation model.
Third, we update the microsimulation model to reflect the dynamic effects of the proposed tax policy on personal and business incomes. We update personal and business incomes in the microsimulation model using similar procedures developed for baseline calibration. Thus, NIPA components of personal and business income along with price-level variables and some NIPA budget variables from the alternative forecast are used to estimate target values for gross tax return income on individual income tax returns and non-taxable income reported on the CPS. We use those targets to set personal and business incomes in the microsimulation model so that they are consistent with the Global Insight model's alternative forecast for the components of NIPA personal income.
We compare dynamically and conventionally estimated changes in federal tax revenues when evaluating results from the Global Insight model and the microsimulation model. [85] We consider the tax-policy simulation complete if differences between the Global Insight model's dynamically estimated changes and the microsimulation model's conventionally estimated changes in federal tax revenues can be accounted for by initial differences in the federal personal income tax bases in the two models.
In practice, we regularly calibrate both the Global Insight model and the microsimulation model to CBO's baseline projections. We also regularly use the calibrated macroeconomic and microsimulation models to analyze a variety of tax proposals. In some instances, tax data in the microsimulation model provide a "stand-alone" conventional revenue estimate. In other instances, the conventional revenue estimate is input into the Global Insight model to generate a "first-round" dynamic estimate of the economic and budgetary effects of the tax proposal. For a handful of major tax proposals, we have used the "first-round" dynamic estimate to re-age the matched file to reflect the new alternative forecast from the Global Insight model. When we have done so, we have iterated between the Global Insight model and the microsimulation model until the two models have produced similar revenue results. [86]
-- Tracy L. Foertsch, Ph.D. , is a Senior Policy Analyst and Ralph A. Rector, Ph.D. , is a Senior Research Fellow and Project Manager in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation. The useful comments of Mark A. Ledbetter (Bureau of Economic Analysis), Christopher Williams (Congressional Budget Office), Mark Lasky (Congressional Budget Office), and Rosemary Marcuss (Deputy Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis) are gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Kevin Kellert and Ben Keefer for their research assistance.
APPENDIX A: IMPLICATIONS OF CBO'S BASELINE PROJECTIONS FOR GDP AND PERSONAL INCOME
We use the final CBO-like forecast to infer values for key measures of macroeconomic activity and incomes. We focus here on two related issues -- the extent to which the January 2006 final CBO-like forecast reproduces key economic and budgetary projections published by CBO and the implications of those projections for the components of GDP and NIPA taxable personal income.
CBO publishes its projections for only a handful of the economic and budgetary variables comprising its current-law baseline. However for those projections CBO does publish, we ensure that the final CBO-like forecast replicates as closely as possible published values for every year in the 10-year budget period.
Table 2 gives calendar-year (and where appropriate fiscal-year) averages for a selection of variables included in the final CBO-like forecast. CBO publishes either levels or growth rate projections for a number of these, including nominal GDP (billions of dollars), real GDP (percent change from a year ago), the GDP deflator (percent change from a year ago), the CPI for all urban consumers (percent change from a year ago), the Employment Cost Index (ECI) for wages and salaries (percent change from a year ago), the 3-month Treasury bill rate (annualized percent), the 10-year Treasury note rate (annualized percent), the unemployment rate (percent of the civilian labor force), corporate book profits (billions of dollars), wage and salary income (billions of dollars), NIPA net federal government saving (billions of dollars), and unified federal surpluses (billions of dollars).
The final CBO-like forecast generally reproduces CBO's published economic and budgetary projections exactly. Exceptions include nominal GDP, NIPA net federal government saving, and unified federal surpluses. [87] Even then, however, the discrepancies between forecast values from the final CBO-like forecast and CBO's published projections are small. For nominal GDP, they average well under $1 billion between 2007 and 2016 and never exceed 0.02 percent of GDP (in absolute value) in any one year. For NIPA net federal government saving and unified federal surpluses, discrepancies average around $17.7 million between 2007 and 2016 and never exceed roughly $0.9 billion (in absolute value) in any one year. [88] They are almost entirely attributable to comparably small discrepancies between projections from the final CBO-like forecast and CBO's projections of NIPA federal receipts from personal and corporate income taxes.
Table 2 also gives forecasts from the final CBO-like forecast for several key macroeconomic and income variables excluded from CBO's published projections. Those forecasts include year-over-year percent changes in real personal consumption, residential and non-residential fixed investment, exports, imports, and government spending (federal as well as state and local purchases and gross investment). They also include nominal levels values for several components of NIPA taxable personal income used in the calibration of the microsimulation model -- namely, personal dividend income, personal interest income, personal rental income, proprietors' income (farm and non-farm).
We focus first on the largest component of GDP, personal consumption. The final CBO-like forecast puts growth in real consumer spending at 3.5 percent in both 2006 and 2007 (see Table 2). CBO forecasts the same growth rates in real consumer spending over the first two years of the 10-year budget period. [89] The final CBO-like forecast also incorporates a marked slowdown in the growth of real consumer spending between 2010 and 2011 (see Figure 13). That slowdown in real consumer spending is intended to be broadly consistent with the drop in personal disposable income implied by CBO's published projections of NIPA taxable personal income and NIPA federal receipts from personal income taxes (see Figure 1B and Table 2). It contrasts sharply with the GI control forecast's higher rates of growth in real consumer spending.
The final CBO-like forecast also implies a sharp drop in personal saving and the personal saving rate in the medium term (see Figure 14). Both the slowdown in the growth of real consumer spending and the decline in the personal saving rate are intended to reflect CBO's current-law assumption that tax relief provisions originally enacted under EGTRRA and JGTRRA expire in 2010. The GI control forecast assumes at least a partial extension of the expiring provisions of EGTRRA and JGTRRA. As a result, the personal saving rate in the GI control forecast is substantially higher than the projected personal saving rate implied by the final CBO-like forecast.
Projections for the remaining components of GDP do not so explicitly reflect current-law assumptions in the medium term. However, in most cases, we do attempt to ensure that they are broadly consistent with any additional details CBO makes available about its short-term forecast. [90] For example, non-residential fixed investment consists of business spending on equipment, software, and structures. The economic outlook chapter of The Budget and Economic Outlook indicates that in the short term CBO expects an "acceleration in the growth of structures relative to that of equipment and software." [91]
The final CBO-like forecast for business fixed investment seems broadly consistent with CBO's short-term outlook (see Figure 15). In it, the year-over-year percent change in real business spending on non-residential structures increases from just under 1.9 percent in 2005 to just over 10.0 percent in 2006. Over the same period, forecast growth in real business spending on equipment and software accelerates by far less. The economic outlook chapter also indicates that real business fixed investment expanded by around 9 percent in 2004 and 2005 and that "CBO forecasts similar growth for 2006 and 2007." [92] The final CBO-like forecast puts average growth in real business fixed investment at nearly 9.5 percent over the next two years.
Unfortunately, the final CBO-like forecast does not seem consistent with what we know about CBO's short-term forecast for state and local government purchases of goods and services. The economic outlook chapter indicates that CBO expects state and local government "spending to rise by roughly 2 percent in 2006 and 2007." [93] The final CBO-like forecast puts growth in real state and local purchases above 2 percent in both fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2007.
The final CBO-like forecast includes particularly strong growth in both real state and local gross investment and real state and local outlays for personnel. [94] Growth in either one could potentially be dampened during calibration, thus reducing overall growth in state and local purchases of goods and services. However, doing so would change projections of spending by all levels of government in the final CBO-like forecast. [95] It would also require adjusting other components of GDP -- possibly net exports -- so that in aggregate projected values of GDP remained consistent with CBO's published projections.
The final CBO-like forecast already seems roughly in line with what we know about CBO's short-term expectations for government spending and net exports. For example, CBO expects that "if current laws and policies do not change, such spending [real purchases for current consumption and investment by all levels of government] will grow by another 2 percent in 2006." [96] However, it expects that federal defense spending will to slow in 2007, "reducing the growth of the total purchases by the government sector." [97] The final CBO-like forecast puts growth in real purchases by government at all levels at a little over 2 percent in fiscal year 2006 and a little under 2 percent in fiscal year 2007. It puts the year-over-year percent change in real federal defense spending at -2.5 percent in fiscal year 2007.
Moreover, the final CBO-like forecast projects a trade deficit that is roughly stable. The nominal trade deficit measured as a simple difference between NIPA exports and NIPA imports levels off between 6.0 percent and 6.1 percent of GDP in 2006. It begins to decline gradually as a share of GDP in 2007. The economic outlook chapter indicates that CBO similarly expects that "the trade and current-account deficits will level off this year and then decline as a share of GDP over the medium term." [98]
We turn next to the components of taxable personal income (see Table 3A). Consistent with CBO's published projections, the ratio of wage and salary income to NIPA taxable personal income in the final CBO-like forecast is nearly constant over the 10-year budget period, never varying more than some 0.2 percentage point from a 10-year average of roughly 69 percent. However, income shares for the remaining components of NIPA taxable personal income drift slightly. For example, the ratio of personal dividend income and NIPA taxable personal income slips almost 1.4 percentage points over the 10-year budget period, declining to roughly 5.4 percent of NIPA taxable personal income by 2016. That decline in the personal dividend income share is largely offset by concurrent increases in personal interest income and personal rental income as a share of NIPA taxable personal income. It is most pronounced not after 2008 but in the second half of the 10-year budget period.
These changes in the composition of NIPA taxable personal income partly reflect trends in the GI control forecast -- but only partly (see Table 3B). Some components of NIPA taxable personal income in the final CBO-like forecast are set primarily using information from the GI control forecast. Thus, in both the control forecast and the final CBO-like forecast, personal interest income and personal rental income increase as a share of NIPA taxable personal.
However, the GI control forecast includes a roughly 4 percentage point drop in the ratio of wage and salary income to NIPA taxable personal income over the 10-year budget period. It also includes a slight upturn in the ratio of personal dividend income to NIPA taxable personal income. That increase in the personal dividend income share in large part mirrors trends in corporate profits in the GI control forecast. In contrast with CBO's baseline projections, corporate profits as a share of GDP rebound after 2011 in the GI control forecast. Consistent with the structure of the GI model, dividend income as a share of NIPA taxable personal income similarly rebounds. Figure 1a.
Figure 1b. |
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Nearly everyone on Twitter is sharing this great picture showing a black man and a guy holding a confederate flag, but they're not arguing or yelling at each other. Much to the . . .
Mark Steyn was absolutely fantastic on Hannity tonight, explaining the true, evil history of the Democratic Party and asking when are they going to apologize for it. Here's one small blurb: It's . . .
A "Black Lives Matter" leader thought to take things into his own hands, and offered to pay someone to take down the confederate flag that everyone is fighting over. That's kinda sorta . . .
Both viewers of Hardball on MSNBC were shocked to find out that the greatest supporter of the confederate flag among the presidential candidates was not a racist right-winger, but a nutty Democrat. . . .
BillO has had enough of those who perpetrate lies throughout the media, saying that America has a white supremacy problem and is a racist nation. He gave a fantastic monologue in his . . .
Black Panther leader Malik Shabazz shouted, "let this cracker hear ya!" after calling for blacks to rise up and kill all the white slave-masters and their "g*dd*mn" families. Watch below: He also . . .
It really is amazing how liberals are just physiologically unable to see the blatant racism of their statements when they're aimed at conservatives. That's what animates pathetic attacks like this one on . . .
Ted Cruz was on Special Report tonight, answering questions from the panel in the Center Seat on everything from Obamacare to foreign policy to the Confederate flag. Watch: PART ONE: PART TWO: . . .
Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina gave a short floor speech today on the Senate floor, and came to tears when discussing what one of the family members asked him to say . . .
Obama didn't like it when he was heckled today at the White House gay pride reception, telling the heckler "you're in my house" and that he needed to be quiet or be . . .
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz really took one for the team today - team Muhammed. Speaking before a gaggle of reporters, she made sure that the Muslim world knew that America will submit . . .
Cavuto took the opportunity to confront Jason Chaffetz over ousting Mark Meadows for his TPA vote. Chaffetz admitted that the TPA vote was part of it, but claimed there were a 'variety . . .
Obama just made a public policy shift today, basically promising that the US will never arrest any family for trying to negotiate with terrorists to get their kidnapped family members home. Now . . .
Fascist House Speaker John Boehner is making sure that conservatives pay the price for not voting the way he wants them to: THE HILL - Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), the House freshman . . .
The terrorist maggot Jahar Tzarnaev was sentenced to death after making a statement where he thanked Allah, apologized to the families, and personally admitted that he did the heinous act. Watch below: . . .
Chris Cuomo is constantly trying to get Ben Carson to discuss gay issues, and he did it again this morning in a discussion about race and the confederate flag. Carson has written . . .
I know I'm probably going to catch heat for this, but I'm not going to lie to you. I find this video repulsive to watch. I'm not trying to be offensive or . . .
Rick Harrison from Pawn Stars has cut a new ad for Marco Rubio, explaining that he believes Marco Rubio is a great investment for president: I'd be all about Marco Rubio . . .
This is awesome. CNN interviews Byron Thomas, a black student at the University of South Carolina, about why he chooses to hang the Confederate flag in his home and has no issue . . .
Bobby Jindal tells Fox News that he's going to announce at 5pm today whether or not he's running for president. So, basically he's running for president and he explains why he should . . . |
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This week, ALEC and FreedomWorks introduce Kansas State Representative Ron Ryckman. Representative Ryckman serves as Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives. He was raised in western Kansas and has spent the past 25 years in Johnson County. As a student athlete at MidAmerica Nazarene University, he was dedicated to teamwork and learning business, which built the foundation for his achievements. His civic leadership runs strong. Ron has served on the Olathe City Council since 2009, and been elected to the Kansas House of Representatives first in 2012, then 2014, and again in 2016 where he shortly after was elected as Speaker of the House. He previously served as chairman of the House Social Services Budget Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. Ron and his wife Kim have been married for 22 years and have three children, Haley, Christian, and Chase.
Why did you run for office?
My father was a teacher and community leader in my home town of Meade, Kansas. He has always been a positive role model and is someone I have always looked up to. He first ran for the Kansas House in 2010 and inspired me to follow in his footsteps and run in 2012. I had the distinct privilege of serving alongside him in the House from 2013 to 2016, which was one of the most rewarding opportunities of my lifetime.
If you could "wave your magic wand," what would you like to see immediately implemented in your state?
If I could wave a magic wand, I would return the power of the purse to the legislative branch in Kansas. As the people's elected representatives, it is our responsibility to prioritize spending and appropriate funds accordingly. We are held accountable by the voters. Amending the Kansas Constitution is the only solution to guarantee a clear and defined separation of powers when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars.
Do you serve on any committees? If so, which committees and why? How do you think you have impacted them?
As the Speaker of the House, I serve as chair of the Legislative Coordinating Council, a committee composed of legislative leadership charged with making executive decisions concerning the Legislature. I also serve as chair of the Interstate Cooperation Committee, vice chair of the House Calendar and Printing Committee, and the State Finance Council with the governor and legislative leaders. Before my term as Speaker, I chaired the House Appropriations Committee.
What project or law are you most proud of?
I am proud of one of the first bills I carried in the Legislature, now in statute, which requires welfare and unemployment recipients suspected of using illegal drugs to be screened. I am also proud to have led the implementation of performance-based budgeting which ensures that tax dollars are spent as efficiently as possible throughout the appropriations process.
How has ALEC helped you as a legislator?
ALEC has afforded me several opportunities to confer with other legislators on the similar issues that impact our respective states. I have found that ALEC events hosted across the country help identify commonsense approaches to the multifaceted issues facing today's legislatures.
What is your favorite thing about Kansas?
Kansas is my home. It's where I was raised, and where my wife and I raised our children. We have great schools, strong businesses, and a unique, collective sense of community. Kansans exemplify a sense of compassion and altruism that I have yet to see anywhere else.
Can you share a fun fact about yourself that's not in your official bio?
I was born in Germany, started my first business in the fourth grade, and owned a baseball card shop in high school. Published: July 30, 2018 Tags: Legislator of the Week |
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This week, ALEC and FreedomWorks introduce Kansas State Representative Ron Ryckman |
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The Dow Jones plummeted Thursday over concerns that President Donald Trump is plunging the US in a trade war with China. Such a conflict is widely expected to harm US consumers. But what about the Asian superpower?
What if the Chinese Emperor has no clothes? Remember back in the 1970s when Americans were afraid of the Japanese economy taking over? When they bought great American assets and real estate? In fact, all that fear and anxiety were misplaced. The same may be true today with respect to China.
We hear breathtaking economic numbers coming out of Beijing. The consistent low unemployment rate and high GDP are often the envy of the world. But are those numbers real? And if not, does the Chinese government even know what the real numbers are?
In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service journalist Dinny McMahon, who has spent more than a decade inside China, and who understands much about the mythology and challenges of the Chinese economy.
Many of these economic statistics from China are manufactured from the bottom up, as city and regional leaders puff up the numbers they send to Beijing to make themselves look good. All of this, according to McMahon creates an artificial impression of growth.
It's the Chinese version of fake news.
These statistics encourage more borrowing by state-owned companies and local governments to build more factories, housing and public works, much of which are not needed. The overcapacity creates so-called investments that may never pay off.
McMahon also explains how China's continued emphasis on infrastructure and heavy industry could be a disaster. And that China has to make the turn to a more consumer- driven economy if it is to join the modern world economy.
Its once endless supply of cheap labor is drying up, the move from rural areas to the cities has slowed, the population is aging, manufacturing costs are increasing and it's very possible that China might grow old, before it grows rich. If that happens, McMahon explains, the repercussions for the world economy could be substantial.
Full Text Transcript:
As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to time constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like. Should you spot any errors, we'd be grateful if you would notify us .
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I'm Jeff Schechtman. Many of you remember that back in the seventies, we were terrified by the power of the Japanese economy. They were buying up the great companies and the great real estate assets of America, and we thought we'd all be speaking Japanese and working for Japanese bosses. Obviously, none of that came to pass. Today, much the same fear exists about China. We fear that in technology, they're way ahead of us, that their infrastructure and economy is booming, and that by controlling so much of America's debt, we are beholden. But what if the emperor has no clothes? What if everything we think we know about the Chinese economy is wrong, that it is propped up on a mountain of debt, and could come crashing down, taking the world economy with it at any time? That's the view of my guest, Dinny McMahon, in his new book, China's Great Wall of Debt. Dinny McMahon spent more than a decade in China as a journalist covering the Chinese economy and financial systems, and he's the author of the new book, China's Great Wall of Debt . Dinny McMahon, thank you so much for joining us on Radio WhoWhatWhy . Dinny McMahon: Hi Jeff, it's great talking to you. Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that you discuss in the book is that as big a part as China is of the geopolitical discussion, and certainly the world economic discussion, that so much of what we know in terms of numbers, statistics, information, transparency, that it's all very sketchy. Talk about that first. Dinny McMahon: Yeah, it's always very difficult getting to the bottom of Chinese data and exactly just how legitimate it is. Some of the numbers that they publish, just outright, there is no legitimacy to them. For example, China's unemployment level has been about 4.2 percent for about a decade. No matter what happens, it just doesn't move. It's fair to say that there's no truth behind that particular number. The number that everyone watches is the GDP figure. China's economy clearly is one of the fastest growing in the world, it's probably the fastest-growing large economy, but certainly we can't take the GDP numbers at face value either. You kind of look at the way that other nations' GDP figures bounce all over the place. China's numbers are amazingly smooth from one quarter to the next. They just move up and down by maybe a tenth of a percentage point or two-tenths of a percentage point. Certainly there's enough to suggest that these figures aren't legitimate, and that makes it incredibly difficult to actually know at any given time just how strong the Chinese economy is. Jeff Schechtman: I guess the broader question then is the degree to which this information that is coming out to the rest of the world may not be accurate, and how much internal information that the Chinese government has is accurate, and is there something that they know that we don't? Dinny McMahon: Yeah, this is an age-old question is that is the data we see really for the consumption of foreigners, and do the Chinese have a parallel set of numbers which actually tell the real story? There was a quote that was released in one of the Wikileak dumps a few years ago was a big leak of American State Department cables from embassies around the world, and one of those had the report, the notes from a conversation that the US ambassador had with a senior governor at the time who would later go on to become China's premier, and he said that no, China's data is man-made, and that even he doesn't trust the data. If he's trying to get a sense of what the economy's doing, he looks at things like freight data and energy and electricity consumption. Now, the problem is that the problem with the data isn't simply an issue of the figures being manufactured at the very top. The issue is really that the numbers are manufactured from the very bottom, because everybody throughout the system kind of has an incentive to make what they're doing look better or more successful to the next level of officials above them than they actually are. For example, officials at every level of the Chinese system, they get rated on their ability to drive economic growth. More than anything else, that is the measure against which their success is judged. If they can't generate that economic growth for real, then they often fudge the numbers. Then they fudge the numbers and they submit them to the officials above them, who might have the same pressures to do the same. By the time the numbers get to Beijing, they're being manipulated and massaged at every level, so the guys in Beijing don't necessarily know exactly what's going on. Jeff Schechtman: How much of what drives the economy than what drives public policy is the goal of actually trying to get the economy to work up to the numbers that they've put forth? Dinny McMahon: That sums it up quite well. Economic growth isn't really something that's aspirational. It's very much something, it's a number that everybody is trying to achieve. That bias is baked into the system at every level. State-owned enterprises, they're not so much driven by the motivation to earn profit, they're more driven by this goal of growing bigger and producing more. Local government officials are exactly the same. It's all about generating growth, and in particular, generating up to the level that Beijing says it wants to see. Jeff Schechtman: One of the things you point out though is that a lot of this growth is artificial, whether it's cities being built with nobody to live in them, or factories that are still sitting empty. Dinny McMahon: That's right. When we talk about China's debt levels, I guess when we talk about debt in any nation, we typically first think that maybe it's a [inaudible 00:06:28] issue, but it's not. China's not facing a situation like Greece. The borrowing hasn't been done by the central government. It's also not in a situation like in the United States prior to the sub-prime crisis. All this debt we're talking about, it's not mortgages. What it is is it's borrowing by companies, mainly state-owned companies and local governments, and what they've spent it on is things like factories and housing and public works. Those things in and of themselves don't sound so bad. It may sound like they're making a contribution to real growth, to the real economy, but so much money has been borrowed that the sort of investments that are being made have been hugely excessive and wasteful. You get the situation where you've got factories that are capable of producing far more stuff than the Chinese economy will ever use. We see that in industries like steel, like aluminum, like ship building, like plate glass, paper. There's a huge list that the government keeps of industries that are suffering from gross over-capacity because just too much has been invested in building factories. You have the same problem with housing. There's way too many apartment buildings in parts of the country where it will never be needed, and public works as well. Around the country you've got eight lane highways that hardly support more than a handful of cars, or you have airports that might only have a couple of planes arrive every week. You've had all this investment by local governments in projects that aren't really generating any economic support once they're built, any economic growth once they're built, but the local governments will have to pay off the cost of building them for years to come. Jeff Schechtman: Will those investments, particularly the infrastructure projects you talk about, will they help in fact encourage more investment? Will they in fact pay for themselves over time, although a much longer period of time than originally was anticipated? Dinny McMahon: Some will, a lot won't. When we're talking about government spending, the best way to think about it is not in terms of infrastructure, it's best thought of in terms of public works. Yeah, China has made some amazing strides in infrastructure over the last decade. I remember when they first started building their high-speed rail network, there was a lot of talk at the time that this was a white elephant, that this was a boondoggle. In hindsight, it has been an incredible investment in efficiency, it has made the country smaller. It's often difficult to get a ticket on one of these trains because they're so popular. It has been an incredibly far-sighted investment. At the same time, a lot of what the government builds can't really be put in the same category. I talked about airports a minute ago, and they're kind of in-between. Maybe they only have a couple of flights today, but maybe in the future, there's an airport, you have a distant town with an airport, maybe it will create new economic opportunities. So much of what the money is being spent on is grossly wasteful. You see a lot of new government buildings being created, often with more offices than people to put in them, and you see things like ornamental lakes and man-made mountains. You see newly built industrial parks with roads out there and sewage and electricity and new power plants to support them, and they just don't attract any businesses. You see that sort of waste over and over again everywhere, particularly as you hit the city limits of cities and towns all over the country, where all this new construction really kicks in and you visually can see the waste. Jeff Schechtman: All of that money that is going into these projects, what is the cost of that? What else could that money be used for if it were not channeled into these projects? Dinny McMahon: You know, that's an incredibly important question, because it's often been said that the way the Chinese economy needs to change is that it needs to redirect the resources that currently go towards the state and give them to ordinary people and houses. At the moment, the state companies and local governments benefit hugely from the privileged position they have in the economy. It's not just that they can borrow a lot of money, it's that they can borrow money fairly cheaply, because the banks see them as being a low credit risk, because hey, they're backed by the government, what could go wrong? At the same time, state firms get a lot of subsidy, so one of the reasons that they can build wasteful factories is because they're getting cash subsidies from the government, they're getting tax perks. They're getting low rent on the land, they're getting subsidized energy and subsidized water. You can see that the state's resources get channeled towards the state. The idea is look, if you took those resources, we would be much better off channeling them to ordinary people. Let's improve the healthcare system, so that people don't have to save as much money anymore in case they need an operation or they have a health emergency. They don't have to save as much, they'll be more willing to spend. Or China can bolster its pension system, same sort of thing. People won't have to save as much for retirement because the government will help. The idea is if you can do that, then you can actually change the way the economy works. Rather than being dependent on construction and on heavy industry, you can change the economy so that people consume more and the economy can be more oriented towards consumption. Now, that's something that economists have been arguing for years, that if China wants to become a long-term sustainable economy, kind of one that looks more like the rich countries of the world, then it needs to be less focused on shoveling resources into heavy industry and making it possible for ordinary people to consume. However, that isn't really the direction that this government is taking. Although it is really something that will genuinely contribute to the quality of people's lives. Jeff Schechtman: The other part of that equation seems to be that if you bring down the savings rate in China by doing that, it imperils China's ability to invest the way it has, and that changes its geopolitical position. Dinny McMahon: It certainly affects its way to invest. The question whether it imperils its geopolitical position is slightly more complicated, because certainly a lot of the influence China has today globally comes from its ability to spread its largess around the globe, to be able to go to Africa, go to Central Asia, go to Southeast Asia, and build the infrastructure that those countries have always struggled to get built themselves. If you take the scale of the projects and the scale of the investment that China is doing overseas, it's tiny in comparison to what China is actually doing domestically. In fact, it's tiny in comparison to what its biggest provinces are doing. Even if you do see China's savings rate drop, if this sort of investment is still hugely important to China, then it could potentially still prioritize that sort of investment. We're not quite there yet, so it's certainly a few years down the track before these sorts of questions will have to be answered. I think certainly in the short term, China is still sort of doubling down on its outward investment strategies as being an integral part of foreign policy. Jeff Schechtman: Where does technology fit into this, and China's efforts in and investment in technology, things like AI, solar, etc., that seem cutting edge and would seem to be ways in which it's moving a little bit away from that kind of heavy industry laden economy. Dinny McMahon: Right. I can't speak to AI, although from everything I've read, China does seem to be really developing cutting edge indigenous technology in that space. China is also expanding into a whole lot of other industries as well, things like robotics and electric vehicles and semi-conductors. In fact, the government's vision for how it's going to drive the economy in the future is about moving up the value chain. If the industries that were so integral for the last decade are things like steel and aluminium and ship building and things like that is the future, is China being able to manufacture more of these, getting involved in these high tech industries. That produces, sort of generates its own problems, and that's because China's kind of using the same techniques with which it's developed the steel industry and the aluminium industry, that is subsidies, protectionism, to develop these more cutting edge technologies. Also what it's doing is it's providing state resources for Chinese firms to be able to go overseas and buy up the companies with the technology that China's been incapable of developing itself. The reason that this a challenge is because places like the United States and Europe and Japan see their own economic futures, their own future prosperity as being closely tied with these more advanced types of industries, and they're not willing to see China use the same subsidies and protectionist techniques on these industries to lock them out of their development, allow China to unopposed become a global leader in these industries by using these techniques I was talking about, because they see them as a challenge to their own economic future. I think this is really, the first round of significant tariffs that we saw from the Trump administration were about aluminium and steel. I think the real hot-button issues going forward, the industries where we're going to see the most tension are over these more technologically advanced industries that China intends to expand into. Jeff Schechtman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mean, in many ways, imposing tariffs against aluminum, steel, and these other things, it's going against the industries China's trying to get out of. They're beginning to outsource those industries. Dinny McMahon: Steel in particular is an interesting one. No doubt tariffs will help the American steel industry, but it's not necessarily going to China. The reason for that is, well firstly, China does export an incredible amount of steel. It exports more steel than the United States actually produces, but very very little of that goes to the United States. This has been a problem for years, and the US government has been pushing back against it for years as well. The real issue is that China exports to other countries, and those are the countries, because they can't compete with cheap Chinese steel, they then export their own steel to the United States, so that's kind of how that works. Yeah, the issue here is that the reason China produces and exports so much steel in the first place is that it just invested way too much in its own steel-producing capacity. It really, if it wants to deal with its own economic problems, it needs to start shutting down a lot of that capacity, irrespective of what the United States wants. Towards the benefits for its own economic interests, it needs to start cleaning up the excess capacity in industries like steel. Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the biggest concerns among the Chinese leaders about the economy, even without the accuracy of the numbers, as we talked about at the outset. Where do they see the concerns? Dinny McMahon: The thing that Beijing worries about more than anything else, and we're going to get economic here for a minute. What they worry about is something called the middle income trap. Now, this is an idea that World Bank economists came up with a few years ago. What they did is they looked at the hundred countries that in 1960 could fairly be called middle income. That's countries that weren't rich nations, but they weren't dirt poor nations, they were developing countries that were in the middle. There were about 100 of them, middle income nations in 1960. They then had a look at how many of those had become rich nations 40 years later, and there were only 11. There was a group of Singapore, South Korea, Israel. What they discovered is that a lot of nations got to the point where they're within striking distance of becoming a rich nation, and we've seen this time and time again. We saw this in the 1990s in southeast Asia with Thailand and Malaysia. We've seen this at various times with Mexico and Argentina. Various times, developing economies have been growing extremely quickly, and they've kind of got to a point where it looks like they might be able to join the ranks of rich nations, and then at the last minute, they stumbled. This is the thing that worries the Chinese leaders more than anything else, that they're not going to be able to make this transition from a developing nation to a rich nation. The thing that really has to change is that developing countries can develop very quickly up to a certain point usually because they have, that they're capable of making stuff cheaply. They've got a whole lot of people who probably traditionally were working in the agricultural sector, and they're in a position to move into factories where they'll get paid more, but they'll still be able to produce things extremely cheaply. The country will be able to buy the machines to put in the factories from overseas, and then they'll use cheap labor to become competitive. There comes a point where that dynamic starts to break down because they run out of cheap labor. At that point, they've got to start innovating, they've got to start becoming more efficient. The actual nature of the economy has to become a higher quality economy, and that's kind of the point that China is at the moment. I know journalists like myself for years used to write about how China had this endless supply of cheap labor. As it turns out, it wasn't endless at all. It has ended. The flow of people moving from the countryside to the cities has been slowing year on year, and so the cost of manufacturing in China is going up significantly. One of the reasons behind that, other than this flow of migration is drastically slowing, is China's working age population is shrinking. Now, that's a direct fallout from the one child policy. What that means is since 2012, the working age population in China has been getting smaller and smaller. Over the next decade, it will shrink by tens of millions of people. That has two effects. It means that wages will go up, making China less competitive, and it means the government is going to have to spend more and more money on healthcare and pensions for retirees. I think China's finance minister summed this up extremely well a couple of years ago. He said this was his biggest worry, and he was worried that China would grow old before it grew rich, because the sheer process of becoming old would make it so much more difficult to become a rich nation. Jeff Schechtman: What is the Chinese plan at the moment to try and make this turn, or is there one? Dinny McMahon: No, it's what I was getting at before, it's that China needs to move into more technologically advanced industries, so it's this whole idea that rich nations innovate and they produced more high-quality manufactured goods, and so China, their government is trying to force-march its industry into these more highly technologically advanced businesses. Lord knows it might actually work, but there's a whole lot of other moving parts to what makes a successful developed economy, and they're things like efficiency and competition, and they're not the sort of reforms that China is making at the moment. Actually, the finance minister a couple of years ago explicitly said the reason he worries about the middle income trap is because China needs to become a more efficient economy. The reforms that will take, the reforms necessary for that are going to take years, and he doesn't think that China has that window of opportunity. Jeff Schechtman: What are the things that could happen that could stall this and really cause the whole economy to start to unravel? Dinny McMahon: See, this is the hardest thing to say, to work out. Certainly I think potentially a heightened trade conflict with the United States or with developing nations generally speaking, that could be it, because at the moment, China is trying to wean itself away from this investment-heavy, construction-focused model of growth. It would like to be able to export more high technologically advanced goods. The thing is, if foreign nations become less willing to take Chinese exports, then in order to maintain growth, I could imagine Beijing would have no option to double down on this debt-led, investment-driven model. We're already at levels where debt is so high and the waste is so excessive that you'd imagine that sort of situation wouldn't really end well. In terms of other than that, a one particular moment that might cause things to unravel, it's very difficult to say, because the Chinese government has proven itself extremely good at being able to paper over the problems and kick the can down the road, whereas a more market-based, competition-based system would be more fragile to various economic shocks. The Chinese government has proven itself more than capable of being able to hold things steady when there are potential shocks and external crises. Jeff Schechtman: How are the changes that are taking place in Europe right now in the EU, how is that impacting China, or potentially might impact China? Dinny McMahon: Right. That's a very interesting question, because it comes at the same time that China is becoming more globally assertive. For a very long time, China's foreign policy was very low-key. Its priority was very much about developing the economy, but under Xi Jinping, that has very much started to change. In some ways, it's opening up a space for China to become more globally assertive. Certainly here, I think we're in this moment where China being so strong, people tend to assume that it's set to become one of the two global powers, even challenge the US global primacy. I think we're so ready to think in those terms because in particular, Europe has perhaps politically been at its weakest it has in a very long time. Jeff Schechtman: The other part of that equation is what the US should be doing, one, in terms of asserting its own economic concerns vis-a-vis China, but also not doing things that will be really dangerous in terms of the Chinese economy, which could have a deleterious effect on the world economy, as you talk about. Dinny McMahon: Yeah, Jeff, how you balance that equation, I really don't know. We are at a point where the US really does have to rebalance the trade relationship it has with China. So much of, China has traditionally had a lot of its natural advantages. It has been a cheap place to manufacture because of its labor force, but the reason that China has become so dominant globally as a manufacturer isn't solely because of its cheap labor, it's because of the subsidies of the government, not just the central government, but every level of government has been willing to give to industry. For the US, it's really at a moment where it's like, we can't allow that sort of balance in the economic relationship to continue as it is, and particularly with China now planning to move into more technologically advanced industries as well, it really has to come up with a way to balance the playing field. Now, how exactly to do that is going to be a very complicated and drawn-out process that's going to take a lot of trial and error, and how you do it without exacerbating some of the problems underlying China's economy as well, that's well above my pay grade. Jeff Schechtman: Finally, talk a little bit about how the global banking system sees all of this at this point and how it views China. Dinny McMahon: I think China isn't as integrated into the global financial crisis, sorry, the financial system as you might assume that a country of its size and its importance might actually be. If you go back to the late 1990s, the lesson that China took away from the Asian financial crisis is that if you break down capital controls, if you let foreign money flow easily into the economy and then allow it to easily flow out again, then you expose yourself to real risks, because if foreign capital decides to leave in a hurry, there's not much you can do about it. In some ways, China has ring-fenced its financial system from the rest of the world. Yeah, there's leakage points and crossovers, but for the most part, what happens in China's financial system stays there. Now, perhaps the one exception to that, and I think this is probably what you were getting at is the issue of US treasuries, because China holds a massive amount of US treasuries. For a period of time, it held more than any other country in the world, but my understanding is that these days, Japan now holds the number one position. There's always been this theory that perhaps China could weaponize them, that the US is vulnerable because China might one day sell them all off. The problem is that there's a reason why China holds that many US treasuries. It doesn't want to. It's been trying to diversify for years and years, and that diversification has resulted in things like China doesn't have one sovereign wealth fund, it has two. They've diversified into everything from buying more gold to buying warehouses in Sydney and office towers in London. The problem is, no other financial market is big enough to hold China's foreign exchange reserves, so they need to hold US treasuries, and the other thing is it needs somewhere liquid, because if it needs to cash in those US treasuries for being in a hurry, it needs liquidity. We saw that a couple of years ago when China's foreign exchange reserves declined by about a trillion dollars in the course of a year. That's a lot of money. It's actually in China's interest to be able to hold something like US treasuries, which it can cash in quickly if its own domestic economic situation demands it. Certainly in the last couple of years, China seems to have got under control the outward flow of capital, but if it happens again, it needs to be able to cash in its foreign exchange reserves quickly, and that's why it needs to hold US treasuries. Jeff Schechtman: Dinny McMahon. He has spent over a decade inside China. He's the author of the book China's Great Wall of Debt , and Dinny, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy . Dinny McMahon: Not at all, Jeff, it's been great talking with you. Jeff Schechtman: Thank you for listening and for joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy . I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I'm Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org /donate.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from China flag (Unknown / Wikimedia) and China's Great Wall of Debt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Where else do you see journalism of this quality and value?
Our Comment Policy
Keep it civilized, keep it relevant, keep it clear, keep it short. Please do not post links or promotional material. We reserve the right to edit and to delete comments where necessary. |
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The Dow Jones plummeted Thursday over concerns that President Donald Trump is plunging the US in a trade war with China |
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Florida congressman Mark Foley, who sparked a firestorm of controversy when he called a press conference in May to denounce rumors that he is gay, on Monday touted his support for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act while speaking to a group of members of the Spirit of '76 Republican Club of Pasco County, reports the St. Petersburg Times. At the event, in which Foley was stumping for votes in his run for the Republican nomination for Bob Graham's U.S. Senate seat, Scott Factor, treasurer of the Pasco Republican Executive Committee, asked Foley about his votes on two gay rights measures. One proposal would have banned adoptions by gay people in Washington, D.C.; the other would prohibit the use of federal funds for a San Francisco ordinance requiring benefits for "unmarried domestic partners." Foley voted against both measures, saying Congress should not meddle with issues decided at the local level. But Foley confirmed that he voted for DOMA, which denies federal recognition of same-sex unions, and said he does not support adoptions by gays.
Factor, apparently, was unconvinced. "He's clearly in favor of gay rights, and he refuses to address that issue to a mostly conservative crowd," Factor said. |
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We've gone over the benefits of saving oneself for marriage (read Waiting Till the Wedding Night - Getting Married the Right Way ): mutual trust with your partner, disease prevention, no unexpected pregnancies... Also not getting thrown in jail if you live in a place like Abu Dhabi, which loves to throw people in jail. Especially women .
Yep, that's our segue. A pregnant woman was tossed in da clink for being unmarried and with child. Now she's being forced by the government to undergo medical tests to determine when she gave away her flower. Yes, really. It's of national interest, apparently ...
A pregnant Ukrainian woman held in Abu Dhabi with her South African fiance faces medical tests to see when she lost her virginity... [The couple] were arrested for unlawful sex outside of marriage when a doctor discovered the pregnancy.
Having sex outside marriage is illegal in the UAE, and those who are convicted can face long jail sentences. The couple have reported been detained since January 29, but details of their arrest are just emerging. They have not, however, been charged because authorities are still investigating the paternity of the child, how long the couple was sexually active and are testing [the mother's] HIV status.
According to The Times, [the man's] mother, from South Africa, said: 'How can they determine how long she's been sexually active? It must feel as if she is being raped by the authorities.'
Firstly, if you had any doubts about the pervertedness of Islamic countries like the UAE... Wonder no more. This should put those questions to rest. The male-dominant government measures women's virginity and lobs threats of jail at those it deems unclean. Which is usually women. Sounds rather sexist, right? If you answered anything other than "yes," promptly relocate to the Middle East. Also slap yourself. Because this is what actual sexism looks like, and it's a big part of Islam (see Qatar: Dutch Woman Reports Rape and SHE'S Jailed For It... ).
You've likely noticed how feminists are eerily quiet on this issue... Possibly due to being too busy trying to defund American colleges guilty of fake rape culture or morally crucifying those who fall victim to verifiably false rape accusations (see Students Accused of Rape Suspended, Lose Scholarships. Except the 'Victim'? She Lied... ). Priorities.
While those of hairy-armpitted, leftist persuasion attack America for fake rape culture, they ignore Islam's actual rape culture. And sexism . And terrorism . This is why Islamophobia is a thing.
By the way, normal people? For the love of all that is good and non-halal, stop going to Muslim countries. They don't want you. Clearly...
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT ! IT'S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE . |
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By Daniel J. Weiss , Arpita Bhattacharyya , Raj Salhotra | August 18, 2011
Washington, D.C.--As the White House completes its interagency review of the Environmental Protection Agency's updated ground-level ozone standard to protect public health, some of the companies required to reduce their pollution continue to make exaggerated claims that negative economic impacts will occur due to these updated protections. This will be the first improvement in the science-based standard to protect children, seniors and other sensitive people from ozone (smog) in the air since 1997.
Leading the charge against these safeguards are Big Oil, coal, and utility companies who assert the protections will wreak economic havoc. These groups made similar charges when the ozone standard was improved in 1997. The Center for American Progress analyzed the economic data from the metropolitan areas affected by the 1997 standards, and found that industries' predictions did not occur.
"Industries' predictions of economic armageddon following the adoption of the 1997 ozone standard did not occur. In fact, economic growth and unemployment in the metropolitan areas newly out of compliance generally followed the national economy. This means that Big Oil and other polluters' similar, current attacks on the pending ozone standard also lack credibility," said Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and coauthor of the analysis.
"Big Oil and its allies have launched a fact-free onslaught aimed at the pending ozone standard, while this analysis shows that a stricter ozone standard will likely have little impact on the economy of the affected areas, while the air in these communitites will be safer for children, seniors, and other sensitive populations," he added.
CAP evaluated the economic growth and employment rates metropolitan areas experienced after they were put into "nonattainment" (or violation) for the first time due to the 1997 standard. The analysis determined that contrary to industries' predictions, the areas with smog levels exceeding the health standards for the first time experienced very similar economic growth to the nation as a whole. Additionally, employment rates were very similar to the national rate.
The administration is expected to finalize the smog standard very soon. Industry and business groups will undoubtedly continue their strong opposition to protecting the health of millions of Americans on the grounds that it will hurt the economy. Installing new scrubbers and controls will cost money, but will also create jobs. After the establishment of previous safeguards, industry has found ways to meet them much more cheaply than their rhetoric predicted.
History shows that the new ozone health standard is unlikely to have much negative economic impact, but will save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in lower health care costs. "The Obama administration must ignore the tired, disproven pleadings of Big Oil and other special interests, and instead set an ozone health standard based on the science to provide additional protection to all Americans," concluded Weiss.
To read the full analysis, click here .
To speak to CAP experts on this issue, please contact Laura Pereyra at lpereyra@americanprogress.org or 202.203.8689. |
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Here are quotes from Linda McQuaig on various life and family issues:
McCuaig decried the Harper Conservatives for not allowing abortions in Africa to become part of the government's Maternal Health Initiative: "There's much that urgently needs scrutiny, starting with the Harper government's use of the G8 summit to score points with its ultra-conservative base by launching a "maternal health initiative" that denies abortions to the world's most desperate and impoverished women." [Column on LindaMcCauig.com, "G20: Protest-phobia", May 31, 2010]
Her response to a gay-activist reporter about her thoughts on federal funding of a Christian charity who does development work abroad: "These groups are also anti-women, anti-abortion. That's the Conservative agenda right there. An NDP government would have totally different priorities. We need to get our priorities right. We need to establish that we shouldn't be funding discrimination. " [DailyXtra.com, "Toronto Centre by-election: NDP candidate Linda McQuaig", Nov. 17, 2013] |
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Here are quotes from Linda McQuaig on various life and family issues |
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But according to Politifact , the legislation to which she referred requires only that ICE have 34,000 beds available every day.
BIOGRAPHY CHICANERY
The far-left Democrat is the "future of the Democrat Party" according to DNC Chair Tom Perez.
Her biography, however, began with chicanery. She decided to straighten it out with sleight of hand.
In the original bio, she said she commuted from the Bronx [the reader must presume it is her home] to school in Yorktown -- she spent "much of her life" doing it.
Her bio states: "The state of Bronx public schools in the late 80s and early 90s sent her parents on a search for a solution. She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx."
She has corrected that with artifice. The sly Socialist now says she commutated to see her "extended family".
Her bio currently reads: "The state of Bronx public schools in the late 80s and early 90s sent her parents on a search for a solution. She ended up attending public school in Yorktown-40 minutes north of her birthplace. As a result, much of her early life was spent in transit between her tight-knit extended family in the Bronx and her daily student life." |
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Rep. Maxine Waters attacked President Donald Trump on Saturday for "undermining" former President Barack Obama, saying she will push for Democrats to "reverse" the "GOP tax scam" if Democrats retake control of the House in November's midterm elections.
During an interview with MSNBC , Waters threw a hissy fit when she was asked by host David Gura about the whopping 4.1 percent GDP growth in the second quarter.
Rather than offer the Trump administration an ounce of credit for the booming economy, Waters got defensive and claimed the president's economic proposals were "undermining" Obama's legacy.
"Of course, the economy has improved, and of course he would like to take credit for all of that. But in the final analysis; when this country understands and feels what has been done with the tax scam and what that's going to do for our deficit in this country, it's going to be reversed. A combination of the tax scam and the tariffs will undermine all that has been done in the economy that was started by Obama."
She also claimed Obama was responsible for the booming economy, which isn't logical given the economy and markets have hit unprecedented levels that Obama was never able to achieve when he was in office for eight years.
Watch below:
Her bizarre comments came one day after the U.S. economy grew by 4.1 percent in the second quarter of 2018, marking the fastest economic expansion in nearly four years.
Waters also said she wants Democrats to repeal the GOP tax cuts, which has helped create millions of new jobs and accelerated the markets to historic levels. Waters is apparently so blinded by her own hatred toward Trump that she wants to undo one of his most important accomplishments because it has arguably benefited the nation far more than anything Obama ever did.
Her insane rant on Saturday also comes after she called for Americans to scream at Trump Cabinet officials in public.
Last week, the California Democrat claimed she was " sent by God " on a mission to get Trump and hold him accountable for his actions.
Her calls for violence resulted in pro-Trump Florida Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi being spit on and harassed by liberals, a mob of deranged liberals swarmed the home of DHS Secretary Kristjen Nielsen, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to get a Secret Service unit.
And now she has made it abundantly clear that she will push for Democrats to repeal Trump's tax cuts if Democrats retake the House in November. |
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California governor Jerry Brown made history today by signing legislation making his state the first to deliberately include the contributions of gay, lesbian and transgender Americans in its schools' history curriculum.
Brown explained his motivation for approving the bill:
History should be honest. This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.
SFist describes the move as including "queer studies, if you will, into social sciences along with education about 'disabilities and members of other cultural groups.'"
The bill's passage is not without its controversy, with some Republicans in the state arguing that it forces a "gay agenda" onto students. But state Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco, who came up with the bill, says including gay and transgender Americans in public school textbooks and lesson plans will help quell bullying in schools, as well as provide students with a more complete understanding of American history:
Denying LGBT people their rightful place in history gives our young people an inaccurate and incomplete view of the world around them.
h/t LA Times |
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With the election season fully in bloom, the aroma of deceit and desperation is growing more pungent by the hour. Mitt Romney, The Original Bankster , continues to be evasive about his international business affairs, and he refuses to release more than a single year of tax returns in order to quell speculation. His electoral prospects have not been noticeably enhanced with the addition of Wisconsin congressman, and extremist right-winger, Paul Ryan to the ticket. Consequently, the GOP PR machine (aka Fox News) has swung into action to attempt to cauterize the wounds and manufacture some positive spin on behalf of the struggling Republican standard bearers.
The most effective contribution of the Fox spinners is their expertise in disseminating brazenly dishonest propaganda without shame or fear of reprisal. They construct fabrications that benefit their patrons and broadcast them to an audience that is so undiscriminating that they'll watch Sean Hannity more than once. And since the majority of rational news consumers will never see much of what Fox works so hard to invent, we have complied a list of some of the most dishonest moments so far in the 2012 election cycle. [Note: in order to pare this list down to a manageable length, it has been limited to just just the last eight weeks. There's only so much bandwidth on the Internet]
1) President Obama Did Not Call Mitt Romney A Felon Mitt Romney claims that he had ceased to be involved with Bain Capital in 1999, although his signature on SEC documents affirms that he was the sole shareholder and CEO as late as 2002. Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, pointed out that Romney had to have lied on either the SEC forms or his public statements that contradict them. Fox News turned that into an accusation by Obama that Romney is a felon. However, there is a big difference between calling someone a felon and simply noting that if one were to commit a felony they would be a felon, which is all that Cutter had done. But Fox is not inclined to miss an opportunity to invent a controversy where none actually exists.
2) Fox News Built That In a speech to supporters in Virginia, Obama praised the hard work of individuals and businesses while also noting the collective value of American investment in economic prosperity. So Fox News plucked an out-of-context soundbite from the speech that said "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." What Fox deliberately left out was that Obama was referring to public services like teachers and police, and to infrastructure like roads and bridges that contribute to the success of all businesses. It's a position that Romney himself has taken. However, Fox News blew this distortion up into such a frenzy that the Romney campaign adopted it and now have made the Fox-built fallacy the theme for the GOP convention in Tampa. [Note: The GOP convention is being held in the Tampa Bay Forum, a facility that was built with mostly public funds]
The tactic of taking quotes out of context has been a favorite of the Fox News gang this year. They did precisely the same thing with remarks Obama made about the economy (the private sector is doing fine) and his record in office (we tried our plan and it worked). In both cases Fox left out critical language surrounding these remarks that revealed just how purposefully dishonest the Fox News team is.
3) The Swift-Boating Of President Obama Fox News has proudly announced the commencement of a Swiftboat campaign against President Obama. The organization set up to carry out the assault is described as "A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives," but in reality is a partisan assembly of Republicans and professional Obama haters. The Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund (SOOEF) plans to produce and distribute videos and advertisements that will criticize Obama for "taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden." This is an archetypical implementation of Swiftboating whose purpose is to spread lies about a key achievement of Obama's leadership as Commander-in-Chief.
The assertions by the SOOEF that Obama has improperly heralded himself for the demise of Bin Laden are demonstrably false. Their video features gross misrepresentations of Obama's statements on the subject that loop portions of his speech referencing himself, but leaves out his abundant praise for the military and intelligence operatives who carried out the mission. The opening line of the President's address to the nation announcing that Bin Laden was dead explicitly and unselfishly stated that "the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden." He went on to thank "the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," and he praised "the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country."
None of that was in the SOOEF video which Fox has featured in numerous broadcasts. What's more, Fox actually uses the term "Swiftboating" to describe the anti-Obama campaign. Either they have completely given up on trying to pretend that they are a "fair and balanced" news enterprise (which no one believes anyway), or they don't know that Swiftboating means lying.
4) Fox Nation Ignores Polls By CNN, Reuters, And -- Fox News Virtually every time a new poll on presidential politics is released Fox News will make a point to publish the results - so long as the poll shows Obama losing. In a particularly egregious example of this bias earlier this month, Fox prominently reported on a poll by the right-wing Rasmussen operation that placed Mitt Romney in the lead 47-43. What Fox neglected to report was that there were three other polls released at the same time that all put Obama ahead. And the most striking part of this omission was that one of the polls that Fox declined to cover was conducted by Fox News itself and put Obama ahead of Romney by nine points.
Fox couldn't even bring themselves to report on their own poll conducted by their own pollsters. That's the sort of biased cherry-picking that is the hallmark of Fox's "news" charade. And it's a crystal clear message to pollsters from Fox: If you want to be covered, you better say what we like. And that goes for Fox's pollsters as well.
5) Welfare-To-Work Rules Were Not Weakened By the Obama Administration The Romney campaign recently accused Obama of directing his administration to relax the welfare-to-work provisions of Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill. That accusation is directly refuted by the facts. What Obama did was to permit waivers for states that could affirm their progress in moving people from welfare to work, and allowing them flexibility to enhance their programs. It's a modification that Romney himself had requested when he was governor of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, Fox News picked up the accusation and ran with it. In every segment on the subject they portrayed the issue precisely as Romney had framed it despite every fact-checking operation concluding that Romney's charges were entirely false.
And speaking of fact-checking, Romney has been rated untruthful 67 times by PolitiFact, and 14 of those were "Pants-on-Fire" lies (including the welfare lie). In fact, 43% of PolitiFact's findings on statements by Romney are rated as untruthful. He's downright pathological, but Fox has not yet reported that fact.
6) Obama Did Not Sell Amnesty For $465.00 After Obama issued a directive to the Department of Homeland Security not to advance the deportation of young immigrants who had been brought to this country by their parents and who had demonstrated achievement in school or the military, there was a rush of dishonest reporting from Fox News that Obama was placating law breakers and opening our borders to criminals, drug traffickers, and terrorists. Of course, none of that was true. News reports from more objective sources correctly noted that the beneficiaries of the program had broken no laws and that the public overwhelmingly supported the President's plan.
After the initial drama subsided, Fox News decided to take another stab at promoting their false narrative. They began running reports alleging that Obama was "selling amnesty" to illegal aliens. What Fox was grossly misrepresenting was that the program had an application fee to help offset its costs. One would think that deficit minded conservatives would have approved of that fiscal responsibility. But Fox chose to present it as the purchase price for amnesty even though no one in the program would receive amnesty.
7) Soldiers Were Not Prevented From Voting In Ohio The issue of voter suppression has been a major factor in this years election contests. In states across the country Republicans have been working strenuously to reduce early voting availability and impose unreasonable identification requirements that serve to disenfranchise mostly voters who are minorities, seniors, students, and low income. But perhaps the worst example of distorting the issue occurred when Fox News accused the Obama administration of seeking to trample on the voting rights of people in the military.
The actual story is that the Republicans in the state of Ohio passed a bill that reduced early voting for everyone in the state except the military. The Obama Justice Department contested the move arguing that the same early voting privileges should be available to all Ohio voters. So the Obama administration was actually advocating for expanding voting rights for everyone, including veterans who would have been excluded under the GOP bill. The characterization by Fox News was 180% opposite of the truth.
8) Fox News Reports Obama Birth Certificate "Definitely Fraudulent" In a stunning piece of journalistic malpractice , Fox News reported assertions that Obama's birth certificate was "definitely fraudulent." The remarks were from Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, and while they were correctly attributed, nowhere in the article did Fox note that the birth certificate had been authenticated and that every credible source agrees that it is valid. The only references to the birth certificate's authenticity were framed as merely "claims." And Fox being "fair and balanced" regards all claims as having equal weight, even those without any substance to back them up.
This is a necessarily abridged collection of Fox falsehoods. There are far too many more to list here. But in the last eight weeks Fox News has disseminated some glaring whoppers in an attempt to prop up the flailing Romney campaign. Expect this to continue through the upcoming conventions and straight through to November. Because when you are supporting a candidate who refuses to reveal his taxes, his business history, or even his proposed policies, all you have left is what you can make up.
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What began yesterday as just another Monday in the horrific hellscape that is Trump's America ended with a more horrifying moniker: the Monday Night Massacre
Modeled off of a similar day during the Nixon Administration, the day is being so called because it was the day that President Trump unceremoniously fired acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates for defying his refugee ban and publicly criticizing the administration.
Yates was fired by the President after she refused to call on the Department of Justice to enforce or defend Trump's refugee ban. Yates said that she felt the ban was unenforceable and even unlawful.
In a letter to the lawyers of the DoJ, Yates stated:
"At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful."
For her honesty, she was swiftly fired and replaced by Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
After she was given notice of her firing, the White House issued a scathing statement attacking Yates' character and attempting to align her opposition with the previous administration's political leanings.
"Ms. Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration."
Senator Chuck Schumer defended Yates' action saying, "[The] attorney general should be loyal and pledge fidelity to the law, not the White House. The fact that this administration doesn't understand that is chilling."
Yates was a carryover from the Obama administration and was asked to serve as acting Attorney General until Trump's pick, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, could be confirmed by the Senate.
Now, Trump's hand-picked selection of Boente will head the department for the interim, and no doubt he was chosen to do so because he will not question the administration's agenda. The person who was poised to replace Yates in the line of succession was skipped over, indicating that Trump chose Boente for a reason.
Many have referred to this day as Monday Night Massacre in reference to a similar day, the 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre" in which President Richard Nixon dismissed independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox, head prosecutor in charge of the investigation into his involvement in Watergate. This resulted in a constitutional crisis, something we may be headed toward as well.
Despite the Trump Administration's fury at Yates, those who oppose Trump are applauding her action and making grand comparisons to past historical events.
People say, "If I'd been in Germany in WWII, I would've refused to obey orders." We just saw someone who meant it. #ThankYouSallyYates
-- Amy Jo Cousins (@_AJCousins) January 31, 2017 |
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PLEASE, PERMIT ME TO VENT MY SPLEEN A BIT!
by Dr. Thomas E. Davis , Colonel, USA (Ret), (c)2016
(Aug. 21, 2016) -- Without doubt, there are poor misguided souls who fall hook, line and sinker for the deceptions and outright lies passed around "cooperatively" by the MEDIA, mainstream or tributary. The following link is demonstrable evidence that most, if NOT all, the so-called NEWS is the result of a cut-and-paste job from a single source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/world-class-journalist-admits-mainstream-media-completely-fake-we-lie-cia/
Much of the "news" comes from the sycophantic minds of "little" no-talent jerks like Sissy Chrissy Matthews, who says he gets chills or thrills running up and down his leg when he hears "The One" pontificating in front of the White House press corps. Chrissy and his counterpart, the idiot import from jolly old blighty, Piers Morgan, the sanctimonious know-it-all. Contrast these two sanctimonious non-journalists with investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, who is most critical of these wannabes who lack the moral courage to report honestly the information they report as "the news" rather than the bogus substitutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmMieu3Kug&feature=youtu.be
Attkisson reveals in her book "Stonewalled" how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama administration and its scandals and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today's media. Sharyl appears to be one of the last in a long list of top-notch investigative reporters. Her book is truly revealing, just what our servants think of us versus them. I have no idea exactly how much Sheryl has uncovered regarding the criminal activity of the Obama administration. But, of this I am certain, Walter Williams founded the Missouri School of Journalism and wrote the Journalist's Creed which stands engraved in bronze at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. but is likely unread by all but the most diligent and honest members of the Fraternity.
For the moment, let's take a look at how our servants, the Congress, the Executive and the Judiciary regard themselves. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State." However, that caveat fails to deter the servants from setting the manner in which We the People are expected to address them formally as "The Honorable" Representative or Senator or Justice, when as a matter of fact, the majority of THEM are dishonest, untrustworthy, derelict in their sworn duties, simply spoiled or discourteous. These majestic beings oftentimes go to great lengths to avoid being questioned regarding certain of their activities. Many are simply downright arrogant.
The same applies to most of the "talking heads" of ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. Money is their most important value, ranking well above character, honesty, Judeo-Christian ethics, patriotism, loyalty, courtesy and humility. Give me one Sharyl Attkisson any time before even suggesting an egoist like a Matt Lauer, Bob Schieffer, Scott Pelley, Bill O'Reilly, or Megyn Kelly. Those last five seem to have lost their American loyalty. None has called for the indicting, trial, conviction and execution of Barry Soetoro-Obama, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, John Kerry, or Huma Abedin or even "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, all traitors.
In the early days of our republic, the members of the Congress worked more days during a session than the current Congress and those of the recent past: this, in spite of the fact that travel time has been shortened from days or weeks to hours. Communications to and replies from our congressional representatives are, for the most part, a one-way activity. Replies from or even acknowledgements of receipt of an email, fax, letter or phone call are rare to non-existent. Of course, the same applies to O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Greta Van Susteren and Fox News when I had the audacity and even the temerity to suggest that Megyn, Greta, Kimberly Guilfoyle or Dana Perino might be a viable candidate to become America's "first" female president. Oh! Silly me. As a matter of fact, I was very serious, and now we have a perverted, derelict, foul-mouthed, liar and TRAITOR attempting to buy the presidency. And, speaking of Hilly: George Stephanopoulos used an interview with Schweizer on ABC's "This Week" to point out what other "nonpartisan" journalists have found: There is no "smoking gun" showing that donations to the foundation influenced Hillary Clinton's foreign policy decisions. Where did they find a "journalist?" Probably among the White House press sycophants.
Just one final momentary rant: We have been in existence as a Democratic Federalist Republic since September 17, 1787, just 27 days short of 229 years. The "Democratic" portion of that title refers to and means We the People; "Federalist" refers precisely to the form of government the Founders intended for We the People to elect periodically. "Republic" expresses the mode of government as "a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them."
That notion remained sacrosanct until 1828, when the poison of party politics became the drink of choice for the power-brokers, their benefactors and all the graft of which they could conceive. Their devices and deceptions have brought "God's Chosen Republic" to the brink of extinction. We have deferred to sloth, sapphism, homosexuality, gratuitous sex, pornography, drugs, and all manner of activities inconsistent with the lives of our founders and their ancestry. We were forewarned by 55 Christian intellectual giants to be ever vigilant; we have failed our responsibilities to preserve this Republic for our heirs; we must be ashamed and repentant and change direction back to our Creator and Father.
At the very ripe old age of 91, I have no fear for me and mine; I fear only for the continued life of my beloved America. I am headed for a better place, my Father's House of Many Mansions, one of which has been reserved for me. As long as there is a spark of life left in me, I intend to pursue two goals only:
1. Do all that I am able to bring this rabid animal, our faux president, to a judicial termination of his worthless service in the company of Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Kerry, Leon Panetta, Martin Dempsey, Valerie Jarrett, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice and Cheryl Mills for their treason against America and its legal residents.
2. Do all that I am able to force the Congress to call an Article V Convention of States in order that those in attendance might offer some few needed amendments to the Constitution which the 50 States may consider and ratify.
Sources of Nonsense On or In the News added on Sunday, August 21, 2016 |
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After years of living amongst the violence of political turmoil and strife, Nancy Adossi and her family left Togo in West Africa when she was nine. They settled in Houston staying on a visitor's visa that expired after a year.
Twenty years later, Adossi remains in Houston. The 28-year old graduate of the University of Houston is undocumented and only protected under former President Barack Obama 's 2012 administrative action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
As of September 2017, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that there are 689,800 active DACA recipients. They came to this country as children and are exempt from being deported while also receiving permission to work (subject to renewal). Last year, Donald Trump's administration announced that it would end the DACA program, forcing Dreamers to return to their home countries.
Adossi has worked tirelessly to receive both her masters and doctorate degrees focusing on the education of foreign medical graduates. She currently consults with immigrant organizations like the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the UndocuBlack Network doing advocacy work and research on how Black immigrants are treated in America.
Her story is not all that uncommon. She is one of the many undocumented Black immigrants who are seeking a pathway to legal citizenship. As of 2016, there were 4.2 million Black immigrants living in the U.S. with 39 percent of the overall foreign-born Black population coming from Africa, according to a Pew Research Center study of U.S. Census Bureau data.
As Congress continues to work on a bipartisan deal, the Dreamers are left wondering what will happen to their American dreams after the March 5 deadline. Adossi explains what life is truly like for an undocumented young, Black woman and what's going through her mind as she waits for the government to decide her future.
theGrio: Why did your family come to the United States? Nancy Adossi: We left Togo because of political strife. I grew up around a lot of military action and rules. It was a tough environment to live in, so in 1997, my dad came to America, leaving my mom, my older brother and I in Africa. A few months after he left, we were attacked in our house by rebel forces. They rounded us up with the intention of killing us, but someone decided otherwise. Instead, they told us if we could make our way across the border to Ghana, we would be spared. My mom packed as much as she could. My brother was 10 and I was eight and together, we were escorted with guns to our heads to the Ghanaian border, which was about a 10-minute walk away. They told us, don't look back and don't come back and that's exactly what we did.
theGrio: What happened to your family in Ghana? Nancy Adossi: When we got to Ghana, we didn't have anywhere to go. We didn't know anyone there. We were basically homeless. Fortunately, we found a place to stay for a few weeks until it was announced that the government had regained control in Togo and that we could go back. Our home had been ransacked and it was no longer safe to live there. We stayed with some family members, but during this whole time, my dad couldn't get in touch with us for a month. He thought he'd lost us after the news reached him that we were attacked. When he found out we were safe, that is when he decided that no matter what, he would never be separated from his family again.
theGrio: When did you arrive in Houston? Nancy Adossi: It took exactly one year. I was 9-years old when we arrived in Houston. Before he left Africa, my father worked as an economist for the Bank of West Africa, but when he came here, the only job he could get was as a taxi driver. He already had a two-bedroom apartment for our family. My brother and I were enrolled in school three days after we arrived. I didn't study English at all in Togo so it's the strangest thing to be in school when you don't speak the language.
theGrio: Why didn't you renew your visa? Nancy Adossi: We were supposed to stay for less than a year, but in December, it will be 20 years that I have lived in the U.S. without proper documentation. I used to live in fear of being deported , but now I have protection through DACA and I qualify for the DREAM Act. Adossi's younger brother and father in 2002 (left) and with her mother, four months after arriving to America. (Photo courtesy of Nancy Adossi.)
In order for me to get a green card or permanent residency, I would have had to return to Togo and start the process all over again. Also, my family is known to have left the country because we didn't want to be there. We would be going back into the same situation we left. People don't realize that immigration is not merit based. The only way you can come and stay in America legally is either you have a place of employment or a family member sponsoring you.
theGrio: Was there any opportunity to file for asylum? Nancy Adossi: My father tried, but his petition was rejected. One of the problems Black immigrants face is the stigma that if you are Black, you are expendable. I believe there is more recognition for those asylum victims who are from the Middle East and Eastern Europe than from African nations.
theGrio: Why do you think that is? Nancy Adossi: If you are from the Middle East, you have lighter skin. North Africans get a lot of these asylums because they look mixed. When you are West African, there is no doubt you are Black.
Just like what President Trump said, America wants anyone who looks white. It is easier for them to assimilate into a country where being white means being the best. For example, the Diversity Visa Lottery program gives people from countries with low immigration numbers the opportunity to come to the U.S. and was originally created for Irish immigrants to come here legally. I cannot tell you how many Irish undocumented immigrants are living peacefully in America. Nobody is double-checking them. Trump said exactly what the immigration policy in America has dictated all along.
theGrio: Explain to people what being undocumented means. Do you pay taxes? Nancy Adossi: I pay my taxes. I do not have any criminal record. Every undocumented person I know is the perfect citizen. Even when we are wronged, we are scared to scream at people in public because we don't want any trouble. One of the best things about living in Texas is that there is in-state tuition available for undocumented immigrants. I took advantage of that and I worked hard for my undergraduate, masters and my doctorate degrees. I have had no less than four jobs since I was 17 because I never know what's going to happen and I always have to have a backup plan.
theGrio: How are you feeling about the bipartisan meetings in Congress regarding DACA? Nancy Adossi: I was scared when I was younger. What I feel is like my soul is tired. It has been 20 years of struggle and hearing the same old promises. Waiting on these papers for my life to start is like I'm waiting to exhale. I see myself as an American. It's all I know. When I talk to people back in Togo, they don't see my as Togolese. I don't know the history of my country or even the full history of my language.
theGrio: Do you know anyone who has been deported? Nancy Adossi: My father had a mental break in 2005. He reported himself to ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials and they deported him. He lives in Togo and I haven't seen him since the day they took him to the detention center. I always considered myself a daddy's girl, so it has been really hard. I was 15 when he left, and I didn't know how to process that. I support him financially and send money overseas.
theGrio: What will you do if something tragic happens to him? I don't know. I'm at the point in my life when I realize I need to take care of him, but I don't know how to do that from another country. It is something that I think about just about every day.
theGrio: Have you thought about what you will do if they repeal DACA next month? Nancy Adossi: I don't know, but I know I will survive. I will figure out a way. I have come to see myself as a true warrior to be in a country that does not want you or your kind. To be undocumented and rejected by even African-Americans because you are still considered an "other."
theGrio: Are you saying the African American community has rejected you? Nancy Adossi: Every African who comes to America has probably felt this--dealing with the misconception that Africa is a jungle and Black kids would make comments about the way I smelled. When I was a teenager, it was hard for me to befriend them. I wanted to connect to people who looked like me, but they would tell me you speak like you're white. Then, in college, I hung out with other immigrant students because I felt closer to people from other countries than to the Black community. In the work place, I've encountered Black Americans who say they don't like Africans because we come here and take their jobs.
theGrio.com: What's your response to that? Nancy Adossi: I've become more assured of who I am as a woman, so when I am rejected by a Black American person, I remind them that we are both Black. Listen, I get the fact that as a Black person born in this country and trying to get ahead it is hard to see another Black person come along who seems to be doing better than you. You may think I have a better deal, but really, the white person you think is giving me a chance is really just making me the token.
theGrio: Are you at all optimistic that the lawmakers will be able to come up with a fair option? Nancy Adossi: I have hope, I don't know if that's the same as optimism. Everything happens for a reason and I don't think God would put me through all of this only to leave me with nothing. I have appreciated my life story and the 20 years that I will have spent in the US as an undocumented Black, female immigrant because it has given me so much hope in the impossible. |
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During Tuesday's episode of "The View," actor Kevin Costner told the show's panel how he does not recognize the United States anymore because of President Donald Trump and his administration.
Co-host Joy Behar specifically asked Costner about illegal immigrant families being separated after being caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
"This is a hard thing to say, but I'm not recognizing America right now," Costner replied as the audience clapped.
"I don't recognize its voice. I don't recognize any individual statements," he continued. "I feel people going with the flow, and there's people right in the middle. We're in a really weird spot, and it takes a high level of compassion, empathy, and intelligence to work our way out of this."
Watch the video below:
"We have to do better. We've been about more. We can be about more, and right now, we are acting really small," Costner added.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep detained illegal immigrant families together.
Displaying the Executive Order to keep families together, Pres says his wife and daughter feel very strongly about the separation of families, as does he. "Anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it," but reaffirms policy against people entering US illegally. pic.twitter.com/2SW7fKlOZL
-- Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 20, 2018
"We want security for our country," Trump said stated before signing. "The Republicans want security and insist on security for our country, and we will have that. At the same time, we have compassion. We want to keep families together. It's very important. I'll be signing something in a little while." |
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The decennial census has undergone significant changes as the U.S. population has evolved. Rapidly changing demographics continue to present challenges to the U.S. government in its effort to collect demographic data.
By Farah Z. Ahmad and Jamal Hagler
As concepts of race and ethnicity evolve, the methods and language used by the decennial census to capture data are key to ensuring that policymakers recognize and understand all communities, particularly growing communities of color.
By Farah Z. Ahmad and Jamal Hagler
Despite an improving labor market, other indicators show that we are far from the healthy economy Americans need.
By Michael Madowitz and Danielle Corley
Targeting economic policies at the state rather than the federal level may produce more tangible assistance for struggling communities of color.
By Sam Fulwood III
The president's fiscal year 2016 budget makes smart investments in international climate finance that are, at their root, inseparable from domestic climate actions.
By Pete Ogden and Gwynne Taraska
The Access to Contraception for Women Servicemembers and Dependents Act and other policy changes are critical to address the reproductive health care inequities that women serving in the armed forces face.
By Julia Rugg and Donna Barry
While most the current research focuses on women and mother's experiences balancing family life and paid employment, addressing the issues facing men and fathers is equally important to promoting greater equity at home and at work.
By Erin Rehel and Emily Baxter
A ruling for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would take away quality, affordable health care from millions of Americans.
A new proposal to update the No Child Left Behind Act includes a provision that could substantially redistribute federal dollars away from the students who need them the most.
By Max Marchitello and Robert Hanna
Despite a fourth-quarter slump, Big Oil posted big end-of-year profits.
By Danielle Baussan and Miranda Peterson
Policies and programs aimed at homeless youth routinely fail transgender young people, and the disparities they experience in health, safety, and social and economic well-being hold them back.
By Hannah Hussey
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill ignores opportunity to improve U.S. school systems for students with disabilities.
FACT SHEET
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill ignores opportunity to improve U.S. school systems for communities of color.
FACT SHEET
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill reduces parent access to information about their children's progress.
FACT SHEET
With U.S. GDP growth so dependent on consumer spending, there is reason for concern, despite positive numbers.
Tuesday Aug 14, 2018 10:00 AM From Community Schools to Community Districts: Building Systems for Student Success
Tuesday Sep 25, 2018 08:30 AM 2018 Smart on Crime Innovations Conference |
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When you meet the feminist punks of Pussy Riot, you might find yourself fighting off deeply uncool, motherly urges to hug them, offer them a cup of tea, and ask if they're OK.
For one thing, we only know about them because the Russian government has made the past couple years very rough for Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova and Maria "Masha" Alyokhina. They're just 24 and 25, respectively, but you can read a wary curiosity in their otherwise youthful looks, a toughness born of the habitual questioning that probably comes with serving out nearly 500 days in Russian prisons, where Tolokonnikova went on a hunger strike to protest horrifying conditions and briefly disappeared to a distant gulag , before they were released two days before last Christmas.
The holiday spirit of the early commutation of their two-year sentence is notable: Their August 2012 conviction was for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." In the simplest terms, their crime was performing an obscene, antigovernment song in a beloved church. Less than a minute of off-key, screeching activism catapulted them into a global spotlight, not for quality of performance but for the zeal of the responding government repression and the anger inspired in Russia's born-again religious nation, Pussy Riot's lesser target. Many Russians have taken up open worship with relish since the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of the enforcement of godless communism in 1991--that year the share of adults identifying as Orthodox Christian was 31 percent, rising to 72 percent by 2008. With religion has come conservative pressure for women to conform to mom roles--which Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina (and any good feminist) reject as a pure societal mandate, though they both have young children.
Add up their ages, and Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina are still younger than their main foe, a political target who must hold some sort of record in the "amount of time spent shirtless , global leader over 60" category. At 61, Russian President Vladimir Putin openly disdains Pussy Riot and the lesser-known elements of his opposition. During an hour-long show that aired on state-run television to honor his 60th birthday, Putin lauded Pussy Riot's sentence, saying they "got what they asked for." Though they didn't: Pussy Riot's anti-Putin "punk prayer" asked the heavens to "drive away Putin." (As most Ukrainians can tell you, Putin is still around and very much so.)
What's more, when you meet Pussy Riot, it gets really hard to imagine that the leader and legal system of the largest country on earth (double the size of the U.S., fully an eighth of the world's inhabited land) found the art of these young women to be a jailable insult. Pussy Riot members have been attacked in the streets by Cossacks and targeted by pro-Putin protesters and have been taking measures to improve their security in Russia.
In an interview at the TakePart offices on Friday, the first question I asked Tolokonnikova was this: Do you feel safe in Russia?
"Well, in Russia, you should understand, the louder you become, the more pressure you begin receiving," Tolokonnikova began, speaking through her translator and husband, Pyotr Verzilov.
"So for us, well, it's not a safe situation, and we try not to think about it too much (in a broad sense), but we try to think about practical situations and take security precautions," Alyokhina continued, with Verzilov's help.
"And since we still want to live in Russia and make changes in Russia, you have to treat all these security problems as something you acclimate to, like the weather outside," Tolokonnikova said.
Unlike the chill the women are adapting to year-round in Moscow, the weather was sunny and warm when Pussy Riot visited Los Angeles for the first time this week, the latest stop on their global human rights campaign. They're here to talk about their causes and a documentary, Pussy v. Putin. Shot mostly by insiders, the pastiche of film cobbled together by Journeyman Pictures captures the fierce antagonism they've faced as rabble-rousers in Russia. In their fight for a Russia where it is free and safe to express opposition, they are launching a nongovernmental organization, called Zona Prava, that's focused on the protection of prisoners' rights and legal reform in Russia.
Sitting in our conference room, Tolokonnikova's and Alyokhina's eyes searched the walls, eyeing posters for the films and documentaries produced by our parent company, Participant Media. At one point, Tolokonnikova gestured and said in English, " Food !"--expressing her admiration for Food, Inc. , our documentary on the cruel turns industrial farming has taken, adding that she loved the title's nod to corporatism.
When you meet Pussy Riot, another thing is clear: In an impossibly cool and casual way, they embody the ethos of punk women everywhere. They are fearless, smart, and totally unapologetic in their demands for what's fair. Their shock, anti-jock approach is clearly calculated, and they're focused. You don't have to tell them that Pussy Riot is more than a band of women who don balaclavas to perform caterwauling tunes. They know that from the aggression they've been fielding from Russian authorities, yes, but also from the response they've been inspiring in the world's other leading women and human rights activists.
Madonna is kind of obsessed with them, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently praised them after posing for a photo-op --and they're riding the media wave, full speed. So is it weird for their anticorporate, antiauthoritarian stances to be taken up by global leaders and pop stars?
"Every person who's now [backing] Hillary Clinton also has a certain punk background," said Alyokhina, upping the likely 2016 presidential candidate's cool factor exponentially. And getting support from other powerful people doesn't change you, said Tolokonnikova.
"If you have your own set of values, you don't disappear and dissolve into someone else's set of values," said Tolokonnikova. "And besides that, in the media, if we meet these people, we navigate."
Charting their own course hasn't been easy. Plenty of Russians call bullshit on Pussy Riot's antics, saying their antireligion, antigovernment shtick isn't what's best for Russia. And that brand of nationalism appears poised to spread: Armed, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine are looking to cede independence and allow Putin to take power, while NATO warns that Russian troops are amassing along the country's eastern border.
For Pussy Riot, current geopolitical upheaval is an unsurprising outcome of the thuggish government they have decried through public martyrdom--and they're only expecting it to get worse.
As George Orwell wrote in the dystopian novel 1984 :
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina went to prison for more than a year for what amounts to yelling in church, and their minds have come back untorn and ready to agitate.
But are they reaching Putin in a meaningful way or changing other minds? The answer to the former relies on the unlikely admission of a foe, but the latter is where they hope to make their mark.
"The opposition is usually an indicator of tolerance, of a government's ability to communicate with a society," Alyokhina said. "Putin pressures down all opposition in Russia, and in our case it's really illustrative."
That's why, most of all, when you meet Pussy Riot, you feel certain that they're going to meet everyone you know, or reach them, somehow. |
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a rally organized by the liberal Patriotic Millionaires group / Getty Images
BY: Joe Schoffstall Follow @JoeSchoffstall November 21, 2017 3:20 pm
A group of deep-pocketed progressive millionaires seeks to "fundamentally reset" America's ideology and economy and "expose the dogma of free enterprise, limited government, and traditional family values," according to a brochure obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at a secretive progressive dark money donor conference.
The group, called Patriotic Millionaires, is a Washington, D.C.-based organization that consists of wealthy liberals with an income of at least $1 million. The organization initially formed in 2010 to "demand an end to Bush tax cuts for millionaires" and has launched a recent campaign against the Republican tax cut plan.
Patriotic Millionaires's newest organizational overview, which is not the same brochure that is currently available on its website, was obtained by the Free Beacon at the Democracy Alliance's fall investment conference held last week at the swanky La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, Calif. Each Democracy Alliance member vows to steer hundreds of thousands in funding to approved left-wing organizations the group supports.
The group is led by Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock, one of the world's largest investment firms, and identifies its core values as pushing for "equal political representation," a "livable minimum wage," and a "fair tax system" that rejects free enterprise, limited government, and traditional family values.
"We hope to facilitate a wholesale rejection of modern conservatism, exposing the dogma of 'free enterprise, limited government, and traditional family values' for what it truly is: a thin veil concealing rapacious capitalism, social Darwinism, and a profound misunderstanding of--and disinterest in--the human condition," the group writes in its brochure.
Race, immigration, reproductive freedom, social equality, mass incarceration, and global climate change are labeled as the group's most pressing issues, suggesting they can be dealt with if "a political economy capable of meeting the basic needs of our citizens" is established. The group hopes to establish these tenets as the dominant political system in the United States by 2026, when America celebrates its 250th birthday, its brochure states.
"In a political system that has become more an oligarchy than a democracy, our power lies in being seen as members of the 'elite' class arguing against our perceived self-interest," the brochure reads. "The truth, however, is that values we support will make the country more stable and more prosperous for all its citizens, including rich ones."
The wealthy progressive activists say that the country is facing an "unstable president, a volatile political climate, and an almost wholesale capture of government" by moneyed interests, and wants to capitalize by leveraging their position to promote a "powerful new governing framework" in public debate and "fundamentally reset" America's ideology and economy.
"The 2016 election sparked a profound awakening, creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally reset America's ideological course and its political economy," they write. "Voters are rejecting the wholesale capture of government that began 50 years ago, and they are demanding their elected officials focus on the fundamental issues of power and money that have always been at the heart of the Patriotic Millionaire's work."
Patriotic Millionaires writes this is "once in a lifetime opportunity" to relentlessly push for a "new American paradigm around two things that matter the most in a capitalistic democracy: Power and money."
The organization also boasts of its issues on the national, state, and local level, ranging from the minimum wage to tax policy. Patriotic Millionaires joined former President Barack Obama at the White House for his 2012 Tax Day address and his 2014 signing of an Executive Order raising the wages of federal contract employees.
In order to become a member of the group, an individual must have an income of more than $1 million and/or assets of more than $5 million, which can include funds in family foundations, and can choose to have their names public or private.
The organization's members operate through education, which includes providing perspective and analysis to journalists and members of the media; advocacy, such as testifying in front of lawmakers on the national, state, and local levels; and funding, with each member providing annual donations to support their education and advocacy work.
The group boasts of generating hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of media attention and has appeared on national television programs. Most recently, the organization has popped up in outlets such as the Atlantic , Vox , Huffington Post , Newsweek , and others, pushing back against the Republican tax cut plan.
Patriotic Millionaires did not return a request for comment on its operations or what kind of American ideology and economy they would like to see instead of one that supports "free enterprise, limited government, and traditional family values."
This entry was posted in Politics and tagged Democracy Alliance , Democratic Donors . Bookmark the permalink . |
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Muslim Ban Draws Protests
Trump dismisses international controversy, fires acting AG.
By Victoria A. Brownworth
UPDATE:
As Trump keeps tweeting about it, remember it was ONLY a week ago #SallyYates was fired for asserting what 27 judges have since ruled. pic.twitter.com/Q00HUiCrQy -- Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) February 6, 2017
On January 28, the New York Daily News cover depicted the Statue of Liberty weeping with the headline "Closing the Golden Door" - a reference to the Emma Lazarus poem "The New Colossus" that was engraved in bronze and attached to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor in 1903.
The lines we are most familiar with read:
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
That golden door slammed shut on January 27, which was, coincidentally or not, Holocaust Memorial Day. That day links to a dark history for America, which in 1939 turned Jewish refugees away from New York harbor. Most of those refugees were murdered in the Holocaust at various concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. One well-known family that applied for refugee status was that of Anne Frank . She and her sister Margot and mother Edith would perish in the camps. Only her father, Otto, who would later publish the journal she kept, survived.
Today millions have read The Diary of Anne Frank and it continues to be required reading in American schools.
The last American ban against refugees sent #AnneFrank , her sister & parents to #Auschwitz to die. #MuslimBan pic.twitter.com/YQdopD6CNK -- Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) January 29, 2017
The memory of Frank and other refugees whose lives could have been saved by America was the ugly shadow behind President Trump as he signed an executive order referred to as the "Muslim ban" - a restriction on all people coming into America from seven predominantly Muslim countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. The ban also covers anyone holding dual citizenship with banned countries, thus impacting people in the U.K., Australia and other nations the U.S. previous considered allies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered sanctuary to people turned away from the U.S. while German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has accepted over a million immigrants into Germany over the past two years alone, expressed her outrage over the ban in a statement Jan. 30.
Trump's own rationale for the ban was delivered on Twitter:
There is nothing nice about searching for terrorists before they can enter our country. This was a big part of my campaign. Study the world! -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017
Trump and his interlocutors have insisted this is merely a temporary 90-day travel ban and not a ban on Muslims, but since Trump noted that Christians from these countries would be exempted because he claimed hundreds of thousands of Christians were being beheaded by ISIS, that's a difficult assertion to make. What's more, Syrian refugees are in dire need of help from the U.S. Refusing them entry is remarkably similar to the 1939 ban on Jewish refugees.
Like the U.K.'s Brexit vote , which was largely justified as keeping Syrian and other immigrants out of the U.K., Trump campaigned on fear of immigrants. His opening salvo as a candidate insisted that Mexicans were "rapists" and were coming to the U.S. in large numbers basically to rape and kill.
Trump also claimed former-President Obama and former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were allowing "hundreds of thousands" of Middle Eastern immigrants into the U.S. This false claim was repeated by candidate Trump in stump speeches and in debates. But in point of fact, it's the Department of Homeland Security that determines visas and vetting of immigrants, not the State Department.
Even Hillary Clinton, who has been attempting to remain off the main stage as is demanded of losing candidates, felt compelled to weigh in on the protests:
I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution. This is not who we are. -- Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 29, 2017
Yet Trump has blamed Clinton for what he considers an unsafe America where hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim nations are plotting against America. As a candidate he repeatedly said, including in a statement after the Pulse nightclub massacre in June 2016, "Under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of the children and their children."
This was totally false, yet in a news segment on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 , on Jan. 30, Trump voters in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania-white men and women who had voted for Obama in 2009 but voted for Trump in 2016, cited his stance on keeping out Syrian and other refugees versus Clinton's plan to admit them with full vetting (which takes at least two years), as their main rationale for voting Trump over Clinton.
That's part of how we got here.
The other part is Trump's inability to control his impulses or think things through prior to acting - something we see on his Twitter feed daily. Had Trump waited for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), his nominee for Attorney General, to be confirmed by the Senate prior to issuing his executive order banning immigrants from these seven Muslim nations, there may have been little protest.
But that's not what happened. Instead the president decided late Friday afternoon to sign the ban, clearly believing doing so right before the weekend would go unnoticed by press and populace alike.
It did not.
As with most of Trump's actions since his inauguration on Jan. 20, signing the travel ban was ill-conceived and impulsive. Protests erupted immediately, and Saturday, when people began to be either detained or turned away at airports throughout the country, including legal permanent residents (LPRs) - people with green cards - chaos reigned.
On Saturday night, after the ACLU got involved, Ann M. Donnelly, a federal judge in Brooklyn, issued an emergency stay against the Muslim ban. This allowed people who had valid visas and had already landed in the U.S. to remain. It also protected those in the air after the judge's stay was issued. It did not, however, help those who had been sent back either in mid-air or from airports in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
Donnelly's ruling, while only a stay, marked a swift defeat for Trump-for the time being.
Saturday night and all day Sunday and Monday were marked by protests erupting at airports and city halls across the country, even in red states like Nebraska, Iowa and Vice President Mike Pence's home state of Indiana. The largest protests on Saturday and Sunday were held at JFK airport in New York, PHL airport in Philadelphia and Seattle's Westlake Park. At Dulles International Airport in Virginia, officials were refusing to follow the stay of the ban on Sunday, Jan. 29, creating further conflict and a possible constitutional crisis, as the executive branch has no constitutional ability to override the other two branches of government.
Muslim women protesting at Westlake Park seattle sunday night
Conflict and chaos was exacerbated on Monday Jan. 30, when at 9 p.m.EST, Trump fired the acting Attorney General, Sally Yates. Yates, an appointee of Barack Obama, was an ostensible placeholder while the Senate held hearings on Sessions.
Sessions is the most controversial of all Trump's nominees, with a long history of racism that kept him from being appointed to the federal bench under Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1986. Sessions was the only Reagan appointee to be rejected. Sessions is so controversial, members of Congress, including civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), testified against Sessions at the Senate hearings.
Yet despite the protests and the confusion at airports which had officials in tears, visa-holders in agony and small children abandoned at airports, unable to be picked up by their families, Trump insisted all was moving smoothly. In concurrent tweets Monday morning Trump wrote:
Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage,..... -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017
protesters and the tears of Senator Schumer. Secretary Kelly said that all is going well with very few problems. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN! -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017
Trump's rather bullying reference to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) emotional response to the ban utterly ignored the reality of the protests and the outrage within both the Democratic side of Congress and his own State and Justice Departments.
Enter Sally Yates, acting Attorney General, being hailed by those on the left as the one identifiable hero. Yates had sent a letter to the Justice Department asserting that she did not believe the Muslim ban was constitutional and that they were not to enforce it. She ordered everyone working in the Justice Department to refuse to defend Trump's executive order in court.
Yates' letter reads in part: "I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution's solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right. At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful."
Sally Yates
Yates said, "For as long as I am the acting attorney general, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the executive order, unless and until I become convinced that it is appropriate to do so."
That act of courage lasted just as long as it took Trump and his team to find someone in the Justice Department to take her place - Dana Boente, another Obama administration appointee who agrees with Trump on the ban.
This is why acting AG #SallyYates was fired. pic.twitter.com/timfptKFIz -- Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) January 31, 2017
But there are problems. In firing Yates in another impulsive move, Trump may have put the nation at risk. Boente is not, unlike Yates, approved by the Senate and there are conflicting points of view on whether or not he has the power to sign surveillance warrants. The New York Times quoted senior Justice Department officials saying no, but at 11 p.m. EST Jan. 30, Lawfare disagreed .
What's remarkable over the period between Friday afternoon and Monday night is how much drama and turmoil have arisen in this brief 11 days of the Trump presidency. That turmoil has put America in a highly precarious position with friend and foe alike.
Congressional Democrats lead protest outside Supreme Court against "unconstitutional and immoral" immigration order. https://t.co/YCwb7C76Dl pic.twitter.com/wIQuRHuwDd -- ABC News (@ABC) January 31, 2017
That should concern all Americans, but the nuances of the Muslim ban seem to be lost on many. Even among Democrats, the percentage of Americans who favor keeping Middle Eastern immigrants out is depressingly high - well over half the country agrees with the concept.
But seeing families torn apart at airports may have a different effect in the coming days and weeks - it's impossible to say. Refugees fleeing to America from the nations on Trump's list are mostly fleeing for their lives and have spent inordinate time and money trying to obtain visas to get here. People who aided our military throughout the Iraq war are now being turned away. This is, of course, unconscionable. Whether it is also unconstitutional - the president has broad leeway to restrict people from entering the country - remains to be seen.
The last time an attorney general was fired in the U.S. was during the Nixon administration. During the Watergate scandal, which forced Richard Nixon to resign, the so-called "Saturday Night Massacre" took place on October 20, 1973. Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus.
Regarding the firing of Yates, the White House stated that in "refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States, [Yates] has betrayed the Department of Justice."
Sean Spicer, Press Secretary
Yet she was upholding the Constitution, which was, in fact, her job.
According to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, Dana Boente, US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was sworn in at 9 p.m. EST.
The president did not call Yates. She was informed via a hand-delivered letter.
It's difficult to assess what happens next with regard to the Muslim ban or any other executive order signed by Trump in the coming weeks and days. The president has done exactly what he said he would do as a candidate on the campaign trail. Those campaign promises , outrageous as many of us knew them to be, may shatter our Constitution and the democracy it upholds. For his part, Trump summed it all up in a tweet:
If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the "bad" would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad "dudes" out there! -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017
For the rest of us, it will take far more than a tweet to explain what is happening to ourselves, our families or our children.
This is who #MuslimBan is keeping out of America. Explain THAT to your kids. pic.twitter.com/jJl2XyIIhe -- Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) January 29, 2017
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer and the author and editor of nearly 30 books. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Scripps-Howard Award, RFK Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 SPJ Award for Enterprise Reporting. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and A Room of Her Own, senior politics reporter and contributing editor for Curve magazine, contributing editor for Lambda Literary Review and a columnist for San Francisco Bay Area Reporter. Her reporting and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Ms Magazine, Diva and Slate. Her book, Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic won the Lambda Literary Award, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for cultural & historical fiction. Her new novel, Ordinary Mayhem, won the IPPY Award for fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Mystery. Her book Erasure: Silencing Lesbians and her next novel, Sleep So Deep, will both be published in fall 2017. @VABVOX Edit Module Edit Module |
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fatalities from the ongoing opioid epidemic gripping the United States are fueling "personnel shortages" and equipment failures within America's "death investigation system," a forensic doctor told lawmakers Thursday.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), drug overdoses in 2015 yielded an unprecedented 52,404 deaths, including 33,091 (more than 60 percent) that involved an opioid.
"The opiate crisis is a slow moving mass fatality event that occurred last year, is occurring again this year, and will occur again next year. Each year getting worse than the previous," declared Dr. Thomas Gilson, the chief medical examiner for Cuyahoga County in Ohio, dubbed the nation's overdose capital in late 2016.
Dr. Gilson's comments were part of his written testimony prepared for a synthetic opioids hearing Thursday held by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Subcommittee on Investigations.
The forensic pathologist pleaded U.S. lawmakers for more funds to combat the increase in heroin-related deaths facing the coroner's office in his jurisdiction and those across the rest of the nation, saying:
At this time, however, local resources have been exhausted. The Death Investigation System and local Forensic Labs are now facing double-digit caseload increases annually, personnel shortages, equipment breakdown and failure and costly and complex processes to identify, catalog, standardize, and confirm an ever-changing menus of substances known as novel synthetic opioids -- the fentanyl analogs.
Fentanyl refers to a powerful synthetic opiate that is driving opioid-affiliated deaths.
This year, the coroner's office in the Dayton, the capital of Ohio, reportedly ran out of room for opioid overdose bodies.
Dr. Gilson told Senators the epidemic is overloading the entire country's death investigation system, noting:
There is a national crisis in death investigation. My field of specialty, forensic pathology, is in dire need. Less than 500 forensic pathologists practice in the United States. Currently, 28 different offices across the United States are seeking to hire forensic pathologists. As the oldest training program in existence, our office is one of only 35 in the country. Our program graduates 1 or 2 doctors a year in a system that only produces a few dozen new forensic pathologists annually. It is essential that additional support be given to these programs as well as incentives for doctors to enter this field.
Experts who testified during the Senate panel hearing stressed the need to tackle the deadly problem associated with the use of fentanyl .
"Chemical flows from China have helped fuel a fentanyl crisis in the United States, with significant increases in U.S. opioid overdoses, deaths, and addiction rates occurring over the last several years," reported the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission this year.
Most of the fentanyl in the United States originates in China.
"According to U.S. law enforcement and drug investigators, China is the primary source of fentanyl in the United States. Along with shipments sent directly to the United States, fentanyl is shipped from China to Mexico and, to a lesser degree, Canada, before being trafficked across the U.S. border," noted the commission.
"China is a global source of fentanyl and other illicit substances because the country's vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored," it also said.
An official from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told lawmakers that fentanyl seizures have skyrocketed in recent years.
Robert Perez, the acting executive assistant commissioner for CBP's operations support, testified that the agency's fentanyl seizures increased more than 200-fold from 2 pounds in 2013 to 440 pounds last year.
The CBP official acknowledged that interdicting fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, primarily smuggled through official ports of entries (POEs) and the international mail system, presents a "daunting task" for the federal government.
"Fentanyl is the most frequently seized illicit synthetic opioid, but CBP has also encountered various types of fentanyl analogs," Perez told lawmakers.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission added, that "the combination of the drug's potency and affordability has made fentanyl an increasingly common drug in the United States, often mixed with heroin or cocaine -- either intentionally or without the user's knowledge -- to increase its euphoric effects." |
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When you take a look at the entertainment industry over the last several decades, there are countless fictional characters that have caused women to question their sexuality. Just within the past few years, straight and queer women alike have fallen for androgynous female characters such as Shane McCutcheon from The L Word , Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in The Runaways , Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , and pretty much every character in Orange is the New Black . These are women who inspired bi-curious conversation, or simply reaffirmed already apparent queerness, making them go down in queer history as some of the most fantasized about characters of all time. Yet, for me, it wasn't a '70s rocker or a Swedish hacker that sparked my queer awakening, because, by the time I saw those films, I was already well aware of my sexuality. Instead, one of my first instances of sexual curiosity came from the 21st century cult classic Mean Girls and I still have a big lesbian crush on Janis Ian, played by Lizzy Caplan.
Although Janis Ian's sexuality was used as a homophobic bullying tactic by Regina George and the Plastics, many found her "dykey-ness" to be a total turn on. Sure, Regina may have poked fun at Janis's gothic wardrobe and pin-straight black hair, but it was her badass sense of style and no-fucks-given attitude that made her a queer sex icon.
I was 10 when Mean Girls came out, which was a few years before I began to seriously question my sexuality. As I entered middle school and began my teen years, Mean Girls played a key role in the pop culture of the time, and like every other 12-year-old, I was just trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into society. I related to Cady's struggles to fit in, but as I got older, I found myself identifying less with the film's protagonist and more with the brazen and eccentric supporting character. By the time I was halfway through high school, I had seen the film over twenty times, and I knew that instead of wanting to be Janis Ian, I wanted to date her.
There was something in the way that Janis unabashedly dismantled patriarchal standards and navigated high school to the beat of her own drum that got teenage me all hot and bothered, and to this day I still find her to be a total babe. Even though in the end, Janis may not have been a lesbian (although I still don't totally buy her relationship with Kevin Gnapoor) and I was left secretly hoping that Regina and Janis would hook up in a sequel of their lives after North Shore, she is still a queer role model in my eyes. And while we were never rewarded with a follow-up confirming Janis Ian's sexuality, Showtime's Masters of Sex has given fans a second chance at drooling over Lizzy Caplan. Sure, the characters are about as dissimilar as you can get, but throughout her acting career, Caplan has continually played feminist characters, which are sexy no matter what.
Nevertheless, today on October 3rd, also known as Mean Girls Day, let's all take the time to honor the women of the big screen and the silver screen that affirmed our blooming lady love and reassured outsiders everywhere that it was okay to be different. So whether you're team Ruby Rose or still shipping Naomi and Emily from Skins, be sure to think back to the fictional feminists that made sleepovers just a little bit hotter.
Photos and GIFs Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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It is of the nature of modern secular ideologies that they can't ignore the least deviation from their lengthening list of what counts as culturally unacceptable. In America, new racial and gender ideologies are now affecting even children's literature.
In an article in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal , Meghan Cox Gurdon, who writes a weekly column on children's literature, gives a litany of incidents just this year in which the cultural totalitarians who now control our institutions quelled any deviation from the Party orthodoxy on matters of creative literary thought.
The Thought Police at Scholastic Books earlier this year swung into action to deal a blow for the cause of narrow-mindedness everywhere when it pulled A Birthday Cake for George Washington , because (prepare yourself) Washington's chef, Hercules, a slave, was portrayed as excessively jolly. Never mind that the book glorified Hercules or that it was written by an Iranian-Trinidadian woman and was illustrated by two African American women.
[Illustration from A Birthday Cake for George Washington, Scholastic Books]
This was reminiscent, said Gurdon, of an earlier incident in which (strap yourself in) a book called A Fine Dessert created controversy by depicting "an enslaved mother and daughter in 1810 enjoying themselves as they make and taste" a dessert.
The young adult novel When We Was Fierce was recalled by book publisher Candlewick. What was it about this book that triggered the intervention of the Tolerance Police? It contained (sit down for this one) "invented" urban dialect that was "deeply insensitive."
In addition, Harlequin Teen Books delayed publication of Kiera Drake's The Continent for its portrayal of "'uncivilized' warring peoples."
Says Gurdon,
"That a mother and child, even in bondage, might enjoy a tasty dessert; that a father and daughter in the same historically cruel circumstances might experience happiness and pride--who will now dare depict such nuance? Yet it is a strange means of enforcing diversity, to prevent its real expression."
Fewer and fewer schools include books like George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm , or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , books that portray societies run by the same kind of cultural bullies that are now running ours. It's no wonder these books are dropping from school reading lists. Better that our students not be encouraged to ask too many questions about the real meaning of the "Tolerance and Diversity" our cultural elites are always talking about.
In fact, despite the fact that the chief theme of Fahrenheit 451 is censorship, it has been repeatedly censored. This is, of course, both ironic and laughable. The trouble is, the culturally illiterate ideologues now stalking the landscape on patrol for the slightest deviation from their PC dogmas have not only rendered themselves incapable of appreciating the irony of their own intolerance, but are unable even to laugh at themselves.
But it's okay. We'll do it for them. |
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On March 14, which is this Saturday, people will gather together in communities across Canada for an emergency Day of Action to stop the government's "secret police" law Bill C-51. If you are not able to attend these protests, you can sign one of these OpenMedia campaign or Leadnow campaign or this one from Amnesty International .
If you'd rather get out into the street, here is a listing of protests across Canada this March 14. Many thanks to the folks who put together this resource , who note that if your city is not listed, protests are to be held at your local MP's office.
Find the protest in your community (this list is always growing so if you don't see your city, please click here ):
Bancroft 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Meet at the millennium Park parking lot, Hastings Street
Barrie 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Meet at the office of MP Patrick Brown, 299 Lakeshore Dr, Suite 200
Brampton 2:00 p.m. Meet at the office of Conservative MP Parm Gill 180 Sandalwood Parkway East
Brantford 2:00 p.m. Meet at 108 St. George Street
Calgary 12:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Meeting place at City Hall
Castlegar 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at Spirit Square, 460 Columbia Avenue
Charlottetown 11:30 a.m. Meet at MP Gail Shea's office, 119 Kent St
Collingwood 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Kellie Leitch's office at Hume/Pretty River Pkwy
Courtenay 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Meet in front of the court house, 420 Cumberland Rd.
Edmonton 1:00 p.m. Meet at Canada Place , 9700 Jasper Avenue
Fergus Time TBD, Meet at the office of MP Michael Chong, 200 St. Patrick St. East, Suite 5
Fredericton 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at City Hall 35 York St
Hamilton 7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Meet at Hamilton City Hall , 71 Main Street West
Kitchener 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., Meet at Kitchener City Hall
Lindsay 9:30 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. Meet at MP Barry Devolin's Constituency office, 68 McLaughlin Rd
London 2:00 p.m., Meet at Victoria Park 509 Clarence Street
Moncton 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., Meet at the City Hall
Montreal 2:00 p.m. Meet at Jarry Park
Nanaimo 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Commercial St. and Terminal Ave, 14 Commercial St
Nelson 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Government building/court house.
Orangeville 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at MP David Tilson's Office, 229 Broadway
Orillia 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at MP Bruce Stanton's Office, 575 West Street South
Ottawa 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at 80 Wellington Street
Peterborough 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at City Hall, 500 George St N
Prince George 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at 1584 7th Ave
Regina 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Meet at City Square Plaza - Victoria Park
Saint John 12:00 p.m. Meet at MP Rodney Weston's office on King Street
Salt Spring 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Salt Spring Island Centennial Park
Sarnia 10:00 a.m. Meet at 1000 Finch Drive, Unit 2
Saskatoon 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Meet at CITY HALL Civic Square - 3rd Ave N and 23rd St E and march to 904 22nd Ave MP Kelly Block's office.
Stratford 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at Freeland Fountain, Ontario St. above Erie
Thornton 12:00 p.m. Meet at 23 Paris Street
Toronto 12:00 p.m. Meet at Nathan Phillips Square , 100 Queen Street West
Vancouver 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby Street (This event is hosted by openmedia.ca, leadnow.ca, and BCGEU)
Vernon 12:00 p.m. Meet at 3105 29th Street
Victoria 12:00 p.m. Meet at Fisgard/Government. We will march south on Government, East on Courtney, to the Courthouse. At the Courthouse, for a rally and music.
Winnipeg 1:00 p.m. Meet at Winnipeg City Hall, 510 Main St.
West Kootenays 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at the Spirit Square, 460 Columbia Avenue
Windsor 1:00 p.m. Meet at the Paul Martin Building
Yellowknife 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Greenstone Bldg
Press release for Day of Action can be found here . |
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Perverse creatures that we are, many of us find the sight of a piece of broiled eel on a bed of rice extremely attractive. The appetite for unagi , the sweetest sushi, is causing big trouble for the eels. With nets and dams, we're messing up the most significant event in their lives, an odyssey we know amazingly little about. Their migration to spawn--from freshwater to the ocean depths--is a feat of navigation and endurance that makes the march of the penguins look like the proverbial day at the beach. For more, read the full text of " Spaghetti With Eyes ." Photograph of an eel by Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.
The Skunk
It is the skunk's confidence in that potent defensive weapon that makes its personality appealing. The critters, the size of a small cat but with a wider rump and a bit of a waddle, are the opposite of aggressive. Most of the time they're curious, playful, fearless, and calm (though in late winter, mating season, the males go haywire). A devil-may-care attitude does not serve them well on the highway. The poor creatures stick their tails straight up as a warning to a car. It doesn't work; most of us know the smell of skunk musk from road kill. For more, read the full text of " Skunks ." Photograph of a skunk by Comstock Images/Thinkstock.
The Snapping Turtle They're shy but not beautiful, these creatures of the mud, and I have seen them up close. A couple of summers ago, I was swimming in my upstate New York pond and saw, a few yards away on the surface of the water, a curious combination of moving body parts. There was a glossy, ridged back, then another glossy back, a scaly paw with bearlike claws, and part of a thick, thorny tail. Breaking any previous pond freestyle record, I swam to shore. For more, read the full text of " 'These Dirty Filthy Mud-Turtles ." Photograph of a snapping turtle by Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.
The Vulture Under threatening circumstances, an angry bird can aim green vomit at you from as far away as six feet. Normally, though, a turkey vulture's sociability extends to human beings as well as to its fellows. The people who care for injured wild birds report that vultures are gentle, inquisitive, and smarter than hawks and eagles. Here's the bottom line, according to one expert: "Once they get to know you they don't regurgitate on you." For more, read the full text of " Vulture World ." Photograph of a vulture by Hrvoje Polan/AFP/Getty Images.
The Tick Ticks not only extract blood, they ooze pathogens from their salivary glands into the wound they've sliced with their tiny claws and penetrated with their barbed mouthparts. ... I managed to locate Willy Burgdorfer, the scientist who identified the Lyme spirochete in 1982, and asked, "Why did God make ticks?" "I don't have the answer," Dr. Burgdorfer said. "There are a lot of things we assign to the good Lord and we ask the question, why? All I can advise is to check yourself for ticks and remove them fast." For more, read the full text of " A Tick's Life ." Photograph of a deer tick by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Jellyfish A profusion of jellyfish is often described as an invasion or an attack. Which is laughable, given the guiding principle of jellyfish behavior--"whatever." No brain, no spine; they don't have the capacity to plan a beach invasion. We bump into them, and because we're too big to eat, they perceive us as attackers. Planning is not their forte. In place of a brain, jellies have a nerve net. Jellyfish are the free-floating relatives of sea anemones and corals, much older than fish, and not much changed for more than 600 million years. They ruled the ocean, in their passive way, when there was almost nothing but ocean. Now they drift into their food or their food drifts into them. The pulsing creates a current that pulls prey within reach. For more, read the full text of " The Life of a Jellyfish ." Photograph of a jellyfish by Mark Ralston /AFP/Getty Images.
The Hyena Hyenas, particularly the African spotted hyena, with its massive jaws, hulking shoulders, and startling laugh, have been terribly misunderstood. The creatures may not be beautiful, but they don't deserve contempt. They are intelligent and gregarious with a well-organized social system of clans patrolling discrete territories. The clans are ruled by females. Maybe the female hyenas gain a little extra authority or assertiveness from the surprising fact that male and female hyenas have nearly indistinguishable external genitals, about 8 inches worth. Their appearance has aroused amazement, confusion, and sometimes disgust. For more, read the full text of " Sad Yowlers? The story of the hyena ." Photograph of a hyena by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
The Slug In most kinds of slug, the penis is about half the length of its body. ("Is that a Kalashnikov in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?") It's not clear why such anatomical grandeur might be important for survival: Slug experts discount the idea that the oversize penis functions like a peacock tail, as a display of virility--they point out that the chemical signaling and seduction occurs before the magisterial organs even come into view. In any event, the chosen mate isn't likely to be impressed, since most slugs possess both male and female sexual organs. During a single coupling, slugs can mate reciprocally--with each partner inseminating and being inseminated--or one can serve as the recipient. For more, read the full text of " Feeling Sluggish ." Photograph of a slug by Gregory Badon, found on Wikipedia.
The Mosquito Biology professors like to ask what animal kills the most people. Their poor students humiliate themselves by calling out grizzly bear, tiger, cobra, even hippo. The right answer, of course, is the female mosquito--no fur, no fangs, just a hypodermic needle on the wing. She's less than a quarter-inch long, has six legs, and is the most efficient transmitter of disease in the animal kingdom. She uses scent to find us, attracted by the lactic acid and other ingredients in perspiration. She also senses the carbon dioxide in our exhalations and follows the slipstream back to our faces. The more you sweat and pant as you shoo her away, the more attractive you become. For more, read the full text of " A Hypodermic Needle With Wings ." Photograph of a mosquito by Leslie Vosshall lab at Rockefeller University. |
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21 January, 2016 Countercurrents.org
(The most important and the very first act of the "popular" government should have been to take action to prevent the future floods. Nothing tangible seems to have been done so far!)
T he sudden passing away of the former Chief Minister has thrown the state into a very uneasy state of uncertainty. One is not sure how long will the Governor's rule continue nor is any definite indication about the date of swearing in of the new Chief Minister. One of the negative fall outs of this uncertainty is the stalling of urgent measures for taming the River to prevent future floods. The Governor in a high level meeting held recently had ordered the Secretary Irrigation and Flood Control to immediately start dredging of the River Jhelum and also strengthen its embankments. The process was directed to be completed in a given time frame and had also to be continuously monitored. This is the most important assignment which has to be carried out in the shortest possible time by some resourceful agencies.
In fact, there are already detailed reports and plans on the subject of flood prevention with the concerned department. They had even submitted some of these plans to Government of India few years back but after that the whole thing seems to have gone into limbo, the result of which was the destructive flood of September, 2014. The destruction could be easily classified as criminal negligence on the part of all concerned. In any other country, there would have been a thorough probe and the guilty would have been tried and punished. However, in Kashmir, the "Accountability" has been the first victim of the turmoil of the recent years!
Even last year some experts have conducted detailed satellite survey of the flood. It has been pointed out by the experts that most of the flood basins of the River have been fully silted or encroached upon. The River and its spill over channel have not been dredged for decades. Apart from this the water shed of the River has been deforested thereby allowing the rain water to run off immediately after it falls. There is hardly any retention because of the denuded soil. It has also been observed that there is a definite climate change which has resulted in either very little precipitation sometimes while as some other times like during the start of the month of September, 2014, there is too much precipitation. Keeping in view all these reports and observations, it is the most immediate need to implement specific flood prevention measures. Rehabilitation and restoration of the infrastructure even if delayed, will not be as fatal as neglecting measures for prevention of future floods. Moreover, no one would like to be once again rehabilitated after yet another disastrous flood. People already rehabilitated have still not forgotten the nightmares of the last trauma!
The work of dredging has to be undertaken throughout the length of the River, especially, at Baramulla and Sopore in the downstream area and beyond Sangam in the upstream area. During Maharajas time there used to be a dredger permanently stationed in Baramulla.
According to Environmental Policy Group almost all the wetlands have been silted up. These too need to be desilted. The Srinagar City itself is now in continuous danger of getting submerged with every sizeable flood. The areas across towards Mahjoor Nagar, Natipora, Barzulla, and Bemina and so on formed the flood basin of the River. These have been encroached upon and a major portion of the Capital City is housed there. Most of the water bodies in and around Srinagar have either disappeared or have shrunk due to encroachments. To restore all these will take quite some time. The immediate solution to save the City from yet another disastrous flood would be immediate and sizeable dredging of the River all along its length and strengthening of the embankments on the its two sides as it passes through the City. This task can be successful only if it is entrusted to a very resourceful agency with sufficient equipment and trained manpower. Piecemeal dredging here and there will not solve the problem.
The Governor has initiated a very good people friendly move. It would be in the fitness of things if he continues to supervise and monitor the operation even after the installation of a popular government. This being the most fundamental requirement for the safety and security of the people, all the political parties should have no objection to such a project initiated in the public interest! Let us hope some good sense prevails and people rise above all petty considerations!
Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir |
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He had 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. He did not need a single GOP vote to pass some type of reform.
Furthermore, the president did not call the congressional leaders and demand a reform. Unlike President George W. Bush, who spoke to the nation in 2006, President Obama was dead silent about the issue. He gave Cinco de Mayo speeches but never followed them with any proposals or calls to Congress.
Last, but not least, the president and the Democrats did not put the DREAM Act to a vote before the 2010 election. They waited until after the election, when most Dems did not have electoral consequences.
The Wall Street Journal reminded us a few years ago that the Democrats are always a lot better at making immigration reform promises than actually delivering a solution:
Samantha Bee's choice of words was awful, and her knowledge of history is no better.
Before beating up President Trump on immigration, let's remember that President Obama and the Democrats had all the votes and did not pass immigration reform or a DREAM Act.
He had 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. He did not need a single GOP vote to pass some type of reform.
The truth is that he did not try and took Hispanics for granted. He showed zero respect for the millions who voted for him in 2008.
Furthermore, the president did not call the congressional leaders and demand a reform. Unlike President George W. Bush, who spoke to the nation in 2006, President Obama was dead silent about the issue. He gave Cinco de Mayo speeches but never followed them with any proposals or calls to Congress.
Last, but not least, the president and the Democrats did not put the DREAM Act to a vote before the 2010 election. They waited until after the election, when most Dems did not have electoral consequences.
On the other hand, President Trump actually put a solution on the table regarding the "DREAMers."
The Wall Street Journal reminded us a few years ago that the Democrats are always a lot better at making immigration reform promises than actually delivering a solution:
We understand the political imperative, and these columns have favored liberal (in the 19th-century sense of that word) immigration policies since before the current crop of Republicans was born. But a shrunken, bureaucratic guest-worker program that lets unions define job openings and determine wages is worse than the status quo. It won't help the economy but it will guarantee that illegal immigrants keep coming. Then in 15 or 20 years Republicans can enjoy debating what to do with another 11 million illegals who want a path to citizenship.
Let's not forget Senator Obama killing McCain-Kennedy in 2007 with that "poison amendment" about guest worker visas.
So why is Miss Bee picking on Ivanka? Why not the Democrats who failed to keep a campaign promise about immigration?
The answer is that Samantha Bee is a partisan ignoramus with a mouth that belongs in the gutter and not on a TV network.
PS: You can listen to my show ( Canto Talk ) and follow me on Twitter . |
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by Patrick Ball Patrick Ball with Yezidi boys at an informal camp in Sharya, Iraq. Farhad (not his real name) got the call from ISIS on his personal cell phone just after lunch: we have your sister, and we will give her back if you pay us $6000, plus $1500 for the driver. Carrying little [...]
Middle East Eye | -- "The Syriac Military Council (MFS) was established in January 2013 to protect the marginalised Assyrian Christian communities in Syria. They have fought to defend themselves from the Islamic State, Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham and frequently work in tandem with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). As sectarian violence swamps [...]
By Juan Cole | -- IC doesn't usually cover hostage-taking, since it is an artificial and manipulative criminal act. Any two-bit thug can grab someone off the street and push them into a car, and subsequently kill them. It doesn't take intelligence or any other admirable quality, just brutishness. One's heart goes out to the [...]
Channel 4 News | -- "Channel 4 News identifies the man who became one of the most-followed disseminators of pro-jihadi material on Twitter." Channel 4: "IS Twitter account Shami Witness unmasked | Channel 4 News"
By Maysam Bizar | (Your Middle East) -- As the US-led campaign against the extremist ISIL militants in Iraq and Syria goes on, Iran, which has not taken part in the coalition, is gearing up for the Rouhani-proposed international conference 'World Against Violence and Extremism' (WAVE) on December 9-10 in Tehran. Maysam Bizar reports. Referring [...]
By Nawzat Shamdeen | Mosul | (Niqash.org) Mobile phones are no use in Mosul any more. The extremist group controlling Mosul in northern Iraq has decided to shut down most mobile telecommunications inside the city. Rumours are flying as to why. Have they done it because they can no longer profit from the phone companies [...]
By Juan Cole | -- The US war on Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria takes up less and less space in the MSM. The group and its issues haven't gone away, however. A source in Iraqi security told AFP Arabic that US and allied air strikes had killed about 100 fighters near Mosul on [...]
By Mustafa Habib | Baghdad | (Niqash.org) While members of the Sunni Muslim al-Bu Ulwan tribe were fighting extremists in the Anbar province, alongside the mostly Shiite Muslim military, judges in Baghdad sentenced a politician from the tribe to death. The tribe says it feels like Baghdad has stabbed it in the back. Other Anbar [...]
Iraqi Kurds Seek Greater Balance between Ankara and Baghdad By Mohammed A. Salih ERBIL, Dec 4 2014 (IPS) - After a period of frostiness, Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Turkey seem intent on mending ties, as each of the parties show signs of needing the other. But the Kurds appear more cautious this time [...] |
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Ever since White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a Lexington, Virginia restaurant simply for her political views, liberals have been celebrating. Finally, they thought, a member of the Trump administration got what was coming to them.
If they want to try that in the District of Columbia, however, they'd better watch out -- it seems their own liberal laws could end up with them facing criminal charges.
First, let's begin with what happened at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington. Here's Sanders' tweet about the incident:
Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so
-- Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) June 23, 2018
The owner of the Red Hen, Stephanie Wilkinson, made it clear Sanders was getting kicked out for her political beliefs.
"I would have done the same thing again," Wilkinson said.
Just don't try the same thing in Washington, D.C., however.
As Townhall.com pointed out, the District enacted a Human Rights Act in 1977. Apparently, one of the most liberal polities in the United States felt that it needed a comprehensive act to stamp out discrimination for good -- liberals, of course, being very good at both discrimination and publicly appearing to be conspicuously against all forms of it.
However, they inadvertently made it legally impossible for restauranteurs like Wilkinson to make decisions like she made this weekend.
Do you think this law is inane?
Here's the text of the act: "It is the intent of the Council of the District of Columbia, in enacting this chapter, to secure an end in the District of Columbia to discrimination for any reason other than that of individual merit, including, but not limited to, discrimination by reason of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, familial status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation , genetic information, disability, source of income, status as a victim of an intrafamily offense, and place of residence or business."
The law makes it illegal "(t)o deny, directly or indirectly, any person the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodations" to anyone under the grounds so listed above -- including political affiliation.
And, if the city finds that you violated this law , "(t)he Attorney General for the District of Columbia shall institute, in the name of the District, civil proceedings including the seeking of such restraining orders and temporary or permanent injunctions, as are necessary to obtain complete compliance with the Commission's orders. In the event that successful civil proceedings do not result in securing such compliance, the Attorney General shall institute criminal action."
Now, this law is clearly insane. While the owner of the Red Hen acted inappropriately and uncivilly, in my opinion -- not to mention in a manner that suggested her decision was based less on conviction and more on publicity -- she certainly acted within the scope of the law. Leftist restaurants in D.C. don't have that luxury.
You should be able to refuse service to an individual if that person's political viewpoints are disagreeable to you. Now, if those viewpoints are those held by roughly half of the American populace, yes, that's probably a bit closed-minded. But reading the District of Columbia's Human Rights Act makes it clear that a restaurant probably couldn't '86 Richard Spencer or David Duke. After all, reprehensible as those individuals may be, their reprehensibility stems from their political beliefs -- and those are protected, aren't they?
Of course, this was hardly what the District likely had in mind when they passed this 41 years ago. They probably thought that they were saving progressives from being discriminated against by hidebound, bigoted conservatives. That's not quite how it works, however, and selective enforcement likely won't hold up in criminal court.
So, have fun trying to follow Maxine Waters' dictum to "get out and you create a crowd" if they see a Trump administration official, and to "push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere." Thanks to the fine liberals that control D.C., that's now a criminal offense. But what do you expect when you're dealing with a city that elected Marion Barry ?
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Many people have asked me for specific examples of my problems are with Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Here is my experience.
On 14 January 2016, Jeremy announced that he had appointed me as a shadow minister for arts and culture without my knowledge or consent while I was in the middle of cancer treatment.
He then sacked me the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else's role.
But didn't bother to tell me that either.
By the time I had sought and received confirmation from the Labour Whips' Office that I was indeed shadow arts and culture minister, to serve under shadow culture secretary Maria Eagle MP, my office had been besieged by the press and the story was out.
I decided to make the best of it and to serve. I worked on his arts policy while I was still having treatment but in Bristol. Bristol West constituents said they were delighted - a good fit for the constituency, and a good decision to ask someone who has an arts background, which I have.
Six weeks later, after being asked every week to do so by Maria Eagle when she met him at shadow cabinet meetings (I wasn't a member of the shadow cabinet, only the shadow secretaries of state sit in that meeting), Jeremy finally phoned me.
I discovered then that he had made a mistake back at the start and having given me part of someone else's role, gave it back the next day. I said that I was not happy about this, as I had spent six weeks working on his arts policy, getting in touch with arts organisations and so on. He invited me to come and have a chat with him the following week.
Contrary to what he frequently says, Jeremy is not easy to "have a chat with". My parliamentary assistant could not get an appointment with him until she went to his office and explained over and over again that I had been promised one.
When my assistant and I met him, I asked how I was supposed to explain the confusion to Bristol West members or constituents. I was faced with the choice of telling the truth that he had made a series of errors, or say I had changed my mind about accepting the role. Either way, I would inevitably face a pile of criticism from his supporters.
Corbyn supporters had already piled onto me for disloyalty when I had had to miss votes for cancer treatment. I had no confidence that he would explain the situation to his supporters, or ask them to trust him that it wasn't my fault. I knew he wouldn't do anything to stop the criticism - I had seen from my own experience that he didn't directly call on his own supporters to follow his slogan of "kinder, gentler politics".
At this meeting, despite the fact he had had six weeks to come up with some idea for how to deal with this, he had nothing to say. No idea what to do. It took my boss Maria Eagle to explain to him that, as he was leader, he could reappoint me if that was what he wanted.
I then worked hard for him on his arts policy, loyally didn't go to the press about the above, got stuck in and worked. And yes, I enjoyed the role; it is one of my dream jobs in parliament and I worked hard for Jeremy and the Labour party. Millions of people work in the arts and culture sectors and they valued being involved in policy-making. So it was never my intention to resign.
However, I kept hearing from other colleagues on the front bench just how difficult or impossible it was to get a decision out of him on important policy issues - the very thing Jeremy is supposed to be good on. I also noticed that the policy-making process through the National Policy Forum was being slowed down by lack of decisions from the Corbyn office.
But then he was missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week's holiday three weeks before the day of the vote. I found that unforgivable. I was doing all I could for the campaign, phone-canvassing to conserve my energy, and kept hearing Labour voters saying "but your leader wants out, doesn't he?" His team didn't send anyone to the EU campaign meetings in Westminster and his lack of enthusiasm showed.
On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit. My constituents want exactly the opposite and were telling me so in their hundreds, and voted strongly to remain.
That was the tipping point for me - you cannot remain on the front bench while taking an opposing view to the leader on something so important.
I therefore had to resign.
The reason I then voted "no confidence" in him as leader is because I have no confidence in him as leader. See above. Plus I had found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Jeremy is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.
Since then he has stated publicly that he isn't prioritising winning elections. How can I support a Labour leader who doesn't want to form a Labour government when working people, the old, the young, the poor, the country, need a Labour government above everything?
I want a Labour government more than anything, because that is how we change the world and how we help millions of people, just as the 1997-2010 Labour government helped millions of people - my own family included.
I profoundly wish I never had to say all this publicly, but people keep asking, and I believe they have a right to know the truth about what Corbyn's leadership is like.
We cannot win general elections with a leader who is unable and unwilling to learn how to communicate with, listen to and persuade people with whom he doesn't already agree - we need to convince swing voters who voted Tory last year in southern seats to vote Labour next time, and we need Labour voters in Wales and the North to continue to vote Labour. Without this we can't win a general election.
That is what's at stake. Not having a Labour government again is unbearable. I will do anything I can to help to ensure this. It's the constitutional duty of all Labour MPs, especially the leader, to try to secure a better life for working-class people through parliamentary means. And that's what I will continue to do.
I hope that's clear.
Thangam Debbonaire is the Labour MP for Bristol West. This article was originally posted on Thangam Debbonaire's Facebook page . It has since been published on her blog . It is republished here with her permission.
The Extroadinary Life and Momentous Times of J M W Turner by Frannky Moyle is published by Viking (508pp, PS25)
Young Mr Turner: the First 40 years (1775-1815) by Eric Shanes is published by Yale University Press (552pp, PS85) |
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Rachel DiCarlo Currie
Reuters correspondent Edward McAllister reports on the growing number of federal lawmakers from Texas -- America's biggest oil-producing state -- who believe it is time to jettison the Ford-era ban on U.S. crude exports: "Even representatives of districts that include large oil refineries, the owners of which have expressed strong opposition to exports for fear it would increase the price of crude, told Reuters that they would support the shipment of oil overseas." Enacted in 1975, following the first global oil shock , the 39-year-old ban seems more than a bit anachronistic in the Age of Shale , during which the United States has become the planet's top oil producer . Moreover, the export ban is now a significant obstacle to key U.S. foreign-policy goals. Back in March, for example, after Russian forces invaded Crimea, Harvard scholar Meghan O'Sullivan -- who served as a deputy national security advisor in the Bush administration -- noted that the most potent short-term energy weapon to use against Vladimir Putin would be U.S. crude-oil exports, rather than U.S. natural-gas exports. "Russia's real vulnerability lies in the price of oil, not in the realm of gas," she explained. "Revenue from gas sales abroad make up 8 percent to 9 percent of the Russian budget, while oil revenue accounts for a much heftier 37 percent to 38 percent." In the current issue of National Review , historian Arthur Herman makes the larger economic and strategic case for scrapping the 1975 export ban : "[T]here are sound economic arguments for lifting the ban, including creating new jobs and increasing government revenue, as well as using American sales of crude to stabilize world prices. But even more important from an energy-security standpoint, the United States would then be free to use its oil exports to support our allies in times of economic or geopolitical crisis, for example if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz or China cut off shipments of oil to Japan and South Korea via the Strait of Malacca. "We could use exports not only to stabilize prices but also to exert a steady downward pressure on them. A new Brookings Institution-sponsored study by NERA Economic Consulting predicts that lifting the export ban could lower world crude prices by as much as $6 a barrel just in the first year. That would mean significantly less revenue for despots and terrorists, even as our exports made the market more efficient and responsive to normal supply and demand instead of to the whims of countries such as Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. "Indeed, U.S. exports could prevent OPEC from ever again using the threat of an oil cutoff to blackmail our allies. At the same time, American tankers carrying oil to developing countries in Africa and Asia could make 'energy diplomacy' as integral a part of America's foreign policy as 'Chinook diplomacy' is today -- but in a less symbolic and far more potent form. "Critics of lifting the ban have argued that allowing U.S. crude exports would force domestic gasoline prices up at the pump because there would be less oil to refine. This claim, however, misunderstands the nature of the current North American oil market. Domestic refineries in the Midwest and on the Gulf Coast are geared for refining a heavier crude than the light crude from today's shale production. The latter -- known as 'tight oil,' since it is fracked from tight shale formations -- is ideally suited, however, for refineries in Europe. And if the Keystone pipeline is completed, American refineries will have plenty of heavier oil flowing in from Canada. "Far from raising gas prices, U.S. exports would -- by raising the amount of crude available to be refined worldwide -- actually push prices down at home by as much as twelve cents a gallon, according to an estimate by the Houston-based firm Cambridge Associates. This would save consumers some $420 billion a year. "America's oil weapon will work according to a simple economic formula: supply and demand. By keeping world supply up, the United States can put downward pressure on prices. This not only would promote economic growth around the globe and especially in emerging economies, but also would squeeze the revenues of OPEC and Russia, the key sponsors of terrorism and aggression worldwide, as their share of the global market shrank." |
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Terrorism has always existed in our world. Abraham's encounter in ancient Mesopotamia (Genesis 14) is one of the earliest recorded examples of local terrorists (tribal chiefs) kidnapping and plundering innocents. The Assyrian invasions of ancient Near East kingdoms were particularly brutal. Certain tactics used to win the American Civil War were horrific, and individuals involved in winning that war often took matters into their own hands, thus terrorizing the local countryside.
Of course, in our day, radicals have flown planes into buildings and launched individual attacks using guns, cars, and bombs.
But no one has ever seen the destruction possible in the new frontier of cyberspace. Certainly, Western nations are intimately aware of these threats, which range from computer hacking by foreign governments, to an even scarier possibility: an EMP attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the 2016 CyberTech Conference in Tel Aviv.
Israel and her ally, the United States, stand at the forefront of efforts to combat cyber-terrorism. The recently concluded CyberTech Conference, held in sunny Tel Aviv, was a unique opportunity for cyber journalists to interact with the folks who are working to keep all of us safer.
The America-Israel Friendship League , coordinating a delegation of such writers with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, is committed to strengthening friendships for Israel the world over. Executive Director Daniella Rilov couldn't have been happier with the outcome of the conference:
"Cyber security highlights an area in which Israel excels and her cyber security experts introduced a dialogue in a language that is easily spoken amongst colleagues. I was honored to join these distinguished American Cyber journalists and to witness their profoundly positive response as they visited Israel for the first time. Seeing Israel through their eyes reminded me of the truly unique value of this amazing country."
Several of the writers on the AIFL delegation were impressed with what they saw; and each has spent a good deal of time in the field of cyber-security. Richard Steinnon easily saw the potential of what Israel is doing in pioneering high-tech:
"The meetings painted a picture relative to other countries in the world: a tight-knit community pulling in the same direction, even with different motivations. In Israel, we saw the government and venture capitalists all pushing an agenda of creating a cyber powerhouse in Israel."
Anthony Freed, director of corporate communications for Evident.io, was particularly interested in a chance to visit with a person who has contributed greatly to public safety, General Danny Gold, who developed the Iron Dome Project.
"We had an action-packed week. We had an opportunity to have dinner with Danny Gold. The Iron Dome has proven to be 90 percent effective, and it was very impressive to see technology behind it." Freed also understands the threats faced with regard to electric grids.
The AIFL delegation enjoyed opportunities for close networking with Israeli cyber-security experts.
"We went to Haifa, and had a briefing with some of Israeli electric company officials. Their grid is an isolated grid, unlike other countries. They have a lot of fail-safes there. It's much more challenging than what we face with ours, and they do a very good job of it."
As we all go about our daily lives, it's comforting to know that smart people with good intentions are working round-the-clock to keep ahead of the bad guys.
That's a great comfort in our Brave, New World. |
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Summary: The serial fabulists and exaggerators of the Southern Poverty Law Center are determined to portray Donald Trump and his supporters as cancers on the body politic. The Capital Research Center's last report on the SPLC ( Organization Trends, October 2012) observed that although the group "began with an admirable purpose," it long ago "transformed into a machine for raising money and launching left-wing political attacks."
Unlike the rest of the Left, which is currently obsessed with finding Russian influences everywhere, the disciplined, prolific fabulists of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have stayed admirably on-message. Founder Morris Dees and his minions laboring behind the thick walls of their "poverty palace" in Montgomery, Alabama, continue to push the line that the greatest threat to America is white men.
And the most dangerous of all the Caucasian males, according to the SPLC, is the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. In two recent reports titled "The Trump Effect," the SPLC claims that Trump's presence on the American scene has sparked thousands of cases of "prejudice," "bullying," and hate crimes in the nation's schools.
According to the SPLC, an alarming array of social ills afflicting schoolchildren, from bullying to poor grades to tummy aches to suicidal thoughts, may now be attributed to the election of Trump. Trump is allegedly such an all-powerful, yet intimate, influence that he is inducing nausea and crying fits, not only in elementary school students, but also among their teachers.
Obviously, the real explanation for mass election-related hysteria among six-year olds lies entirely in the behavior of the teacher in the front of the classroom. And the solution ought to be simple: such educators should be instructed to leave their politics at home and stop frightening the children they are supposed to be instructing.
But we live in a world where many teachers view their classrooms as petri dishes for social engineering. They believe it is their job to shape their students into social justice activists like themselves. The SPLC's Teaching Tolerance education project provides such teachers with lesson plans, professional development materials, and a nationwide peer group of like-minded activist educators.
The SPLC created the phony data in the two "Trump Effect" reports by inviting such teachers to fill out open-ended, subjective questionnaires about the effect of the election on their students. Even among this self-selected group of radical educators, only a tiny fraction filled out the survey. One survey was conducted during the primaries in March and the other in November, post-election.
Despite a miniscule sampling and an unscientific method of collecting data, the SPLC claims its survey results prove the election of Donald Trump is tearing schools and communities apart. In addition to the self-reporting by leftist educators, included in the report are election-related "hate-incidents" as further proof of the thesis that Trump is single-handedly causing a rise in prejudice-related violence. Such incidents, the group says, were reported directly to the organization or found in news sites online, though the information provided about confirmation methods and the details of the alleged incidents themselves are far too vague to fact-check.
According to the SPLC, an alarming array of social ills afflicting schoolchildren, from bullying to poor grades to tummy aches to suicidal thoughts, may now be attributed to the election of Trump.
Despite the unverifiable data and the fact that virtually all high-profile bias crimes reported in the media to date have been exposed as hoaxes (except those committed by opponents of Trump), some have seized upon the reports as proof that Trump's election is causing a scientifically quantifiable rise in prejudice and bias incidents against minorities, especially in schools.
This is what the SPLC does best: fabricate claims of "rising tides" of prejudice that divide Americans, for profit.
LYING FOR DOLLARS
The conclusions drawn from this supposed "Trump effect" are as unverifiable as the other reports of "rising tides of hate" that are the SPLC's long-time modus operandi and meal ticket. In the mid-1990s, for example, it exploited a seeming increase in church fires to claim black churches throughout the South were being intentionally burned in a "tidal wave" of racist hatemongering. In 1996, President Clinton convened a task force and Congress passed the bipartisan Church Arson Prevention Act to investigate the church burnings.
Intensive federal investigations eventually proved that almost none of the fires were related to race. Many turned out to be accidents. Of the churches incinerated by arsonists, most had white congregations, and of arsonists caught, almost all were thieves, vandals, or self-proclaimed Satanists who did not choose their targets by race. Some of the most widely publicized racial arson cases turned out to be frauds committed by the churches' own members or by others seeking to cash in on insurance payouts or on the donations pouring in from goodhearted Americans responding to the invented crisis.
Nonetheless, for years the SPLC has persisted in fundraising o the claim that racist white nightriders were again threatening churchgoing blacks throughout the South, as
if nothing in race relations had changed in society since the 1930s. Similar campaigns alleging "rising tides" of organized hate groups, hate crimes, and white supremacy among conservative political activists have repeatedly filled the SPLC's coffers.
The SPLC doesn't need more money. At last check, the fabulously wealthy 501(c)(3) nonprofit had one third of a billion dollars ($338 million) in assets, as well as investments in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
SPLC founder and chief trial lawyer Morris Dees' financial improprieties have been documented again and again, by critics from the left and right sides of the spectrum. But it would be a mistake to view his racial fear campaigns as merely a way to grow rich. The political stakes are higher and more complex. The SPLC's ultimate goal is smearing Republicans as bigots, in order to coalesce political power on the Left. Along with its fellow "opposition research" organizations (even those in conflict with Dees) and the Democratic Party, the SPLC labors to sustain the illusion America is perpetually threatened by "haters" who also happen to be Republicans, conservatives, rural Southerners, Christians, or some combination thereof.
The real rewards for sustaining this narrative are twofold: election victories, and control over the priorities and budgets of the many public bureaucracies dealing with bias and hate.
FROM KLANSMEN TO KINDERGARTENERS
Throughout the 1990s, the most profitable and influential "anti-hate" activism was in the legal arena. The Chicken Littles of the SPLC habitually warned of violent "hate crimes" infecting communities nationwide. Grandstanding politicians responded with presidential task forces, congressional hearings, and a vast expansion of hate crime investigation and prosecution units at every level of government, from the Department of Justice to small-town police forces.
The SPLC doesn't need any more money. At last check, the fabulously wealthy 501(c)(3) nonprofit had one third of a billion dollars in assets, as well as investments in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
Despite the relatively few crimes that could be wedged into even the most sweeping definitions of "hate crime," and the petty nature of the vast majority of these crimes, hate crime units were generously funded and became permanent fixtures.
Yet the "tidal wave" of hate crimes predicted never materialized. Nor have the criminal justice organs of government been entirely comfortable with nonpro t organizations that style themselves as bias warriors. Focusing on the enforcement of hate crime laws has not always advanced the SPLC agenda. For example: No evidence has been found of any type of racial conspiracy to commit crimes against minorities. As is amply demonstrated by researchers such as Colin Flaherty, individual black offenders and gangs of offenders are responsible for scores of horrendous crimes that clearly include racial animus. As those crimes receive coverage in the media, the public grows increasingly impatient with the obvious anti-white biases in the enforcement of bias-crime laws. Multiple hate-crime hoaxes are also taxing public sentiment. In a nation where police investigated more than a million violent crimes--including 15,000 murders and 90,000 rapes in 2016--the investment of resources to investigate a few hundred "hate crimes" that consist mostly of vandalism and simple assault (including name-calling) also raises questions.
Mission dissonance between the justice system and SPLC's activists also runs deep. Law enforcement itself is anathema to leftists. Obviously, it is difficult simultaneously to demonize police and also to advocate working with them to solve "bias crimes," just as it is difficult to advocate for prison abolitionism while working to put people behind bars.
Even after 20 years of law enforcement vigorously pursuing hate-crime investigations, no evidence has emerged to support the SPLC's contention that "a rising tide" of organized hate groups pose a criminal threat in America, unless one counts Islamic terrorists, which the SPLC, ever sensitive to its coalition partners' politics, would never do.
But the absence of actual hate crimes against minorities has never stopped the SPLC from claiming white-supremacist hate infects every nook and cranny of the American landscape. These people have always had another part of government from which to hang their white-supremacist hunting hats: the education bureaucracy. And unlike the justice system, where evidence is required no matter how much the system is slanted in one's favor, the education bureaucracy has no such prerequisite. Schools are thus more amenable arenas than courts for SPLC activism.
Light on evidence, deceptive in focus, and alarmist in language, they attempt to pathologize a new president and his supporters, equating their politics with fascism.
The "Trump Effect" reports are just the latest version of what the SPLC has done throughout its existence: manufacture smear jobs presented as scientific research on yet another "rising tide of prejudice." Light on any evidence, deceptive in focus, and alarmist in language, the SPLC attempts to pathologize a new president and his supporters, equating their politics with fascism and violence.
But the reports also reveal something new: the degree to which the SPLC and its model of smear jobs have gained footholds in K-12 schools. This time the "rising tide of (white) prejudice" the SPLC claims to have identified is located in the minds and hearts of schoolchildren as young as kindergarteners, and this focus helps the SPLC gain more access to schools in order to "cure" the "hate" problem. That these children's own teachers are reporting them to an organization as unsavory and divisive as the SPLC is truly alarming.
A TALE OF TWO SURVEYS
On Nov. 29, 2016, SPLC officials staged a press conference that was more like a show trial to unveil the group's "Trump Effect" reports. Joining SPLC president Richard Cohen were Wade Henderson (Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights); Brenda Abdelall (Muslim Advocates); Janet Murguia (National Council of La Raza); and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a union that vigorously supported Hillary Clinton's campaign for president.
The National Press Club event was the usual drama in three parts: first, a parade of professional civil rights activists took to the stage to denounce Trump as a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, immigrant-phobic hater. Then they unveiled the "Trump Effect" reports, luridly illustrated with pixelated, close-up photographs of Trump's mouth.
In the reports, anonymous teachers blame Trump for real and purported events ranging from swastikas spray-painted on buildings by unknown vandals, to nightmares and the crying spells of young children, to students being so upset by the election they were unable to study for exams. Then SPLC officials demanded that Trump publicly confess his crimes.
"Mr. Trump claims he's surprised his election has unleashed a barrage of hate across the country," Cohen said. "But he shouldn't be. It's a predictable result of the campaign he waged. Rather than feign surprise, Mr. Trump should take responsibility for what's occurring, forcefully reject hate and bigotry, reach out to the communities he's injured, and follow his words with actions to heal the wounds his words have opened."
After convicting Trump of ideological crimes great, small, and micro-aggressive, SPLC officials delivered the guilty verdict and moved to sentencing. They commanded Trump to "immediately, and forcefully, publicly denounce racism and bigotry, and to call on Americans to stop all acts of hate."
But what were these hateful acts Cohen was talking about? He wasn't referring to the serious crime that occurred Nov. 10, when a white Chicago motorist was pulled from his car by a gang of black criminals who held him down, punched and kicked him while shouting "You voted Trump," "Beat his ass," and "Don't vote Trump" before dragging him from the side of his car over several blocks in traffic.
No, Cohen was citing the highly processed product of the two surveys of leftist schoolteachers conducted by the SPLC through its Teaching Tolerance project. As we've seen, the survey responses were elicited only from educators who subscribe to the Teaching Tolerance newsletter or follow the social media of a few other hard-left education nonprofits that partner with the SPLC, including Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching for Change, Not in Our Schools, Rethinking Schools, and AFT.
The questions posed to teachers did not reference Trump. What would eventually be the "Trump Effect" reports began as a survey asking teachers generally about the impact of the primary contest on their classrooms and school "climate" and asking how teachers were teaching the election.
Of course, it is possible that the plan all along was to focus on Trump.
The SPLC provides teachers with lesson plans, anti-bullying and anti-bias exercises, petitions, pledges, and other emotionally coercive busywork designed to address students' purported intolerance.
Founded in 1991, Teaching Tolerance is the SPLC's educational project. The Teaching Tolerance newsletter goes to more than 400,000 educators in nearly every school in America, the SPLC boasts.
The SPLC provides teachers with lesson plans, anti-bullying and anti-bias exercises, petitions, pledges, and other emotionally coercive busywork designed to address students' purported intolerance. Students are also encouraged to become Teaching Tolerance activists and educate fellow classmates. Materials urge teachers to seek bias and prejudice in their white students' every word and deed. Meanwhile, minority students and their teachers are encouraged to view all minorities as victims of an ever-present, all-encompassing, dangerous culture of white supremacy.
Abetted by legions of easily flattered, social-justice-warrior schoolteachers, the SPLC turns classrooms into indoctrination hubs while profiting from them, as the group heavily promotes Teaching Tolerance in fundraising appeals. This is the pool of teachers with whom the "Trump Effect" surveys were conducted.
Out of the 400,000 individuals and institutions that receive Teaching Tolerance materials, 2,000 participated in the first "Trump Effect" survey, while 10,000 participated in the second survey (with an unknown number participating in both). And again, the first survey of schoolteachers, from which the "Trump Effect" meme was developed, did not mention any presidential candidate by name. The title, " The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on our Nation's Schools," was created only after the survey had been conducted. SPLC staffers said they dramatically changed focus because "out of 5,000 total comments, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump," while under 200 mentioned Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton.
This is how the SPLC interpreted the written responses it received: More than two-thirds of the teachers reported that students--mainly immigrants, children of immigrants, and Muslims--have expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election. More than half have seen an increase in uncivil political discourse. More than one-third have observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment. More than 40 percent are hesitant to teach about the election.
In 2014 there were about 3.5 million full-time equivalent teachers employed in K-12 classrooms. In other words, at the height of presidential primary season, merely 2,000 teachers out of 3.5 million participated in the first survey. (And of the 2,000 teachers, some may be other classroom professionals such as librarians, administrators, English as a Second Language or other teacher aides and paraprofessionals.) The respondents all self-selected by subscribing to or reading the SPLC's leftist agitprop: Approximately 1,333 K-12 educators (or 0.00038% of respondents) reported that students were concerned about what will happen to their families (presumably though not explicitly if a Republican were elected). Approximately 1,000 K-12 educators (or 0.00028% of respondents) perceived "an increase in uncivil political discourse" in their schools. Approximately 664 K-12 educators (or 0.00019% of respondents) perceived "an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment." Approximately 800 K-12 educators (or 0.00023% of respondents) reported being "hesitant to teach about the election," though the rationale for their hesitancy is not detailed.
There are no actual data that show any increase in school bullying in 2016. Nonetheless, the SPLC claims that "Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail."
Despite its flimsy data, the SPLC scored a home run with the "Trump Effect." The first report was soon cited as evidence Trump was fomenting a "tidal wave of hate" among schoolchildren. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton warned: "Parents and teachers are already worrying about what they call the 'Trump Effect.' They report that bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants."
Built on a foundation of nothing more than the subjective impressions of 0.0057 percent of K-12 educators, the "Trump Effect" was soon being cited as scientific fact throughout the educational establishment.
A day later, the influential "political accountability" blog, PolitiFact, defended Clinton's use of the report. While acknowledging the survey was both unscientific and anecdotal, the fact-checkers accepted it as truth because "experts in bullying" concurred with the findings. "Their sense of current trends in schools supports Clinton's point. We rate her claim Mostly True," PolitiFact asserted. (For more on this organization of so-called fact-checkers that explicitly treats guesses as facts, see the "Deception & Misdirection" article in the January 2017 issue of Capital Research .)
Built on a foundation of nothing more than the subjective impressions of 0.0057% of K-12 educators, the "Trump Effect" was soon being cited as scientific fact in news reports and by experts throughout the educational establishment.
After the election, the SPLC immediately followed up with a second "Trump Effect" survey and report. Perhaps because of the publicity attending the first report, this time 10,000 educators and others submitted responses totaling 25,000 comments.
The SPLC dubiously claims the overwhelmingly negative effect of Trump's election on schoolchildren is everywhere. But the evidence presented is entirely beside the point. With their invention of the Trump Effect, these propagandists have achieved their actual goal: creating a potent organizing tool. Whether it reflects reality is irrelevant.
SAMPLE TEACHER COMMENTS
According to many of the responding teachers, Trump's candidacy had an immediate, unambiguous effect on students, all of it profoundly negative. Here is a sampling of teachers' responses, given here anonymously as in the reports: "White males have been overheard saying, 'screw women's rights, fag lover liberal, build the wall, lock her up.' The rebel flag is draped on the truck of a popular student, and the p-word has been used very casually, citing Trump as the excuse." -- HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, MICHIGAN "In a 24-hour period, I completed two suicide assessments and two threat of violence assessments for middle school students. This was last week, one week after the election ... students were threatening violence against African Americans. Students were suicidal and without hope. Fights, disrespect have increased as well." -- MIDDLE SCHOOL COUNSELOR, FLORIDA "A kindergartener asked me 'Why did the bully win?' Other kids who have been awarded student of the month and considered great examples for our school hid in a classroom after school and drew pokemon fireballs attacking the man. This is a serious issue that we have not clearly addressed. We need help and we must claim our districts and other districts 'sanctuary districts.'" -- ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER, ARIZONA "I teach at a charter school in [an inner city]. The student makeup is 99 percent black and Latino children, with the majority qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. The climate in the school itself has been fine, because almost all of the students are people of color. However students have been emotionally distraught, especially the day after the election. Many came to school sobbing, fearing for their future and their families, worried about their relatives being deported. Many expressed sadness that they didn't realize how messed up the country was until that day, and that they either hated America or now understood why their friends said they hated America." -- MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER, NEW JERSEY "We have had many students fighting, especially between the Latino and African-American population, as well as many more boys feeling superior to girls. I have had one male student grab a female student's crotch and tell her that it's legal for him to do that to her now. We have not had as many hate crimes in our school as others, but that is likely because we have a VERY small white population. One of my students from last year who is Muslim has not worn her hijab since the election. She is one of three Muslim students in our school." -- ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER, MINNESOTA "When I attended a Veteran's Day service on Thursday, some of those same students were in the ROTC group here. I saw a distinct parallel to Hitler Youth. I am no longer able to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I am compelled to turn away when it comes on over the loud speaker and am repulsed by 'liberty and justice for all.'" -- HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, VIRGINIA
It is difficult to read these comments--they number in the thousands--without concluding that many schools are essentially laboratories where leftist educators are guided less by the mission to impart knowledge than by a desire to engage students in endless efforts to divide society along lines of sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
NO DISSENT FROM TOLERANCE
There were only a few educators who reported that the election had little impact on their schools. The SPLC was even able to find so-called evidence of election-related conflict when teachers themselves could not find such conflict. When the schools concerned were overwhelmingly white, the SPLC construed the absence of conflict as proof of white students' ignorance of the wider world.
"These students are isolated, with little exposure to students who are frightened by the election results, and few opportunities to see the world from their perspective," according to the report. "Teachers at these schools report that their students have accepted (or welcomed) the results and have moved on."
The Center provides the following examples: "Truly, it hasn't had a huge impact. Because I talk about these things in class, I have been able to see what little impact there is. Colleagues haven't seen anything." -- MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER, UTAH "If we stop trying to find problems and focus on the future, our country would be a better, more tolerant place to live. I explained to my students how lucky we are to live in the greatest country in the world, a place where we can have a peaceful transition of power; and if you do not agree with the results, we get to do it again in four years." -- HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, FLORIDA "I don't think the election has had a big impact on our school climate. It is a 6-8 middle school in a wealthy suburb. We have mostly white students with a decent size Asian population. It seems that there was support for both sides in our community, but the students seem to be taking the results fairly." -- MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER, OHIO "Absolutely nothing; if anything, this survey is creating more hatred than the election results." -- HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, RHODE ISLAND
Other schools, the SPLC claims, avoided conflict by "establishing inclusive welcoming communities," having "response programs in place," and by sponsoring "talking circles, student-led groups, leadership clubs, character programs and proactive staff," all programs the Center promotes in schools.
HEROES OF TOLERANCE
The SPLC reports praise teachers who profess extreme anti-parent, anti-conservative views and who bring those attitudes to the classroom. They praise teachers who view themselves as embattled freedom-fighters who must struggle against uncaring, unfeeling administrators, ignorant fellow teachers, and hateful parents. "I have thrown caution into the wind and have spoken out against certain candidates which I have NEVER done," wrote a Michigan high school teacher, "but I feel it's my duty to speak out against ignorance!" "I am teaching off the hook before anyone 'catches' me and puts me in a Common Core box; we are reading Howard Zinn, Anne Frank, Haig Bosmajian, Jane Yolen, Ayn Rand, George Orwell and survivors' testimonies from the Holocaust and the genocides around the world. ... I am making it as real and as connected to my students as I can. I feel like I am teaching for our lives."
THE THERAPEUTIC TOLERANCE POST-APOCALYPSE ACTION PLAN
On the morning after election night, Tommy Chang, Boston Public Schools superintendent, sent out an impassioned letter addressed to the "Boston Public Schools Family." Unable, as a public official, to explicitly denounce Donald Trump, he nonetheless managed to treat the election results like a deadly public disaster. "It is important today to be strong for our students and each other," he wrote, adding that the schools' "Behavioral Health Department is available to support students who may be having a difficult time processing any fears or concerns ... the Employee Assistance Program is available to support City of Boston employees' well-being."
In addition to referring all students and city employees to mental health professionals, he urged the entire school district to begin collective healing with the help of the SPLC, which had pre-emptively created an array of post-election exercises with titles like "The First Hundred Days," and "The Day After." Both Chang's letter and the "First Hundred Days" exercises feature self-evaluations with ominous-yet-inane questions. Chang recommended Bostonians contemplate, "How will I interact with others based on what I know about their feelings?" The "First Hundred Days" exercise is written in the voice of an adolescent whose reaction to the outcome of a class president race includes wishing to spit on the winner, but in the end, through self-evaluation "in the text" and "in my head," the narrator commits to getting along with her "stupid" classmates.
In "The Day After," the SPLC gets more to the point: "Prepare yourself," the worksheet warns, "to engage in difficult conversations surrounding the various topics--racism, civil rights, immigration and so forth--that the election has raised."
Superintendents in places like New York City and Los Angeles issued similar letters. The SPLC offered more exercises: "Our Classroom Values"; "Our Classroom Priorities"; a "Speak up for Civility Pledge" that could be printed out and signed. In the second "Trump Effect" report, the group praised Chang for having the vision to link to its therapeutic resources.
But this lip service paid to empathy and healing was overshadowed by the report's primary message: Adults and students who voted for Trump or supported him had committed unforgivable actions of hatred. The veneer of "tolerance" was mere click-bait, or cover for public officials like Chang as he abused his authority by referring to his pro-Trump employees as Nazis, Klansmen, and advocates for slavery and genocide. The section of the report appearing directly below praise for Chang starts: "Take care of the wounded."
"Many students," it continues, "especially immigrant, LGBT, Muslim and African-American students--are profoundly upset and worried by the election results. Their anxiety is warranted; many have been targeted in and out of school by individuals who think Trump's election has licensed hatred and bigotry."
Have they? What is a public official doing recommending such defamatory material through official channels, in the name of tolerance, no less?
Claiming to provide lesson plans for tolerance is the way the SPLC gets into schools. Once in, the mask quickly comes off; the civility pledges and classroom empathy exercises are merely a ploy.
A few weeks before the election the U.S. Department of Education announced grants of $6.5 million to fund four Regional Equity Assistance Centers. The money would, in part, "provide resources and training to combat issues such as hate crimes, implicit bias, racial prejudice, and bullying." Region 1 would be served by the SPLC under the umbrella of the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium Inc. So, taxpayers are now effectively funding agitprop data-gathering that accuses anyone who supported Trump of committing crimes against humanity, and the SPLC will continue this work until your tax dollars run out.
With the invention of the "Trump Effect," the SPLC has finally bypassed the criminal justice system and its insistence on actually investigating the validity of reports of hate. They are liberated from the burden of proving that a "hate incident," or even any fleeting hint of micro- aggression (let alone a crime), actually occurred. SPLC researchers and their education partners now use the excuse of researching the Trump E ect to bring their politics into classrooms in the name of conducting research on students "traumatized" by Trump's victory.
The "Trump Effect" reports do not merely represent a new low in leftist political bias masquerading as opposition research on hate groups: They mark a frightening step in the psychological manipulation of even very young children in classroom settings to achieve the political ambitions of radical leftists. The act of researching the Trump Effect itself is an instance of political activism imposed on captive schoolchildren by the SPLC.
Tina Trent received a doctorate from the Institute for Women's Studies of Emory University, where she wrote about the devastating impact of social justice movements on criminal law under the tutelage of the conservative, pro-life scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Dr. Trent lives with her husband on a farm in North Georgia. She blogs about crime and politics at tinatrent.com. |
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What, you've never seen a man and woman in formal dinner wear attempt to save pigs before?
Last night on Downton Abbey , "pigs" were mentioned ten times by seven different characters. This may not seem like much for an hour-long episode, but when there is so much going on inside Downton--Lady Edith is pregnant with a bastard child; Cousin Rose is romancing a black jazz singer; Anna has been raped by a neighboring valet; Lord Grantham is managing the estate with Monopoly money; and the Dowager Countess is bedridden--it seems rather superfluous to have pigs randomly dominating the household discussion, even if it does result in some slapstick mud comedy. (Though that whole over-the-top sequence was more befitting of an episode of I Love Lucy than Downton .)
On closer inspection of the pig-related references, we worry that Downton 's writers were simply playing a pork-themed game of ad libs in the writers room. Below, take a look at every single pig reference made in the episode and note how easily "shape-shifting werewolves," "cake-eating monkeys," or literally anything could have been substituted for "pig" in these comically vague lines.
"We're just discussing the pigs." - Tom
"The arrival of the pigs and the departure of their master." - Dowager Countess
"Are the pigs a good idea, Mr. Blake?" - Dowager Countess
"Good luck with the pigs." - Robert
"I'm meeting the new pig man!" - Branson
"Did the pigs arrive?" - Charles Blake
"Do you have a good pig man?" - Charles Blake
"Should I fetch the pig man?" - Mary
"I gather you were the heroine of the pig drama." - Evelyn
"Some pigs arrived." - Mary
In case you didn't catch on, the estate has received a shipment of pigs. And despite the fact that Mary claims she has hired a very good pig man to take care of them--"pig man," we imagine is the technical term--he has not given them any water. On a walk with Mary, Charles Blake, suddenly a pig expert, notes that the pigs are wildly dehydrated. "If they haven't had water this long, you must give it to them gradually!" Blake commands, jumping over a fence several times to show that he is passionate about saving these pigs. Cut to Mary and Blake hauling buckets of water through mud for the pigs and, we presume, saving them. We don't know for sure if they were saved because once Mary and Blake are adequately covered in mud, Julian Fellowes determines that their chemistry is more important than the pigs' welfare. After smearing mud all over each others' faces, the duo do what anyone might in that situation. . .
. . .steal away to the kitchen to drink wine and eat eggs while still covered in pig filth.
Although this anecdote seems like it will make for a great wedding toast one day--"And then Mary and I spent an entire episode talking about pigs for no reason, ha ha ha. Here's to a lifetime of more innocuous pig conversation!"--we aren't quite sure Charles Pig-man Blake will be Mary's next match. Because the very next day, Mary finally finds herself in the company of the three men who have recently fallen for her: Pig-man Blake, Evelyn, and Lord Gillingham.
Elsewhere, in less pork-heavy subplots, the Dowager Countess falls ill with bronchitis and Isobel attempts to Annie Wilkes her back to health. Only Isobel's Misery -style nurse punishments consist of something even worse than scalding soup spills and rogue bone breaks--hers center on incessant conversation ("She's like a drunken vicar," the Dowager complains) and terrible food. "She doesn't know what she's talking about!" Isobel shouts, when the Dowager deliriously disses her toast.
Lady Edith confides in her Aunt Rosamund that she is pregnant and the two manage to enact an entire abortion-related story arc without ever uttering the horrible word. Rather, the two consider "it," visit an alley-way clinic, and ultimately decide that Edith will keep the child even though the phrase "meet my niece and her charming bastard child" doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue. Gregson, Edith's baby daddy, is still mysteriously M.I.A., and even more mysteriously, no one suggests that maybe he "hit it and quit it." Surely, the Brits have a more eloquent phrase for that sentiment. Now we must wait for Edith to broach the subject with her family. . .
Lady Mary finds out that Anna has been raped and tries to channel her best sexual assault crisis counselor, asking her if she should see . . . uh, a doctor . . . or describe the ruffian robber who roughed her up. Anna says she can't talk about it.
"Even to me?" Mary asks incredulously, as if it is insane for her lady's maid to not want to talk about being sexually assaulted by the slimy valet of one of her employer's paramours.
Elsewhere, Gillingham's valet surprises the household with an appearance at the end of the episode. And although Anna and Hughes have vowed to keep his identity a secret from Bates, their expressions of surprise and disgust upon his re-entrance cannot mask much.
Meanwhile, Cousin Rose spends a day in London "shopping."
And lastly, Lord Grantham is jetting off to America--not for a wild Vegas vacation, but to bail her Ladyship's brother (played by Paul Giamatti in a future episode) out of some sticky situation. As we know, Lord Grantham falls at the very end of the list of Downton-ites from whom one should solicit help--he is last, after Isis and Thomas's skeletons--and we can only think of one crisis situation in which a trans-continental visit from Robert would actually help. Our guess: her Ladyship's brother needs to lose a family fortune in the fastest, most careless, and most efficient manner possible. And has rightly called upon Lord Grantham to do so.
Line of the episode: "I've been married, I know everything," Lady Mary tells Robert after he questions how she knows Thomas has a thing for handsome male stewards.
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All across America, parents, teachers and local school districts have been having conversations about how best to accommodate the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of students who identify as transgender while also addressing the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of other students. Schools found win-win solutions, such as the creation of single-occupancy restrooms and changing facilities for students who identify as transgender while retaining girls' and boys' rooms for biological girls and boys, but activists attacked these commonsense compromise policies as "transphobic."
Then, in May 2016, the Obama Administration announced that Title IX, a 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded schools, requires schools to allow students access to bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitory rooms, and hotel rooms for overnight field trips based entirely on the self-declared gender identities of their students.
On August 21, 2016, Judge Reed O'Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that the Obama Administration's attempt to redefine sex under Title IX was unlawful and blocked the decree from going into effect. On February 22, 2017, the Trump Departments of Justice and Education formally rescinded the Obama-era "gender identity" guidance that had created the confusion. [REF]
The federal court and the Trump Administration got it right. Congress, the courts, and the Trump Administration should continue to make clear that sex means objective biological sex, not subjective gender identity. Title IX was designed to address invidious sex-based discrimination and at the same time explicitly allowed single-sex intimate facilities. More recently a new question of "gender identity" has arisen, and the result has been a variety of federal attempts to force gender identity policies on our nation's schools, including the creation of a "Shame List" for religious schools seeking protection from this government overreach.
These new gender identity policies are unlawful. When Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, no one thought that "sex" meant "gender identity." It did not mean it then, and it does not mean it now. Federal bureaucrats have unlawfully attempted to rewrite federal law. The term "sex" is not ambiguous and cannot be unilaterally redefined by executive branch agencies to mean "gender identity."
Redefining "sex" as "gender identity" is also bad policy. The Obama Administration turned the purpose of Title IX on its head and favored the concerns of students who identify as transgender while entirely ignoring the concerns of other students. Valid safety, privacy, and equality concerns exist, and the Obama Administration ignored them. States and local schools should take these concerns seriously and find solutions that respect all Americans.
The Trump Administration's Departments of Justice and Education should continue to reject the unlawful redefinition of "sex" from the Obama era; Congress should ratify this action by specifying that the word "sex" in our civil rights laws does not mean "gender identity" unless the people, through their elected representatives, explicitly say so; and the courts should respect the democratic process.
History of Title IX
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex "under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." [REF] At the time Title IX was passed, girls and women faced difficulties and discrimination in pursuing education, particularly higher education. The purpose of Title IX was to minimize or even eliminate sexism in both primary and higher education and to ensure equal opportunities in education for our nation's girls and women.
Introduced in Congress in 1972 by Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972, Title IX ensured that federal dollars would be as available to programs for women as they were for men's programs in colleges, universities, and elementary and secondary schools. Title IX also applies to any educational or training program operated by a recipient of federal financial assistance. Because most schools receive federal funds of some sort, Title IX's influence is widespread:
Virtually all school districts and colleges receive some form of federal money (the exceptions are private secondary schools and colleges that do not participate in federal student loan programs, such as Hillsdale College in Michigan). Thus, practically all scholastic and college sports are governed by Title IX. [REF]
Implementation of Title IX has always allowed exemptions for religious schools. In the years between the implementation of Title IX and the Arcadia Resolution Agreement in 2013, 190 religious schools were granted exemptions. Among the schools receiving such exemptions were seminaries that trained only men for the Catholic priesthood; educational institutions "controlled, conducted, and operated by the Orthodox Jewish religion"; and Brigham Young University, a Latter Day Saints institution that maintained different dress codes for men and women because "BYU believed that 'differences in dress and grooming of men and women are proper expressions of God-given differences in the sexes.'" [REF]
Because most religious schools did not treat students or staff differently on the basis of sex, most of them did not file for exemptions to Title IX. According to Professor Kif Augustine-Adams:
For years on end, [the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights] had no new work on religious exemptions to Title IX. By 2012, it may have been easy to conclude that educational institutions' demand for religious exemption to Title IX had evaporated or at least been fulfilled through the exemptions OCR had already recognized. [REF]
This would begin to change, however, in 2013 when the OCR used the government's redefinition of "sex" to threaten local school districts with funding revocations for having sex-specific facilities based on biology instead of gender identity.
Protecting Women Against Invidious Discrimination. In his remarks on the Senate floor during the debate on Title IX, Senator Bayh said that the intention behind the law was to create a "strong and comprehensive measure [that would] provide women with solid legal protection from the persistent, pernicious discrimination" that existed at the time. [REF] Bayh stated that:
[Title IX was] an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs--an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice. [REF]
Before passage of Title IX, sex discrimination in education was manifest in numerous ways. The editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review explain that Title IX was designed specifically to reduce explicit discrimination against women:
The practices most obviously covered by Title IX involve overtly different treatment of male and female students. Some elementary schools forbid girls to join the safety patrol. Colleges and universities often prescribe earlier curfews for women than for men. Vocational interest tests have been color coded pink and blue with different career choices for women and men. All of these are examples of explicit discrimination based on sex, prohibited by Title IX. [REF]
Title IX did more than protect students from this overt discrimination. It also ensured that female students, professors, and staff in schools receiving federal funding would be protected from discrimination in all aspects of the educational experience, but it is most often discussed because of its impact in allowing women to participate in athletic programs at all levels:
At American colleges, more than two hundred thousand women are on varsity sports teams, up from a handful in 1971. More than 2.8 million girls were on high school teams in 2002. There were roughly 490,000 college athletes and 6.7 million high school athletes, so women comprise about 40 percent of the total on both levels. [REF]
Affecting athletics, however, is only one portion of the scope of Title IX, which covers 10 areas: "access to higher education, career education, employment, math and science, standardized testing, athletics, education for pregnant and parenting students, learning environment, sexual harassment, and technology." [REF]
Preserving Commonsense Single-Sex Policies Based on Biology. During the debate on Title IX, there was concern that its enactment would mean the end of sex-specific educational programs and sex-specific intimate facilities like bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers. Because of this concern, Congress explicitly constructed Title IX to ensure that access to living facilities could take biology into account: Section 1686 states that "nothing contained herein shall be construed to prohibit any educational institution receiving funds under this Act, from maintaining separate living facilities for the different sexes." Three years later, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's implementing regulations made clear that Title IX "permits separate but comparable toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex," [REF] thereby preserving sex-specific facilities while ensuring that women's facilities would not be inferior to men's and vice versa.
Title IX was able to provide equal opportunities for women in education without violating their privacy. Its implementation over subsequent years shows that genuine differences between men and women could be acknowledged--in many sports, such as football and basketball, women do not compete on the same teams as men because of physical differences--while allowing women equivalent opportunities to participate in school and extracurricular activities.
This binary nature of sex is reflected explicitly in Title IX itself, which exempts "father-son" and "mother-daughter" school activities for students "of one sex" so long as the school provides "reasonably comparable activities for students of the other sex." Additionally, Title IX exempted scholarship awards from beauty pageants that took into account "personal appearance" and where participation was limited to "individuals of one sex only." In short, Congress protected women and men under the common, biologically based, binary understanding of a person's sex that prevailed when Title IX was passed and left no room for any other interpretation.
The Question of Gender Identity
Title IX was passed in 1972, and its implementing regulations were promulgated in 1975. They were meant to address sexism and promote the equality of girls and women. Many years later, a different question arose: How should schools accommodate students who identify as transgender? Schools created balanced solutions that were age-appropriate and nuanced given the type of institution: whether at the grade school level, the high school level, the university level, or the graduate school level. No one assumed that a one-size-fits-all rule would be appropriate for students of all ages in all types of educational institutions.
Parents, teachers, principals, and school administrators, in conjunction with students, tried to find win-win solutions for all of the parties involved and came up with appropriately nuanced proposals. These proposed solutions existed long before the recent surge in high-profile media attention on transgender issues, and details were being worked out at the local level without generating much controversy.
Schools facing this issue were sensitive to the feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that students who identify as transgender would face were they to be required to share bathrooms or locker rooms with persons of the same biological sex. At the same time, they recognized that students of the other biological sex also had dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of their own.
The solution that schools generally settled upon was to give the student who identified as transgender limited access to other facilities--such as faculty facilities, the teacher's lounge, or the faculty locker room--or to provide single-occupancy restrooms for any student that did not feel comfortable using a multiple-occupancy intimate facility. They found a way to accommodate both the student who identified as transgender and the rest of the students. These nuanced solutions addressed all involved and reflected their dignity, privacy, and safety concerns.
The Current Redefinition of Sex in Title IX
In recent years, however, the original purpose of Title IX and the prior, localized way of dealing with concerns of students who identify as transgender came under attack by the Obama Administration. Instead of being used to protect women from discrimination in education, Title IX was used by bureaucrats to force schools to create special privileges based on gender identity that could undermine the law's very purpose. This subversion of Title IX, largely pushed by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, began in 2010 and has been furthered by lawsuits and guidance documents.
December 2010 "Dear Colleague" Letter. A December 26, 2010, "Dear Colleague" letter from the Office for Civil Rights provides one of the first examples of the Department of Education's intention to extend Title IX to include gender identity protections. Detailing how schools should react to harassment and bullying to remain in accordance with federal regulations, the OCR deftly expanded the definition of "sex" under Title IX to include gender identity:
Title IX also prohibits sexual harassment and gender-based harassment of all students, regardless of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.
Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also, as this example illustrates, be subjected to forms of sex-discrimination prohibited under Title IX.... [REF]
While this applied only to bullying, it was the first step in redefining Title IX beyond its additional scope of protecting women and girls in education to include "LGBT status." This letter laid the groundwork for the later, more sweeping inclusion of gender identity under Title IX.
2013 Arcadia School District Resolution Agreement. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) extended Title IX to cover gender identity in single-sex facilities. The Obama Administration forced a school district in California to allow students unfettered access to bathrooms and locker rooms on the basis of gender identity, not sex.
A student in the Arcadia School District sought access to sex-specific facilities at school and cabins at a school-sponsored science camp based on gender identity. The school district had provided the student with use of a private single-occupancy bathroom but allegedly did not allow the student access to the restroom or cabin designated for students of the opposite sex on a school field trip. The DOE's Office for Civil Rights and the DOJ's Civil Rights Division intervened. The result was a resolution agreement that for the first time included gender identity and gender expression as protected under Title IX's ban on sex discrimination:
"Gender-based discrimination" is a form of sex discrimination, and refers to differential treatment or harassment of a student based on the student's sex, including gender identity, gender expression, and nonconformity with gender stereotypes, that result in the denial or limitation of education services, benefits, or opportunities. Conduct may constitute gender-based discrimination regardless of the actual or perceived sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation of the persons experiencing or engaging in the conduct. [REF]
Because of the Arcadia agreement, the school district was required to provide the student with access to sex-specific facilities and activities according to the student's self-declared gender identity. The school district was also required to keep the student's birth name and biological sex confidential and not disclose the information to any district employees or other students without consent from the student's parents or the student. [REF]
Beyond requiring the school district to modify its treatment of the student in question, the agreement also specified that:
[The school district must] revise all of its policies, procedures, regulations, and related documents and materials...related to discrimination to a) specifically include gender-based discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex, and b) state that gender-based discrimination includes discrimination based on a student's gender identity, gender expression, gender transition, transgender status, or gender nonconformity. [REF]
The school district had to provide training to all district and school administrators regarding their responsibilities to prevent gender-based harassment and "best practices for creating a nondiscriminatory school environment for transgender students." [REF]
Palatine District 211. In November 2015, Palatine School District 211 outside of Chicago, Illinois, received a report from the DOE's Office for Civil Rights threatening loss of funds under Title IX if it did not allow a male student who identified as female access to the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms. [REF] Previously, the school had come up with arrangements that would seek to accommodate the student who identified as transgender while also balancing the privacy and safety concerns of the female students.
The school district went to considerable lengths to make the student comfortable, treating the student as a female in every way (including access to bathrooms and sports teams) except allowing access to the girls' locker rooms. [REF] Even in this, the high school went to great lengths to accommodate the student, "at one point install[ing] a bank of lockers in a private bathroom and encourage[ing] the student to invite friends who were comfortable changing there to move their lockers. This was meant to avert Student A from being forced to change alone." [REF]
These accommodations were nevertheless deemed discriminatory by the OCR. With a threatened loss of federal funding looming, the school district buckled to the OCR's demands and agreed to allow the student access to the girls' locker rooms in the Palatine School District. The resolution also required the schools to install "sufficient privacy curtains (privacy changing stations) within the girls' locker rooms to accommodate Student A and any students who wish to be assured of privacy while changing." [REF]
But installing privacy curtains was not sufficient to address the concerns of high school girls who are now forced to share a locker room with an anatomical male. One 15-year-old girl spoke of her concerns:
[I]t just doesn't feel right knowing someone with male anatomy is in the bathroom with me. I have nothing against Student A and would be her friend if I knew her better, but when it comes down to it, I don't feel right changing in the same room as a transgender student. The locker room is already filled with so much judgment, and I barely feel OK changing in front of my naturally born girl peers. [REF]
Moreover, the agreement did not say what would happen if Student A, a biological male who "wanted to be a girl like every other girl," [REF] chose not to use the curtains when changing. On May 4, 2016, a group of 51 families sued the school district to attempt to reverse the policy brought about by the resolution agreement. [REF] In October 2016, an Illinois judge recommended denying an injunction in the case, which is still unresolved. [REF]
Gloucester County Public School Board v. G.G. On June 11, 2015, a female student who identifies as male, G.G., sued the Gloucester County, Virginia, School Board because it would not allow G.G. access to the boys' restroom. The district had allowed such access until complaints by several families prompted it to implement a policy by which only biological girls could use the girls' room, only biological boys could use the boys' room, and any student could use one of three single-occupancy bathrooms, which the school built specifically to accommodate students who identify as transgender. This arrangement, which accommodated students who identify as transgender while also protecting the privacy rights of other students, was not good enough for G.G., who sued the school district for alleged unlawful sex discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
A district court ruled in favor of the school district, but on April 19, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned that decision and ruled against the district. [REF] In determining the meaning of sex discrimination under Title IX, the court held that it was bound to defer to an unpublished guidance letter from the OCR'S acting assistant deputy director, which specified that "sex" for Title IX purposes included "gender identity."
The school district appealed the decision, and on August 3, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on the circuit court's opinion that halted implementation of the guidance for the upcoming school year. On October 28, 2016, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two of the questions being considered in the case: whether the DOE's guidance letter deserved controlling deference (known as Auer deference) and, regardless of deference, whether the word "sex" under Title IX and regulations allowing for sex-specific facilities actually encompass the DOE's "gender identity" theory. On February 22, 2017, the Trump Department of Education formally rescinded the Obama-era OCR's "gender identity" guidance, [REF] and on March 6, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the ruling by the circuit court and sent the case back to that court to be reconsidered in light of the recent Trump Administration action.
May 2016 "Dear Colleague" Letter. In May 2016, the Obama Departments of Justice and Education released a long joint guidance letter declaring that "both federal agencies treat a student's gender identity as the student's sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX." The letter directed schools to allow "students to participate in sex-segregated activities and access sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity." [REF] In other words, access to sports teams, bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitory rooms, and hotel rooms for field trips would have to be based on the self-declared gender identity of the students.
The Obama Administration explicitly rejected compromises such as single-occupancy facilities: "A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so." Similarly, with respect to campus housing or hotels for off-campus trips, "a school must allow transgender students to access housing consistent with their gender identity and may not require transgender students to stay in single-occupancy accommodations." [REF]
The "Dear Colleague" letter makes clear reference to the importance of privacy concerns, but the only privacy concerns it acknowledges are the concerns of students who identify as transgender: "protecting transgender students' privacy is critical to ensuring they are treated consistent with their gender identity." [REF] It gives short shrift to the privacy concerns of other students. The guidance states that "the desire to accommodate others' discomfort" is not a legitimate basis for schools' retaining sex-specific facilities even if they also provide private accommodations for transgender and other students. [REF] The guidance does not allow schools to inform students (or their parents) whether they will have to share a bedroom or locker room with a student of the opposite biological sex. At most, it says that a school "may" (not must) "make individual-user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy" so long as students are allowed full access to the intimate facility of their choice based on their subjective gender identity. [REF]
When it comes to athletics, the Obama directives are confusingly vague, telling schools that they may not "rely on overly broad generalizations or stereotypes about the differences between transgender students and other students of the same sex (i.e., the same gender identity) or others' discomfort with transgender students." [REF] Thus, both the specific teams on which a student athlete who identifies as transgender must be allowed to play and the sports in which the student must be allowed to participate are unclear, which would likely prompt many schools to make all of their athletic policies based on gender identity to avoid having to find out the boundaries through lawsuits.
In response to this letter, 24 states filed lawsuits against the Obama Administration. [REF] On August 21, 2016, federal District Judge Reed O'Connor issued a nationwide injunction blocking enforcement of this gender identity mandate, holding that "[i]t cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex as used...following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth." [REF] The Obama Department of Justice appealed this ruling on October 20, 2016, but on February 10, 2017, the new Trump Department of Justice withdrew that motion for a stay and cancelled the scheduled oral arguments. [REF] On February 22, 2017, the Trump Departments of Justice and Education formally rescinded the "Dear Colleague" letter. [REF]
Title IX "Shame List" and Religious Exemptions
In the past several years, another troubling development has arisen under Title IX: efforts to shame religious schools that have sought to preserve their religious identities through a waiver.
As they became aware of the major changes the Obama Administration was imposing through Title IX enforcement, numerous schools filed for religious exemptions. Religious exemptions from Title IX existed during the first implementation of Title IX in the 1970s, but in the years leading up to the Arcadia resolution agreement, the number of claims had slowed to a trickle because few religious schools engaged in actions that the government considered discriminatory. In the aftermath of Arcadia, however, many schools rightly feared that their reasonable policies concerning intimate facilities and student conduct would be deemed discriminatory by the government. As a result, many religious schools requested exemptions from Title IX:
After more than a decade with only two new exemption claims, OCR received 63 new claims in the two and a half years between July 2013 and January 2016, with additional new exemption claims likely. All but one of those 63 new claims--a claim Liberty University made formally at the OCR's request when a student complained regarding abortion--asserted the religious educational institutions' exemption from Title IX to allow it to discriminate based on gender where transgender, gender nonconforming, and in some cases gay individuals were involved. [REF]
Since many religions teach that sex is objectively determined by genetics and physiology, these additional schools sought exemptions from Title IX so that they could continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs in the wake of Title IX's redefinition to include gender identity.
In December 2015, LGBT activist groups started attacking these religious schools. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) published Hidden Discrimination: Title IX Religious Exemptions Putting LGBT Students at Risk , [REF] charging that colleges and universities seeking exemptions from Title IX are "taking advantage of legal loopholes to enshrine their ability to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity." [REF] The HRC called on the Department of Education to publish information about the schools requesting and receiving exemptions from Title IX because of religious beliefs. The department responded by posting the letters from schools requesting exemptions on the DOE website, bringing about a swift attack on religious schools that had requested exemptions. [REF]
An organization named Campus Pride promptly published what it called a "Shame List" with the names of the religious colleges and universities that sought exemption from Title IX. The organization claimed that it published the list "for the purpose of calling out the harmful and shameful acts of religion-based prejudice and bigotry." [REF] As part of this initiative against religious schools, Campus Pride, along with a long list of other LGBT organizations, wrote a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association encouraging the NCAA to disassociate from all religious campuses on the list. [REF]
Unlawful Agency Redefinition of "Sex" as "Gender Identity"
In 1972, when Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, no one thought that "sex" meant "gender identity." The phrase "gender identity" did not exist outside of some esoteric psychological publications, and the word "gender" had been coined only recently in contradistinction to sex. The Obama Administration simply attempted to rewrite federal law as it wished the law had been written originally. To this day, the term "sex" is not ambiguous and therefore cannot legitimately be redefined by executive branch agencies to mean "gender identity."
Moreover, neither the agency memo issued by an acting assistant deputy director in the G.G. case nor the 2016 Obama Administration DOE/DOJ "Dear Colleague" letter went through the appropriate rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires that regulations and binding agency guidance must be subject to public notice and comment before finalization. Because the Title IX memo and letter did not follow the APA rules, they should not be given any deference. They also should be rejected because they do not offer a plausible alternative interpretation of the unambiguous word "sex."
Federal courts agree that the meaning of the word "sex" is unambiguous. There was no ambiguity in the original text of Title IX, which was passed to prevent sex discrimination. At the time, the word "sex" was clearly used to refer to the biological and physiological differences between men and women. In his opinion on the "Dear Colleague" guidance, Judge O'Connor stated that the reinterpretation of sex as gender identity was directly contrary to the original intent of the law as applied in its implementing regulations (34 C.F.R. SS 106.33):
[I]t cannot reasonably be disputed that DOE complied with Congressional intent when drawing the distinctions in SS 106.33 based on the biological differences between men and women.... [T]his was the common understanding of the term when Title IX was enacted, and remained the understanding during the regulatory process that led to the promulgation of SS 106.33. [REF]
The fact that the implementing regulations allowed separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for the different sexes shows that Title IX was to be implemented on the basis of biological sex and that it acknowledged legitimate differences between the sexes with respect to privacy concerns.
Judge Kim R. Gibson of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania has similarly made clear that Title IX was never intended to include protections on the basis of gender identity: "Title IX does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of transgender itself because transgender is not a protected characteristic under the statute." [REF] In particular, his opinion in a case involving the University of Pittsburgh defends the right of schools that receive federal funding to establish bathroom and locker room policies on the basis of sex: "[T]he University's policy of requiring students to use sex-segregated bathroom and locker room facilities based on students' natal or birth sex, rather than their gender identity, does not violate Title IX's prohibition of sex discrimination." [REF]
Significantly, Judge Gibson's opinion also makes the case that only Congress, not the courts, can expand the scope of Title IX:
Title IX's language does not provide a basis for a transgender status claim. On a plain reading of the statute, the term "on the basis of sex" in Title IX means nothing more than male and female, under the traditional binary conception of sex consistent with one's birth or biological sex.... The exclusion of gender identity from the language of Title IX is not an issue for this Court to remedy. It is within the province of Congress--and not this Court--to identify those classifications which are statutorily prohibited. [REF]
Judge Gibson's reasoning is correct. Title IX was intended to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex, not on the basis of gender identity. Congress, not courts or federal agencies, has the ability to change the scope of Title IX, but until it does so, gender identity protections cannot be considered within the scope of Title IX.
Judge Paul Niemeyer points to these same legal realities in his dissenting opinion in the Fourth Circuit case of G.G. v. Gloucester County Public School Board . He notes that "the majority's opinion, for the first time ever, holds that a public high school may not provide separate restrooms and locker rooms on the basis of biological sex" [REF] and further explains that:
This holding completely tramples on all universally accepted protections of privacy and safety that are based on the anatomical differences between the sexes.... [S]chools would no longer be able to protect physiological privacy as between students of the opposite biological sex.
This unprecedented holding overrules custom, culture, and the very demands inherent in human nature for privacy and safety, which the separation of such facilities is designed to protect. More particularly, it also misconstrues the clear language of Title IX and its regulations. And finally, it reaches an unworkable and illogical result. [REF]
Judge Niemeyer points out that the majority opinion relies not on the actual text, history, or legal implementation of Title IX, but rather on a 2015 letter from the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights: "The recent Office for Civil Rights letter, moreover, which is not law but which is the only authority on which the majority relies, states more than the majority acknowledges." [REF] In fact, the OCR letter suggested that schools "offer the use of gender-neutral, individual-user facilities to any student who does not want to use shared sex-segregated facilities." [REF]
The history of the words "gender," "gender identity," and "transgender" shows that they are not the same as "sex." Each of these words was coined precisely in contradistinction to "sex." "Gender," as it began to be used in the 1960s, was meant to draw attention to the differences between men and women that were specifically not biological. According to Dr. Stephen L. Ristvedt:
[B]y the mid-1960s the word gender was adopted outside of sexual science by feminist writers to mean the "socially constructed" (vs. biologically determined) aspects of male-female differences, that is, the stereotypical psychological and behavioral characteristics presumably shaped by societal expectations. [REF]
When Title IX was passed, gender was still considered something distinct from sex that would not be included in the definition of sex. [REF]
In an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett calls attention to the fact that at the time Title IX was enacted, sex as included in every major dictionary referred to biological anatomical characteristics, not gender identity:
"Ordinarily, a word's usage accords with its dictionary definition,"...and the dictionaries recording the sense of the word "sex" around the time when Title IX was enacted uniformly indicate that the word was understood, then, the way it had always been understood: as referring to the anatomical or physiological characteristics that constitute a person's sex, not his or her internal identification with one gender or the other. [REF]
Bennett's brief makes the point that the term "transgender" did not gain general usage until the late 1980s, years after Title IX was passed. [REF] According to the Handbook of Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders , the term "gender identity" came into use in the 1960s: " Gender identity was introduced into the profession lexicon by Hooker and Stoller almost simultaneously in the early 1960s." [REF] None of these then-esoteric terms would have been included within the definition of sex at the time Title IX was enacted. In addition, Bennett argues, "if the Education Department's current revisionist understanding of the term 'sex' had been disclosed to Congress when Title IX was being debated in 1972, Congress would have taken care to expressly define the term in the statute to accord with the commonly understood anatomical meaning of the term." [REF]
Other legislative and executive branch actions show that "sex" does not mean "gender identity." Congress and the executive branch know how to make policy on the basis of "gender identity" when they want to do so. Congress has specifically included "gender identity"--as distinct from "sex" and listed alongside "sex"--in two bills: the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. [REF] The distinct inclusion of both gender identity and sex protections shows that gender identity was never intended to fall within the definition of sex. If Congress had intended to include gender identity protections within the scope of Title IX, it could have specified their inclusion, but it did no such thing.
President Barack Obama similarly showed that he understood "sex" and "gender identity" to be different categories. In his executive order barring federal contractors from "discrimination" on the basis of "sexual orientation and gender identity," he replaced existing protections on the basis of "sex" with protections on the basis of "sex, sexual orientation, gender identity." [REF] In implementing an executive order placing "gender identity" alongside and in addition to "sex," President Obama showed that, legally, he did not consider gender identity protections to be included in protections on the basis of sex. Thus, he added "gender identity" to "sex."
Congress also knows how to reject "gender identity" provisions and has done so dozens of times. For example: The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employment discrimination both on the basis of sexual orientation and on the basis of gender identity, has been introduced in almost every Congress since 1994 but has never been enacted. [REF] Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already bans discrimination on the basis of sex in employment, which begs the question as to why Members of Congress would attempt to pass a law for over two decades if such protection was there all along. The so-called Equality Act, which would go beyond ENDA and add "sexual orientation and gender identity" (SOGI) to more or less every federal law that protects on the basis of race, has likewise never been enacted by Congress. [REF] The Student Non-Discrimination Act, championed by the Human Rights Campaign, which would "prohibit public schools from discriminating against any student on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity," also has never become law. [REF]
All of these bills establishing legal protections on the basis of gender identity have been rejected by Congress. Agency redefinition of sex to include gender identity explicitly goes against congressional precedent, for Congress has been explicit as to when it does and does not intend to protect on the basis of gender identity. The burden is on transgender advocates to prove that statutory terms have always carried the meaning they prefer as opposed to its plain meaning, and they have failed.
Sex-Specific vs. Gender Identity Discrimination
Even if one were to grant that in prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, Title IX also prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity, that would not change the outcome for school policies. The bathroom, locker room, and housing policies in question do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity. They make reasonable--and explicitly lawful--distinctions based on sex. All biological males, regardless of their gender identity, may use the men's room, and all biological females, regardless of their gender identity, may use the women's room. These policies do not even consider "gender identity." They classify on the basis of "sex" in a way that Title IX and its implementing regulations explicitly permit.
If someone is discriminating on the basis of X, it means that he or she takes X into account in deciding how to treat you. If someone takes X into consideration when it is irrelevant and only to oppress you, however, that is invidious discrimination. [REF]
Racially segregated water fountains were one form of discrimination that took race into consideration--in a context in which it was completely irrelevant--and then treated blacks as second-class citizens precisely because they were black. The entire point was to classify on the basis of race in order to treat blacks as socially inferior. As a result, such actions were rightly described as invidious race-based discrimination and--given the entrenched, widespread, state-facilitated nature of the problem--were rightly made unlawful.
Similarly, throughout much of American history, girls and women were not afforded educational opportunities equal to those available to boys and men. This form of discrimination took sex into consideration and then treated girls and women poorly precisely because of their sex, barring them from education in certain subjects or at certain levels despite being otherwise qualified. As with invidious racial discrimination, such treatment took a feature (in this case, sex) into consideration precisely to treat women as less than men. As a result, such actions were rightly viewed as invidious sex-based discrimination, and--again, given the entrenched, widespread, and state-facilitated nature of the problem--Title IX of the Education Amendments was enacted to ensure that girls and women received equal educational opportunities.
In this vein, to discriminate on the basis of gender identity would be to say that students who identify with their biological sex can use the school water fountains, but students who identify as transgender cannot. That would be taking a student's transgender status into account where the factor has no relation to the issue at hand and would rightly be deemed discriminatory.
Nothing of the sort takes place when it comes to policies on bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams. The gender identity of a student is not taken into account at all. The policy simply says that with respect to certain intimate facilities, entrance should be determined on the basis of anatomy, physiology, and biology. Bathroom, locker room, shower, and athletic team policies are based on objective external expressions of sex--biology, physiology, anatomy--and not on a subjective internal sense of gender.
In other words, it is not because some people wear suits and ties and others wear dresses that there are separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women. The existence of sex-specific intimate facilities is explained not by our internal sense of gender, but by our external manifestations of biology. The Obama Administration's argument that this is gender identity discrimination is therefore misplaced.
Not only is it misplaced, but the Obama Administration's view would require gender identity discrimination by schools. Under the Obama view, gender identity overrules biology. Therefore, a school with students who are biologically male or female and who identify with their biological sex or with the opposite sex would have to grant and deny access to its showers and lockers according to Table 1:
The table illustrates that the only students who must be denied access are those who identify with their biological sex-- i.e. , non-transgender students--which is a clear example of irrational gender identity discrimination under the Administration's own logic.
Redefining "Sex" as "Gender Identity" for Sex-Specific Intimate Facilities
The Obama Administration's transgender directives are bad policy for several reasons.
The Obama gender identity guidelines ignore legitimate privacy concerns. Sex-specific intimate facilities exist in the first place to provide a sufficient level of bodily privacy. In her majority opinion for the Supreme Court forcing the Virginia Military Institute to become coeducational, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that it "would undoubtedly require alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex in living arrangements." [REF]
Some critics had argued that the Equal Rights Amendment, a predecessor of Title IX that never became law, would have required unisex intimate facilities. In 1975, when Justice Ginsburg was a law professor at Columbia University, she wrote an op-ed article for The Washington Post explaining that a ban on sex discrimination would not require such a ridiculous outcome:
Again, emphatically not so. Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy. Individual privacy, a right of constitutional dimension, is appropriately harmonized with the equality principle. [REF]
In other words, the Constitution required protection for the right of bodily privacy. Justice Ginsburg's colleague, Justice Anthony Kennedy, makes a related point that acknowledging biological differences is not the same as engaging in mere stereotyping:
To fail to acknowledge even our most basic biological differences...risks making the guarantee of equal protection superficial, and so disserving it. Mechanistic classification of all our differences as stereotypes would operate to obscure those misconceptions and prejudices that are real. [REF]
Yet the 2016 Obama Administration DOE/DOJ "Dear Colleague" letter instructs schools that they may not notify students (or their parents) about whether they will have to share a bedroom, shower, or locker room with a student of the opposite biological sex.
The Women's Liberation Front (an organization from the left) and the Family Policy Alliance (an organization from the right) point out the double standard when it comes to whose privacy is being protected: "It is truly mind-boggling that informing women as to which men have the 'right' to share a bedroom with them is an 'invasion of privacy,' but it is not an invasion of privacy to invite those men into women's bedrooms in the first place." [REF]
Many courts have defended the bodily privacy rights of people in a variety of settings. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, for example, has ruled that prisoners have a right to bodily privacy. With the exception of true emergencies, prisoners have a right not to be seen in a state of undress by guards of the opposite sex. The court based its ruling on "society's undisputed approval of separate public restrooms for men and women based on privacy concerns." [REF] As the State of North Carolina has explained, the DOJ's prison regulations follow this principle:
For instance, those regulations tightly restrict "cross-gender" strip searches, pat-down searches, and visual body cavity searches, 28 C.F.R. SS 115.15(c), and also require policies that generally "enable inmates to shower, perform bodily functions, and change clothing without nonmedical staff of the opposite gender viewing their breasts, buttocks, or genitalia." Id. SS 115.15(d). [REF]
It is entirely reasonable for people not to want to see the opposite sex in a state of undress, regardless of their gender identity. Likewise, it is entirely reasonable for people not to want to be seen in a state of undress by people of the opposite sex, regardless of their gender identity. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) explains this long-running American practice:
In the late 1800s, as women began entering the workforce, the law developed to protect privacy by mandating that work place restrooms and changing rooms be separated by sex. Massachusetts adopted the first such law in 1887. By 1920, 43 of the (then) 48 states had similar laws protecting privacy by mandating sex-separated facilities in the workplace. Because of our national commitment to protect our citizens, and especially children, from the risk of being exposed to the anatomy of the opposite sex, as well as the risk of being seen by the opposite sex while attending to private, intimate needs, sex-separated restrooms and locker rooms are ubiquitous in public places. [REF]
This concern is particularly heightened for minors, especially as children go through puberty and rightly desire bodily privacy. "Specifically," adds the ADF, "minors have a fundamental right to be free from State compelled risk of exposure of their bodies, or their intimate activities, such as occur within restrooms and locker rooms, to the opposite biological sex." [REF]
This is also of particular concern to women who have been victims of sexual abuse. Seeing a naked male body, particularly the genital area, can function as a traumatic trigger. Whether the naked male body they suddenly see in front of them belongs to a man who identifies as a woman (and has not had surgery) or a man who identifies as a man (and has not had surgery) is of no moment to survivors of sexual abuse who are caught in that situation.
Safe Spaces for Women, a group that "provides survivors of sexual assault with care, support, understanding and advice," recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court explaining how gender identity policies can negatively affect such women:
Safe Spaces for Women has a strong interest in ensuring that the voices of women who have suffered sexual abuse are heeded when policies are made that may directly affect their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. This includes policies that require educational institutions covered by Title IX to admit to female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms biological males who identify as female. While Safe Spaces for Women bears no animus toward the transgendered community, it is deeply concerned that...survivors of sexual assault are likely to suffer psychological trauma as a result of encountering biological males--even those with entirely innocent intentions--in the traditional safe spaces of women's showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms. [REF]
The brief goes on to note that the Obama Administration issued its guidance "without giving those affected a voice in the process...improperly circumvent[ing] the notice and comment process when that process was needed most." [REF] As the brief further notes:
Women who have suffered sexual assault are especially sensitized to the risks posed to their physical and emotional wellbeing by allowing biological males to enter the traditional safe spaces of women's showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. Moreover, these women are vulnerable to suffering emotional trauma as a result of encountering biological males in those spaces--including those with entirely innocent intentions. [REF]
Several families have expressed similar concerns to the Supreme Court. Consider the declaration of Y.K. the parent of several minor children including C.K.:
C.K. currently attends middle school within the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. She is required to change clothes at school for curricular activities, which includes undressing in front of other students within a large open single-sex locker room.
She is not aware of any private single-stall changing facilities. But even if those were available, she would feel ostracized from the rest of her peers by being required to change away from the rest of the girls in order to avoid undressing in front of a male or see a male undress in front of her.
She experiences anxiety, discomfort, and embarrassment at the thought of having to change in front of a boy or a man, and the fact that a male may profess a female gender identity does not reduce her anxiety. She also fears that some men may profess a female identity as a pretense to access the locker room where she is changing.
C.K. has been afraid and anxious about returning to school this year because of the school system's new policy regarding sex-specific restrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities. Her anxiety has been slightly allayed because the new policy is currently on hold as a result of a recent Supreme Court ruling, but nonetheless the thought that she will have to undress in the presence of males, and to be subject to males undressing in front of her, once that policy goes back into effect, is deeply distressing to her. [REF]
Consider also the declaration of S.H.:
I am 14 years of age.
My former public middle school feeds into a public high school which permits males into female restrooms, based upon whether they profess a female gender identity. The high school district adopted this policy a couple of years ago, without notifying the parents of this change. The school district also let one student have access to locker rooms formerly reserved for the opposite sex.
The idea of permitting a person with male anatomy--regardless of whether he identifies as a girl--in girls' locker rooms, showers and changing areas, and restrooms makes me extremely uncomfortable and makes me feel unsafe as well.
Even the idea that a boy or man is allowed in those areas makes me anxious and fearful, regardless of whether I ever encounter them in any of those places.
I feel unsafe because I am concerned that a boy or man can access the girls' facilities by just professing a female identity, and that would allow them to take advantage of the school's policies in order to see me and my friends as we have to undress for school. They could take pictures of us with their phones and then post them to the internet.
I would feel especially violated in the event that the school district's policy enabled a person with male genitalia, regardless of what gender that person professes, to see me partially or fully undressed. I also do not want to be exposed to male genitalia in any way while in facilities formerly designated for girls only. [REF]
Finally, consider the testimony of J.S., recounted in the Safe Spaces for Women amicus brief:
In Washington state the Human Rights Commission passed a Washington Administrative Code allowing men who gender identify as female to enter women's locker rooms, spas, and restrooms. As a survivor of childhood molestation and rape, the passage of this law left me feeling vulnerable and exposed in areas [in which] I should be protected. I worked for many years to heal from the emotional, physical, and spiritual effects of the trauma inflicted by my childhood attacker. Depression, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and physical phantom pains are a legacy of my past abuse.
I had been panic-attack free for over a decade when Washington's law went into effect. Now, using a public bathroom is very difficult and has led to many panic attacks. I have not entered a public women's locker room in over a year. Before Washington's law was passed, if I encountered a man in the woman's bathroom or locker room, management, staff, police and the general public would all have been there to protect my privacy and safety. This is no longer the case. To be in a position where I am left exposed, separate from others and no longer have a voice is the same position I was in as a child of eight. [REF]
America has recognized in law that there is an interest in bodily privacy--not just for workers or students, but for prisoners as well--particularly in a state of undress. If this is true in the case of prisoners, who do give up certain rights upon incarceration, why would it not also be true for minor students, almost all of whom are subject to a law mandating their attendance at school?
Even some members of the political left seem to understand this. Maya Dillard Smith, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, resigned from her position with the ACLU after it came out on the wrong side of this issue:
I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school aged daughters into a women's restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults over six feet with deep voices entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.... Despite additional learning I still have to do, I believe there are solutions that can provide accommodations for transgender people and balance the need to ensure women and girls are safe from those who might have malicious intent. [REF]
As Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, has written in The New Yorker , "[t]he discomfort that some people, some sexual-assault survivors, in particular, feel at the idea of being in rest rooms with people with male sex organs, whatever their gender, is not easy to brush aside as bigotry." [REF]
The Obama gender identity guidelines ignore legitimate safety concerns. Sex-specific intimate facilities also exist to protect girls and women from male predators. The concern is not that people who identify as transgender will engage in inappropriate acts. Rather, the concern is that predators will abuse these new gender identity policies to gain readier access to victims. Several experts have testified precisely about this problem, and recent history confirms their insights.
Kenneth V. Lanning, for example, is a veteran of 40 years in law enforcement who specializes in preventing and solving sex crimes. A former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, he was assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico for 20 years. Lanning has consulted on thousands of sex crimes and has published an essential book, Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis , now in its fifth edition. [REF]
Lanning identifies the problem that "gender-identity based access policies" (GIBAPs) create for sex-specific intimate facilities: "the problem with potential sex offenses is not crimes by transgendered persons. The problem...is offenses by males who are not really transgendered but who would exploit the entirely subjective provisions of a GIBAP...to facilitate their sexual behavior or offenses." [REF] As Lanning explains:
[A]llowing a man, based only on his claim to be [a] transgendered woman, to have unlimited access to women's rest rooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, showers, etc. will make it easier for the type of sex offense behavior previously described to happen to more women and children. Such access would create an additional risk for potential victims in a previously protected setting and a new defense for a wide variety of sexual victimization. [REF]
Tim Hutchison, the retired sheriff of Knox County (which includes the City of Knoxville and the University of Tennessee), agrees. Drawing on more than 33 years of experience in law enforcement, he testifies to what every local law enforcement official knows: "Public restrooms are crime attractors, and have long been well-known as areas in which offenders seek out victims in a planned and deliberate way." [REF] More specifically, "[a]ccess policies to restrooms based on 'gender identity' create real and significant public safety and privacy risks, especially in women's and children's restrooms/dressing rooms. These incidents are already occurring." [REF]
Part of the problem is that many sex crimes depend on intent, which will be harder to prove with gender identity policies. Lanning explains that predators "will use the cover of gender-identity-based rules or conventions to engage in peeping, indecent exposure, and other offenses and behaviors." [REF] Additionally, "[c]laims that existing laws are sufficient to address abuse of GIBAPs and similar social customs by male sex offenders are particularly weak, because the specific types of illegal conduct most likely to be encouraged by the policies are intent-based offenses." [REF] Hutchison notes that "[p]eople pushing for the adoption of GIBAPs are downplaying or dismissing serious and legitimate public safety concerns because they do not see (or maybe do not want to see) the problem." [REF]
Another problem with gender-identity policies is that they lack a clear and objective definition and standard of who belongs where. Lanning elaborates:
[O]bjective standards are also important to effective law enforcement. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors will be less likely to record, investigate, or charge indecent exposure or peeping offenses in a GIBAP environment, because there is no objective standard for determining whether someone born a male can lawfully be present in a women-only facility. It would be more difficult to prove lascivious intent when self-reported gender identity drives access rights, and easier to accuse law enforcement personnel of discrimination. This is made even more difficult when that self-reporting [gender identity] need not be corroborated in any way whatsoever. [REF]
And just as fear of being accused of bigotry or discrimination can make law enforcement personnel less likely to investigate or enforce sex crime statutes, it can make women less likely to report certain forms of sexual misconduct, such as peeping and indecent exposure:
Under such policies, the very real victims of such conduct--women deliberately exposed to the male genitals of an exhibitionist, for example--would be forced to consider whether the exposure was merely the innocent or inadvertent act of a transgendered individual. Moreover, because GIBAPs and similar social conventions link facility access to self-reported gender identity , a victim may be unwilling to report an exhibitionist appearing to be a male for fear of being accused of bigotry or gender identity discrimination. As a result, reporting of public-facility sex crimes is likely to decrease as a result of GIBAPs and similar social conventions, even as the actual number of offenses increases . [REF]
This is particularly the case with children, who are already more likely not to report abuse. "With a GIBAP in effect," explains Hutchison, "sex crimes would increase, but an even larger percentage of those crimes would go unreported. In fact, children often delay reporting of sexual abuse until adulthood." [REF] Many women are likewise afraid to make reports of sex crimes: "The decrease in reporting would not just be because victims and bystanders would be less certain that a violation had occurred. Most women are already afraid to report suspected crime or suspicious activity if they think that people will label them for making a report." [REF] Although "it is good that society is becoming more accepting of different people," Hutchison concludes, "the fear of being accused of bigotry creates a public safety risk." [REF]
Another disturbing question arises: "Is a biological male who displays his private parts to a woman while coming out of a women's restroom stall a flasher or transgendered? What about the biological male whose eyes wander while in a women's locker room?" [REF] Many women have already been victimized by men entering women's spaces: In Toronto, a man posed as a transgender woman ("Jessica") to sexually assault and criminally harass four women--including a deaf woman and a survivor of domestic violence--at two women's shelters. Previously, he had preyed on other women and girls whose ages ranged from as young as five to as old as 53. [REF] In Virginia, a man presented as a woman in a long wig and pink shirt to enter a women's restroom at a mall to take pictures of a five-year-old girl, her mother, and another woman. [REF] In Washington State, a man used a women's locker room at a public swimming pool to undress in front of young girls who were changing for swim practice. When staff asked him to leave, the man claimed that "the law has changed and I have a right to be here." [REF] In Toronto, two separate occurrences of voyeurism took place on campus after the University of Toronto implemented a policy of gender-neutral bathrooms. In both cases, male students were found using their cell phone cameras to film women showering. These incidents prompted the University of Toronto to revise its new policy. [REF] In Minnesota, a biologically male high school student who identifies as female was allowed access to the girls' locker rooms, where the student danced "in a sexually explicit manner--'twerking,' 'grinding,' and like he was on a 'stripper pole,'" flashed his underwear while dancing, asked about a girl's bra size, and asked her to "trade body parts." [REF] In Milwaukie, Oregon, Thomas Lee Benson was arrested for dressing as a woman to enter the women's locker room at an aquatic park. Benson had been convicted previously of sexual abuse, purchasing child pornography, and unlawful contact with a child. [REF] In Olympia, Washington, a man, Taylor Buehler, wearing a wig and a bra was arrested for entering the women's bathroom at Everett Community College. He admitted under police questioning that "he was the suspect in an earlier voyeurism incident." [REF]
Similar incidents have taken place in the United States at several Target stores since Target changed its policy in April 2016 to allow bathroom and fitting room access in accordance with gender identity, not biological sex. In July 2016, Sean Patrick Smith, a biological man who identifies as a woman and was wearing a wig and dress, was charged with secretly recording an 18-year-old girl changing into swimwear in a Target fitting room in Idaho. [REF] Although women undressing in the past for the "same reason men go online to look at pornography." [REF] In September 2016, customers saw a man taking pictures of women changing in the stall next to him at a unisex Target dressing room in Brick, New Jersey. [REF]
Some 130 examples of men charged with using bathroom, locker room, and shower access to target women for voyeurism and sexual assault are documented in the appendix to this paper.
The Obama gender identity guidelines provide no legal definition of "gender identity" or legal criteria for determining who is a "transgender" person. The Obama Administration's "Dear Colleague" letter states that a "school may not require transgender students to have a medical diagnosis, undergo any medical treatment, or produce a birth certificate or other identification document before treating them consistent with their gender identity." [REF] The Administration goes on to say that "[g]ender identity refers to an individual's internal sense of gender." [REF]
Other institutions, including the U.S. Department of State, the Olympics, and the NCAA, require actual evidence for determining gender identity and deciding who shall be treated as identifying as transgender. Lanning points out that "[t]he State Department requires a statement from an attending physician stating that he or she has a doctor/patient relationship with the subject, and stating that the subject has completed or is in process of appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition." He adds that this "is very different from the subjective standard in...the Department of Justice/Education guidelines, which allow people to use female-only facilities based solely on their subjective 'internal sense' of gender identity." [REF] The Olympics requires men who identify as women to "demonstrate that their testosterone level has been below a certain cutoff point for at least one year before their first competition." [REF] The NCAA requires that a man who identifies as a woman can compete on a women's team only "if the athlete obtains a doctor's certification of the subject's intention to transition to a woman, and that hormone therapy has actually begun." [REF]
Lanning concludes that "such objective standards are also important to effective law enforcement." [REF] Hutchison concurs:
If someone could enter a public facility based entirely upon their "internal sense of gender," then law enforcement personnel, bystanders, and potential victims would have to be able to read minds in order to determine whether a man entering a women's facility was really transgender or was instead there to commit a sex offense.... [T]he non-transgender male sex offender would simply have to claim that his "gender identity" was female to make successful prosecution difficult if not practically impossible. [REF]
In other words, objective definitions and standards are necessary for our laws to work.
The Obama gender identity guidelines undermine the equality purposes of Title IX for girls and women. Many women worry that the original purpose of Title IX--working toward women's equality--is in danger when "sex" is redefined to mean "gender identity." This leads to harms in educational opportunity and in legal equality for biological girls and women.
In an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) and the Family Policy Alliance (FPA), while generally disparate politically, jointly acknowledge the dangers of redefining sex for women:
[R]edefining "sex" to mean "gender identity" is a truly fundamental shift in American law and society. It also strips women of their privacy, threatens their physical safety, undercuts the means by which women can achieve educational equality, and ultimately works to erase women's very existence. [REF]
WoLF and the FPA argue that redefining Title IX would particularly affect women's educational access by allowing scholarships that were intended only for women to become available to biological men who identify as women. This undermines the original purpose of Title IX: "Congress enacted Title IX as a remedial statute for the benefit of women, and granting Title IX rights to men who claim they are women necessarily violates the rights Congress gave women in this law." [REF] In addition, allowing anyone who identifies as a woman to be considered a woman erases the very meaning of womanhood in law:
When the law requires that any man who wishes (for whatever reason) to be treated as a woman is a woman, then "woman" (and "female") lose all meaning. With the stroke of a pen, women's existence--shaped since time immemorial by their unique and immutable biology--has been eliminated by Orwellian fiat. [REF]
Another brief, filed on behalf of the Women's Liberation Front (WLF), highlights the strange development of Title IX protections. Originally intended to ensure educational rights for women, they are now being used to deny women privacy, safety, educational opportunity, and equality: "The idea that women and girls must surrender their rights and protections under Title IX--enacted specifically to secure women's access to education--in order to extend Title IX to cover men claiming to be women is a jaw-dropping act of administrative jujitsu." [REF] The WLF stresses that this redefinition of sex is a way to erase the legal standing of women:
Redefining "sex" to mean "gender identity" means that the sex-class comprising women and girls now includes men, with all the physiological and social characteristics that come with being male (and vice-versa). Likewise, the agencies make little effort to keep up the pretense that "transgender" is a coherent descriptor; under their policy a transgender person is simply any person who claims to be so, and that person's "sex" is whatever they say it is whenever they say it. By rendering men legally indistinguishable from women, the policy threatens to extinguish the very meaning (and independent legal existence) of women. [REF]
There are concerns about athletic fairness for women and girls as well. If biological males play on women's sports teams, they often have an advantage. In Alaska, high school girls have already lost medals in track competitions because of their inability to compete with a male who identifies as a girl. In a video put out by the Family Policy Alliance's Ask Me First campaign, one of the girls who raced against this athlete talks about the unfair aspects of allowing biological males to compete in races against girls:
There was obviously one girl in each of those races who did not get to compete because of this athlete. It's not fair scientifically--obviously male and female are made differently. There are certain races for males, and certain races for females, and I believe it should stay that way. [REF]
Girls are also on the losing end when students who identify as transgender taking hormones compete against them in sports. In February 2017, a biological girl taking testosterone as part of a "transition" process won the Texas state championship, completing an undefeated wrestling season against other girls (who were not taking testosterone supplements). [REF] Accommodations should be reached so that biological girls can compete on a level playing field instead of being forced to compete and lose against biological males or biological girls who are taking male hormones that can enhance their performance.
The words "girl" and "women" mean something, and in the words of rape survivor Kaeley Triller Haver, "When gender identity wins, women always lose." [REF]
What Needs to Be Done
Title IX was enacted to ensure that girls and women would have equal opportunities in education. It prohibited any school that receives government funding from discriminating on the basis of sex, and it did this while recognizing privacy concerns and stating that living spaces could remain separate for the different sexes. Once Title IX was implemented, individual schools were able to find nuanced solutions to the concerns raised by students who identify as transgender.
But beginning with the 2010 "Dear Colleague" letter and culminating with the 2016 "Dear Colleague" letter, federal bureaucrats have extended the scope of Title IX. Title IX has become a tool to force schools and programs receiving federal funding to allow biological boys in girls' restrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Religious schools have come under attack for filing for exemptions from Title IX so that they can continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs.
What can be done to return Title IX to its original, laudable purpose of granting women equal opportunity?
First, the Department of Education should explicitly return to the intended meaning of "sex" in Title IX. While the Trump Administration's Department of Education should be praised for rescinding the bad Obama-era guidance, repealing guidance without a clear replacement gives bureaucrats and judges too much room for mischief. The DOE should issue clear guidance to state that "sex" in Title IX means biological sex, not gender identity. By doing so, the department could ensure the continued protection of women and girls in school bathrooms and locker rooms and on sports teams. Through this guidance, it could emphasize that accommodations for students who identify as transgender are encouraged while retaining the privacy rights of women and girls in the school system.
Second, Congress should ensure that Title IX will continue to protect girls and women. There are three actions that Congress can take to preserve Title IX's original intent. Congress could specify that "sex" does not mean "gender identity" in Title IX and civil rights law. Language included in H.R. 5812, the Civil Rights Uniformity Act, for example, introduced by Representative Pete Olson (R-TX) in 2016, would do exactly that. [REF] The act clarifies that for the purpose of interpreting civil rights statutes, the term "sex" does not mean "gender identity." This would prevent current and future abuses of Title IX and other civil rights law and ensure that unelected bureaucrats and judges would not get to reshape policy affecting women and girls. Schools could continue to provide separate bathroom and locker room facilities and sports teams based on biological sex, not gender identity, and religious schools could continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs without having to fear agency action against them. At the same time, such legislation could leave the door open for reasonable accommodations of people who identify as transgender. Congress could include language in a statute offering the same clarification but targeted to the specific federal laws that have already been abused, such as (among others) Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. This would reiterate that when Congress referred to a person's "sex" in these laws, what the word referred to then is what it refers to now: biological reality, not "gender identity." It would achieve in piecemeal fashion what the Civil Rights Uniformity Act would achieve in wholesale fashion. Congress, based on its power of the purse, could specify that the Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, may not use any funds to implement or enforce any new administrative gender identity directives or regulations against persons, institutions, schools, businesses, and governments that allegedly do not comply. Additionally, Congress could specify that these agencies may not revoke federal funding for any purported noncompliance with the Administration's gender identity directives.
Finally, the courts should not interpret "sex" to mean "gender identity" and should not usurp the authority of the representative branches of government to make policy in this area.
In this way, the original purpose of Title IX and other laws banning sex discrimination can be restored. Instead of being used by unaccountable agencies and unelected judges to hold that schools cannot have separate restrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex, Title IX can function once more to protect women and girls and ensure that they have equal access to educational programs and opportunities.
Before the April 2015 prime-time interview with the celebrity then known as Bruce Jenner, few Americans had ever had a conversation about transgender issues. Instead of encouraging such a conversation, however, and allowing parents, teachers, and local schools the time, space, and flexibility to find solutions that work best for everyone, the Obama Administration attempted to force a one-size-fits-all policy on the entire nation.
The Trump Administration has taken the first steps to correct this. While the Obama Administration attempted to rewrite law to impose a nationwide federal "gender identity" policy, the Trump Administration is respecting federalism, local decision-making, and parental authority in education. Congress and the courts should do the same.
For most Americans, concerns related to students who identify as transgender are a new reality. Rather than follow the Obama Administration's rush to impose a top-down solution on the entire country, the Trump Administration is allowing the American people to consider all relevant concerns and help to devise policies that will best serve all Americans. Congress should support such efforts, and the courts should respect them.
-- Ryan T. Anderson, PhD, is William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation. Melody Wood is a Research Assistant in the DeVos Center.
Examples of Individuals Charged with Engaging in Sex Crimes in Intimate Facilities |
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Thursday January 5, 2017 Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has plans to bring a congressional delegation to Russia. Rohrabacher is quoted in a Wednesday article by Robert Costa in the Washington Post as saying a purpose of the trip is to discuss with Russian officials "how we can work with the Duma." The Duma is a legislative body of the Russian government. Rohrabacher, as chairman of the Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has a significant role in the United States House of Representatives regarding US relations with Russia. In this position, Rohrabacher has on occasion forcefully made the case for easing tensions between the US and Russia. For example, in March of 2015, Rohrabacher, speaking during a meeting of the subcommittee concerning Ukraine, criticized the US government's effort "to basically defeat and humiliate Russia." He argued that the US goal should instead be "to do what is right by Ukraine and bring peace to Ukraine." Rohrabacher's influence in the House, though, should be understood in context. In introductory remarks at the Ukraine hearing at which Rohrabacher spoke out for peace and detente, Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), who is chairman of the full Foreign Affairs Committee, asserted the US government should take more aggressive actions in opposition to Russia in relation to Ukraine, calling US action so far "quite tepid." And, last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) cheered and called "overdue" the announcement by President Barack Obama of punitive actions, including the expelling of 35 Russian diplomats from America, in response to purported Russian government actions including interfering with the 2016 US presidential election. For some interesting information regarding Rohrabacher and his foreign policy views read Justin Raimondo's December 5 article " Dana Rohrabacher for Secretary of State? " at antiwar.com. Rohrabacher was recently in the news as a possible choice for the Secretary of State position in a Donald Trump administration. Trump ended up choosing Exxon Mobil Corporation CEO Rex W. Tillerson. |
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There are three types of people in the world. Those who acknowledge reality, those who seek to change it and the third type, which ignores reality altogether, instead focusing on such lofty goals as creating new hashtags and championing causes which are, to put it delicately, completely stupid. Also known as SJWs (read Surprise! SJWs Rage Over #TheTriggering Twitter Movement ).
This is a story which concerns all three types of people. Following a stabbing spree of Israelis at the hands of Palestinians , an Israeli diplomat (a Christian of Arab descent) was giving a speech at UC Davis, when pro-Palestinians channeled their creative might into chants including "Allhu Akbar." Feel free to watch...
"Palestine will be free, fight white supremacy!" they chanted along with, "Israel is anti-black!"
Either the speaker or someone in the audience questioned that assertion, asking, "Is it though?" evoking a chuckle from the audience.
Israelis of African and Middle Eastern descent enjoy equal rights under the law as other Israeli citizens. During the 1980s and 1990s, Israel flew thousands of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Israel.
Besides their vocal support for the intifada uprising that has plagued Israel with nearly daily stabbing and other violent attacks since September, the California protesters chanted another slogan that suggested they support violence against Israelis.
"When Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified," they shouted.
Emphasis mine. Because that's the money shot. When Palestine is occupied, Muslims are totally justified in stabbing people. See how that works? We didn't want to stab them, but they were in our country and deserved it. So there.
Here's where the opening commentary comes in. Those of us who are type one, who see reality for what it is, know exactly what's going on here. Pro-Palestinian rabble-rousers need a cause for violence. Not just because they're part of the religion of peace (trademark pending) though that's a big reason. In order for Pro-Palestinians to even be pro-Palestinian, they need an enemy to hate. The jews. See also Michigan Muslim Woman Openly Defends the Stabbing of Jews. Yes, All Jews...
If you seek to change reality, you might believe that if Palestine were "free," then attacks on Israelis would stop. This is of course complete poppycock. The Muslims and the Jews have been fighting for hundreds of years. Nothing will ever change that. If pro-Palestinains laid down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no Israel.
Now comes the third type of person: he or she who ignores reality. You are the most harmful of our citizenry. Sadly you're gaining in numbers despite aborting your children. You know neither reality nor history. You receive information through the feelings generated through chants like those in the video above, or hashtags you peck out with your never-worked-a-real-job fingertips. Put some lotion on them.
You believe in the falsely aggrieved while ignoring those who have been stabbed to death in the name of an unjust cause. Because of how you feel. Worse, you feel these Palestinians are justified because of how they feel about this "occupation." It's feelings all around. Excuse me while I barf.
Well tough toenails, folks. The Allhu Akbar chanters would just as soon see you cut down, feelings or not. All that matters is the caliphate, the spreading of Islam. Anyone who stands in its way, hashtag creating or not, is an infidel.
Don't believe me? Since you love to live in your feels, imagine this scenario instead: a pro-Palestinian speaker is addressing a group of Muslims about how evil Israel is. A student group comes in to protest, chanting "Long live Israel." What happens next? Use your imagination. Hint? There might be some blood. And by some I mean buckets.
So enter the real world. Stop it with the chants (which just repeat in lieu of actual facts), get educated. Israel isn't the bad guy. Learn it, live it, love it. |
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-cops-killed-white-men-conservatives-silent-article-1.2632965 Would it shock you to learn that the number of police who've been shot and killed in 2016 is up an astounding 59% from where it was this same date last year? Seventeen police officers have already been shot and killed in 2016, by mid-May. Only 10 had suffered that fate by May 10th, 2015. The drastic increase shocked the hell out of me. While I primarily track, study and report the number of people killed by police, I still follow police fatalities closely. Contrary to popular belief, despising police brutality does not mean I despise police officers. I appreciate all public servants and have both a police officer and a longtime Secret Service member in my family. They are amazing, kind-hearted men who do great work. I also despise gun violence and loathe every single fatality suffered because of it. Something's afoot, though, on why we're not hearing much about this shocking increase in the number of officers who've been shot and killed so far in 2016. Sadly, I think I have the answer. So with that in mind lets get into Dallas shall we?
One of the gunmen who opened fire on police in Dallas said he wanted to kill white police officers and expressed anger at a recent spate of shootings by police before he was killed, it was revealed Friday morning. The suspect, who has not been named, was cornered for several hours by officers and was killed by an explosive device deployed by a police bomb robot after extensive negotiations failed, said Dallas police chief David Brown. Brown told reporters at an early morning news conference that The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter, during negotiations. He said he was upset about the recent shootings, he was upset at white people. The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/08/dallas-police-shooting-gunman-kill-white-officers So if you notice this was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Much like San Bernardino last year where the attack was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Or Orlando, where the the attack was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Hey Im not seeing a pattern here! So what else went down in Dallas? It was pretty much a gigantic cluster fuck that ended extremely poorly. So of course Dallas sent in the killer police robots:
For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded. We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was, Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters. Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes about the technology of warfare, said he believed this was a first. There may be some story that comes along, but Id think Id have heard of it, he said. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bomb-robot-explosive-killed-suspect-dallas So youve got police bombs, tear gas, and now a killer police robot. Which is probably the first time in history this has ever happened. And that is something that you never want to be first for. Much like you never want to be the first person to get arrested for public urination, or you never want to be the first person to win a Rocky Mountain Oyster eating contest. Thats disgusting, John, quit showing us that medal! Put it away! And of course Mike Huckabee immediately blames Obama for what went down in Dallas:
http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/07/08/mike-huckabee-goes-full-stupid-after-dallas-shooting-who-he-blames-will-make-you-angry-details/ Friday on Fox and Friends, Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas said that he feels President Barack Obama should have reacted to the attacks on police officers in Dallas the same way that former president Ronald Reagan did in 1986 after the Challenger disaster. This is after Thursday evenings sniper attacks that left five police officers dead and another seven injured. The former presidential candidate responded to the question of what he would do in Obamas place: I think this is a time when real leaders bring people together. he doesnt split them apart.... Oh, but the conservative Governor took issue with that statement and said: He doesnt need to inject the divisive arguments like gun control at a time of great grief for the nation. And he ought to do for us what Ronald Reagan did after the Challenger disaster. Thats remind us of what we have in common, not what separates us. And thats why Im always so frustrated. Barack Obama has such great potential to be a leader. And yes there is tape of this: [font size="8"]Dallas Pt. 2: The Memorial[/font] Spin it! Memorials. Folks we here at the Top 10 will never use our powers (or lack thereof) to speak ill of the dead, in any way shape or form. So this entry will discuss the memorial for the Dallas PD officers who lost their lives over the weekend, and we wont use any funny memes, graphics or videos as a sign of respect. But somebody who did not show any sign of respect toward the fallen officers? I give you former president George W. Bush:
http://news.groopspeak.com/george-w-bush-says-something-appalling-in-response-to-dallas-shooting/ George W. and Laura Bush live in Dallas and thus have a close, personal connection to the horrific attacks that occurred last night which left five law enforcement officers dead and seven others wounded. Bush released a statement this morning which, at first glance, looks pretty standard and innocuous. The former President and First Lady are heartbroken by the heinous acts of violence. They have seen firsthand the dedication, professionalism, and courage of the Dallas Police Department, and of course they pray for the wounded officers to recover fully and quickly. But heres the phrase that caught my eye: Murdering the innocent is always evil, never more so than when the lives taken belong to those who protect our families and communities. Wait a minute are you telling me the President and his wife witnessed the carnage first hand? Are you serious? But whats the aftermath of this? Weve seen shooting after shooting after shooting after shooting after shooting. And nothing has changed. Not a god damned thing. Or will it? Heres what one police department in Minneapolis said in response:
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) In the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where authorities were criticized for what some called heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators, many departments took a more restrained approach. Now, after the shooting deaths of five officers at a Dallas protest decrying last week's police killings of two more black men, some experts are suggesting it's possible the pendulum could swing from hugs back to flash-bang grenades and mass arrests. After days of peaceful protests in St. Paul, officers in riot gear met protesters who blocked Interstate 94 late Saturday in the biggest confrontation between police and demonstrators since an officer fatally shot a black man during a suburban Twin Cities traffic stop last week. About 100 people were arrested half during the highway standoff and the other half early Sunday in another part of St. Paul and 21 St. Paul police officers and six state troopers were hurt. Police Chief Todd Axtell called the pelting of officers with rocks, bottles, firecrackers and other objects "a disgrace." http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Police-may-change-tactics-at-protests-after-8350946.php And what else went down at Dallas and at the memorial?
Nixon explained that he had to regain his humanity after the bullets started flying. You start to think its me against the world. And with that type of mentality, well implode as a people, he said. Well implode not as ethnicity as a people, but as a people, period. Were all one race at the end of the day. If we get a me against the world mentality -- last night I was thinking, maybe its not black lives matter or all lives matter, maybe its just my life matters. Maybe its just my familys life matters. I had to recover from that spiritually. I had to be reminded that love conquers all, he added. If I let that mentality overwhelm me, then who can I help? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kellon-nixon-msnbc_us_577ff5a0e4b0344d514f3ae7?section=politics Well said. And heres what else conservatives had to say about Dallas. Bet you didnt think it was going to be him did you? :
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) Donald Trump said Monday he believes relations between police and the nation's African-American community are "far worse" than people think, predicting that protests against police violence that followed last week's slaying of five police officers in Dallas "might be just the beginning for this summer." In an interview with The Associated Press, the presumptive GOP nominee struck a balance between the law-and-order rhetoric he has espoused during his campaign and an appreciation for the concerns held by African-Americans nationwide about the conduct of police. Trump suggested that a lack of training for officers might be at least partially to blame for the two police shootings that led to last Thursday's protest in Dallas, where a lone gunman killed five in an act of vengeance against white officers. At the same time,Trump denounced the name of the Black Lives Matter movement as "a very divisive term." http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-black-lives-matter-divisive Really Trump? Says the guy who has no idea who David Duke is, besides the fact that the former KKK Grand Wizard has been head over heels in love with Trumpenfurors campaign? [font size="8"]Republican Empathy[/font] Spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy stop! And it lands on Inception Study. So you know with all the uptick in violence lately, naturally people are going to study it to determine the cause and effect of said violence. So first let's show the Harvard Study On Police Violence:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force officer-involved shootings we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 And then there's the New York Times critique of the Harvard Study On Police Violence:
A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police. But when it comes to the most lethal form of force police shootings the study finds no racial bias. It is the most surprising result of my career, said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=0 And then there's the critique of the critique of the New York Times Study On Police Violence:
Today, amid nationwide protests over state violence against black people, The New York Times chose to publish an article headlined: Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings. The articles authors, Quoctrung Bui and Amanda Cox, quote Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economics professor and the studys author, who says: It is the most surprising result of my career. But once you look at the context of data cited by the Times, its not so much the evidence (contested here) thats surprising, as the way the Times chooses to frame it. Heres why. Fryer is not afraid of controversial questions. It might be more accurate to say that he actively seeks out questions that could challenge conventional wisdom, given that his interests have included considering the possibility of genetically lower intelligence in black people than whites. http://theinfluence.org/three-problems-with-how-the-ny-times-highlights-a-non-peer-reviewed-study-allegedly-showing-no-racial-bias-in-police-shootings/ You know.... this is kind of like that movie Inception. It's a study within a study within a study within a study. Spin it again! Empathy. You know that thing that republicans are world renowned for. So you know with the Dallas shooting comes that good old fashioned republican empathy that they're famous for. You know a "compassionate conservative" point of view. Kind of like when Gordon Ramsey screams at a contestant on Hell's Kitchen because he didn't cook the meat the correct way. You should have turned the fire to 7, not 8 you dumbass!! That is not how you cook chicken rangoon!!!! (Ed. Note: BTW a good friend of mine was the one getting rejected on Hell's Kitchen in that clip... )
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called protesters who ran away from the hail of bullets that rained down on Downtown Dallas on Thursday night "hypocrites" during an interview Friday on Fox News. "All those protesters last night, they turned around and ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to protect them. What hypocrites!" an audibly emotional Patrick said. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-calls-dallas-protesters-hypocrites-article-1.2704730 Yeah because the first thing you want to do when protesting something is run *INTO* the gunfire. But no one knows empathy for a tragedy better than former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued Sunday, in addressing the two shootings in which police officers shot and killed two black men, that black families should teach their children to "be respectful to the police." Giuliani commented on the shootings in Dallas where five police officers were shot, and the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile during an appearance on CBS' "Face The Nation." He said his "deep sympathy" goes out to the families of the victims in those shootings. Then, he argued that there was "too much" violence in the black community and that there were some black men and boys who feared being confronted by the police given the recent shootings. "If you want to deal with this on the black side, you've got to teach your children to be respectful to the police and you've got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police, the real danger to them 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 1,000 times are other black kids who are going to kill them," Giuliani said. "That's the way they're going to die." Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/giuliani-black-families-respect-police So to trace Guiliani's "logic" (or lack thereof), African Americans need to be taught to support the police because of "too much violence" so therefore the way to avoid death or prison time is... supporting "the man"? What the fuck is he smoking? Or is he watching too much Reno 911? [font size="8"]Chik-Fil-A[/font] Entering the spin zone!! And it lands on................ come on VR Headset.... Daddy wants an HTC Vive... wait for it.... Farting. Yes probably the most disgusting item on the wheel so far. And really Bernie supporters? Really??? Is this what we really need at the DNC this year? And who is this benefiting? Um........ nobody.
PHILADELPHIA - Some Bernie Sanders supporters are planning a protest that could be described as silent but non-violent. A spokesperson for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign told U.S. News & World Report that her group is planning to stage a "fart-in" during Hillary Clinton's closing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this month. Cheri Honkala and other outspoken Sanders fans told the publication that despite Sanders's endorsement of Clinton earlier this week, they still plan to protest the presumptive nominee's big moment in Philly. So how exactly would a "fart-in" work? Honkala said her group has gathered a "stockpile" of various types of beans that will be cooked and fed to delegates, journalists and others who will be inside the Wells Fargo Center during Clinton's nomination acceptance speech at the DNC. They hope to stink up the arena in a move will act as a symbolic gesture of the group's displeasure over Clinton's nomination. http://www.wkbw.com/news/national/bernie-sanders-fans-stage-fart-in-protest-at-dnc Silent but non violent... excuse me a minute! Spin it again!! Food. And promotional items. With Dallas comes one of the more extremely poor taste and ill timed way of supporting the cops. See, Chik-Fil-A has had a long standing way of supporting pro-establishment policies. But this might be the weirdest promotion they have in their marketing arsenal:
ATLANTA, June 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chick-fil-A(r) is issuing a cattle call! Mark your calendar for the 12th annual Cow Appreciation Day on Tuesday, July 12, 2016. On that day, Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide will offer a free entree to any customer who visits a restaurant dressed as a cow. Adult customers who dress in any type of cow attire, whether it's head-to-hoof or sporting a cow-spotted accessory, will be rewarded with a free Chick-fil-A entree of their choice, such as an Original Chicken Sandwich, Grilled Chicken Cool Wrap or Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit. Children can receive a free Kid's Meal for dressing in a cow costume. The Cow Appreciation Day celebration will last from store opening through 7 p.m. local time (check local store listings for individual store opening hours). http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/save-the-date-chick-fil-a-offers-free-food-to-cow-clad-customers-on-cow-appreciation-day-july-12-300288795.html So this raises a lot of questions like what grown adult puts on a fucking cow costume just for a free sandwich? You know that cow suit you bought costs $50 or more, so congratulations you just purchased the most expensive chicken sandwich ever! Bravo well done! I mean for that kind of money you could buy 25 of these for $2 a piece, and just look, theyre guaranteed awesomeness!!! But you know who did show up to Chik-Fil-A in a cow costume? You might want to put a splash guard on your monitor because this is too fucking good!
Sierra is the Duggar familys party planner, and shes appeared in a few episodes of 19 Kids and Counting and Jill & Jessa: Counting On. Shes helped organize gender reveal parties, weddings, baby showers, and birthday parties. However, the Duggars arent partying at Chick-fil-A in the photo above. As Fox News reports, yesterday was Cow Appreciation Day at the fast food chain, meaning that customers who dressed up like cows could score free entrees. Josh and Anna Duggars cow costumes seemingly consist of nothing more than white T-shirts with black splotches painted on them. Its no secret that the Duggars are fans of Chick-fil-A. As E! News reports, Jill Duggar loves her Chick-fil-A so much that she believes that the restaurant will exist in heaven. However, chicken nuggets and Polynesian sauce werent enough to lure Josh Duggar out of hiding for last years Cow Appreciation Day fast food giveaway. As The Inquisitr reported, Josh was noticeably absent in a photo that showed a heavily pregnant Anna Duggar and their kids posing with a giant inflatable Chick-fil-A cow. Josh likely stayed home because he feared facing the publics wrath; he had recently confessed to sexually molesting four of his younger sisters, so was getting tons of negative press at the time. Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3303327/josh-duggar-resurfaces-at-chick-fil-a-dressed-like-a-cow-scores-free-food-with-other-family-members/#SdHb2OfI2LLdorUc.99 But getting back to Chik-Fil-A and their pro-establishment policies, heres how one franchise tried to support the Dallas PD but failed miserably because this isnt the first time that Chik-Fil-A employees spouted Back The Blue shirts.
The tension between the police and the Black Lives Matter movement is currently more intense than the line outside of a Chick-fil-A on opening day, but that isnt stopping one location of the chain in Texas from taking a stance. According to The Blaze, recent photos show staff members at Chick-fil-A in Conroe, Texas sporting t-shirts that say Back the Blue under the Chick-fil-A logo. Customers are also apparently sporting t-shirts with the phrase Go Blue or Go Home on it. First We Feast called the location where an employee, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that employees at the location were indeed wearing the shirts and have been for a little while. http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/11/chick-fil-a-police-lives-matter-back-the-blue-t-shirts Or was it really? So look at what happened when Snopes got a hold of this and a ton of similar articles:
WHAT'S TRUE: In 2015, high school employees at a single Chick-fil-A in Texas created their own "Back the Blue" shirts. WHAT'S FALSE: Chick-fil-A has not voiced support for either movement in question; "back the blue" is not tantamount to "a bomb on Black Lives Matters"; the shirts were not created or distributed by a franchise (much less the company); the shirts had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter protests in July 2016. http://www.snopes.com/chick-fil-a-just-dropped-a-bomb-on-black-lives-matter/ [font size="8"]Donald Trump[/font] Spin it to win it! Something random in the news!
Newmans computer, actually a megaprocessor, takes up a whole room in his house in Great Shelford. I spent around three hours a night working on it and Ive had to take all the books and shelves and sofas out of my lounge, he told SWNS. Im lucky because its quite a big lounge but Ive had to put everything else in my spare room. In total, it cost more than $51,000 over a five-year period. I didnt plan on spending [that much money] at the start. It grew as time went by and I got a bit more ambitious, he said. He admits, If I had a wife shed probably have left me by now. What did he get for efforts? Not much. Its a million times slower and has a million times less memory than a typical desktop, according to South West News Service. Oh, and you can only play Tetris on it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/supercomputer-only-plays-tetris_us_577febe8e4b01edea78dcaf1?ir=Weird+News SSion=us_weird-news&utm_hp_ref=weird-news But how many frames per second does it get on Counter Strike: Go? Or maybe hes preparing for Tetris: The Movie . Spin that shit again! Donald Trump. So Trumpenfuror provided what could quite possibly be the classiest response to the Dallas shooting yet:
During two separate discussions of Black Lives Matters protests on Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that people have called for moments of silence for Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas and injured nine others, without specifying who or where. On an OReilly Factor segment filmed earlier in the day, Trump expressed disgust with the actions of the officers who shot Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and said it could be that police treat African-Americans differently, but criticized the Black Lives Matter movement as dividing America. I saw what theyve said about police at various marches and rallies, said Trump. Ive seen moments of silence called for for this horrible human being who shot the policemen. http://gawker.com/donald-trump-claims-hes-seen-people-calling-for-moments-1783561092 But this isnt the only empathetic way Trumpenfuror has responded to the rally:
Republican Donald Trump presented himself as "the law-and-order candidate" with a compassionate heart on Monday, positioning himself as strong on security in response to a wave of anxiety among Americans after the Dallas police shootings. Trump's remarks in Virginia Beach, Virginia, showed how much the Dallas violence has shaken up the political conversation with both Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton devoting time to the topic. "We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country 100 percent," Trump said. "I am the law-and-order candidate." Trump's remarks about safety and security were added to a speech devoted to reforming the troubled Veterans Administration. He also presented himself as a compassionate candidate and mentioned the two episodes that preceded the Dallas shootings: the killing of two African-American men by police, one in Minnesota and the other in Louisiana. "But you can't have true compassion without providing safety to the citizens of our country," Trump said. "Every kid in American should be able to securely walk the streets of their own neighborhood without harm. http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-law-order-vice-president-479527 I am the law and order candidate! Nobody makes better laws than I do! I make the best laws, I bribe the best law enforcement officers, I hire the best judges nobody hires better judges than I do. Oh wait did I say bribe? I meant hire!. In fact even the New York Times called Trumpenfuror volatile and hostile in the wake of Dallas:
In the wake of Dallas, Donald Trump is getting pummeled by the press. In the wake of James Comey, Hillary Clinton is getting thumbs down from a majority of voters. And these dynamics are unfolding at a crucial stretch of the campaign: Trump must settle on a running mate in the next couple of days, while Clinton needs to pick a running mate by next week. Lets start with Trump. Its true, according to my sources, that his campaign had a daylong debate on how to respond to the murder of five police officers in Dallas, and took the cautious route. Trump gave no interviews and limited himself to a few comments on Twitter and a 90-second Instagram video. Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country, Trump tweeted. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/07/12/after-dallas-new-york-times-calls-trump-volatile-and-hotheaded.html But oh no! According to recent inquiries, Trumpenfuror warns that it may be just the beginning:
"We are in a divided nation" Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Monday warned that the U.S. is a divided nation where the relationship between police officers and African-American communities is far worse than many people believe. Trumps comments, made in an interview with the Associated Press, served as a direct contradiction to President Barack Obamas assessment of tension and division in the country. Speaking after the deadly shooting of police officers in Dallas, Obama said Saturday that the U.S. is not as divided as some have suggested, and he rejected the idea that history is repeating itself when it comes to racial tension. http://time.com/4402724/donald-trump-dallas-violence-warning/ Well fucking duh!!! Youre running for president! Tell us something we dont know already! [font size="8"]Donald Trump[/font] Spin it to win it! And it lands on Party Unity! You know folks in the tradition of Stephen Colberts Hungry For Power Games it is down to two. Bernie officially announced his support for Hillary Clintons campaign in the if you cant beat em, join em kind of way:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that, Sanders said. She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States. Sanders thanked those who voted for him during the Democratic primary -- especially the people of New Hampshire, where he got his first primary win, and his home state of Vermont. He also warned against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, arguing the business mogul would be bad for working families, calling Trumps economic policies reckless. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-endorses-hillary-clinton_us_56e98f60e4b0b25c91841bdd See folks thats how it should be done! Spin it again. And it lands on. Wait for it Donald Trump! While Bernie is showing people how it should be done, you know whos not showing you how it should be done? Donald Trump. So while I was a Bernie Sanders supporter as was most of my family for this campaign, well, I kind of feel sorry for Bernie Sanders supporters who are pledging to vote for Donald Trump. I love Jessica Williams on the Daily Show, and for her final outing before starting her new gig, she filed this report about this very subject: Now I say that, oh fellow Bernie enthusiasts, because this is what you get if you switch party affiliation and vote for Trumpenfuror. Wheres the whambulence? :
Donald Trump chided Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a Tuesday interview with The New York Times after she gave multiple comments that were highly critical of his campaign. I think its highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly, Trump told the Times by phone. I think its a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldnt believe it when I saw it. Ginsburg in recent days has ramped up her criticisms of Trump's campaign. She has said he's a "faker" who should release his tax returns, that she "can't imagine" a Trump presidency, and that "everything" would be up for grabs with him occupying the White House. Ginsburg's comments are unique in that a Supreme Court justice typically doesn't comment on presidential candidates during election season. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-slams-ruth-bader-ginsburg But what else is Trumpenfuror up to? Well his son may be just as full of shit as his father if not more so:
Last week, Eric Trump said that his own charitable foundation had received "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in personal donations from his father. But on Monday, Eric Trump said he could not name a single instance when Donald Trump had given such a gift. "Im sure there have been but without going back through 10 years, I wouldnt remember check for check off the top of my head," Eric Trump wrote in an email message to The Washington Post. Eric Trump made those comments in response to follow-up questions from The Post which has been seeking evidence for Donald Trump's assertion that he has given generously, but privately, to charities in recent years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/eric-trump-said-his-charity-received-hundreds-of-thousands-from-his-father-now-hes-not-sure/2016/07/12/b31458be-88c6-4c12-b154-8c0a1e536f92_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop_b [font size="8"]The Bathroom Police[/font] Lets give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And sweet! I win 15,000!!! Boom. Of what, we still dont know what that is. Lets spin it again. Buy A Vowel. OK Ill buy an O. All right I got two. So I get a letter? How about a C? OK got one there. Ill solve the puzzle. Top 10 Conservative Idiots. What? Thats wrong? What did I wager? 15,000? Nooooooooooo!!!! Spin it again. Bathrooms. So the GOP recently rolled out their party platform prior to the convention. And I hate to break to my LGBT friends, and especially the Ts, this platform *DOES NOT* favor you in any way, shape or form. Lets go through their platform line item by line item, shall we?
One of the most pressing issues for the party, according to a draft leaked to the New York Times, is the reversal of the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S. Previously, leaders called for a marriage amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now, however, the party is demanding a reversal whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. http://fusion.net/story/323943/the-gop-is-debating-its-official-2016-platform-and-things-are-getting-totally-insane/ Now theyve been chasing that one the way Wiley Coyote chases the Road Runner. Theyre never going to catch it because the GOP has been losing the argument on gay marriage every single time. But they do it in hopes they might someday catch that delicious, delicious road runner. Or how about education? Guess what the GOP is pushing for Bible-based education!
On the subject of religion, the delegates have reportedly included an amendment calling for the Bible to be taught in schools as part of American history. Maybe the Garden of Eden really is in Missouri, after all? But heres where the bathroom police come in, and theyre getting really scary out there.
Because the 1950s, the time when this battle was fought and lost already, were cool, so why not relive the glory? GOP leaders also lent their support to the idea of conversion therapy, the notorious practice that sends LGBTQ children to therapists who try to convert them back into being straight. Mental health experts and human rights groups are almost universally opposed to conversion therapy. Gee, what a surprise they would resort to conversion therapy? I mean remember that episode of South Park where Butters gets sent to a gay straight rehab camp? And heres where the trans bashing comes in:
Bathroom choice The Obama administration's rule advising schools to allow students to use the bathroom of their gender identity was condemned as "illegal and dangerous" and "alien to America's history and traditions." http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a46621/republican-party-platform-2016/ Never mind that a court rejected a schools request to force a female male trans student to use the girls bathroom:
A federal appeals court has denied a Virginia school board's request to allow it to prevent a transgender teen from using the boys' bathroom when he returns to school this September. The Gloucester County School Board wants to delay an order forcing it to let Gavin Grimm to use the restroom matching his gender identity while it appeals. . http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/court-rejects-schools-request-transgender-bathroom-case-40546011 But oh no, this might be the weirdest thing to come out of the GOP platform for the 2016 election:
Porn "The internet must not become a safe haven for predators. Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children's safety and well-being. We applaud the social networking sites that bar sex offenders from participation. We urge energetic prosecution of child pornography which closely linked to human trafficking." Yup! They really hate them some porno, dont they? And of course for every time the bathroom police feel they need to harass trans people, like I have shown, I will always respond to their insanity by posting an actual sex crime committed by the uber-religious, and they did not leave me a shortage of material this week. And yes this is the guy who founded Americas border patrol wannabe gun slingers:
Co-founder of Minuteman vigilante group gets 19-year prison sentence for child molestation The co-founder of the vigilante border patrol group known as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps was sentenced on Monday to 19 1/2 years in an Arizona prison for molesting a five-year-old girl who was the friend of his daughter, prosecutors said. Christopher Allen Simcox, 55, who helped form the Minuteman militia group in 2005, received the sentence following a hearing in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix stemming from his contact with the girl between April 2012 and May 2013. .... Authorities said he molested the girl during parental visits with one of his daughters and showed the victim pornographic movies. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/co-founder-of-minuteman-vigilante-group-gets-19-year-prison-sentence-for-child-molestation/ [font size="8"]Fox News[/font] Spin it to win it! What? Go directly to jail? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! And I dont have a Get Out Of Jali Free card either! So I have to give this entry from a jail cell. So Ill just show John Olivers rant about for profit prisons: Im out. Spin it again! Fox News. You know speaking of the Republicans and sex crimes, Fox News has been on Defcon 5 the last week in the wake of Gretchen Carlsons exit. In fact when she filed suit against Roger Ailes, the network that is the replacement for critical thought among the average republican has gone into overdrive. Lets recap first and then discuss in further detail:
Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the network's CEO Roger Ailes, alleging he fired her because she refused his sexual advances. The host of The Real Story was reportedly terminated on June 23, the final day of her contract, and she claims she was the victim of sexual harassment and retaliation for rebuffing his advances as well as questioning unequal treatment of women in the Fox News workplace. http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/07/06/fox-host-gretchen-carlson-sues-roger-ailes-for-sexual-harassment.html Holy shit! You know last week we discussed how Roger Ailes is the Zapp Branagin of TV News journalists. I seriously think he might be more Bill Cosby after reading this:
Attorneys for former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson were contacted by 10 women in the wake of their lawsuit against the networks CEO, Roger Ailes, CNNs Brian Stelter reported on Wednesday afternoon. I just spoke with one of the attorneys involved in Carlsons suit, Stelter said in video posted by Media Matters, adding that the women reached out because they say they also have stories to share about treatment by Roger Ailes. Stelter did point out that the women have not joined the lawsuit filed by Carlson on Wednesday. Carlson said in her lawsuit that she was fired in response to both denying Ailes sexual overtures and objecting to what she called severe and pervasive harassment during her 11-year career working for the conservative news network. Stelter pointed out that neither Fox nor Ailes have commented on the suit, and that the network has not covered Carlsons allegations. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/gretchen-carlsons-lawyers-contacted-by-10-women-after-roger-ailes-suit-cnn/ 10 different women! Is Roger Ailes a professional playboy who gets around or is he a creepy pervert? But now 6 more women have come forward against Ailes:
"You know if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys. Those were the words one woman, a former Republican National Committee field adviser, claims Fox News head Roger Ailes used on her one night in 1989 as she was attempting to land a contract with the RNC, reports New York magazine. Like the case of Bill Cosby, sexual harassment allegations are beginning to flood in after one victim former Fox host Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit this week against the powerful conservative news executive. According to Gabriel Sherman, who wrote a biography on Ailes in 2014, allegations of highly inappropriate sexual banter by Ailes come as no surprise, dating back to the 60s when he was a producer on The Mike Douglas Show. Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/6-more-women-accuse-fox-head-roger-ailes-of-sexual-harassment-including-one-who-was-16-at-the-time/ But now Carlson is accusing Fox News of continuous, verbal harassment! Holy shit! He really is Zapp Branagin!
I just wanted to stand up for myself, first and foremost, Carlson told The New York Times in a Tuesday interview at her lawyer Nancy Erika Smiths New Jersey home. And I wanted to stand up for other women who maybe faced similar circumstances. The former Real Story host stood by the allegations laid out in the lawsuit, claiming that Ailes made sexual advances towards her, oversaw a culture of sexual harassment at Fox News and fired her because she refused him and complained about her treatment at the network. She told the Times that she kept quiet about the continuous offensive language she heard from Ailes because of the hierarchical structure of the network. Everyone knew how powerful Roger Ailes was, she said. I certainly felt intimidated by that. Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gretchen-carlson-says-roger-ailes-harassment-continuous Are they taking cues from Family Guy? [font size="8"]Westboro Baptist Church[/font] Spin that shit!!! And it lands on. Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy stop!! Clip without context! Im still not tired of that! Spin it again! And it lands on Pokemon! Hit it! So by now youve heard of Nintendos insanely popular new app Pokemon Go. This thing is insanely popular. I kind of wish I was a stock holder for Nintendo because its made the company something like $7 BILLION in profit. BILLION!! And it still has yet to be released in a lot of markets, so Nintendo could be even richer by the time this thing is rolled out world wide. So this thing has attracted a lot of attention mostly positive, but also a lot negative. Like this:
Man's private home turned into Pokemon gym Involuntarily, some people have seen their homes overtaken by Pokemon trainers. Boon Sheridan, who lives with his family in an old church in Massachusetts, was surprised to find that his house has been marked as a Pokemon gym: A place where people can train their fictional creatures. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/11/tech/pokemon-go-crazy-events/ Or this:
Armed robbers used the game Pokemon Go to lure victims to an isolated trap in Missouri, police reported on Sunday. At about 2am in OFallon, Missouri, officers responded to a robbery report that led them to four people, all local residents aged 16 to 18, in a black BMW in a CVS parking lot. The occupants tried to discard a handgun out of the car when an officer approached, said Sgt Bill Stringer. The officer then identified the four people as suspects of similar armed robberies described in St Louis and St Charles counties. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/10/pokemon-go-armed-robbers-dead-body Thats right you can have your homed turned into a Pokemon gym or you can be lured into an armed robbery and possibly murder. But theres no one out there more butthurt over the new Pokemon game than the Westboro Baptist Church. So lets explain first before we crank up the whambulance:
If you havent noticed already, youre about to. Suddenly everyones playing, Pokemon Go. Soon youll notice masses of people gathered in one spot, say a public park, holding their phones in the air. Pokemon Go is an app that demands its users collect Pokemon (short for pocket monsters) that are hanging out in real spots around the globe (in augmented reality). In the game, certain locations are named as gyms where you can battle your Pokemon against another teams Pokemon. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas was designated as one such gym and a team has taken it over using a monster called a Clefairy. That Clefairy is named, appropriately, LOVEISLOVE. http://www.towleroad.com/2016/07/pokemon-go-westboro/ Thats right a pro LGBT group has trolled the Westboro Church. You know these people: Yup. So now we can turn up the whambulance because heres what they did this week in response to Pokemon Go:
The church responded to the stunt via Twitter, employing images from Pokemon to spread its anti-LGBTQ message. We recruited Jigglypuff to deal with the sodomite loveislove Clefairy for us, the WBC tweeted. Church elder Steve Drain told USA Today that the church uses whatever tools they can to get their message across even if that instrument may be a false idol. We try to speak whatever language is being spoken, Drain said. This little church, as despised and vilified as we are, the location of this church will be memorialised throughout eternity, he added. Were willing by Gods grace to say that homosexuality is wrong, and thats what weve been known for, even though we preach the whole counsel of God. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pokemon-go-westboro-baptist-church-lgbtq-claims-clefairy-loveislove-a7131706.html [font size="8"]Star Trek: The Search For Sulu's Sexual Orientation[/font] Lets spin the wheel one last time this week! And it lands on.. Star Trek! Hit it! So by now you know that the latest film in the series Star Trek Beyond beams into theaters on July 22nd. But with the new movie, news is coming fast and furious (ha!) after head screen writer & actor Simon Pegg, who portrays Montgomery Scott, revealed that U.S.S. Enterprise pilot Hikaru Sulu is actually gay, married, and has a daughter. So in order to juxatapose this argument I'm going to cross memes and clips from one of my favorite movies - Simon Pegg's amazing 2006 flick "Hot Fuzz" with some hilarious stuff from George Takei. Lets discuss this:
Its already been revealed that Hikaru Sulu will be shown as an out gay man in the upcoming Star Trek Beyond. But a new Korean trailer for the movie seems to give us a glimpse of the Enterprise helmsmans husband and daughter. As crowds of people run from an unknown threat, we see a quick shot of what reports are calling Sulus husband holding their young daughter. (The man is actually Beyond co-writer Doug Jung in a cameo role.) Sulus daughter, Demora, has appeared as an adult in the film Star Trek Generations, so the scene could be bringing the Star Trek mythos full-circle. George Takei, who played Sulu on the original TV series and subsequent films, said he was disappointed in the decision to have Sulu be gay because it wasnt in line with creator Gene Roddenberrys vision for the character. http://logoonline.mtvnimages.com/uri/mgid:file:http:shared:newnownext.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/sulufamily-1468416655.jpeg http://www.newnownext.com/sulus-husband-and-daughter-appear-in-new-star-trek-beyond-trailer/07/2016/ So that happened. But not everyone is pleased with that including Sulu himself the great George Takei. I actually went to a screening of Star Trek at the Hollywood Bowl last week with the LA Philharmonic playing the score, and Takei himself was in the audience. That was pretty cool. Oh my!!!
Simon Pegg has addressed speculation that he and original Star Trek actor George Takei have had a falling out, over the sexuality of character Hikaru Sulu. It was recently announced that in the upcoming film Star Trek Beyond, Sulu - played by George Takei in the original sci-fi series - would be coming out as gay. However, George, who came out as gay in an interview with Frontier magazine in 2005, had a surprisingly displeased reaction to the news, calling it unfortunate and a twist to the sci-fi series creators original vision. Simon - who was partly responsible for the decision, as one of the films co-writers - has now addressed Georges comments, telling BANG Showbiz: We were emailing the other day, you know its discussion. Were adults, were not catty fighters writing comments to each other on the Internet, were grown men. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/star-trek-simon-pegg-george-takei-sulu-gay_uk_578614e3e4b0f4bc594612a1 So George Takei himself has weighed in on the issue and it was more that he was upset about the ruining of Gene Roddenberrys creation, not that it has anything to do with his or his characters sexual orientation. Its kind of like the NBA D League its your favorite game, your favorite players, but the overall appeal is lacking some of the magic. But the rest of the cast including Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana are apparently fine with this:
While the original Mr. Sulu, George Takei, may disagree, this next generation of Star Trek actors is solidly in favor of going where no franchise screenplay has gone before by making the USS Enterprises helmsman an openly gay character, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in Star Trek Beyond and is openly gay, told the trade magazine Wednesday that its definitely high time for an LGBT character to be included in the Star Trek universe. Weve been really excited by the response, particularly from young people, who have been inspired and motivated by this turn toward progress, said Mr. Quinto, who was in London for the movies U.K. premiere. Last week, Mr. Takei told reporters that while he was delighted to see an openly gay Star Trek character, its a twisting of creator Gene Roddenberrys vision to make Sulu gay rather than come up with an original character who was openly gay all along. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/13/star-trek-beyond-actors-back-decision-make-sulu-ch/ But you know going with Mr. Takeis argument why did Simon Pegg go against Mr. Takeis argument and make an existing character gay rather than create a new one? Well Gene Roddenberrys son weighs in on that argument:
Star Trek Beyond co-writer Simon Pegg, who also plays Scotty in the series, released a statement last week saying that he respectfully disagrees with Takei, and at the London premiere of Beyond on Tuesday, the cast and crew told the BBC that theyre all in support of Sulu being gay. The LGBT community has long advocated for representation in the Star Trek universe, said Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in the movie series and is himself openly gay. Weve been really excited by the response, particularly from young people, who have been inspired and motivated by this turn toward progress. Multiple cast members said they were surprised by the debate around the Sulu news, and Chris Pine told the BBC, Im a little stunned theres been so much attention given to it. As for Cho himself, he admitted that he was a little nervous about the revelation, but hes extremely supportive of the news. I was worried because I knew [George] was a gay man who had played a straight character, Cho added. I know he felt a fair bit of ownership of that character, and legitimately so. I was also worried that it might be inferred that we were somehow suggesting that sexuality was a choice. But I dont think anyone has inferred that, and were certainly not saying that. http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/13/star-trek-beyond-cast-gene-roddenberry-son-sulu Cant wait for this movie. See you next week! |
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Scher began by noting that a few influential Trump critics in the conservative movement have left the Republican Party in the Trump era, and a few are even rooting for a Democratic takeover of one or both chambers of Congress in November. This is, in his estimation, a half-measure unequal to the gravity of the moment and generally not in this group's interests. There is no country for a homeless pundit. They will need a tribe if they are to be effective and, ultimately, protected.
Outside the tent, Scher claims, the Democratic Party will continue to move left and become even more unappealing to those on the right. The party can serve as a haven for conservative refugees, he insists, if they'd only just throw off their partisan blinders. Ideologically diverse, accommodating, and conciliatory, Scher insists that Democrats maintain the last true big tent. "[I]f you are primarily horrified at how Trump is undermining the existing international political and economic order--hugging Russia, lauding strongmen, sparking protectionist trade wars--then becoming a Democrat is your best option," he wrote.
This isn't just a terrible misunderstanding of what animates Trump's conservative critics; it is a misguided and ultimately deceptive misrepresentation of the modern Democratic Party.
Scher makes the point repeatedly that the Trump-skeptical conservative movement has utterly lost the debate and the GOP with it. In 2016, most of the party's voters rejected the doctrinal conservatism to which they cling. What else is new? The Republican Party has not always been a conservative party. Conservatives waged a 20-year struggle to displace the progressive ethos that typified the GOP from T.R. to Eisenhower. Preserving the GOP's ideological predisposition toward conservatism is a constant struggle, but it is one that conservative opinion makers relish.
Trump's critics in the conservative movement abandoned him not just because of his temperamental defects, but because of his progressive impulses . The president's skepticism toward free trade, his conciliatory posture toward hostile regimes abroad, his Keynesian instincts, his apathy toward budget deficits, and his general amenability toward heedless populism are traits that traditionally appeal to and are exhibited by Democrats . Why would conservatives join that which they are rebelling against?
Scher's contention that the Trump-skeptics in conservative ranks would have more influence over the Democratic Party than the GOP is bizarre. The anti-Trump right is far too small a contingent to have any impact on the evolutionary trajectory of the Democratic Party, even if they were to abandon the principles that led them into the wilderness in the first place. They do, however, enjoy influence over American politics wildly disproportionate relative to their numerical strength.
Trump-skeptical conservatives are ubiquitous features on cable news. Their magazines and websites are enjoying a renaissance . They haunt their comrades who have made their peace with Trumpism. Most critically, they represent the strain of conservatism to which the majority of the Republican Party's congressmen and women are loyal because it was that brand of conservatism that led them into politics in the first place. The worst-kept secret of the Trump era is that this president receives his highest marks when he's doing conventionally conservative things. When the president behaves as he promised to on the campaign trail, Republicans rebel and often rein in his worst impulses . It's not much, but it is a sign that a partial restoration of the status quo ante is not unthinkable.
Scher frequently cites exceptions within the Democratic firmament as though they do not illustrate the rule. He claims that the Democratic Party is not "a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion, and government run amok." As evidence, he cites the fact that a handful of pro-life Democrats have managed to resist the party's purge of that formerly-common view, but that is an admission of heterodoxy. The Democratic Party's fealty to divisive identity politics is hardly a figment of conservative imaginations. From Salon.com to the New York Times opinion page, many on the left, too, have soured on the party's attachment to racial and demographic hierarchies. And as for the party's reputation for profligacy, Democrats can renounce the works of the 111th Congress --the last time the party had total control of Washington--whenever they muster up the gumption.
Scher believes it is inconsistent for conservatives to support a Democratic takeover of one or more legislative chambers and not support the Democratic agenda, but there is nothing inconsistent about it. Conservatives who think the GOP-led Congress has proven an insufficient check on the GOP-led executive are placing a vote of confidence in the Constitution, not the progressive agenda. If the cohort formerly dubbed #NeverTrump conservatives believe Democrats would be a better governing party than the GOP, they should certainly register Democratic at the nearest opportunity. If they believe that, though, they're not #NeverTrump conservatives at all. They're just #NeverTrump.
Conservatives are no strangers to being torn between their principle and their influence. Conservative opinion makers have been compelled to choose between proximity to power and their core values before. Those who chose temporary isolation in order to shield conservative beliefs from being disfigured by those who do not cherish them might not enjoy the gratitude they've earned. But they left behind a markedly more conservative country than the one they were born into.
The lessons of recent history are clear: Those who are content to sacrifice their principles for access and influence preserve neither in the long run.
When Acosta descended from the podium on which he broadcasts, he calmly approached his abusers and invited them to speak --most of them happily accepted. This isn't the first time that Acosta has served as the object of a mob's derision, only for their ire to transform into celebrity-worship when the cameras go off. No one should minimize the potential for savagery here; it would not be the first time that the president has incited his followers to acts of violence , and the media figures and outlets Trump singles out endure harassment and credible threats from the president's most unhinged fans. But there is a performative aspect to the Two Minutes Hate directed toward Acosta. He serves as their foil, the heel who absorbs the crowd's fury in the ring only to sign autographs for his hecklers backstage. And there's some evidence that Acosta relishes that role .
That doesn't excuse any of this behavior. Indeed, it makes it worse. In his conduct as America's chief executive, Donald Trump has inflamed and aggravated tensions to serve his own narrow ends. That objective is so transparent, though, that most who participate in this performance must do so knowing it is a farce. In willingly suffocating their better angels with a pillow, Trump and his allies may be radicalizing the truly unhinged who cannot see through the act. Perhaps more depressing, the Trumpified Republican Party is acclimating itself to behaviors and policies that would have been considered unspeakably callous not all that long ago.
In that speech before a group of veterans last week, Trump implied that media reports of businesses or individuals hurt by his trade war were pure fabrications. "Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news," Trump said to cheers. "What you are seeing and what you are reading is not happening." That goes for polling data, too. At least, polling that the president doesn't like. "Polls are fake, just like everything else," Trump insisted this week before citing his own standing among Republicans as determined by--what else?--polls.
The only way to avoid feeling insulted by this naked contempt for the audience's intelligence is to convince yourself that this is all a game. Maybe rally goers think that blind displays of fealty to the president frustrate all the right people. Maybe they love being swept up in the performance art of it all, and Jim Acosta might as well be the Iron Sheik to Trump's Hulk Hogan. The bottom line is that the audience believes they're part of the act.
But Trump's acolytes are endorsing or excusing shameful behavior that no one should tolerate from public servants or the government of which they are a part.
Donald Trump is fond of reciting portions of civil-rights activist Oscar Brown Jr.'s 1963 poem, "The Snake," from behind the lectern to impugn foreign refugees fleeing war and poverty abroad as sleeper agents who seek only to do Americans harm. This isn't just agitation; it's policy. The United States took in just 33,000 refugees last year, the lowest intake in over a decade and well below the quota. This year, administration officials led by immigration antagonist Stephen Miller hope to resettle only 15,000 refugees, a decline that experts contend is designed to allow the private charities and public mechanisms that facilitate resettlement to atrophy permanently.
At first, Trump was happy to defend his "zero tolerance" policy, which became a euphemism for breaking up families at the border to deter future border crossers. He incoherently blamed "Democrat-supported loopholes" for the policy while simultaneously insisting that a secure nation cannot have a "politically correct" immigration policy, all to the sound of applause. Only when the backlash became so great did he back off this draconian policy, and his fans cheered him for that, too .
The public outcry that erupted following the termination of "zero tolerance" has abated, but the horrors have not. In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, a Health and Human Services official confessed that they knew the "separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children." The psychological abuse associated with this policy has occasionally led to outbursts among incarcerated children, leading U.S. government officials to administer regular doses of psychotropic medication to their charges without the consent of a parent or guardian--a practice that a district judge halted in a sweeping ruling on Monday.
The president's rallies exemplify the post-truth moment, in which his supporters adopt Trump's penchant for moral and intellectual malleability as though it was a virtue. As Jonah Goldberg observed, the president's vanguard has seamlessly transitioned from claiming that there was no evidence that the president welcomed the interference of Kremlin operatives in the 2016 election to contending that welcoming such interference would not violate any statutes to insisting that cooperation with hostile foreign powers for political gain is just best practice. Likewise, when Trump's crowds chant "lock her up" nearly two years into the Trump administration, they know that's not going to happen. It's the kind of banana republicanism that owns the libs , and that's all that matters. |
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craftivist collective / flickr via wikimedia
A recent Australian survey on violence against women, found that people's attitudes to violence are largely determined by two factors: attitudes to gender equality, and understanding of violence against women. With 1 in 5 Australians believing women are 'partly responsible' for being raped if they are drunk, and 1 in 6 believing "that when women say no to sex, they mean yes", the importance of getting to the heart of such attitudes is evident.
It turns out that one's attitude to gender equality is the best predictor of one's understanding of violence against women, and this in turn is the best predictor of one's attitude to violence. So what does it mean to have a negative attitude towards gender equality?
Gender equality is defined as "the state in which access to rights or opportunities is unaffected by gender", a definition which is nonetheless open to a range of interpretations and ideological biases.
Adding substance to this basic definition, the VicHealth report incorporated a Gender Equality Scale, comprising factors which contribute to one's attitude towards gender equality. These factors include the beliefs that "Men make better political leaders", "Men have more right to a job than a woman", "University education is more important for a boy", and "Men should take control in relationships and be the head of the household". They also include "A woman has to have children to be fulfilled", "It's okay for a woman to have a child as a single parent", "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the workplace", and "Women prefer a man to be in charge of the relationship".
The highest levels of negative public attitude toward gender equality were in favour of men being better political leaders, women preferring men to be in charge of the relationship, and it being not okay for women to have a child as a single parent.
What the VicHealth report is saying is that those who have negative attitudes towards violence against women are likely to score poorly on the Gender Equality Scale, which is discomforting because some of the items on that scale are areas of debate among those who of us who critique prevailing sociocultural norms. For example, the idea that a woman has to have children to be fulfilled is false. However, it is equally false to pretend that women do not enjoy a unique form of fulfilment through having children, a fulfilment that can't be met through other means. Having children clearly brings fulfilment to both parents, albeit in different forms as befits the differences implicit in their relationships with the child.
While gender equality is good in principle, in practice it is not always possible to separate it from other, more questionable, ideas. There is, after all, nothing in 'gender equality' that requires women to put off having children for the sake of career advancement, only to find years later that they may have missed their opportunity. Yet such outcomes may occur anyway as society over-compensates for the past rigidity of gender roles.
Another pertinent example that doesn't fit into a basic dichotomy of gender equality versus inequality is the debate over how our society values the work associated with raising children and managing a household. That is, how our society routinely and discriminately undervalues the duties and responsibilities of those who dedicate themselves to raising children.
As far back as 1910 the British writer G.K. Chesterton attempted , in his characteristic way, to turn the typical critique of 'narrow' domestic work inside out: To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
We can forgive Chesterton his lack of lived experience in childcare because the sentiment of his idea is a noble one, and one equally endorsed by 'traditional' families struggling to survive on single incomes, as well as by feminists keen to ensure that the predominantly female domestic workforce receives its due recognition.
But whether one is a 'traditionalist', feminist, or jovial 19 th Century journalist, it is important to remember that critiquing a progressive orthodoxy is very different from having resisted the advances of that orthodoxy in the first place.
For those of us raised with no sense of deeply significant difference between the sexes, it is easy to forget that for a minority of the population, difference is all there is. I never met misogyny until my late teens when I discovered that some among my peers had been raised to view women as peculiarities: on the one hand enticing, on the other hand more trouble than they are worth. Those of us keen to critique the excesses of new orthodoxies need to remember that there is an uglier sector of society which never adopted the new orthodoxy, and for whom rigid gender roles and inequality are the unconsidered status quo.
The underlying logic of a firm belief in gender roles and a failure to understand violence against women is clear and disturbing. As the VicHealth report indicated, an expectation of rigid gender roles can lead to an endorsement of violence in situations where women are seen as 'subverting' or shirking their duties, or where participation in the workforce and the earning capacity this implies begins to change the balance of power between male and female in the relationship.
The expectation or implication that women ought to stay at home because this is their role and duty as women is entirely different from the recognition that mothers have unique bonding relationships with their children which are greatly enhanced if, ideally, the mother can care for the child in its early years. It's one thing to agree with one's spouse after considered discussion that she will care for the child; it's quite another thing to expect that this will happen, ought to happen, because she is a woman and that's just the way life is.
Yet from the outside the outcomes may look the same, and it may be tempting to diminish the informed decision of what is best for mother and child to the more basic predetermined gender role. But so doing risks not only misrepresenting the nature and dignity of the informed decision, but also lending credence to people who hold a superficially similar yet markedly inferior perspective.
People can intelligently criticise and critique cultural norms without succumbing to the faults of an uncritical unintelligent conservatism. We need to be careful that in critiquing the predominant culture we do not lend strength to those whose unconsidered views are little more than prejudice.
Zac Alstin is a freelance writer living in Adelaide, South Australia. He blogs at zacalstin.com . |
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A Gaza-based j ournalist has started the "rubble bucket challenge" as a way to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza. Rather than dump ice water over his head as part of the wildly popular ice bucket challenge , Ayman al Aloul used a bucket of rubble, saying it is far more abundant than ice in the war-torn region, NBC News reported .
"If five famous people in the world like actors or presidents will do the challenge, that means I succeeded in sending the message about Gaza," he said. Ayman al Aloul, a Gaza-based journalist, started the "rubble bucket challenge." (Image via YouTube)
A Facebook page created in support of the rubble bucket challenge describes its purpose as "a campaign to raise awareness about the war on Gaza, where people are are bombed inside their homes."
"It came to my mind that it's good idea to show the whole picture -- how Gaza looks now, rubble, destruction, cement with sand, small rocks," Aloul said.
You can watch the rubble bucket challenge video, below:
(H/T: Mediaite ) |
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Immigrant rights supporters rally outside Wrigley Field before an Arizona Diamondbacks game Thursday in Chicago, Illinois.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS NEW: Baseball players union, Urban League, fraternity voice disapproval of new law Arizona Legislature amends law to address accusations that it will lead to racial profiling Critics call law unconstitutional, file suits, plan boycotts; backers say it's needed, urge "BUYcott" Protests to take place in at least 21 states, District of Columbia, 2 Canadian provinces
An Arizona police officer, Martin Escobar, says he doesn't want to have to enforce the new immigration law and is suing. Find out why on " AC360 ," tonight at 10 ET on CNN.
(CNN) -- Demonstrations in support of immigrants' rights are scheduled Saturday in at least 21 states, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces. In all, protests are planned for 47 cities.
The demonstrations come amid a swirl of controversy surrounding a new immigration law in Arizona that allows police to demand proof of legal residency. Arizona lawmakers say the law is needed because the federal government has failed to enforce border security with Mexico, allowing more than 450,000 illegal immigrants to move into in the state.
Critics say the law is unconstitutional and will lead to racial profiling, which is illegal. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and others who support SB1070 say it does not involve profiling or other illegal acts.
The Arizona legislature passed a series of changes to the law late Thursday in an attempt to address the accusations that the measure will lead to profiling .
Video: Supporters: Arizona law a right solution
Video: Officer sues over immigration law
Video: Saying goodbye to undocumented husband
Video: Shakira's immigration mission
The law, which does not go into effect for 90 days, has already drawn at least two lawsuits and condemnation from the Mexican government and other Latin American nations. Prominent entertainers, including Shakira and Linda Ronstadt, also have spoken out against the law.
Some critics are calling for a boycott of Arizona, urging that tourists stay away and that no one do business with companies in the state.
On Friday, two San Francisco, California, officials wrote a three-page letter to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig to ask that the 2011 All-Star Game be moved from Phoenix, Arizona, if the law is not repealed.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, the players' union, is also voicing its disapproval of the law.
"The recent passage by Arizona of a new immigration law could have a negative impact on hundreds of Major League players who are citizens of countries other than the United States," Michael Weiner, executive director of the association, said in a prepared statement Friday.
"These international players are very much a part of our national pastime and are important members of our Association. Their contributions to our sport have been invaluable, and their exploits have been witnessed, enjoyed and applauded by millions of Americans. All of them, as well as the Clubs for whom they play, have gone to great lengths to ensure full compliance with federal immigration law. ...
"The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members."
Also Friday, National Urban League President Marc Morial announced that the civil rights organization is suspending consideration of Phoenix -- which had submitted a bid -- as the location for its 2012 conference "as long as this unfortunate law remains in effect."
"The law is repugnant not just to people of color but to all Americans who value fairness, decency, and justice," said Morial, who added that no site in the state would be considered unless the law is repealed or overturned.
The organization is expected to announce the winning location for the convention at its 2010 conference in late July.
In addition, the African-American Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity announced it is pulling its July 2010 convention from Phoenix and moving it to Las Vegas, Nevada, because of what its board called "the egregious immigration act signed recently by the governor of Arizona."
"It was the full opinion of the board that we could not host a meeting in a state that has sanctioned a law which we believe will lead to racial profiling and discrimination, and a law that could put the civil rights and the very dignity of our members at risk during their stay in Phoenix, Arizona," the fraternity's board said.
Though perhaps not as vocal, the law also has plenty of supporters. Some have launched a "BUYcott," in which they urge people to spend money in the state to support the measure. Backers applaud Arizona legislators for taking seriously their concerns about illegal immigration and crime.
Arizona's new law requires immigrants to carry their registration documents at all times and mandates that police question people if there is reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. The measure makes it a state crime to live in or travel through Arizona illegally.
It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.
Brewer signed the law last week, and the legislature changed some language in it Thursday night in an attempt to make it less ambiguous as to how and when people can be questioned about their residency.
Brewer signed the changes into law Friday, saying they will ease concerns about racial profiling.
According to the bill the governor signed April 23, police would be able to detain an individual based merely on the suspicion that he or she entered the country illegally. A change that legislators approved Thursday night, however, says police could check on residency status only while enforcing some other law or ordinance. An officer could ask about an immigrant's status, for example, while investigating that person for speeding, loitering or some other offense.
In addition, the law says Arizona's attorney general or a county attorney cannot investigate complaints based "solely" on factors such as a person's race, color or national origin. The changes that legislators approved Thursday night would remove the word "solely," to emphasize that prosecutors must have some reason other than an individual's race or national origin to investigate.
The Arizona law will be the focus of Saturday's May Day immigration demonstrations, which have been held yearly since 2006.
Eleven protests are scheduled in California, with two in Los Angeles. New York has eight protests slated, including five in New York City.
In Canada, demonstrations are planned in Toronto and Vancouver.
The protests are being organized by the National Immigrant Solidarity Network and are being billed as "May Day 2010 -- National Mobilization for Immigrant Workers Rights."
Demonstrators want immigration reform that will lead to an easier path toward legal residency and citizenship.
"We have an immigration system that has been neglected for 30 years," said Clarissa Martinez of the National Council of La Raza. The Arizona law is not the answer, she said.
"That leads to greater chaos over that broken system," Martinez told CNN.
President Obama has called on Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law this year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other top Democratic senators unveiled the outlines of that legislation late Thursday.
But House Minority Leader John Boehner said at a briefing Thursday that "there's not a chance" that Congress will approve the measure this year, especially after the recent passage of health care reform.
Obama conceded this week that immigration reform is not likely this year.
The Arizona law has raised concerns in Mexico and throughout Latin America, U.S. officials say.
"It comes up ... in every meeting we have with the region," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday. "We are hearing the concerns of the hemisphere loud and clear."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States will work to "understand and mitigate" Mexico's concerns. The Arizona law, she said, will be on the agenda when Mexican President Felipe Calderon visits Washington on May 19.
One of the two lawsuits against SB1070 was filed Thursday by a police officer in Tucson, Arizona, who asked that local law enforcement be exempt from enforcing the measure. Officer Martin H. Escobar says in the federal suit that the law will "seriously impede law enforcement investigations and facilitate the successful commission of crimes."
The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders also filed a federal lawsuit Thursday.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Arizona and the National Immigration Law Center said Thursday they also plan to jointly file a lawsuit.
Supporters of SB1070 cite high levels of illegal immigration and crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants as a reason for the new law.
"Border violence and crime due to illegal immigration are critically important issues to the people of our state," Brewer said at the bill signing. "There is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona. We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of the drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life."
But statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and the FBI indicate that both the number of illegal immigrants and violent crime have decreased in the state in recent years.
According to FBI statistics, violent crimes in Arizona dropped by nearly 1,500 reported incidents between 2005 and 2008. Reported property crimes also fell during the same period, from about 287,000 reported incidents to 279,000. These decreases are accentuated by the fact that Arizona's population grew by 600,000 people between 2005 and 2008.
According to the nonpartisan Immigration Policy Institute, proponents of the bill "overlook two salient points: crime rates have already been falling in Arizona for years despite the presence of unauthorized immigrants, and a century's worth of research has demonstrated that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be behind bars than the native-born."
Federal officials estimate there are about 10.8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, of which about 6.6 million come from Mexico and 760,000 from the rest of Latin America. About 1 million come from Asia.
Arizona, which is on the Mexican border, has about 460,000 undocumented immigrants, the federal government says. At least five other states, including California with 2.6 million, have more undocumented immigrants, the government says. The other states with more illegal immigrants than Arizona are Texas, Florida, New York and Georgia.
A Pew Research Center survey late last year found that Americans believe Latinos are discriminated against more than any other major racial or ethnic group in American society.
The Pew survey also indicated that about one-third of the nation's Latinos say they or someone they know has experienced discrimination. About 9 percent said they had been stopped by police or other authorities and asked about their immigration status in the year before the survey.
Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they worried that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported.
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On Dec. 16, the Federal Reserve--the U.S. central bank, and under the dollar system the world's central bank--announced an increase in its "policy rates" of interest, the first since before the Great Recession. These rates include the rate at which commercial banks lend reserves to one another overnight (the federal funds rate) and the discount rate (for lending to commercial banks by regional Federal Reserve banks). The decision by the Fed's Open Market Committee brings these rates more into line with rising money market rates.
Money market rates have been in an uptrend since mid-2011, about two years after the initial recovery from the devastating Great Recession got underway in 2009. For example, the interest rate on two-year Treasury notes has risen from barely above zero to about 1 percent currently. (See chart below.)
Market-based interest rate of two-year Treasuries
Despite the widespread belief that the Federal Reserve controls interest rates, the fact is that the Fed typically sets its policy rates to follow , in stair-step fashion, market-based rates down when those rates are declining, and follow them up when they are rising, with a lag in each case. The money market rates fluctuate in accordance with the capitalist industrial cycle--falling sharply during an overproduction crisis and subsequent depression phase and rising after a recovery gets underway, as shown by the above chart.
Fed unusually cautious
This time the Fed waited an unusually long time to raise its policy rates, worried that the sluggish recovery would be aborted if it acted "too soon." Moreover, the increases are small--for example, only 0.25 percent for the Federal Funds rate (from 0.0-0.25 percent to 0.25-0.50 percent) and the same for the discount rate (from 0.75 to 1 percent).
Commercial banks have followed suit, raising their "prime rate" (offered to the most credit-worthy customers) as well as credit card, auto loan and other rates.
Although the Fed normally follows but doesn't set money market interest rates, it does control its "monetary base," the paper dollars it prints and digital dollars it creates electronically. The resulting "bank reserves" over and above the minimum required to back up deposits of commercial banks provide the basis for new lending by those banks. Most of what is called "the money supply" is created by such lending activity (via credit cards, auto loans, house mortgages, student loans, and so on) and shows up as bank deposits, mere accounting entries, called by economists credit money.
The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee controls the Fed's policy rates by expanding or contracting the size of its monetary base, mainly through its "open market operations"--hence the name of the committee--buying and selling securities. If it decides to raise policy rates, like it has just done, it must contract the monetary base (by selling securities from its holdings). When later it wants to reduce its policy rates, it will need to expand the monetary base (by purchasing securities).
'Quantitative easing'
Normally, the Federal Reserve's open market operations involve short-term (mostly government) securities. However, because the entire banking system teetered on the verge of collapse during the Great Recession, the Fed was forced to expand these operations to long-term government and mortgage bonds--called "quantitative easing." As part of bailing out the "too-big-to-fail" banks, the Fed purchased huge quantities of these bonds, paying for them by crediting the banks' accounts with the Federal Reserve, thereby greatly augmenting the banks' reserves and therefore the Fed's monetary base. As a further gift to the banks, the Fed agreed to pay 0.25 percent interest on the humongous bank reserves, now raised to 0.50 percent.
The following chart shows the unprecedented increase in "excess reserves"--starting from the "normal" level of close to zero in 2008 and preceding years--that resulted from three rounds of quantitative easing, each round followed by a pause reflected in the decline or leveling off of the amounts shown in the chart. The Fed ended its third round of QE last year, and the excess reserves initially declined but then leveled off at about $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000).
The pauses shown on the chart actually represent monetary tightening by the Fed, even though it didn't raise its policy rates, until now. Each pause in the face of continued, if sluggish, economic expansion meant that short-term interest rates would rise--as in fact happened, as shown in the first chart above.
The Fed's big gamble
The latest move by the Fed further tightens credit, since it will require a further contraction of the monetary base to implement. If the economic expansion continues, that will inevitably mean a renewed rise in market interest rates, which in turn will require the Fed to raise policy rates again, and again.
A Credit Suisse research note issued after the Fed's rate hike stated: "In some ways, it seems odd that the Fed would increase interest rates in the current circumstances. Commodity prices have collapsed, credit and emerging markets are showing distress, and our measure of global risk appetite is hovering near 'panic' levels. On top of that, ISM [Institute of Supply Management] headline and new orders have fallen below 50 for the first time in three years and US industrial production has contracted in eight of the last eleven months."
In its statement, the FOMC sought to reassure the financial markets by saying that it expects the ensuing rate increases to be "gradual"--in small increments and spaced out. This means the Fed expects (really, hopes) market-based rates--determined not by the Fed but by economic developments beyond its control--will rise only gradually.
The Fed's move suggests the recovery will continue and a new boom phase of the industrial cycle will get underway in the not too distant future, followed at some point by a new overproduction crisis--though as always the Fed hopes (but will fail) to avoid such a crisis. An extended recovery is by no means certain, however, as hinted in the Credit Suisse research note. There are many signs of a slowdown of the global economy happening now, with some economies--notably Brazil but others as well--falling back into recession.
The countries hardest hit are exporters of primary commodities such as oil and natural gas, copper, platinum, palladium and iron ore. The prices of such commodities, which are priced in dollars, have plunged in the face of the pause in the growth of the dollar monetary base following the third round of quantitative easing. Oil, for example, has collapsed from well over $100/barrel in mid-2014 to around $35 currently.
Since most oil-producing countries--for example, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq and Saudi Arabia--depend on oil exports for a large portion of government revenue, and most of the big oil producers in these countries are state-owned, the response to falling prices is at first to increase, not decrease, production. This pushes prices down further in a deflationary spiral.
That has been bad for one sector of the U.S. economy, the rapidly growing fracking industry, but has been beneficial for most other sectors, acting like a big tax cut for businesses and consumers alike. The net result for the U.S. has been positive so far, which made possible the latest Fed tightening move. However, further declines elsewhere in the world could bring a premature end to the current expansion.
'Junk bonds' fiasco
Another risk to the economy is a collapse of the high-yield--so-called junk--bond market. Many of these bonds, floated to finance exploration and production of oil in the fracking sector, are already in steep decline. The following chart shows the steep decline in the share value of a prominent junk bond fund from its peak earlier this year.
Banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions invested in junk bonds for their high yields and now face defaults and heavy losses. One major mutual fund, Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund, recently went belly up due to a panicky wave of redemption requests by shareholders that it could not meet. This disastrous run on the fund occurred despite a $200 million cash reserve built up in the days before its collapse.
A further major default on debt is looming, and that is the $2 billion in debt payments coming due at the end of this year owed by the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. It's bonds, which paid exceptionally high interest, are owned by a wide spectrum of financial institutions, including hedge funds, mutual funds and even pension funds.
Congress failed to pass legislation granting Puerto Rico the right to declare bankruptcy and go through an orderly, if highly unjust, process for getting out from under its debt burden like Detroit did. Therefore, this could end up in a disorderly default that could further rile the financial markets.
Another danger is a stock market correction that turns into a crash. As a result of years of super-low interest rates, along with massive stock buybacks by corporations, share values have soared since the market hit bottom in 2009. (See following chart.) Now with the prospect of rising interest rates, these levitated share prices could turn down--possibly with a vengeance as panicky investors rush for the exits at the same time.
If all or some combination of these losses start a serious contagion that threatens the big banks, the Fed may be forced to reverse course and begin a fourth round of quantitative easing--and on a massive scale. But that would risk a new run on the dollar, such as began in late 1979 and early 1980, before the sky-high interest rates of the famous Volcker Shock saved the currency from total collapse. Since a strong dollar is crucial for the continued dominance of the U.S. empire, ensuring that status has the highest priority for U.S. finance capital.
Socialist planning and regulation must replace capitalist anarchy
The conclusion is inescapable: The glory days of capitalism in general and the U.S. empire in particular are receding into the past, never to return. The system has reached the point that the most basic needs of major parts of society are going unmet or in serious jeopardy--especially in the oppressed countries but increasingly also in the "advanced countries."
Wars multiply and escalate. One country after another is torn apart, its infrastructure and institutions destroyed. Austerity bites ever deeper. Climate change threatens the livability of the planet for many species including our own. Mass unemployment and poverty spread. Policy brutality and mass incarceration (along with surveillance) reach unprecedented levels. Racism is on the rise, and fascism has raised its head. The capitalist system has to go. |
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Wrong Turn: Learning to Drive Loses its Way
Wrong Turn: Learning to Drive Loses its Way
Unlike the bracing feminist essay it is based on, Learning to Drive struggles to move beyond fantasy and stereotypes. Maxine Phillips ▪ August 28, 2015 A scene from Learning to Drive (Broad Green Pictures)
Early on in her wrenchingly funny tell-all essay about being left by her lover, feminist writer Katha Pollitt fantasizes that after she learns to drive she mows him down at a crosswalk, where he just happens to be standing with his new wife and at least one other former lover. Pollitt imagines she will be sent to prison for decades, where she will reorganize the library and become a lesbian. Her story will be made into a movie.
Well, it has been made into a movie, and that's not the story it tells.
First published in the New Yorker in 2002, the essay is a clear-eyed account of a middle-aged woman finally taking charge of her life, symbolized by her learning to drive. In the process, she skewers the unnamed lover with the literary leftist version of revenge porn. Pollitt is not afraid to expose her own insecurities even as she verbally flays the philandering lover.
The essay caused a stir when it came out, because women like Pollitt, that is to say, strong feminists, aren't supposed to slash their wrists over men, even if metaphorically. She was excoriated for being too personal, but the essay struck a chord among many and eventually became the title of a collection of perceptive and poignant essays about her childhood, a stint as a proofreader of porn, her obsessive internet stalking of the ex-lover, being a mother, aging, death, and feminism. And even though my own life doesn't parallel Pollitt's, I can relate. We are children of the fifties who came to our feminism in the sixties. We have tried to pass on feminist ideals to our daughters. I still won't drive in New York City. And, we both look at a man's political portfolio before gazing into his eyes.
Like Pollitt, I, too, stayed with someone long past the due date because of his politics. And, like her alter ego in the film (literary critic Wendy Shields, played by Patricia Clarkson) I, too, was once dumped by a man during a meal in a restaurant. Unlike Wendy, however, I didn't follow him onto the street screaming that he was a coward for choosing a public place. This opening scene tells us that Wendy is a woman who speaks her mind. Conveniently, the cab into which she pursues her fleeing husband is driven by Darwan Singh Tur (Ben Kingsley), who also has a day job as a driving instructor. When Darwan returns a manuscript she has left in the cab, she asks for his card. Her daughter is dropping out of school to work on a farm in Vermont, and if Wendy is to visit she will need to learn to drive.
What was once the story of a passionate feminist intellectual who refused to abandon a life of the mind in order to give blow jobs to her lover every morning has morphed into an "odd couple" comedy that its creators hope will appeal to a wide audience.
Director Isabel Coixet worked with Clarkson and Kingsley on Elegy , an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, in which Kingsley plays the kind of guy Central Casting should have sent to portray Pollitt's real-life lover. However, Coixet told an interviewer, she "realized all my films are full of tragedies and darkness, and I wanted very badly to make a film that showed some kind of hope and lightness." But could such a film capture the subtleties of Pollitt's essay?
The title essay and those that make up the book are about a subset of heterosexual women of a certain age who, while not pioneers of feminism, rode the Second Wave into adulthood and have spent their lives navigating the shoals of leftist politics, sexism, love, parenthood, and work. These are women who came relatively late to motherhood, after they had made career choices, women who are fully aware of the ways that they are objectified but who still worry about those extra pounds that cling to their hips. They are women who can remember a time when people "believed in some big triumphant idea like science or reason or socialism or art, or even a small, cozy hope like everyone having a place to live and nobody having to eat cat food." And, in the most poignant essay, they are women who live with men who (statistically) will die before they do: "No more staying up listening to each other's old records, no more reading Don Quixote to each other in bed, no more sex--strange to think that there will be an actual, specific last time for that."
OK. I get it. A feature film has to have wider appeal.
In the essay, the driving instructor is a Filipino man named Ben who gives sage advice about driving and, hence, about life ("Observation, Kahta, observation! This is your weakness." Yes, Pollitt thinks, "I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer . . ."). In the film, the instructor is a Sikh with a backstory of religious persecution in India and a long stint in prison that explains why such a paragon of virtue is unmarried. Ben and Darwan represent the anti-jerk.
According to Coixet, the film tells "a great story about human connections surpassing race, age, time and religion." This, of course, is part of the American Dream, which Coixet, despite being Spanish, is happy to propagate. She also admits that the story grabbed her because she'd just been left by the father of her child and she, too, does not know how to drive.
The original book jacket showed a long road heading off into daybreak. The movie poster shows a smiling, airbrushed Clarkson in the foreground, coquettishly holding a half-eaten Popsicle, while in the background a turbaned, airbrushed Kingsley looks at her in a way that made a young Indian friend exclaim, "Do they get involved with each other?" There is no car or road in sight.
"How stereotypical that they made the driver a Sikh!" snorted my friend. "Ben Kingsley couldn't have played a Filipino," I countered, as she gave me a withering look. "He can play any ethnic role he wants," she said. "They must have made the character a Sikh because of the stereotype of Indians being so spiritual."
I hadn't seen the movie yet, but she was right. At every moment when Darwan does the honorable thing or offers sage advice and Wendy expresses amazement, he attributes his actions to his religion. The director says that creating Darwan's character presented an opportunity to learn more about Sikhs, who are often confused by many in this country with Muslims and have faced discrimination and violence because of this misperception. Seriously though, how many people who can't tell the difference between Muslims and Sikhs will watch this movie?
In the essay, all the action takes place either in the car or in Pollitt's memory, as she ruminates about her past (her mother never learned to drive, either), the execrable ex-boyfriend's philandering, and her own bemusement about why she has so far declined to learn to drive. This refusal, of course, is incomprehensible to the rest of the country, where driving may be third only to breathing and gun ownership as an inalienable right.
Readers most likely to relate to the essay are, perhaps, those for whom politics comes second to breathing. Here, the only overt politics comes when Wendy's sister sets her up with an eligible banker and Wendy asks in horror whether he's a Republican. She goes to bed with him, the question unanswered. The fact that she looks at her watch during the interminable tantric sex that ensues tells me the script was written by a woman (Sarah Kernochan).
Despite the brief sexual interlude, which may or may not have also been a satirical look at Western fascination with Eastern practices, Wendy remains focused on learning to drive. And unlike Thelma and Louise, she's not going off a cliff.
Like myriad precursors, the film focuses on putting your life together after a relationship ends, not on what kept you frozen in place for so long. These days, the largest group of spouses fleeing the nest is middle-aged women, but Wendy never got the memo. She is the main financial support of the family (ex-husband Ted asks for 25 percent of her income in alimony), and there is nothing except her sexual attraction to him and, perhaps, some love of literature that seems to have kept them together. Except for a good body, Ted (Jake Weber) has nothing going for him. "He couldn't even get tenure after twenty years," sniffs Wendy. We never hear the ideas that seduced Pollitt or the words that are supposedly important to Wendy. Pollitt's essay made it clear that she was attracted to "G" because he combined good sex with a brilliant mind and that, at least for a while, he was drawn to her for the same reason.
If Wendy has a life of the mind, we do not see it, even though Ted accuses her of having spent too much time at her work and not enough with him. As soon as he leaves, though, she is too heartsick to go into the office of what appears to be a New Yorker -type magazine. When Ted comes to pick up his books, the only one they reminisce about is The Joy of Sex , which leads to a cringe-inducing scene in which she attempts to recapture some of that joy while Ted recoils in embarrassment. When she does try to think about what went wrong after two decades, we only hear her blaming herself. This is a literary critic, not a feminist, presumably because that is an identity with wider appeal. But at such moments, the contrast between the film character and the real-life woman behind it could not be more stark.
The person we do hear from is Darwan, whose story slowly unfolds in parallel to Wendy's. The driving instructor may have been cast as a Sikh because of the spiritual stereotype, but he also fits another trope, that of the educated immigrant (he's got a PhD) relegated to a more menial occupation than in his home country. He, too, is stuck. Having lost several members of his immediate family to political terror (most likely the pogroms against Sikhs in India in 1984) and been granted political asylum and citizenship, he has buried himself in work.
We see Wendy alone in her spacious Upper West Side brownstone as Darwan returns to the crowded basement apartment in Queens that he shares with several undocumented compatriots, including his nephew. The contrast between her clueless white privilege and his outsider status is driven home in scenes where some white adolescents taunt him by yelling, "Osama, I thought we killed you," and another in which she causes an accident and the police start hassling Darwan. An indignant Wendy screams at the black officer, "I have two words for you: racial profiling!" Earlier, the viewer has seen Darwan lose his housemates during an immigration raid. As a citizen, he is safe from deportation, but is harassed daily.
While Wendy's sister urges her to move on, fixing her up with men such as the aforementioned banker, Darwan's sister sends photos of potential marriage partners. Despite misgivings, he finally agrees to an arranged marriage with a woman named Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury) from a neighboring village. Jasleen's unmarried state is explained by her betrothed having been murdered in the same wave of terror that sent Darwan to prison. The fear in her eyes when he greets her in the airport and during the wedding ceremony scant hours later does not abate. Her English is limited, but Darwan, who has been warm and understanding with Wendy, refuses to welcome his fiancee in their native tongue. He presents her with a book of poetry by Wordsworth (suggested by Wendy, who had received such a gift from Ted). He insists that Jasleen read to him, and when she stumbles over the words, he asks whether she can even read English. She tells him that her brother took her out of school at age fourteen.
He criticizes her cooking, having lost his taste for so much ghee. She is too scared to leave the house, and he is never home because of the two jobs. She is no doormat, though, realizing long before he does that he is attracted to Wendy.
However, the film, as its website declares, is a "feel-good, coming of (middle) age comedy about a mismatched pair who help each other overcome life's road blocks." Even though she barely gets fifteen minutes in the film, Jasleen, too, overcomes some roadblocks. Having run out of sanitary pads, she ventures out to a store, where she meets a compatriot who soon introduces her to the neighborhood's other immigrant women. The women gather at her house to catechize her to this new world. When Darwan arrives home to this scene, he rejects her offer to run into the kitchen and urges her to enjoy time with her new friends. Soon, Jasleen is taking English classes.
So much for Jasleen's story arc, which would have made a fascinating movie in its own right. Could Wendy and Jasleen have bridged their cultural differences? Will Jasleen and Darwan? Unfortunately, we see too little of them interacting. No tantric sex for them. No poetry. No driving lessons.
It won't be giving away the ending to say that we know from the many times we've seen this story play out that Wendy will either discover romance with someone better looking and more sensitive than Ted or face the future alone and unafraid. Or both.
There are so few movies made by women about women that it seems petty to criticize this one for not moving beyond fantasy and stereotypes. In the real world, when men leave women or vice versa, it is women who almost always suffer a major loss of income. In cinema, such women are thin, good-looking, and have beautiful homes that they do not lose after the divorce. In a country where the median salary for women ages fifty-five to sixty-five is $41,000, these fictional ex-wives have jobs that allow them to maintain their upper middle-class standard of living. Wendy may have to sell the brownstone, but instead of downsizing to Queens, she relocates to a spacious Upper West Side apartment. The biggest fantasy, though, is that she and Darwan always find parking in Manhattan.
If the movie had focused on the ideas that drew Pollitt to her lover, we would be living in another country (France?). If the driving instructor hadn't had a PhD, we might have had to confront class issues as well as race. Again, we'd be living in another country (the United Kingdom?). Instead, we're living in the United States, where we can ignore both.
At the screening I attended, the audience was silent at the end. I muttered to the other person in my row, "It's not like the book." She gave me a "What did you expect?" look and said, "It's enjoyable." That it is. Clarkson, Kingsley, and Choudhury are certainly worth the price of the ticket. The sight of Weber's bare behind isn't bad, either.
But, if you like your comedie humaine with both wit and verite , read the book.
Maxine Phillips is editor of Democratic Left and former executive editor of Dissent . |
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Imagine for a moment your husband has issued a 'zero-tolerance' immigration policy which has led to over 2,000 children being separated from their families. Photographs of toddlers sobbing are being circulated the world over and thousands of medical experts are describing what is going on as child abuse which will cause irreparable damage.
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After global condemnation and outrage your husband eventually signs an executive order to end child separation and you visit a facility housing children at the border for a damage control photo opportunity.
Now think about what you'd have to be smoking to look into your wardrobe before the visit and choose to wear a jacket which had emblazoned on the back 'REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?'
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Yesterday First Lady Melania Trump was photographed in the Zara jacket while boarding a plane to visit migrant children in Texas. Unsurprisingly her wardrobe choice has outraged many people, though weirdly not the right-wing media who were so furious that time Michelle Obama showed her bare arms to visit an oil spill site.
Let's just talk facts. Melania Trump flies to Texas to meet with immigrant children separated from their parents. Good for her. She wears a jacket that says "I really don't care." This is tone deaf at best. Why would anyone wear a jacket that says "I don't care" any time? -- Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) June 22, 2018
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Then in that case, please tell Melania, Marie Antoinette called. She wants her jacket back. Also, how in the hell are you planning to reunite the 2,300 children you cruelly separated from their family? Why isn't the meadia allowed into the facilities? Where are the girls? https://t.co/s1oBcQ9vIj -- Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) June 21, 2018
You know what? I *am* going to be distracted by Melania's fucking jacket. Whatever's going on with her is really bad; if you hate your husband that much, leave him. If you hate your adopted country, you can leave that, too. -- Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) June 21, 2018
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If Melania Trump actually did wear the "I really don't care do u?" jacket to troll the media as she was visiting traumatized children, as her husband claims, that's even more pathetic than it being a dumb blunder. The White House is more committed to trolling than helping people. -- Adam Best (@adamcbest) June 22, 2018
Her choice to send such a clear political message on a public stage is especially baffling when only this week she uncharacteristically weighed in on the issue to say that she 'hates to see' children separated from their families at borders.
"There was no hidden message," a spokeswoman said of the first lady's jacket, however Donald Trump weighed on the jacket to say that the message, "refers to the Fake News Media".
"I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" written on the back of Melania's jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares! -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2018
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Across the country, states are reporting more homeless school students. According to new data by the Department of Education , more than 1.1 million students in the United States in grades K-12 were homeless in the 2011-12 school year--a record high. Of the 50 states, the 10 in this gallery have the fastest-growing homeless student populations, and chances are they aren't the places you'd expect.
Experts say that the numbers may even be higher than what you'll see here, because irregular class attendance and changing addresses mean homeless kids are difficult to track. The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth says that two trends are responsible for these big numbers: a growing shortage of affordable rental housing and a simultaneous increase in severe poverty in the U.S.
Many schools already have homeless education coordinators, and more districts are hiring them. These educators help students access what many of us consider life basics--a pair of shoes, a shower, and even a prepaid phone for safety. There are more than 15,000 of these liaisons in schools in the United States. Under the 1987 McKinney-Vento Act all schools are required to provide homeless services, but many don't have the money to fill the position and haven't secured a federal grant to help.
Just 3,000 of the country's 15,000 school districts are taking advantage of about $65 million in relevant government subgrants. Some districts are instead partnering with community-based organizations to deal with their homeless issues. Still others are training administrators, teachers, counselors, and bus drivers on how to best serve homeless kids and meet their needs.
Many educators and officials are looking for further solutions. Some cities are connecting with local organizations to create after-hours learning centers with tutors and computers. Some schools are relaxing procedures for homeless kids. For example, a homeless child may not want to hang up his or her coat but instead wear it through class, because it's the only one he or she owns.
It serves everyone when homeless students prevail. If they don't, the cycle of poverty continues. Read on to find out which states have the fastest-growing populations of homeless students and what they're doing about it.
This article was written as part of the social action campaign for the documentary TEACH , produced by TakePart's parent company, Participant Media, in partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates. 0 of 0 |
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By Sharon Rondeau on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 Editorials
"A COMPANY GUY" by Joan Swirsky, (c)2018 (Apr. 17, 2018) -- (In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled "James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor," warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it's just as clear that the uncontrolled [...]
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IS IT ALL BEGINNING TO MAKE SENSE? by Sharon Rondeau (Dec. 12, 2017) -- Infowars' Dr. Jerome Corsi reported in an explosive story on Tuesday that Obama birth certificate lead investigator Mike Zullo presented evidence gleaned from a confidential informant that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) participated in the creation of the "long-form" birth certificate [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Friday, August 18, 2017 National
WILL HE SIGN IT, AND IF SO, WHEN? by Sharon Rondeau (Aug. 18, 2017) -- Infowars's Jerome Corsi is reporting that a presidential pardon for former Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio has been readied for President Donald Trump's signature. As Corsi reported on Tuesday, Trump is traveling to Phoenix on August 22 for rally. [...]
By Sharon Rondeau on Thursday, March 23, 2017 National
AFTER DENYING TRUMP "WIRETAPPING" CLAIM, A "SMOKING GUN?" by Sharon Rondeau (Mar. 23, 2017) -- Last Wednesday, March 15, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA22) stated that in regard to President Trump's March 4 tweets claiming that he was "wiretapped" during the 2016 campaign, "We don't have any evidence that that took place." At the [...] |
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"I am devasted [sic] and heartbroken by this accident. My heartfelt condolences go out to the family and friends of Jerome Barson and I continue to keep them in my thoughts and prayers."
CLEVELAND (AP) -- A newlywed accused of soliciting her firefighter husband's killing to collect $100,000 in insurance money has been convicted of aggravated murder in a scheme that was flawed from the start: His ex-wife was still the beneficiary of his policy.
Uloma Curry-Walker, 45, could receive life in prison without parole for the November 2013 slaying of William Walker, whom she had married just four months earlier. Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before coming back with the verdict Friday, Cleveland.com reported .
Prosecutors said Curry-Walker was nearing financial ruin after running up tens of thousands of dollars in debt when she asked her then-17-year-old daughter and the daughter's boyfriend to find someone to kill her husband so she could collect the insurance money.
But a police investigation found that Curry-Walker's plan had a glaring problem from the outset. Her husband had not yet changed the beneficiary on the insurance policy from his ex-wife's name to Curry-Walker's when he was killed, so it was the ex-wife who received the money. In this undated photo, Uloma Curry-Walker appears at a hearing last month in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland. Curry-Walker, 45, a newlywed accused of soliciting her firefighter husband's killing to collect $100,000 in insurance money has been convicted Friday, July 7, 2017, of aggravated murder in a scheme that was flawed from the start: His ex-wife was still the beneficiary of his policy. Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 8. (Cory Shaffer/Cleveland.com via AP)
Testimony showed that Curry-Walker gave the boyfriend, Chad Padgett, a $1,000 down payment to carry out the slaying. Padgett contacted his cousin Chris Hein, who initially failed in his attempt to kill Walker. Hein then turned to Ryan Dorty to carry out the killing.
Prosecutors said Dorty ambushed Walker and shot him four times as he returned home from getting fast food Curry-Walker had requested. She and her husband were packing the night he was killed for a move to a house they had purchased outside Cleveland.
The daughter, Padgett, Hein and Dorty testified against Curry-Walker at trial as part of plea deal for their roles in the murder conspiracy. Hein agreed to a sentence of 18 years to life; Padgett 28 years to life; and Dorty 23 years to life. Prosecutors agreed not to seek adult charges against Curry-Walker's daughter. She will instead spend a month in a juvenile detention center.
The daughter testified at trial that her mother told her: "No one would believe I would hire a bunch of kids to kill someone when I know people that could."
Curry-Walker wrote a confession the day she surrendered to police that said she killed her husband because he was abusive. Her attorneys did not call any witnesses to testify that Walker was violent toward his wife.
Cleveland.com reported that one of Curry-Walker's attorneys pointed to discrepancies in witness testimony during closing arguments and suggested the daughter had devised the murder scheme.
Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 8.
Neither of her attorneys returned telephone messages seeking comment on Friday.
Friday would have been the couple's fourth wedding anniversary.
Information from: cleveland.com, http://www.cleveland.com
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
After leaving the room for the second time he made a break for the emergency exit door, grabbed the handle and tried opening it.
Hudek was arrested on Friday and charged with one count of interference with flight crew members. If he gets convicted he could face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. |
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This issue is one of those cases where no matter how much contrary evidence you produce -- no matter how unimpeachable your sources are, the other side will simply plug their ears, sing "la-la-la-not-listening!" then regurgitate the same response over and over. In this case, their refrain is, "Torture worked, and we were scared after 9/11." It's like debating a brick wall or a member of a cult -- with apologies to walls and cult members. The tactic, of course, is to repeat the same nonsense over and over until it feels truthy.
And to be fair, they're half right. Sort of. In the wake of September 11, Americans were utterly terrified and probably would've acquiesced to allowing the CIA to do whatever the hell it wanted as long as the evildoers were smoked out. But one of the reasons why we have national security and law enforcement officials is to serve as cooler heads in a crisis; to make rational decisions that history can live with based on our long-term values, rather than catering to the panicked whimsy of a horrified, shell-shocked public.
The other half of the refrain, "torture worked," has always been horseshit and ultimately irrelevant.
Almost immediately following the release of the Intelligence Committee's mind-blowing summary report on the Bush-era use of torture in the Global War on Terrorism, three former Central Intelligence Agency chiefs along with their deputies published an extended, predictably defensive cover-your-ass response in the pages of the most receptive, unchallenging forum possible: The Wall Street Journal editorial page. George Tenet, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, along with deputies John McLaughlin, Albert Calland and Admiral Stephen Kappes, essentially wrote "torture worked" over and over again using 2,400 words, hoping enough readers will give up and exclaim, "Okay! Fine!"
See if you can tell what they left out of their primary counter-argument:
First, its claim that the CIA's interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:
* It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
* It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
* It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.
A powerful example of the interrogation program's importance is the information obtained from Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda operative, and from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, known as KSM, the 9/11 mastermind. We are convinced that both would not have talked absent the interrogation program.
Answer? The word "enhanced," as in "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs), was suspiciously and conspicuously absent from the start. This is important because the CIA also used other non-torture interrogation methods that, in fact, worked. These guys are clearly obfuscating what happened by speaking in generalities rather than coming out and saying, "When we waterboarding so-and-so, or forced another so-and-so to stand in a stress position on his broken legs, we eventually learned where Bin Laden was hiding."
And besides, one interrogation expert after another has sworn that "enhanced interrogation techniques" don't work. Detainees end up saying any old thing just to make the pain stop. Here's Special Agent Joe Navarro, a (I'll just copy and paste his bio) 25-year veteran of the FBI where he served as both an agent and a supervisor :
Torture is not an effective way to get information , and the American people need to know that. That's why the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11 is important. [...]
I recall when I learned that cruel techniques were being used. I spoke with several long-term CIA officers and CIA polygraph experts with whom I had worked over many years, and we were all appalled, not just by its immorality, but because we knew it would be counterproductive .
This article wasn't published in Mother Jones or The Nation . It was published by Fox News Channel .
Professional interrogators have lined up in opposition to enhanced interrogation simply because it does not work, and if it doesn't work, it's ineffective and therefore makes us less safe.
Here are another 20 names: Retired CIA officer Frank Anderson, former DIA Guantanamo interrogator Jennifer Bryson, Bronze Star Award-winning interrogator in Iraq Tony Camerino, DEA veteran Donald Canestraro, former CIA counterterrorism strategist Glenn Carle, former Immigration and Customs director Charles DeVita, covert CIA operative Barry Eisler, Army Arabic linguist Eric Fair, national security consultant Mark Fallon, Brigadier General David Irvine, USA (Ret.), Colonel Steven Kleinman, USAF, Colonel Brittain Mallow (Ret.), NCIS special agent Mike Marks, law enforcement veteran Robert McFadden, NCIS veteran Matthew E. Parsons, Army interrogator William Quinn, former FBI agent Oliver "Buck" Revell, Ken Robinson, Mike Rolince and Lieutenant General Harry Soyster, USA (Ret). All of these experts agreed in a printed statement , "Torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are illegal, ineffective, counterproductive, and immoral."
You know who else determined that EITs are ineffective? The CIA. According to a document first published by Kurt Eichenwald in his groundbreaking book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars , and subsequently covered in the Intelligence Committee's summary yesterday, the techniques didn't produce actionable intelligence that hadn't been ascertained using other methods. From the summary:
[A]ccording to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody. CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were usually subjected to the techniques immediately after being rendered to CIA custody. Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques.
Torture produced useful intel less frequently than other methods. Information was volunteered even without the use of torture. But some who might have volunteered useful information were never given the chance, as the CIA showed a predilection for torturing first and asking questions later. And those who were tortured did what they could to end the torment.
While being subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and afterwards, multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.
Put another way, if your goal is to hammer a nail into a wall, you might be able to get the job done by bashing the nail with your clenched fist until your hand is a bloody stump. Or you can use a more effective technique, like a hammer. Duh. The CIA basically opted to reject effective and moral interrogation techniques and went with a far less effective means that's absolutely damaged America's reputation and endangered American lives.
And that leads us to the over-arching counterpoint to this ridiculous "torture works" crapola.
It doesn't matter.
Let's say it worked like gangbusters -- it doesn't, but let's suppose it does. It's deeply immoral, for so many reasons, and it's a violation of international treaties. What we read about yesterday, including the waterboarding, beatings, stress positions and rectal force-feeding are all torture techniques. It's the sort of thing our enemies do, but which we should never do. It's efficacy or lack of efficacy should be entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Hell, we could unilaterally nuke every town and village from Gaza to Tora-Bora. It might work to kill some terrorists, and it might even prevent another 9/11 attack (maybe), but the world would line up against us, and whatever national security gains we might reap from the effort, we'd surely experience decades of blowback and perhaps exponentially more 9/11-style attacks than would've otherwise occurred. Whether torture "works" isn't the hinge in this debate, any more than it'd be if Bush and Cheney had rounded up all American Muslims in the United States and shoved them into concentration camps.
What the previous administration failed to understand is that maintaining a strong national defense has to include preserving an ethical and moral high ground, in addition to the basics -- weapons and soldiers. Most foreign policy and national security disasters have occurred when the government abandons that high ground out of fear or zealotry. And we still don't know the full extent to which this disaster will come back to haunt us in very deadly ways. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday :
"I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn't about our enemies; it's about us. It's about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It's about how we represent ourselves to the world. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea...that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. Our enemies act without conscience. We must not."
That's the beginning and the end of any debate on this issue. There is nothing else.
Bob Cesca is the host of the Bob Cesca Show podcast , a twice weekly political talk show. He's also a contributor to Salon.com. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook . |
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In the West Bank and Jerusalem, seven people--four Palestinians and three Israelis--have been killed amid a wave of violence and protests over Israel's refusal to remove metal detectors from the holy al-Aqsa Mosque.
On Friday, an Israeli settler killed 18-year-old Muhammad Sharaf, and Israeli soldiers killed 17-year-old Muhammad Khalaf and 20-year-old Muhammad Ghanam. On Saturday, an Israeli soldier killed 21-year-old Yousef Abbas Kashour. About 400 more Palestinians were wounded as Israeli troops opened fire against protesters with live bullets and tear gas.
Meanwhile, on Friday night, a Palestinian teenager killed a man and his two adult children in their home in an Israeli-only settlement in the West Bank. The three victims, whose names have not been released, were sitting down to Shabbat dinner when they were stabbed to death.
This is Abed al-Jaleel Alabed, the father of the Palestinian teenager who killed the three Israelis.
Abed al-Jaleel Alabed : "I have no idea about what happened, and I am against any attack. Our children are young, and the occupation is responsible for the attack, not my son. The occupation caused this attack, after pressing on al-Aqsa Mosque."
On Sunday, the violence appeared to spread to the Israeli Embassy in Jordan, where an Israeli security officer killed two Jordanians, after one stabbed him. Israel has deployed more troops to the occupied West Bank amid the growing protests. The U.N. Security Council is set to convene an emergency meeting over the violence today.
Topics: Israel & Palestine |
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Before becoming President Obama's key Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco was the head of the DOJ National Security Division. You might remember the DOJ-NSD is at the center of the "small group" collaboration between DOJ-NSD and FBI Counterintelligence unit. Remember, it was the DOJ-NSD ( via Sally Yates ) who would not allow OIG Oversight. (John Carlin quit; Mary McCord quit; David Laufman quit)
During the 2015/2016 presidential election Lisa Monaco was one of the key WH figures doing the unmasking of raw intelligence provided by the "small group" collaborators (with Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes). Monaco was also one of the key policy strategists, heck, she was the architect, who utilized the compartmentalization of intelligence to hide the fingerprints of collaboration. This was the issue that initially stymied HSPCI Devin Nunes.
Many people have wondered if the Obama White House, recognizing the empirical risk represented by McCabe's insider knowledge, would distance themselves from McCabe -leaving him to swing in the wind- or whether they would circle the wagons to defend him. This interview should answer that question. Pay particular attention to the angst expressed by Monaco of Trump creating transparency within compartmentalized IC.
After watching the video, and understanding what battles are to come from within the Obama IC, you understand why THIS GROUP has assembled. It is all interconnected. It is all related. None of these alignments, moves, maneuvers and shifts are happening arbitrarily. They are all done purposefully knowing the biggest political battle in the history of U.S. politics is now visible on the horizon.
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Chicago saw a roughly 16 percent decrease in homicides in 2017 compared with 2016, the deadliest year in two decades, but the city still finished the year with a death toll that, before 2016, was not seen since the early 2000s.
The city reached 670 homicides in the past year, according to data kept by the Tribune, down from the 792 in 2016 when it hit a level of gun violence Chicago had not seen since the mid-1990s.
"It's no secret that some of our neighborhoods have felt the effects of illegally obtained firearms," Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters just after the new year started Monday morning, "and the offenders who are willing to use them for far too long."
Despite the reduction from 2016, homicides from the past year surpass those in 2014 and 2015, when the city reached 494 and 446, respectively, according to the Tribune's data.
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Before 2016, the last time Chicago broke 600 killings was in 2003, according to data kept by the Chicago Police Department.
In overall shootings, Chicago reached more than 3,500, down from the more than 4,300 of 2017 but up from the more than 2,900 of 2015.
Figures released by the Police Department tallied the 2017 homicide total at 650, compared with 771 for 2016. The numbers differ because, unlike the Tribune, the department does not count homicides on expressways as well as fatal shootings by police officers and homicides considered justified.
Johnson said the reduction has sparked hope in some neighborhoods, and he credited the decrease to community engagement and data-driven policing.
He pointed to a sharp decrease in homicides in the Englewood and Harrison districts, 43 percent and 26 percent, respectively, over 2016, which were the first of six districts to be equipped with intelligence centers that use real-time data.
"There's still a lot of work ahead of us, but we're heading in the right direction," Johnson said.
(c)2018 the Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
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Chicago saw a roughly 16 percent decrease in homicides in 2017 compared with 2016 |
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via BBC
(via TrueActivist ) You might not know this, but there are thousands of women and men being held captive by the terrorist organization Daesh . In fact, a large percent of those are from the Yazidi community. According to the United Nations, approximately 3,500 are still being held against their will, and most are young women and girls.
In 2014, reports Alalam , an attack against the Yazidi community resulted in about 5,000 men, women, and children being taken captive. Since then, about 2,000 have survived - but all with gruesome tales to relay about the experience. From rape and abuse to witnessing their loved ones being massacred in front of their eyes, the escaped survivors are not only pissed , they're ready to take out the bad guys responsible for so much hurt.
The surviving women - who call themselves the 'Force of the Sun Ladies' - have taken up arms in the quest for revenge.
It was the women's collective desire for vengeance that inspired them to form an all-female battalion. Now, they preparing for an offensive on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul where many of the women were exchanged by militants to serve as sex slaves.
Capt Khatoon Khider, a member of the all-female battalion, told the media:
"Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims.
Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die. Our hands were all tied. We couldn't do anything about it.
Now we are defending ourselves from the evil. We are defending all the minorities in the region. We will do whatever is asked of us."
Khider is one of 100 Yazidi women who have trained with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Another 500 are waiting to follow suit.
"Our elite force is a model for other women in the region," Khider said. "We want to thank all the other countries who help us in this difficult time, we want everyone to take up weapons and know how to protect themselves from the evil."
According to multiple sources, ISIS considers the Yazidi to be devil worshippers, even though their ancient faith is a blend of Christianity , Zoroastrianism and Islam. |
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Daytona Beach, Fla. -- 'Bikers welcome here!" read the signs at almost every establishment, and given that over half a million of them arrive each March for the city's annual Bike Week, it is a sensible policy. They come from all 50 states -- even Alaska and Hawaii -- and have gathered almost every year since 1937. The Second World War caused a brief hiatus (in lieu, those not overseas held an informal rally), but when the fighting ended, the tradition was resumed, and it has now grown to be the joint biggest motorcycle convocation in the United States -- an honor it shares with South Dakota's more famous meeting in Sturgis.
For one kaleidoscopic fortnight, Daytona's warm air is filled with engine noise and rock music and its streets are marked out in fast-moving chrome and brightly colored lights. Bike Week's habitues more or less take over their host city, changing its character from slightly run down Floridian beach town to hot mess. Theirs is the America of Hotel California -- of dark desert highways, flickering neon signs, the wind in your hair, and the ineffable, perhaps apocryphal, "spirit of '69." America is deemed the Great Satan by the modern era's neo-puritans, primarily because it is the greatest tempter on earth; and its glittering charms are nowhere more plainly on offer than on its roads. It is a land of contradictions, in which churches stand next to strip clubs -- and in Daytona there are cars and bikes parked outside both.
Motorcycles have long been associated both with America's harder edge and with liberty itself. It is no accident that, in The Great Escape , Steve McQueen rides away from tyranny and toward freedom on the back of a Triumph two-wheeler, but one also gets the impression that if Satan were to use earthly forms of transport to deliver his seductions, he, too, would be carried along the highways and byways on the back of a chopper. (Indeed, hellfire -- and the underworld more generally -- is a favorite decorative theme among those who ride, and bats, skulls, and the Grim Reaper are among the most popular decals.) Bikers thus inspire mixed reactions in the public's imagination, and it is maybe inevitable that even those who feel positive toward them tend also to perceive their culture as being emblematic of an unfortunate American tendency to metamorphose liberty into license and make fiends of the free.
In a seminal 1965 essay for The Nation , a young Hunter S. Thompson noted that the bad reputation bikers enjoyed was largely undeserved, but that there was no smoke without fire. Cataloguing both the true and the false accusations, Thompson argued that, while a few on the fringe exhibited dangerous -- even criminal -- tendencies, most were in fact just "harmless weekend types . . . no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers." This has most likely been true from the outset, but truth does not always reign in the court of public opinion, and the bad-boy image has stuck, tarnishing all with the transgressions of a few. This stubborn perception does a disservice to what is actually a remarkably conservative and deeply patriotic group.
They're religious, too. Daytona Beach is filled with churches, and on weekends during the rally the churches are filled with bikers. Here too -- giant signs make it abundantly clear -- they are "welcome." The city's Catholic Church of the Basilica of St. Paul does not just invite riders to attend services but also holds a "Blessing of the Bikes" on the festival's opening Sunday. Farther down, opposite the beach itself, there is a rudimentary "Drive-In Christian Church," which offers space to thousands of motorcycles in front of a bare wooden stage. Despite their menacing appearances, bikers are a surprisingly pious bunch, and Christian clubs proliferate among them. There are the Bikers for Jesus, the Bikers for Christ, the Bikers for Life, Christ's Cruisers, and a whole host more, all operating under the aegis of a prominent Evangelical group, the Christian Motorcyclists Association. The CMA's 1,116 American chapters comprise 125,000 members, and their organization is thriving: In 2010, CMA affiliates were active in over 30 countries, donated $806,841.65 to partner ministries, and preached to over 170,000 people -- most of them motorcyclists -- around the United States. In Daytona Beach, they have come to the right place -- there are 246 churches in a city of only 60,000 people, and while the festival is on, attendance rises dramatically.
#page#In a local Five Guys burger joint at lunchtime, I stop and talk with three big and burly men, each with a shaved head, a de rigueur salt-and-pepper horseshoe mustache, and a vaguely mean image. They are all members of the Chariots of Light club, and have come down from Pennsylvania for the festival, stopping on the way to preach the Gospel and to pray against abortion. I ask what they are about, and the biggest man in the group points to his expansive right bicep, on which a faded tattoo of a cross with a motorcycle leaning against it is sandwiched between the words, "I ride for Him because He died for me." The word "LOVE" is inked in capital letters across the knuckles of his left hand. All three wear identical leather jackets, identifying them as members of their club and advertising quotations from Philippians and the Gospel of John.
N ot all the bikers at the rally carry slogans on their clothes and motorcycles, but those who do promote overwhelmingly conservative sentiments. Many fly American flags and exhibit slogans about freedom and the open road. Others are more directly political. The Rolling Thunder group -- which boasts more than 90 chapters nationwide, is overwhelmingly populated by veterans, and endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004 -- advertises its POW-MIA and veterans'-rights causes. (Its 2011 ride on Washington, D.C., attracted 400,000 participants.) There are bumper stickers that simply read "God and Country," or "It's Time for Another Tea Party," or "Helmet Laws Suck: Let Those Who Ride, Decide." About the only arguably liberal cause I see endorsed in my three days among them is the legalization of marijuana, which National Review has also long supported.
With the notable exception of the Ron Paul contingent -- which is well represented and typically vocal -- bikers tend to take positions rather than endorse candidates and, more than anything, seem fed up with the little things: with mandatory-helmet laws, interference with gun rights, and incessant nannying about food and drink and light bulbs. They are weary of being lectured about the environment and burdened with endless mandates and taxes. One festival-goer describes the current climate as being like "having your mother constantly calling you to check whether you've eaten your f***ing vegetables."
I ask a leather-clad woman how she feels about the contraception mandate. "It has got nothing to do with the government," she scoffs. "I don't want it banned and I don't want it forced. I run my own business and nobody's sex life ain't no one's but their own." Then she pauses and looks me up and down, perhaps mistaking me for someone who might wish to force or ban contraception. "What am I, twelve years old?" she asks. (It is abundantly clear from the way she is dressed that she is not.) Her attitude is typical. Bikers exhibit much that is consonant with individual liberty and with its most enduring icons. They mistrust rules and reject the supposedly superior wisdom of others. Ruggedly individual, they are the new cowboys -- the tattooed pastors of America's iron horses in an era in which trains have lost their romance and cars all look the same, and theirs is a simple refrain: Leave Me Alone.
That bikers lean rightward, with their knees close to the floor, is unsurprising. Personal transport has always been a redoubt of freedom -- for good and for ill -- but biking is particularly so. Although theirs is an inherently solo enterprise, bikers look out for one another; but they do not need to be instructed to do so, and some I speak to wonder out loud "what the hell is wrong with people" who need to be commanded to help out.
That bikers tend to be conservative is also demographically predictable. The first question I ask myself as I leave the airport and the bikes swarm around my car is, Where are all the young people and women? I am not helped by the local classic-rock radio station, which offers only the lazy platitudes by which our superficial age is marked, repeatedly pretending that motorcycle riders are a diverse crowd: "There is no such thing as an ' average biker,'" one such advert claims, before casually relating that black hip-hop producers and female first-grade teachers own Harley-Davidsons too.
#page#That is probably true, but the sentiment is disingenuous: There demonstrably is such a thing as an average biker. The gathering overwhelmingly consists of white, middle-aged men with the same facial hair and clothes -- who enjoy both sufficient income and sufficient free time to sustain an expensive and time-consuming hobby. The few under-forties who attend Bike Week appear on the non-American bikes -- "Jap bikes," they are called by the Harley-Davidson crowd -- and largely keep themselves to themselves. (They better resemble the cast of Jersey Shore than the Hells Angels and stick out like sore thumbs in the sea of leather and tattoos.) If women are riding they're riding pillion. No motorcycle with a man on it is ever driven by a woman, for that would upset the natural order; but then women tend not to be involved in the subculture, period. Nearly 600,000 people have descended on Daytona Beach for the rally, but only 130 take part in the Women's Ride, and this is a record turnout.
The ranks are disproportionately filled with professionals, ex-military types, and retirees. The average age of a Harley owner is 47, and his median household income is $83,000 -- well above the national median. Moreover, the income and age brackets are both rising: A recent study commissioned by Harley-Davidson showed that in 1987 half of all Harley riders were under age 35 and that their average household income was $38,000. If the trend continues, by 2035 the average biker will be receiving Social Security checks. In fact, many attendees already do. I meet a group of retirees from Wisconsin -- all Vietnam vets -- who have ridden down to Florida together. They plan to attend the entire festival. All in all, their time commitment is the best part of a month.
A nd what of the bad guys? Well, where there are cowboys, there will always be outlaws, and the "one percenters" -- a term coined by an exasperated American Motorcycle Association to describe those few whose income is derived from illegal sources such as crystal-meth production and whose involvement in the subculture is not desired -- still occasionally color the sport for all. Indeed, as recently as 1999, Taco Bowman, the "world leader" of the American Outlaws Association -- perhaps the largest and most dangerous "one percenter" group of its time -- was sentenced to two life terms in prison for carrying out multiple murders and bombings. So serious were the charges against him that Bowman, who boasts a swastika tattoo and has ties to various white-supremacist groups, made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1998.
Sipping giant beers, my retired friends from Wisconsin tell me that, in some parts of the country, they are still very much treated with suspicion. "You have to stay in a lot of hotels when you cross the country," one explains, "and if the weather is bad, you don't always get to choose where you stop. A few places are not happy when nine guys in leather jackets turn up on bikes. They can freak. You have to judge it carefully." While the outlaw tradition may still be honored in some circles, it is not honored by those I meet in Daytona. Biking is still ceremonially communal, but its edge has largely been blunted and the most its participants are guilty of is a wholesome enthusiasm for their hobby. Like Las Vegas, motorcycling has become a pastiche on itself.
By and large, bikers such as the Wisconsin nine are more likely to take part in groups such as the Patriot Guard Riders, which was formed in 2005 in response to the execrable Westboro Baptist Church's picketing of the funerals of fallen soldiers. The Patriot Guard comprises various existing clubs, including military groups such as the In Country Vets Motorcycle Club, the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, the American Legion Riders, and Rolling Thunder, in addition to a 20,000-strong law-enforcement group called the Blue Knights, and the stalwart Christian Motorcycle Association. Its stated mission is to "show . . . sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families, and their communities" and to "shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors," and the group's members, its website notes, have "one thing in common besides motorcycles," that being "an unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America's freedom and security."
Indeed, if there is one unifying sentiment among the people I have come across, it is love of country. It is profoundly important to most that Harley-Davidson is an American brand, and rare to see a biker without at least one American flag on his clothes or his bikes -- often on both. They constitute a legion of volunteers on wheels, representing -- in sundry ways, and in the pursuit of various good ends -- the "vast number of voluntary associations" of which Tocqueville spoke so warmly. They make their cases in rough language, and they go about their business ostentatiously; but their unifying cause is freedom and their sworn allegiance is to America -- and, with this in mind, we might well agree with the ubiquitous signs around Daytona Beach: Bikers Welcome Here.
Charles C. W. Cooke -- Charles C. W. Cooke is the editor of National Review Online . @charlescwcooke |
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
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The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
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Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
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After some of his potential recruits were admonished by the Republican Party, Mitt Romney has apparently given up his push to stop Donald Trump via a third-party run.
Citing a spokesman, CNN says Romney is no longer seeking others to join his NeverTrump-inspired effort.
According to the network's Dana Bash, the NeverTrump movement has been "shrinking" (to the point of near collapse) and a big part of the problem is the inability to find anyone willing to take on the presumptive Republican nominee. Read all >>
The most frustrating job in television news this week has to be covering events in North Korea where, as one CNN crew discovered, "reporting" consists largely of waiting in hotel lobbies while being kept miles away from anyone who matters.
But it did manage to capture something newsworthy while attempting to gain access to a rare conference of party leaders: their fleet of identical luxury cars parked out front.
Yes, while average North Koreans go without food, electricity and other basics, the upwardly mobile elite enjoy riding around in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz. Read all >>
After bowing out of a hard-fought presidential primary campaign, Tuesday was a rough night for Senator Ted Cruz.
Having no option but to withdraw from the race wasn't the only reason for distress: at the conclusion of his concession speech, the Texas Republican accidentally elbowed his wife, Heidi. Of course, it was caught on tape, leading to widespread ridicule from detractors.
Is it nice to kick a man when he's down, especially when he's as exhausted as Cruz was last night? Read all >>
Just in case presidential politics weren't surreal enough so far this year, a Ted Cruz staffer has upped the ante today with a vulgar outburst seen on live television.
During CNN's At This Hour, host Kate Bolduan was left red-faced after New Jersey State Campaign Director Steve Lonegan of the Cruz campaign answered a question about the number of delegates his candidate might receive during tonight's Indiana primary vote by saying, "we're not gonna nominate Hillary Clinton with a penis." Read all >>
Cable news networks have had a strange love/hate relationship with Donald Trump during this election cycle, where it seems perfectly normal to attack him one minute, then revel in the power of his promotional capabilities the next.
Can they have it both ways and maintain credibility?
Today, CNN is downright giddy after the GOP frontrunner called out one of its weekend hosts, Michael Smerconish. Apparently, this is something they'd hoped would happen for some time, given the headline and clip description they've used. Read all >> |
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Grace DeRepentigny was born in 1924 in Manchester, New Hampshire, a heavily Franco-American working-class city known for its textile mills. Her father, Al, was a merchant seaman who left the family when Grace was 10; her mother, Laurette, was a bitter would-be socialite who, as Emily Toth has recounted in her book about Grace, dreamed of writing for Harper's and bought flea-market items, which she then passed off as French family heirlooms. Despite both families' objections, Grace, still a teenager, married George Metalious, a studious Greek whom she'd known since the age of nine. Almost instantly, the marriage hit the skids. "I did not like belonging to Friendly Clubs and bridge clubs," Grace wrote later. "I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink. And George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like."
With her ponytail, baggy flannel shirts, and jeans, Grace broke every mold of the prim New England country wife: she was outspoken, a terrible housekeeper (once, when some P.R. guys from New York came to It'll Do, she grabbed what looked like a Brillo pad, only to discover it was a dead mouse), and shockingly well read. "She was a totally unbridled, free, glorious spirit," says Lynne Snierson, the daughter of Grace's longtime attorney, Bernard Snierson. "I didn't know any other woman like her. Grace swore, a lot, and she drank, a lot, and she had lots of guys around her. She got married and divorced and had affairs. And she talked about sex and she talked about real life and she didn't filter it. I didn't know any other woman who was like that in the 50s."
As a result, she quickly became a lightning rod for gossip wherever she lived, particularly when she would hole up writing and ignore her kids. "We didn't bother her when she was writing," says her daughter, Marsha Metalious Duprey, now 62. "We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if we did, but we didn't want to bother her. When she was writing, basically everything else went to hell: no housework got done, no cooking got done, and my dad mostly took care of us.... I didn't know any better, so I didn't question it."
Grace struck up a friendship with Laurose Wilkens, who wrote part-time for The Laconia Evening Citizen and had tracked Grace down when rumors surfaced that the wife of George Metalious, the new school principal, was writing a novel about some of the townspeople. Grace confirmed that she was working on a book, but insisted it was pure fiction. Soon, she and Laurie were together almost every day in the kitchen of Shaky Acres, Laurie's farm in Gilmanton.
While George began his job as a teacher and principal, Grace wrote. Laurie told her the story of Barbara Roberts, a local 20-year-old who in 1947 shot and killed her father, then buried his body in a goat pen on their farm. She had pleaded guilty to second-degree homicide and was sentenced to 30 years to life. Then the truth came out: for years, Roberts and her sister had been raped regularly by their father, and at times chained to a bed for days. One night he flew into a rage, chasing Barbara and her young brother around the kitchen table and threatening to kill them. She reached into a drawer, extracted her father's gun, and shot him dead. Only after an expose by some crusading journalists--including a cub reporter for the New Hampshire Sunday News by the name of Ben Bradlee--was Barbara Roberts freed.
Grace soaked up the details, and she used them in Peyton Place in the story of Selena Cross, the dark ingenue from the wrong side of the tracks who is brutally raped by her stepfather and kills him, burying his body in a sheep pen. (Saying that the American public wasn't ready for full-on incest, Kitty Messner insisted Grace change him from father to stepfather.) Grace frantically scribbled down additional tales of Gilmanton life, including some from Arlington "Chunky" Hartford, a Gilmanton cop and born storyteller who told Grace about "hard-cider parties" held in the basement of a local farmhouse. Men would supposedly pile in for up to a week at a time, getting sauced. The anecdotes also piled up--as did Gilmanton's wrath once they all appeared in print.
"A lot of people wouldn't read the book--or they said they wouldn't," says Esther Peters, who, as a radio host at WLNH, in Laconia, interviewed Grace shortly after Peyton Place was published, and who still lives in neighboring Guilford. "Of course what happened was that people in Gilmanton, they had the book. If you happened to go to their house and asked them to bring out a copy, they'd bring out a copy--and it generally fell open at one of the places where there was a rather torrid passage."
In retaliation, the town gossips spread Grace stories with brutal efficacy, from the outlandish (she had gone to the grocery store in a mink coat while naked underneath; she had greeted the milkman in the buff) to the valid (her house was filthy; she cheated on her husband). According to Emily Toth's biography, Grace had drifted into an affair with her neighbor Carl Newman and was often spotted carousing with him at the Rod and Gun Club, on Beacon Street. So people talked. And talked. Grace had, in effect, begun living Peyton Place.
The most damning rumor was also the most hurtful: that she hadn't actually written the book at all. "People would say, 'Oh, she couldn't have written that. Her husband went to college. I bet he wrote it,'" says John Chandler, Bernard Snierson's law partner. At one point Grace sat in Chandler's office, writing some background information for a legal matter. "After I read that," Chandler says, "there was no question in my mind about who wrote Peyton Place. "
In public, Grace struck back at her neighbors. Her point wasn't that her life was perfect; it was that their lives weren't, either. The only difference was that she wasn't hiding it. "To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture," she said. "But if you go beneath that picture, it's like turning over a rock with your foot--all kinds of strange things crawl out. Everybody who lives in town knows what's going on--there are no secrets--but they don't want outsiders to know."
In New York, Brandt arranged for Grace to be interviewed on a local news show called Night Beat, hosted by a young, rising journalist, Mike Wallace. Wallace had spent his boyhood summers in New Hampshire. "She was simply a surprise to all of us," he recalls. "Because of her background, because of the way she looked, because of 'Peyton Place,' New Hampshire. That kind of thing has been going on? Well, of course that kind of thing had been going on in small towns all over the world, forever. But suddenly here was this bland housewife."
Terrified at the thought of being on live television, Grace was a wreck, accidentally ripping her girdle right before the show aired. She was helped by an aspiring actress, Jacqueline Susann, who did commercial breaks for the station. (Ten years later, Susann would follow in Grace's footsteps by writing the steamy cult best-seller Valley of the Dolls. )
In her book on Grace, Toth relates how the author, just before the program started, begged Wallace's producer, Ted Yates, to promise that Wallace would not ask if Peyton Place was her autobiography. No sooner had the cameras begun rolling than Wallace, smoking a cigarette in his best noir fashion, turned to her and said, "So, Grace, tell me, is Peyton Place your autobiography?"
"Really," Wallace says with a chuckle when reminded of the incident. "Can you imagine that I would do a thing like that?"
Grace was more comfortable with the print media, where over the years she tossed out chewy bons mots feasted upon by reporters who were charmed by her self-effacing earthiness. "I have a feeling that Gilmanton got as angry with me as it did because secretly my neighbors agreed with me," she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "That was where the shoe pinched. You get angrier about the truth than you do about lies."
In October 1956, Grace went to New York and checked into the Algonquin to sign a $250,000 deal with Twentieth Century Fox producer Jerry Wald for the movie and television rights to Peyton Place. Her attorney, Snierson--whom she'd met years earlier, after she'd passed a bad check--urged her to set up trusts for her children to protect her newfound wealth. He drafted all the paperwork. Even though Grace signed with Wald, she never got around to inking Snierson's documents.
She was distracted: she'd fallen in love with Thomas James Martin, "T.J. the D.J.," who spun discs at WLNH. Stocky and handsome, he was the anti-George, a throwback to the rugged princes Grace had written about in Aunt Georgie's bathtub. They quickly became fixtures at the Laconia Tavern, where Grace was soon as notorious for downing highballs as for her racy book.
One night, a car pulled up to the house in Gilmanton after midnight. Grace and T.J. awoke to a camera's blinding flash--and George standing at the foot of the bed, snapping pictures. He calmly told them to put on some clothes and meet him downstairs. Wrapped in a blanket, Grace tore into him. But George had the upper hand: adultery was illegal. "I've got you," he told T.J. "You're going to jail."
The next day, Grace went to Snierson to file for divorce. As part of the settlement, she agreed to pay George's tuition for his master's degree. In exchange, he turned over the undeveloped roll.
Grace and T.J.'s relationship was volatile at best, with T.J. assuming more and more control over Grace--including how she blew through her fledgling fortune. "He would say to her, 'Darling, you're Grace Metalious. You don't get a room at the Plaza. You get an entire floor!'" Snierson says. So Grace did--along with a new Cadillac, new clothes, dinners at '21,' cases of champagne, and chartered flights to the Caribbean. Grace poured thousands of dollars into renovating the country house she'd bought on Meadow Pond Road, which had once been owned by a Chicago gangster. Opportunistic "friends" began drifting in and out at all hours.
All the while, Grace wrestled with the notion of celebrity. Staying with T.J. and the kids at the Beverly Hilton, Grace played the part of the kid in the candy store. She glimpsed Elizabeth Taylor at a Screen Actors Guild dinner, and chitchatted with Cary Grant on the back lot. Producer Wald made sure the family was treated to limos and lavish dinners. Marsha even got whisked to a studio set to cop an autograph from Elvis Presley, who between takes was playing a pickup basketball game. But, for Grace, it was largely an act. "I regarded the men who made Peyton Place as workers in a gigantic flesh factory," she would write in a Sunday-newspaper supplement, the American Weekly, "and they looked upon me as a nut who should go back to the farm."
And as the press continued to play up *Peyton Place'*s more tawdry aspects, Grace's insecurities ballooned. At lunch at Romanoff's, John Michael Hayes, who wrote the screenplay for the film, asked Grace the same question Mike Wallace had: Was it her autobiography? Grace asked him to repeat the question. Then she tossed her drink all over him.
Lana Turner and Hope Lange take on the film roles of Constance MacKenzie and Selena Cross. From Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest. |
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China's Ministry of National Defense celebrated the 90th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Sunday. The first ever 'Chinese Army Day' commemorated the Communist Party's formation in 1927 under Chairman Mao.
Video Source: Metro (UK)
China's president and commander-in-chief of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, supervised the enormous military parade held at the desert Zhurihe military training base in Inner Mongolia Province -- 400km north-west of Beijing. The army showcased 12,000 of its 2.3 million military service personnel surrounded by type-99 battle tanks, attack helicopters, J-20 and J-15 stealth fighter jets, H-6K bombers and even nuclear missiles. Chinese state media likened the army base -- the largest in Asia -- to the US Fort Irwin National Training Center in California's Mojave desert.
To conclude proceedings China presented its new Dongfeng-31AG intercontinental ballistic missile, which can travel up to 11,000km and is capable of reaching the United States.
It's not the first time China has held public military parades. However, this latest exhibition is unprecedented in scale, with a clear overarching theme of "unswerving" loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. It will send out a message of Xi's tight control of the military ahead of a major CCP summit in fall, which occurs only twice a decade and is likely to include a committee reshuffle.
Defense ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang told journalists that the parade "fully demonstrates that soldiers firmly support, and are loyal and respectful of the Chinese Communist party's central committee, with comrade Xi as its core."
After personally inspecting troops, a camouflaged President Xi announced that the armed forces have the confidence and capability to drive China's ascendancy to a world power.
"All comrades, commanders and soldiers of the PLA: You must unswervingly follow the absolute leadership of the Communist party of China, listen to the directions set by the party and follow its command. Wherever the party points, you shall march."
Chinese 'Army Day' Parade. Image Source: Associated Press
China's Xinhua and other state-controlled media reported that the parade displayed the strength of the modern Chinese military, which "contributes to safeguarding national security and world peace". Foreign reporters were not permitted to attend.
The Communist Party has long claimed that its military expansion is purely for peaceful means and national defense. However, tensions still exist with Taiwan and several Southeast Asian nations over China's claim to most of the South China Sea, as well as its construction of artificial military islands across the region. The desert army base also hosts full-size mock targets including Taiwan's presidential palace.
Relations between China and the United States are still fraught. Last Friday, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile which Pyongyang claimed was capable of reaching the US mainland. President Trump publicly expressed his frustration with China for not pressuring Kim Jong-un to cease nuclear research and missile programs.
I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet...
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017
...they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017
Tucker is a foreign correspondent and media analyst for Not Liberal.
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North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun published an article Sunday indicating that Hawaii and Alaska could...
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China's Ministry of National Defense celebrated the 90th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Sunday |
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Speaking at the launch of the new ITV talent show, the 42-year-old rapper told press including Express.co.uk that the children on the show have more prospects than their adult counter-parts.
will.i.am began: "There's not so much pressure on these kids to win The Voice.
"The prize is not a record contract, it's PS30,000 towards a music scholarship and a trip to Disneyland.
"Because of that, there's more of a chance that the kid is going to develop and brush past the cynics," The Black Eyed Peas star added.
This was echoed by fellow coaches, Pixie Lott and Danny Jones when the former explained: "It's an incredible start for a 7-14 year old.
"They're so young and they're got a massive future ahead of them," the 26-year-old pop princess added.
McFly star Danny chipped in that he would like to work with the finalists in a potential production role. |
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Speaking at the launch of the new ITV talent show, the 42-year-old rapper told press including Express.co.uk that the children on the show have more prospects than their adult counter-parts.
will.i.am began: "There's not so much pressure on these kids to win The Voice.
"The prize is not a record contract, it's PS30,000 towards a music scholarship and a trip to Disneyland.
"Because of that, there's more of a chance that the kid is going to develop and brush past the cynics," The Black Eyed Peas star added.
This was echoed by fellow coaches, Pixie Lott and Danny Jones when the former explained: "It's an incredible start for a 7-14 year old.
"They're so young and they're got a massive future ahead of them," the 26-year-old pop princess added. |
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (photo: AFP/Getty Images). King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Islamic State (Isis), now being described in some quarters as "the most capable military power in the Middle East outside Israel", is at the top of the global agenda. Naturally, there is discussion of its origins and backers.
It is notable that, in particular, the Saudi government has scrambled to deny any links to the group. In the past two weeks, the usually low-profile Saudi ambassador in the UK sent a strongly worded letter to the Guardian. The embassy issued a press release to the same effect, and last week the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia himself made a statement condemning Isis. This follows a $100m contribution to a UN anti-terror programme.
Saudi Arabia is increasingly feeling the heat of the Sunni hardline blowback. While the Saudi government technically doesn't sponsor Isis, it has promoted a fundamentalist Salafi interpretation of Islam that has encroached into the mainstream Sunni space. This has created the conditions, inside and outside the country, for extremism to breed.
The clergy is a powerful force in Saudi Arabia. Its influence derives from the fact that the royal family has entered into a formal pact with the sheikhs, under which the understanding is that the House of Saud can hold on to political power, while the religious establishment gets to dictate the national character of Saudi Arabia, one that has remained doggedly extreme. This vision has also been exported abroad by both state and non-state actors, the former as a clumsy substitute for a coherent foreign policy, by which the Saudi government contributes funds for mosques and charitable organisations in Muslim countries as a way of purchasing influence; the latter via personal wealth and the zeal of private citizens.
Osama bin Laden was a perfect combination of the two, a personally motivated non-state actor, radicalised in the schools and mosques of Jeddah, who managed to also rope in the Saudi establishment by selling a religious mission to them -- pushing back the Soviet invasion -- in the guise of a political project.
But it seems even Saudis are beginning to see the foolhardiness of this arrangement. In a searing essay in the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh last week, Hissa bint Ahmed bin Al al-Sheikh, a member of one of the most influential religious families in Saudi Arabia and a relative of the grand mufti, rails against the "farce of fatwas" in the kingdom, and records a litany of extremist measures introduced since the 1980s that have stifled public life and glorified a culture of "hatred and death" that she recognises in Isis. This is a culture disseminated via state media, the national curriculum and public order laws -- legislation that many Saudi intellectuals warned against.
The Saudi establishment has sacrificed its people, and the wider Muslim world that lies within its influence, in return for immunity from religious revolt of the type that threatened Mecca in the 1970s. While the immediate focus vis-a-vis Isis needs to be on practical counter-extremism measures, the west can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to Saudi's internal contradictions. These have spawned a decadent and west-friendly royal family that preside over a society where clerics run amok, where imams rant against infidels, religious minorities are oppressed, education is heavily slanted towards religion and where people are beheaded for sorcery. As far as containing the radical Islamic threat, the status quo is increasingly no longer working -- neither for the Saudis, nor the western governments who support them.
Saudi salafism is not the wellspring of hardline Islamic groups worldwide, but it is part of something that might be -- a tendency for Arab and Muslim governments to pay lip service to Islam to bolster their religious credentials through politically expedient means. These leaders simultaneously instrumentalise religion while oppressing any form of religious opposition. The combination of serious cash and the religious weight that comes from being the birthplace of Islam renders Saudi Arabia the most dangerous member of this club.
The long-term solution to the constant reincarnation of radical Islamic political movements doesn't lie in grand public gestures like anti-terrorism funding, strong statements of condemnation, or "rehabilitation clinics" for radicals, but in dismantling state-sponsored religious indoctrination. As the Isis threats march on, the old calculations no longer work in Arab governments' favour. |
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, left, welcome Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani |
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The International Organization for Migration reported on Monday that an airstrike on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in Yemen's Hajjah Province killed at least forty people and injured two hundred others. The attack occurred on the fifth consecutive day of airstrikes carried out by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by intelligence and logistical support from the United States
The Imploding Middle East, Saudi Kingdom And Pakistan By Haris Khurshid
In latest turn of the events in Middle East now Pakistan is at crossroads to get embroiled in a distant conflict involving its Muslim benefactor Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or extricate itself from an avoidable war looming on the horizon of Yemen. The region is experiencing new wave of violence and disintegration in less stable parts mainly drawn by Shia Sunni sectarian and ethnic prejudice
Even America's 'Media Watchdogs' Hide U.S.'s Ukrainian Nazification & Ethnic Cleansing By Eric Zuesse
The U.S.'news' media are so censored and controlled, so that even America's 'media watchdog' organizations -- mediamatters.org and fair.org on the left; and aim.org and mrc.org on the right -- have hidden from the American public President Barack Obama's Ukrainian coup in February 2014 that violently overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President and replaced him with a Ukrainian nazi (racist-fascist) rabidly eliminationist anti-Russian, police-state regime in Kiev
Accountability Must Be At The Heart Of The Paris Climate Pact By Harro van Asselt, Hakon Saelen and Pieter Pauw
Slowly but surely, the first climate pledges for the 2015 agreement - or, in UN-speak, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) - have started to trickle in. Mexico and Norway were the latest countries to formally announce their pledges, with the United States and Russia also expected to submit their offers this week. Under the 2015 agreement, the hope is that INDCs will prove to be crucial instruments in preventing dangerous climate change. Yet a key element is still missing
Pakistan has halted work on six coal-fired power projects of some 14,000 megawatts due to environmental concerns, lack of needed infrastructure and foreign investment
Surviving Climate Disaster In Africa's Sahel By Thomas C. Mountain
After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government of Eritrea initiated a major water conservation plan that along with reforestation and soil conservation is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted
We Are Losing The Oceans By Paul Craig Roberts
From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored
Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country's major patron of the last 13 years -- and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces
Two Muslims Lynched In Two Different Cities Of The World Incited Two Different Reactions By Abdul Rashid Agwan
The gory events of Kabul and Dimapur expose modern hypocrisy where both civilizational zeal and barbaric spree are going hand in hand, where religions fail to stimulate respect for human dignity in their followers and where the rule of law is yet not honored by those who are supposed to be its vouched guardians
Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers By Matt Peppe
In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out. Last week, in an act of mass murder with more than 12 times the number of victims, 27-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided the plane he was flying straight into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board. Yet it is only the former murderous act that has been described by politicians and portrayed in the media as an existential threat and an example of terrorism
Television Commercial In California Asks Drone Pilots To Stop Killing By David Swanson
This may be a first: a television ad campaign in a U.S. state capitol appealing to someone to stop murdering human beings who have, in most cases, already been born. A new 15-second television ad, a variation on one that's aired in Las Vegas near Creech Air Force Base, is debuting this week in Sacramento, Calif.
BOOKS: Occupy These Photos By Mickey Z.
Now, I'm asking you to be part of that mission. Occupy These Photos is a book born on the streets and we're seeking funding in the same DIY manner: from the ground up. Please click here to find out how you can get involved! Thanks in advance for your support. Without you, this book would not have happened.
Indian Parliamentarian Doubts If Tobacco Kills! Do Not Reinvent The Wheel By Bobby Ramakant
Indian parliamentarian who is chairing the committee which told the government not to implement stronger pictorial graphic health warnings on tobacco packs (and raise the warning size from 40% to 85%) from 1st April 2015, casted doubts whether tobacco causes cancer. India is at risk of reversing the gains made in saving lives from tobacco! He is the same parliamentarian who had raised similar questions in the parliament in 2011 and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India had given him detailed response underlining the alarming magnitude of the tobacco pandemic in the country
30 March, 2015
Yemen: Saudi-Led Airstrikes Take Civilian Toll By Human Rights Watch
The Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab countries that conducted airstrikes in Yemen on March 26 and 27, 2015, killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 34 civilians during the first day of bombings in Sanaa, the capital, Human Rights Watch said today. The 11 dead included 2 children and 2 women. Saudi and other warplanes also carried out strikes on apparent targets in the cities of Saada, Hodaida, Taiz, and Aden
Yemen: No Military Solution By Chandra Muzaffar
To bring order and stability to a nation which is in such a terrible mess, one has to persuade all the relevant players to talk to one another, to negotiate, to compromise. The peaceful, non-violent approach to conflict resolution has not been given enough space and scope to succeed in Yemen. The UN has been trying to play a role in a very difficult situation. The UN should be given full support by all the contending forces
A Middle East Holocaust By Paul Craig Roberts
How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression? Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the bombers. Iran is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and China can destroy the US and all of Washington's vassal states. The intensity of Washington's propaganda war is driving the world to destruction
A Pakistani Woman named Aafia Siddiqui was abducted from a taxi in Karachi, Pakistan along with her 3 children 12 years ago on March 30, 2003. At the time she was vulnerable, recently divorced from an abusive husband; living with her mother; her father had just died of a heart attack. The youngest child was an infant. Following her abduction, Aafia Siddiqui and her children disappeared from view for 5 years. She spent those years in US Black Site prisons in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One can only imagine the torment she suffered there, in a system created to enable the torture and abuse of terrorism suspects. She was a woman alone. They took her children, and threatened them when personal torture was not enough to gain her acquiescence
A study published in the journal Science found government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. Now, the question is: Whether to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions?
Does Civilisation Mean Insanity And Violence? By Sukumaran C. V.
Biodiversity is the prime necessity for the continuance of Life on Earth, and the humans destroy the very thing which helps them survive on earth
Postcard From The End Of America: Carlisle, PA By Linh Dinh
Black, white, brown or yellow, anyone who's dwelling within these Disunited States will be thoroughly nicked up, if not buried alive, from the coming collapse and turmoil, and it's telling that our final chapter started with a double castrations that was broadcast, live, to the entire world, and that one of our bravest dissidents, Bradley Manning, also wishes to have nothing between his legs, and that our present day Jim Thorpe, one Bruce Jenner, also dreams of the day he will finally be emasculated. Don't worry, it's coming
Gendered Dis-preference In Indian Society By Roli Misra
In present context with the advent of new technology the practice of female infanticide has been replaced by genocide of millions of women known as female foeticide - denying the girl its very right to take birth. The rapid spread of the use of ultrasounds and amniocentesis for sex determination followed by sex selective induced abortions has created a situation of daughter drought with tragic consequences
Lambs To The Slaughter: The Dying Future Of Higher Education By P K Vijayan
For the sake of our professional integrity, then, for the sake of our students, for the sake of the institutions that we have studied and worked in, for the sake of the society to which we belong and to which we are accountable - for everyone's sake, and not just our own, it is time for the teachers' movement to come together once again, and give an exemplary response to the forces that seek to grind us down
Attacking The Cross: Rise In Anti Christian Violence By Ram Puniyani
Julio Ribeiro is one of the best known police officers in India. Recently (March 16, 2015) he wrote in his article that he is feeling like a stranger in this country. 'I feel threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in my own country'. This pain and anguish of a distinguished citizen, an outstanding police officer has to be seen against the backdrop of the rising attacks on Churches and rape of the 71 year old nun in Kolkata. All over the country the rage amongst the Christian community is there to be seen in the form of silent marches, candle light vigils and peaceful protests
Islam, Peace, Justice & Dialogue By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's Interaction Interaction with a group of Catholic priests and nuns, New Delhi
The Healing Power Of Meditation By William T. Hathaway
TM produces mental and physical rest that is twice as deep as in sleep, although we're fully awake. This rejuvenating state enables the body's self-healing mechanism to repair the damage from traumatic events and illnesses. With these blockages gone we are more able to develop our full capabilities
29 March, 2015
Arab leaders have agreed to form a joint military force at a Sharm el-Sheikh summit, hosting Egyptian President Abdel Sisi has announced. The meeting was dominated by the situation in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia leads a bombing campaign against rebels
The US is now openly coordinating another act of naked aggression committed by a tandem force of two US-collaborator countries competing for the title of world's worst domestic dictatorship: Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Shell's Climate Change Strategy: Narcissistic, Paranoid, And Psychopathic By John Ashton
In an open letter to Shell's Ben Van Beurden, the UK's former top climate envoy says now is the time for him to show leadership
A week with Wyden shows a secret fundraiser for a secretly negotiated corporate agreement
Stop Smoking The Democrack By Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
The U.S. government is toying with a war with nuclear Russia while already waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having done severe damage to Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Military spending is climbing ever higher. Presidential war powers are ever more extreme. The proliferation of nuclear technology is combining with the ease and secrecy of drone wars to raise the risk of a Dr. Strangelove finish to the human species. And, let's face it, you had more time to give a damn when the president was a Republican
Scientists and scientific organisations around the world call on Government of India to withdraw a flawed study on chrysotile asbestos and stop blocking UN Convention
Re-Probe Hashimpura Killing Case By Syed Ali Mujtaba
It's bolt on India's democracy that the murders of Hashimpura are let out for want of evidence. There is hardly any hue and cry, local and international pressure being built for re-probe. The evidences are abundant, it needs to pieced together and bring it for the judicial scrutiny. Re-probe of Hashimpura carnage alone can instill confidence among the minority community in the country
Tobacco or Health! U Turn On Pictorial Warning On Tobacco Products By Subhash Gatade
Government is set to defer indefinitely the implementation of notification for increasing the size of pictorial warning on tobacco products beyond April one, when it was to come into force. ..The notification regarding amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules, 2008 sought increase in the size of specified health warning from the current 40 per cent to 85 per cent of the principal display area of the package of tobacco products
28 March, 2015
Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched airstrikes in Yemen against rebel Shiite Houthi forces gaining more ground. The mainly Gulf coalition, which also includes the US, is trying to help embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Twenty-four people were killed and 43 injured as a result of Saudi-led airstrikes over the last 24 hours, Yemen's Saba state news agency reported the Interior Ministry saying in a statement
Nuclear Threat Escalating Beyond Political Rhetoric By Thalif Deen
As a new cold war between the United States and Russia picks up steam, the nuclear threat is in danger of escalating - perhaps far beyond political rhetoric
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth's Ability To Support Life By Paul Craig Roberts
David Ray Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin's book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? The book is a carefully researched document
No Ban On Coal Finance As Green Climate Fund Eyes First Projects By Megan Darby
The Green Climate Fund has not ruled out backing coal plants after a protracted three-day board meeting in Songdo, South Korea. Tense negotiations ended at 04 20 on Thursday with agreement on seven intermediaries to disburse funds for low carbon development and climate adaptation in poor countries
Two Degree Celsius Climate Change Target 'Utterly Inadequate By Countercurrents.org
The official global target of a 2degC temperature rise is 'utterly inadequate' for protecting those at most risk from climate change, says a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), writing a commentary in the open access journal Climate Change Responses. The commentary presents a rare inside-view of a two-day discussion at the Lima Conference of the Parties (COP) on the likely consequences of accepting an average global warming target of 2degC versus 1.5degC
The Czech Republic And The Fine Art Of Collaboration By Andre Vltchek
The US military convoy will soon be passing through the Czech territory, from the Baltics and Poland, to its permanent base in Bavaria, Germany. That is bad enough. The Czechs should not have allowed the convoy to pass. Provoking Russia and moving closer and closer to the fascist Empire is a shameless and cowardly act
Coming Home By William T. Hathaway
From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War. RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from antiwar activists, the true stories of their efforts to change our warrior culture. In this chapter a mother tells of her son's return from combat. She wishes to remain anonymous
Cultural Hegemony And Social Change: 2015 By Jon Kofas
There are conservative analysts who assume that more than anything people crave safety and security. Cultural hegemony rests on the fears of the people who have been conditioned to accept the status quo and avert risk when it comes to securing a new social contract that would represent all people. Some advocates of democracy argue that actualizing their potential is just as important for human beings, but this entails having an institutional structure that permits and promotes those possibilities. I have argued in the past that uprisings are very possible in the 21st century, especially after the next inevitable deep recession, but systemic change is highly unlikely
It's been a bad couple of weeks for Monsanto. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines for not reporting hundreds of uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals at its eastern Idaho phosphate plant. It also paid out a string of lawsuit settlements totaling $350,000 as a result of its GMOs tainting wheat in seven US states. Such amounts represent little more than a tap on the wrist for a company that rakes in sales of almost $16 billion dollars annually
Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict By William James Martin
The Palestinians have little to offer Obama. Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term. If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice
Brutal Lathi Charge On Workers Outside Delhi Secretariat By Abhinav Sinha
Complete account of the brutal lathi charge on workers outside Delhi Secretariat on the orders of Kejriwal Government on March 25, 2015
Human Rights Violations by the Punjab Government and Punjab Police regarding the Surat Singh Khalsa fast unto death
27 March, 2015
Airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by other members of Gulf Cooperating Council and the U.S. government, continued to hit Yemen on Thursday as the situation in one of the world's most impoverished, yet strategically important countries continues to unravel amid what can only be described now as all-out war. Reports indicate that a first wave of bombings overnight which resulted in a number of civilian deaths--including entire families trapped in flattened houses--have spurred widespread anger in Sanaa and other targeted cities, even among members of the population opposed to the Houthi rebels
Saudi Arabia, Egypt Prepare US-Backed Invasion Of Yemen By Niles Williamson
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are preparing a US-backed military invasion of Yemen aimed at pushing back the Houthi militia that has taken over much of the country and reasserting the control of besieged President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that the three-pronged assault would come from Saudi Arabia in the north and from the Red Sea in the west and the Arabian Sea in the south. As many as five Egyptian troop ships have been stationed off the coast of Yemen. The officials said that the assault would begin after airstrikes had sufficiently weakened the Houthi rebels
5 Facts You Need To Know About Yemen And Its Conflicts By Russia Today
One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players - and some of the world's most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation's conflicts
US Warplanes Attack Targets In Center Of Tikrit By Patrick Martin
US warplanes began air strikes on Islamic State positions in the center of Tikrit Wednesday night, the first involvement of US forces in the bloody fighting in that Iraqi city, the hometown of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Military sources said at least 180 targets were struck in one of the most ferocious bombardments since the US resumed military operations in Iraq last August
Far from being a "Sunni jihadist group", ISIS is yet another creation of botched up U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World. Attributing anything Islamic to the group is as ridiculous as attributing American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and illegal detention of "illegal combatants" at Guantanamo Bay to Christianity. Nevertheless, ISIS is an enigma, a by-product of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war, and last but not least, an integral part of Washington's false flag operation in the Muslim World
Europe Must Not Be Forced Into A Nuclear War With Russia By John Scales Avery
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it. Europe must not be the close ally (or vassal) of the world's greatest purveyor of violence and war
The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU's Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013 By Eric Zuesse
So: now you know why Yanukovych, the very next day after his learning about the $160B price tag of the EU's offer, turned it down, and also why this revelation is still news, more than a year later -- just as it was news to me until I happened upon it only today
Amnesty: Gaza Firing Of Indiscriminate Rockets Is War Crime By Robert Barsocchini
Amnesty notes in a new report that attacks by Gazans resisting Israeli occupation, invasion, and terrorist attacks amount to war crimes, due to the uncontrollable nature of the rudimentary projectiles Gazans are forced to use because of the Israeli occupation and siege keeping Gaza isolated from the rest of the world. "According to UN data, more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel during the conflict." But the western media is silent on the number of casualty caused by these projectiles compared to the overwhelming death and destruction caused by Israel's assualt on Gaza
New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During And After WWII By Robert Barsocchini
Germany's The Local reports: Professor Miriam Gebhardt's book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin
A Different Form Of Holocaust Denial By Mickey Z.
The use of the word "holocaust" in relation to factory farming is semantically accurate but horribly insensitive and demonstrably ineffectiv
Volume Loss From Antarctic Ice Shelves Is Accelerating, Finds Study By Countercurrents.org
Scientists have warned: The ice around the edge of Antarctica is melting faster than previously thought, potentially unlocking meters of sea-level rise in the long-term
Vast Majority Of Americans Believe That The Climate Is Changing By Ian James
Stanford University professor Jon Krosnick has been studying Americans' attitudes about global warming for nearly two decades and has found in repeated polls that a large majority see climate change as a threat to future generations that should be addressed
In tracing the rapid deterioration of the legal intellect in Sri Lanka, the extrajudicial killings committed by the State should be scrutinised as one of the most significant factors for such deterioration
The Supreme Court's scrapping of Section 66 A of the Information Technology Act for being "unconstitutional in entirety" is indeed a great moment in the life of the democracy. The Act did, in fact, invade citizenry's right of free speech "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately". However, is this really a moment to celebrate in the life of a republic whose criminal justice system is rotten to the core? Will it really lead to any exercise of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, in a land where ordinary citizens fear the police more than the criminals?
Revisiting The Caste Question By Priyanka Dass Saharia
How is modern form of caste in contemporary times? Nicholas Dirks had argued on colonial power knowledge complexes instrumental in reifying it within bureaucratic structures and discourses. The various institutions of caste were used as tools to manage the divide and rule policies perpetuated by the British. The question then becomes as to what form did these changes take? In what ways did the imported modernity of colonialism changed the 'registers' of belief and social reality in India?
Examinations And Professional Competence By S.G.Vombatkere
The recent news reports of wholesale cheating in matriculation examinations in Bihar, with pictures of accomplices dangerously climbing the walls of buildings in which examinations were being held, to hand over cheating-aids to candidates, are horrifying. The physical risk taken by the accomplices shows that the cash paid to them - by parents who are okay with cheating, and making arrangements to "help" their wards - is adequate
26 March, 2015
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared "to protect and defend the legitimate government" of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi
US Airstrikes, Coupled With Iran-Backed Militias And Iraqi Forces, Target ISIS In Tikrit By Jon Queally
As Middle East historian Juan Cole points out, the U.S. military on Wednesday into Thursday was assisting the Saudi bombing of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, while simultaneously collaborating (at least indirectly) with Iranian military advisors from the Iranian Republican Guard Corp in the operation against ISIS in Tikrit. "The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region," he writes. "But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran."
Washington's Two Air Wars: With Iran In Iraq, With Saudis (Against Iran) In Yemen By Juan Cole
The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region. But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran
"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
Obama Now Sides w. Poroshenko & EU To End Ukraine's War By Eric Zuesse
Obama has other fish to fry with them -- such as his proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), to grant international corporations effective control over the environmental, labor, and product-safety regulations of participating countries. He seems to have decided (at least for the time being) to pursue -- via other routes than Ukraine -- his war against Russia
Agent Orange Funding Opens Door To US Militarism And Covert Action In Vietnam By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Is the United States finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country's affairs as part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" strategy?
Globalization and cheater economics have been destroying the world's great rivers and their fisheries. Most people know about the devastation of rivers from water pollution, but not as many are aware of the significant impacts of big dams, river engineering, and real estate development in and on top of rivers. These activities can seriously damage fisheries and impair the natural functions of riverine ecosystems. A true-cost, steady state economy would, for the most part, avoid the continuing tragic dismantlement of rivers and fisheries
Imagine if an American presidential candidate made a plea to his supporters on election day with the following statement: "The Republican administration is in danger. Black voters are going en masse to the polls. Liberal NGOs are bringing them on buses." Even in a country where Chris Matthews is a media celebrity and Pamela Geller is an intellectual, the statement would be scandalous, a political death wish even. In Israel, however, the opposite is true. In a message delivered in a video on Facebook, incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a sinister call appealing to ingrained racism in Israeli society: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses."
Despite Protests, Japan Diverts Funds Earmarked To Fight Climate Change To Finance Coal Plants In India, Bangladesh By Countercurrents.org
Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, reported the Associated Press
Premises On The Question Of Political Crisis In Bangladesh By Farooque Chowdhury
Today's Bangladesh faces political crisis as scores of news-reports and views claim [an end-note to this article cites headings/excerpts of a few of those], and today's Bangladesh doesn't face political crisis as one can claim periods of turmoil are not crisis, can cite a few data from economy, and can also refer to a lull within a long period of crisis. Both the statements, one can claim, are correct in relative terms. On the other hand, any of the two cancels the other. Only a scientific approach to the question - crisis - can provide a reliable answer. The approach should look into all related aspects instead of making sweeping remarks based on superficial observations and shallow search that ignores basic elements of crisis
Pads Against Sexism Campaign - Some Issues By Parvin Sultana
Elone Kastratia started a unique street art protest using Sanitary napkins with messages against sexual violence in her hometown Krlsruhe, Germany which went viral in social media. With rapidly spreading across to other countries, it was picked up by students of universities like Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They put up sanitary napkins in various spots in the universities. The idea behind using sanitary napkins to start such awareness campaign was to use blunt hard hitting methods in starting a dialogue around sexual harassment of women. The means used raised many eyebrows in a society where sexism continues to be rampant
A Deeper Look At Vedic History Suggests A Tribal Melting Pot That May Surprise The Hindu Nationalist By Amritanshu Pandey
While the nationalists speak of a golden past the truth is that ancient India may very well have been the equivalent of a medieval Arabia! Realisation of this could help us better accept India's vast cultural diversity, and prevent us from engaging in acts such as the ban on beef-production simply because it offends the culture of a select group. The truth is that there could have been several ancient Indian tribes that relished beef, while others abstained from its consumption. Which of them represent the real India, and who are we truly descended from?
The Fear Factor In Indian Republic By Parvez Alam
I am tempted to write because I am feeling insecure. May be I shouldn't write because it becomes easy for them to identify me and kill me. They can kill me any time anywhere, in day light, at mid night, in Hashimpura or in Sopore or in Batla House. What is the purpose of these institutions, only killing and intimidating or something else? Why have we made our society in such a way that police and army symbolize only fear? Why we train security personnel in the fashion which create them spineless robots who just do not feel any acquiescence with thinking and judging? Why are we not agitating against the acts of violence, denial of justice, inhumanity and banality of evil? Why are we so silent when we are feeling so disturbed inside?
A Guide To Understanding Our Times - Review of Recollection of Things Learned By Gaither Stewart By William T. Hathaway
G aither Stewart is a man of passions. In The Europe Trilogy he shared with us his passion for international espionage and intrigue. In Voices from Pisalocca he shared his passion for village life in his adoptive country, Italy. In The Fifth Sun he shared his passion for Native-American mythology. Now in Recollection of Things Learned he shares his passion for socialism, both the complexity of its theory and the clash of its praxis.
25March, 2015
The issue of rising food Prices across the globe is a matter of great concern, and is being discussed on many international forums. Studies show that, since households in developing countries spend most of their income on food items, rising food prices affect them significantly more than households in developed countries
Hold The Rich Accountable In New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs By Thalif Deen
The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments - this time particularly by the rich - if the UN's 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed
Two Towns Face The Fallout As Himalayan Glaciers Melt By Daniel Grossman
For two towns in northern India, melting glaciers have had very different impacts -- one town has benefited from flowing streams and bountiful harvests; but the other has seen its water supplies dry up and now is being forced to relocate
U.S.-v.-Russia: Even Stephen Cohen Is Starting To Speak The Truth By Eric Zuesse
An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) "for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real," and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this "possibly a fateful turning-point in history." He also says "it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance."
How The US Government And US Military Became Murder, Inc. By Paul Craig Roberts
The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war. If the crazed Russophobic US generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will be destroyed. The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war nuclear
Resisting Israeli Politics By Brenda Heard
Six months prior to the upcoming UK general election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published its "2015 General Election Jewish Manifesto." This forty-page document urges both existing and prospective members of the UK Parliament to support various "policy asks" and to "champion these causes." The Manifesto was styled after a very similar one created for the 2014 EU elections. Indeed their goals appear the same: to ensure a pro-Israeli agenda in the House of Commons and beyond
Supreme Court Decision On Section 66A Lays The Basis Of Fifth Pillar Of Democracy By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
India has now unrestricted freedom to speak and express on social sites, albeit qualified by the reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Art. 19 of the constitution. This development makes India one of the most advanced countries in the world where people can release their grievances against the system, and against the leaders who for no attainments still glorify themselves. It gives Indian people a tool to create public opinion on any issue. Internet is now a force with a capacity to channelize the people's anger, desires, and expectations in unified manner towards its destination
Our educational system needs a radical change
24 March, 2015
As U.S. military convoy pushes through countries in eastern Europe while cash contribution to Clinton Foundation gets exposed. Activists are protesting the U.S. military march. An AP report said: A U.S. army infantry convoy is driving through eastern Europe seeking to provide reassurance to a region concerned that the Ukraine conflict threatens its securit
IMF: Ukraine Must Now Steal $1.5 Billion+ From Russia To Buy Arms By German Economic News
The IMF has developed a program for Ukraine, under which the current financial hole is to be filled in the amount $40 billion. The due debts [the senior debt] are part of the plan, and will be restructured, according to the IMF. Exactly how it is to happen, the IMF does not explain. Experts say that the IMF believes that Russia should participate in a haircut
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record - while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years
World's Richest One Percent Undermine Fight Against Economic Inequalities By Thalif Deen
The growing economic inequalities between rich and poor - and the lopsided concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the world's one percent - are undermining international efforts to fight global poverty, environmental degradation and social injustice, according to a civil society alliance
Empire And Colonialism: Rich Men In London Still Deciding Africa's Future By Colin Todhunter
Some PS600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce
Herbicide US Sprays Over Millions Of Acres In Columbia "Drug War" Linked To Cancer By Robert Barsocchini
The Associated Press reports that "the world's most-popular weed killer" has been discovered to be "a likely cause of cancer": The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a French-based research arm of the World Health Organization, has reclassified the herbicide glyphosate as a result of what it said is convincing evidence the chemical produces cancer in lab animals and more limited findings it causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in humans. ...the glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup [made by Monsanto] is a mainstay of industrial agriculture
To coincide with the IARC's findings, public promoter of GM golden rice Patrick Moore recently said during an interview on French TV that: "I do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing cancer. You can drink a whole quart and it won't hurt you." On being repeatedly asked to back up his statement Moore walked out of the interview
Sixty Percent Of Global Drone Exports Come From Israel -- New Data By Rania Khalek
Israel has supplied 60.7 percent of the world's drones since 1985, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. As a result, Israel is the single greatest source of drone proliferation in the world
Secrecy And Democracy Are Incompatible By John Scales Avery
It is obvious, almost by definition, that excessive governmental secrecy and true democracy are incompatible. If the people of a country have no idea what their government is doing, they cannot possibly have the influence on decisions that the word "democracy" implies
A Liberal Lawyer Gives Up On Preventing Murder By David Swanson
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called "There is no such thing as peacetime." Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder
Wait For Justice To Victims Of Hashimpura Has Become Much Longer By Subash Gatade
After around 28 years of the gruesome massacre allegedly by the personnel of the much feared PAC ( Provincial Armed Constabulary) for its biased approach , the Delhi court acquitted all 16 accused on 'benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused'. There have been very few massacres in post-independent India which have shaken the civil society to the core and have propelled it to come forward and raise its voice. And the Hashimpura killings happen to be one such episode
America's Global Dominance (Since WW II) Has Just Ended By Eric Zuesse
Obama's arrogance is what's driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase "the ugly American." In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America's problem, but perhaps they won't become the world's, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won't. And that's today's big news-story
Barbarians Are Coming - Western or Arabs? By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The US and the Europeans see war as an instrument of political hegemony and control over the precious natural resources of the Arab-Muslim world. The super-ego American and the allied Europeans are missing sense of guilt for the vice and ruins of decade long occupation and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan
Vietnam's Major Regional Thrust For A Malaria-Free Asia Pacific By 2030 By Citizen News Service (CNS)
Vietnam signals greater regional leadership in malaria elimination by hosting health officials and experts to discuss challenges to achieving a malaria-free Asia Pacific by 2030. This week, Vietnam will host Ministry of Health officials from the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN); a group of 17 countries in Asia Pacific who each share the ultimate goal to become malaria-free
23 March, 2015
Houthi militia members seized the military airport in Taiz on Saturday without any resistance from Yemeni military forces. The capture of Taiz brings the Houthi forces within 180 kilometers of the southern port city of Aden, the hometown and stronghold of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.Fighters from the Special Security Forces reportedly fired their automatic weapons and volleys of tear gas to disperse large crowds of protesters who turned out to oppose the Houthis' presence in the country's third largest city. Amid the country's descent into sectarian conflict, the United States announced that it was evacuating approximately 100 US Special Operations soldiers who had been stationed at the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province. They cited security threats after Al Qaeda militants briefly seized control of the nearby city of Al Houta on Friday
12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion - 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation By Dr Gideon Polya
Those with consciences recently marked the 12th anniversary on 19 March 2015 of the illegal and war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on false assertions of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was conducted in the absence of UN sanction or Iraqi threat to the invading nations, and led to 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million). The West has now commenced its Seventh Iraq War since 1914 in over a century of Western violence in which Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation have totalled 9 million. However Western Mainstream media have resolutely ignored the carnage, this tragically illustrating the adage "History ignored yields history repeated
The crisis that struck Ukraine last year-- the overthrow of the elected president, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in the Russian speaking eastern provinces-- was the result of problems that had been festering, not only in Ukraine but all along the former frontiers of the USSR since the end of the cold war and the collapse of eastern European socialism over twenty some years previously
For Hamza: Arms Sanctions Against Israel's Everyday Terrorism By Vacy Vlazna
Meet little Hamza Mus'ab Almadani of Khan Younis, Gaza. Look carefully, look tenderly, don't turn away. Please don't turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, turned away from Palestine. Hamza is Palestine. Look carefully at Israel's savage violation to his once perfect little body when on the 25th July 2014, Israel's soldiers loaded and fired pale blue artillery shells that discharged white incendiary rain on Gaza in hundreds of phosphorous-impregnated felt wedges as Hamza and his family slept. Imagine the agony Hamza suffered from the moment the white phosphorous struck and burrowed through his soft three year old skin. Phosphorous burns are only contained by blocking off oxygen but the extreme pain and, as you can see, the horrific tissue damage endures
Middle Income Nations Home To Half The World's Hungry By Thalif Deen
Nearly half of the world's hungry, about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Senator Cotton, Hitler, And 'Appeasement' By Mickey Z.
There are many issues swirling about the current situation in Iran but invoking Churchill, Hitler, and the A Word activates the following historical facade: by whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the United States and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being questioned... especially when every enemy of the United States is likened to Hitler
Jump Out Of The Pot! By William T. Hathaway
Like the frogs in a simmering water pot, we are provided with pictures, music, and other pleasures to distract us from the worsening conditions of our lives and render us incapable of changing them. These entertainments lull us with subjective emotions that offer solace and escape from our objective reality. They range from the crude to the refined, but all are characterized by glorifying the inner life of the supposedly sovereign individual
Declaring Dr. Chia Thye Poh As A Singaporean Hero Is A Better Way To Commemorate The Death Of Lee Kuan Yew A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
Many, including President Barack Obama, have been paying glowing tributes to Lee Kuan Yew since the announcement of his death this morning, 23rd March 2015. However, recalling what Lee Kuan Yew did to Dr. Chia Thye Poh and many other persons who aspired for multi-party democracy and respect for the freedom of expression in Singapore is a better way to remember Lee Kuan Yew. It is the least that can be done to fight back against the terrible legacy he has bequeathed
What Happened In Hashimpura 28 Years Ago? By Vibhuti Narain Rai
There are some experiences that stick with you throughout your life. They always stay with you like a nightmare and sometimes are like debts on your shoulders. The experience at Hashimpura Massacre was such an experience for me, says Vibhuti Narayan Rai, then Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, UP. On 22 May 1987, in Hashimpura, a locality in the Meerut City, 42 innocent Muslims were killed in cold blood by the personnel of Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC)
Police Firing On Women On International Women's Day In Odisha By Ganatantrik Adhikar Surakhya Sangathan
On 8th March 2015, when the world was observing International Women's Day, Odisha police fired upon women agitators at Namatara village of Rajakanika block of Kendrapada district and injured 16 villagers, mostly women. Out of those injured people, 9 villagers (five women, two girl children and 2 men) got admitted in Cuttak Medical College because of serious bullet injury. Now the police have already arrested 6 people for attacking the police and have filed cases against 60 people also. Namatara village having 200 houses are mostly of dalit communities
The Need For A New Approach To Adivasi Development By Gladson Dungdung
It is quite clear that the Tribal Sub-Plan has failed to achieve its objectives due to lack of community participation, transparency and accountability since it was implemented in 1974-75. This is why the Government of India should replace it with a Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP), which would ensure respect, preserve and protect their identity, autonomy, culture and traditional system of governance. Tribals should be given the right to choose their own path of development. The new Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP) would ensure full and effective participation of Adivasis in their own development
Ambedkar: Reimagining The Image By B.Prabakaran
Some years back Gopal Guru wrote an article on how Dalits especially lower middleclass and middle class Dalits have understood Ambedkar and in what form have they established him. With this background of spate of recent attacks, equally important and pertinent question to ask now would be how Ambedkar has been understood in the larger social arena and what he really means to them?
Winemaker Paul Hobbs, Repeat Offender, Violates Agreements Again By Shepherd Bliss
San Francisco's North Bay large winemakers routinely violate the weak rules regarding their practices and are seldom fined, according to the daily Press Democrat, March 11, 2015. Those rules need to be enforced and strengthened, especially as we enter an even more-dry drought
22 March, 2015
Why are so few talking about coal's impact on already scarce water resources? Despite the global water crisis being identified as the top risk to people across the globe, very few are taking a stand to protect dwindling water resources from the huge planned global growth of coal-fired power stations
The "Naturalness" Of The Commons By David de Ugarte
Agricultural and hunting commons are the original form of ownership and work, long prior to State property and private property... and for the time being, the most persistent: commons institutions remained vigorous throughout the world up through the Middle Ages and resisted Modernity with relative strength until the "amortization" of nineteenth-century liberalism forced them to evolve into modern cooperativism. But don't be fooled: even today, there are large European regions, like Galicia, where more of the 25% of the territory is made up of common lands. We have always been surrounded by the commons and by community values. Our culture kept more than just the formula for us
Food Democracy South And North: From Food Sovereignty To Transition Initiatives By Olivier De Schutter
People seek to co-design food systems, to participate in shaping them, to recapture them. We were familiar with the slogan of workplace democracy; we must now open up our eyes to food democracy
Only Less Will Do By Richard Heinberg
As we collide with Earth's limits, many people's first reflex response will be to try to find someone to blame. The result could be wars and witch-hunts. But social and international conflict will only deepen our misery. One thing that could help would be the widely disseminated knowledge that our predicament is mostly the result of increasing human numbers and increasing appetites confronting disappearing resources, and that only cooperative self-limitation will avert a fight to the bitter end. We can learn; history shows that. But in this instance we need to learn fast
Why The Western Alliance Is Ending By Eric Zuesse
It's well-known that only aristocrats profit from wars. And O'Bomba represents them just as much as his Republican 'opposition' do. But, now, even the aristocrats in other nations are increasingly abandoning him. All he evidently still has going for him is liberal and Democratic fools in the United States, who haven't yet figured out that he's a Manchurian candidate, Trojan horse, 'Democrat,' who (like the Clintons) would have FDR twisting in his grave if only he saw this. Fortunately, Roosevelt isn't around to see it
Netanyahu Victory, Saudi Arabia And Iran By G. Asgar Mitha
The failure of the N-talks and Iran not getting the concessions - economic, easing sanctions and political - it is seeking on its terms is that the US, Israel and EU3 may well start a catastrophic war in the Middle East, likely between Iran and ISIS. If it wins, then certainly Iran will be recognized as the balancing force in the Middle East - a defeat for both Israel and Saudi Arabia
What Do The Opponents Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran Really Want? By Dr. John Duke Anthony
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is once again in Switzerland with his British, Chinese, French, German, and Russian counterparts to continue negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Whether the respective diplomatic and national security negotiators will succeed remains to be seen. To be sure, a mutually acceptable agreement with Iran by six among the world's most powerful and influential nations, on one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other, is no small matter. In substance as well as in procedure and desired outcome, the goals - ensuring that Iran does not produce a nuclear bomb and, to that end, agreeing on as intrusive a nature and range of inspections as any in history - are as laudable as they are in many ways timely, urgent, and necessary
Babloo Loitongbam: Three Decades Of Building Human Rights Solidarity An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam By Abhay Kumar
An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam, pre-eminent human rights activist, who for the past three decades is striving hard to bring justice for those in North East India whose rights are being violated on a daily basis especially under the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
On Tuesday 17th March, Violent clashes erupted between Iranian security forces and Ahwazi Arab civilians after the end of the football match between Foulad Al-Ahwaz FC and Al-Hilal Saudi FC. One young fan has allegedly been shot dead by the Iranian anti-riot forces who used live ammunition targeting Ahwazi fans
Condemn Acquittal Of 16 PAC Personnel Accused In The Hashimpura Massacre By People's Union for Democratic Rights
On 22 May 1987, PAC personnel of UP reached Hashimpura, Meerut, took away about 50 Muslim men from a crowd outside a mosque, shot dead at least 42 of the men, and threw their bodies into a canal. On 21 March 2015, a Delhi Sessions Court accepted that the PAC personnel had committed these murders, but acquitted the policemen charged on account of insufficient evidence. Twenty eight years after the brutal massacre of Muslims by state forces, the guilty in uniform have not been identified and are roaming free
21 March, 2015
Ban Ki-moon's special envoy on climate change voiced support for the fossil fuel divestment movement at an event in London on Friday. Mary Robinson, leading climate justice campaigner and former president of Ireland, said it was "very interesting" to see the movement grow in impact. For any fund, "it is almost a due diligence requirement" to consider ending investment in dirty energy companies, she said
Geoengineering May Backfire, Find Scientists By Countercurrents.org
To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are proposals involving using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. But a new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters
The Messages From Israel's Election By Ilan Pappe
The conclusion for the international community should be clear now. Only decolonization of the settler state can lead to reconciliation. And the only way to kick off this decolonization is by employing the same means exercised against the other long-standing settler state of the twentieth century: apartheid South Africa
Russia Under Attack By Paul Craig Roberts
While Washington works assiduously to undermine the Minsk agreement that German chancellor Merkel and French president Hollande achieved in order to halt the military conflict in Ukraine, Washington has sent Victoria Nuland to Armenia to organize a "color revolution" or coup there, has sent Richard Miles as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to do the same there, and has sent Pamela Spratlen as ambassador to Uzbekistan to purchase that government's allegiance away from Russia. The result would be to break up the Collective Security Treaty Organization and present Russia and China with destabilization where they can least afford it
Europe: Old Friendships, Hesitant Alliances By Gaither Stewart
You can't ignore the reality that perhaps never before has a fine knowledge of geography been more important than today. It is a geographical fact that Eurasia exists. However any gung ho American neocon policy that aims at American control over that vast area rings like an Earth power claiming control, or aspiring to the control of, say, the planet Uranus. Fortunately, Europe understands the idiocy of neocon belief in America's invincibility and Exceptionalism ... or perhaps Europe is finally beginning to understand
Opposing War With A Smile By David Swanson
Big changes will be needed in our politics, our economy, our energy use, our culture, and in the stories we tell each other about the world. But these changes can come step-by-step and advance self-aware toward complete replacement of the war system with a peace system. Attempting such a change, which is in some ways well underway already, can hardly be less sensible than the knowing failure of war
The Collapse Of French Intellectual Diversity By Andre Vltchek
If you think that France is not as much a police state, as the UK or the US, think twice. Heavily armed military and police are visible at all train stations and many intersections, even at some narrow alleys. Internet providers are openly spying on their costumers. Mass media is self-censoring its reports. The regime's propaganda is in "top gear". But the people of France, at least the great majority of them, believe that they live in an 'open and democratic society.' If asked, they cannot prove it; they have no arguments. They are simply told that they are free, and so they believe it
The Great GMO Legitimation Crisis By Colin Todhunter
Author of 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' Steven Druker recently talked of how back in the seventies a group of molecular biologists formed part of a scientific elite that sought to allay fears about genetic engineering by putting a positive spin on it. At the same time, critics of this emerging technology were increasingly depicted as being little more than non-scientists who expressed ignorant but well-meaning concerns about science and genetic engineering. This continues today, but the attacks on critics are becoming more vicious
From Basic Income To Social Dividends: Sharing The Value Of Common Resources By Rajesh Makwana
It's time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part IV By Jon V Kofas
The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan's Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate
Public Hero: Paying For Honesty By S.G.Vombatkere
One hopes that Ravi's death will trigger a wave of honest officials and public-spirited citizens who will support each other in the best interest of the people of our sovereign socialist secular democratic Republic
The Maharashra Beef Ban Is Unconstitutional By Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights
The CPDR holds that the Maharashtra Animal Protection (Amendment) Act, 1995 is not in consonance with Article 48 when this is viewed in conjunction with the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. This Act is not even based on Hindu religious faith. Contrary to Hinduism, which is a conglomerate of beliefs and faiths aimed at achieving spiritual salvation, the ideology of the majority in the Maharashtra Assembly that enacted this law in 1995 is that of Hindutva, which is aimed at attaining political power, and is the Indian variant of Nazism. The Act is aimed at depriving the Other of her livelihood and way of life, which must be condemned by all those who stand for pluralism, secularism and democratic rights
The Dimapur Lynch Mob And Violence Of Hurt Sentiments By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
While community politics creates unbridgeable walls between citizens, the fluidity of opportunities under modernity generates another world outside communities. The man killed by the Naga mob in Dimapur was actually married to a Naga woman. Their girl child, half Naga-half Cachharree Muslim, and hence neither Naga, nor Cachharee Muslim, faces an uncertain future. It depends crucially on the future of democracy in the country whether she spends her life in trauma in the barrenness of no-man's land between communities, or she grows up to live full life of a citizen without fear, hatred and suspicion
Documenting Hate And Communal Violence Under The Modi Regime By John Dayal
The 300 days have also seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rightsorganizations and Rights Defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and the systems if the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act and the Passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, Fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. This report is focused on issues of communally targeted violence and the politics of hate and divisiveness that emanates from a thesis of religious nationalism
Progress Made But Work Remains On Firewalling Health Policy From Tobacco Industry By Shobha Shukla
Considerable progress has been made in different countries globally in protecting public health policy from tobacco industry interference, but certainly lot more work needs to be done. 2012 World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) Declaration called on all governments to establish a national coordinating mechanism of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which is fully firewalled from the tobacco industry
South Asian region has very high levels of tobacco use, and thus not surprisingly, rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other tobacco related illnesses rage high. Nepal is in spotlight in South Asian region by demonstrating high commitment to tobacco control and also acting on the ground! Recognizing Nepal's leadership, the country was awarded the prestigious 'Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control' at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH 2015)
20 March, 2015
Crosscurrents By Kathy Kelly
By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee
To Survive, We Must Act Now On Global Warming By Lionel Anet
To ensure that our offspring can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that's to have a worldwide united action to stop that dangerous warming. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth;we must showthe unavoidable disaster they will face in pursuing this ridicules goal. They must see their wealth will be useless in the future on our lifeless planet
Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe By The Danish Pugwash Group
The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe
19 March, 2015
Unless Obama can summon up the will and the courage to publicly tell Israel that enough is enough and then back his words with actions, the answer to Lerman's question is that nobody can stop Netanyahu advancing the doomsday clock. My guess is that Obama will wash his hands of the conflict and walk away from it. In that event he'll deserve a place in history as the American president who gave Zionism the green light to take the region and possibly the whole world to hell. I hope, Mr. President, that I am wrong about you and your intentions
Israel Votes Apartheid By Neve Gordon
Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu's secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier's votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center). The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid
Israelis Vote To Abandon All Pretence Of Seeking Peace By Dan Glazebrook
Israelis went to the polls the other day in an election which, defying all predictions, saw the 'left-wing' of Zionism - genocide with a human face - soundly beaten by its more honest 'right wing', whose commitment to the total eradication of the Palestinians as any kind of political entity is openly stated
Netanyahu Victory Opens Door For One-State Solution By Francis Boyle
Before the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988, the position of the Palestine National Council and the Palestine Liberation Organization was that there should be only one, democratic and secular state for the entire mandate for Palestine, which would include Israel within it. It was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat himself who encouraged the Palestine National Council to accept the two-state solution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988. After 27 years of fruitlessly trying to pursue a two-state solution, it is now time for the Palestine National Council and the PLO to reconsider their options
On Wednesday, March 18th, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of Ukraine -- who was selected for that post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the U.S. coup that installed him into this office -- told his cabinet meeting, "Our goal is to regain control of Donetsk and Lugansk." Those are the two districts comprising Donbass, the self-proclaimed independent region of Ukraine, which now calls itself "The People's Republic" and sometimes "Novorossiya," and which rejects the coup and its coup-imposed Government
Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator's forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin's defense of Crimeans' democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal
Countries Agree On UN Plan In Sendai To Save Lives From Disasters By Megan Darby
Twelve hours behind schedule, 187 countries agreed a deal in Sendai on Wednesday to reduce death and economic damage from natural disasters.The Sendai Framework set seven targets and four priorities for the next fifteen years. These include plans to "substantially reduce" loss of life from 2005-15 levels in 2020-30 and to reduce economic losses as a proportion of global GDP by 2030
The time has come for the Indian Railways to seize the day, and scale up its investment in solar power
1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of "We the People"
'Islamic State' As A Western Phenomenon? Reimagining The IS Debate By Ramzy Baroud
No matter how one attempts to wrangle with the so-called 'Islamic State' (IS) rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up
The Veggie Pride Talk I Didn't Give By Mickey Z.
For the first time in many years, I've declined an offer to be the lead speaker at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC's Union Square Park. I learned the hard way that although the cheers have been loud, the local vegan/animal rights scene wasn't actually hearing me. Since I've opted to no longer howl into an echo chamber, I'll share my thoughts here instead
Ahwazis Call The Amnesty International To Urge Iran To Stop Persecution By Amir Saedi
Ahwazi Community in the UK demonstrated in front of the Amnesty International on Tuesday 17 March 2015 against the persecution of the Arabs by the Iranian regime. Following the protest a group of Ahwazi activists met with Mrs Hassiba Hadh Sahraoui, the Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa Programme
Condemn The Gang-Rape In Nadia And Continuing Attacks On Christians By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR expresses outrage at the gang-rape of a 71 year old nun by a gang of "dacoits" inside a convent in Gangnapur village, Nadia district, West Bengal on 14th March 2015. The men reportedly raided and desecrated the convent before taking away 12 lakhs.Clearly, the motive was not merely to rob and decamp but to punish the school and the community through this horrendous gang-rape. In this connection, PUDR wishes to draw attention to the disturbing trend of attacks on Christians, including their institutions and places of worship, in recent times
The Hindutva Algebra Of Nation-Making By Braj Ranjan Mani
Remembering Martin Niemoller's famous poem, I am tempted to think that if Martin had been an Indian--alive today--he would certainly have scribbled something like the following
Hold Tobacco Industry Liable: Turn The Cost-Benefit Ratio Upside Down By Shobha Shukla
WHO FCTC Article 19 envisions a world where governments hold the power to protect people from harmful products like tobacco, can recover the costs of treating tobacco-related disease from the tobacco industry, and can use their legal systems to ensure their right to do so
18 March, 2015
Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed victory after a closely contested national election in Israel. According to unofficial figures released by the Israeli election committee, Netanyahu's Likud Party has won at least 29 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, putting it in a strong position to form a ruling coalition. Likud's main challenger, the Zionist Union, won 24 seats. Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog has called Netanyahu to concede defeat. President Reuven Rivlin, a longtime Likud loyalist, will designate Netanyahu to form the next government once the distribution of seats is finalized among the ten parties that reached the threshold of 3.25 percent of the vote
Why I'm Relieved Netanyahu Won By Ali Abunimah
The Israeli Jewish public's choice to re-elect Netanyahu should make it clear to people around the world that Israel does not seek peace and does not seek justice. It will continue to oppress and ethnically cleanse Palestinians until it is stopped. Negotiating with such a regime is pointless when its power over its victims remains vast and unchecked. The message we should take away is simple: the proper treatment for a polity committed to occupation, apartheid and ethno-racial supremacy is to isolate it until it recognizes that it must abandon those commitments. Palestinians have asked the world to do that through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Netanyahu makes the case a little easier, so it's time to step it up
Thousands March In Caracas Protesting US Interference,Solidarity Concert In Havana By Countercurrents.org
In the face of imperialist intervention Venezuelan people are mobilizing themselves. Thousands of citizens in capital Caracas have joined in marches protesting US interference in Venezuela. Venezuelan social movements took to the streets to oppose US aggression. Over 100,000 Venezuelans were mobilized throughout the country for a series of national military exercises in defense of their national sovereignty. A contingent of Russian soldiers and naval craft participated in the exercise. And, thousands of Cubans gathered at the University of Havana's Grand Stairway to express their unconditional solidarity with Venezuela and opposition to US aggression
Latin America again sets example of solidarity and unity against imperialist intervention as the Empire threatens Venezuela with sanctions. In this moment of anti-imperialist struggle, Fidel Castro expresses solidarity to Venezuela
Writer and researcher Colin Todhunter takes apart the arguments of pro-GMO lobbyist Anthony Trewavas
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part III By Jon V Kofas
Can Democracy Be Viable with a Wide Gap between Rich and Poor?
Marijuana: Legalize--Don't Advertise By William John Cox
The War on Drugs has proven to be a monstrous mistake resulting in the waste of a trillion dollars and the shameful criminal conviction and incarceration of thousands of Americans. While the end to drug prohibition may not be entirely possible, the more limited movement to decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana is gaining momentum. Those who support ending drug prohibition, but continue to believe drug use is harmful, have the responsibility to find ways to avoid the advertising and promotion of legalized marijuana
Two distinguished Ahwazi former prisoners named "Ramadan Nasseri" and "Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari" in their interviews with human rights organizations and Arab Media agencies revealed flagrant human rights violations that the Iranian occupying government has exercised against Ahwazi Arab prisoners in Al-Ahwaz
Doms In Varanasi Seek Justice Through Honorable Rehabilitation By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Domraj often come in mythologies and they continue to do the task of burning dead bodies at the Ghats and cleaning human excreta in the city. Most of the land meant for them is already occupied and big ghats have erupted on the bank. Nothing has changed for them. In fact, they reflect the criminal civilization which kept them subjugated for thousands of years and the independence that we got in 1947 has no meaning for them as the community remains untouchables among untouchables absolutely ostracized and thoroughly disenfranchised in the holy city
Where There Is A Will There Is A Way: Teeja Devi By Shobha Shukla
According to Teeja, "There has been a lot of change in my life since the time I came to this village as a child bride. Women are in a better position today to improve their lives and also to fight for their rights, although I have been doing that from the very beginning. From personal experiences I can say that women have the capacity to fight for their rights. But unless they come out of their houses, meet other people, and voice their opinions, they will not be able to progress. I am just literate enough to sign my name but I am very much aware of my and other people's rights and am ready to fight for them
No Country For Art? By Arshie Qureshi
Call it official High headedness or the apathy of the people, anyone who watched the vandalism at art gallery in Kashmir last month will point to you the underlying reality about art ignorance in the valley. It almost seems ironical that on one hand we dwell in a part of the world which is historically a crucible of rich cultural heritage, merging a strong sense of mysticism with the delicacies of nature. A place where everything manifests the divinity. And on the other hand, a man with a clueless look on his face frantically drags the delicate figurine out of the gallery and smashes it without a pang of remorse
17 March, 2015
Nearly a quarter of damages wrought by natural disasters on the developing world are borne by the agricultural sector, finds a new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) study released in Sendai, Japan on March 17, 2015 at the UN World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction. $70 billion in damages to crops and livestock over a 10 year period
While the whole country was celebrating Holi, a joyous festival of colours, three farmers that were contemplating suicide in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh went ahead and took their own lives. One of them, wearing the same colour soaked dress he had celebrated the festival in, hung himself to a tree
Agricultural Crisis And Remedial Pathways For India By Dr Sunny Sandhu
NaMo model of development has already spelt doom for the farmers , its clear that its pro corporate and anti farmer government , like the previous government as well . Changing of Land laws in favor of corporates is the start . GM crops are being cleared at an alarming rate . Lip service is being done to promote organic and natural farming . We the youth of india has to rise to this toxic challenge and ensure to safeguard our ecosystems , biodiversity , bhoomi , river goddesses and beej (seeds)
Nandigram today is a sad picture of rejection. Women, who were the integral part of the movement and were at the forefront of the anti-acquistion stir that eventually catapulted the Trinamool Congress into power in West Bengal are now confined to their homes and are subjected to all kind of oppression
Cropping Africa's Wet Savannas Would Bring High Environmental Costs By Countercurrents.org
Converting Africa's wet savannas into farmland would come at a high environmental cost and, in some cases, fail to meet existing standards for renewable fuels, finds a new report published in the journal Nature Climate Change. With the global population rising, Africa's vast wet savannas have been targeted as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at low environmental costs
An Open Letter To Subramanian Swamy By Shehzad Poonawalla
Mr.Swamy, you continue to remain an accused out on bail and the law will catch up with you eventually, notwithstanding the Delhi Police dragging its feet. The kind of politics you subscribe to is also subject to the law of diminishing returns in the long run. Even Mr. Modi has begun to realize that and every now and then, he and his good friend "Barack" throw in a word of caution, for your ilk, even if it is only for symbolism. Frankly, Harvard can and did prevent you from wearing its name. I only wish secular, tolerant Hindus and Indians could have had that authority and choice too
Book Review: The Dispensable Nation - American Foreign Policy in Retreat By Vali Nasr Reviewed By Jim Miles
U.S. foreign policy is not in retreat, perhaps in tatters and rags, wrapped in a flag stained in the blood of far too many millions of people around the world. Works such as "The Dispensable Nation" simply highlight the arrogance and hubris of an empire in decline
Obama And The 'News' Media Continue To Falsify About Obamacare By Eric Zuesse
This "universal healthcare" thing is an ongoing lie from Obama, because there is no way that the plan that he proposed, nor the one that he selected Senator Max Baucus to design to meet his intentions and ram through Congress, could even possibly produce a 100% insureds-rate, or "universal coverage." The rest of the industrialized world has it (and has better healthcare at lower prices), but we still don't
Stratfor: "US Aims To Prevent A German-Russian Alliance" By German Economic News
The head of the private intelligence agency Stratfor has for the first time publicly said that the US government considers to be its overriding strategic objective the prevention of a German-Russian alliance. Blocking that alliance is the only way to prevent an alternative world power capable of challenging extension of the American position of being the world's lone superpower
In the end, maybe the Big Dick School of Patriotism comes down to this: we embrace the idea of an all-powerful military because at a time when the world seems such a fragile and hostile place, if even our military won't keep us safe, who will? Unless there just might be a better way to go through the world than by carrying a big dick?
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy : PART II By Jon V Kofas
Attitudes of the Rich toward the Poor and Working Poor
Each understands according To things misunderstood: A shadow-world in dumb-show Where "evil" contends with "good."
Crisis In The AAP Casts Shadows On Civil-Society Meet On Alternative Politics By Abhay Kumar
Linking the current contestation in the AAP to its inability to take a firm stance on secularism, senior advocate and president of PUCL (Delhi), N. D. Pancholi pulled up AAP for raising the "divisive" slogan of Vandre Matram, which, in his view, had a major contribution to the partition of the country. 'Vande Matram creates suspicion among Muslims,' Pancholi contended
Is it time to have few more paid/payable (read credible) news channels in various regional languages, which can survive with contributions from the subscribers?
16 March, 2015
Poor countries should receive between US$400 billion and US$2 trillion per year from rich countries by 2050 to help them cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fight climate crisis, finds a new paper published on March 16, 2015 by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science
The American Government's Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
The American Government's biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine -- and it's even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that's totally unnecessary for America's national-security, and that actually places all of our nation's security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats ("oligarchs") in both the U.S. and Ukraine -- not for any real reasons of the American people, at all
The Misrepresentation Of Israeli Aggression As Self-Defense By Matt Peppe
The media and the public will uncritically support the position of American and Israeli power. Thousands of Palestinians will be indiscriminately killed, but not because Israel is defending itself. Palestinians will be killed because the U.S. government refuses to protect them from a belligerent and aggressive regime, and refuses even to recognize their right to protect themselves
The Realpolitik Of Revolution By William T. Hathaway
What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution
Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman In America By Chris Hedges
Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bete noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party
Truth Is Our Country By Paul Craig Roberts
Press Club Of Mexico Awards Paul Craig Roberts International Medal For Journalism Excellence
An Ahwazi Arab street vendor by the name of Younes Asakere from Mohammareh city has set himself on fire in protest against the action of the Occupying municipal officials who confiscated his small grocer's stall
Religion, Politics And Society: A Birds Eye View By Ram Puniyani
What has religion to do with politics? What has violence to do with religion? And how does the expression of major political agenda shape itself in contemporary times? Roughly speaking it seems that the religion is being used as a cover for many a political phenomenon. This seems to be the observation more so from South Asian-West Asian perspective
Veloor Swaminathan is no more. He left Plachimada forever on March 14, 2015. Swaminathan along with Mylamma were the initial foundations of the historic struggle of Plachimada in Kerala. The struggle initiated by a small group of these Adivasis with Dalits and farmers forced one of the largest corporate powers in the world, Coca Cola to bend down and quit Plachimada. If anybody asks, how did such a small force of marginalised people achieve such a herculean task, I would say, study Mylamma and Swaminathan, for any strategy for any people's movement raising issues of marginalisation
Another Church Attacked In Haryana: Holy Cross Replaced With A Hanuman Idol By Shehzad Poonawalla
Petition registered with NCM (National Commission for Minorities) To draw attention to and direct action on the constant spree of attacks and vandalism on churches (7th in 4 months) including the latest one in Kaimri village near Hisar, Haryana where the Holy Cross was replaced with a Hanuman Idol
Rapist Mukesh Singh Is Not Alone In Denigrating Women By Shamsul Islam
It is true that Mukesh made reprehensible statements about women in general and rape victim in particular. It is debatable whether banning a film containing such statements is the solution but fact is that rapist Mukesh is not alone in holding male chauvinistic views denigrating women.India is flooded with popular religious literature denigrating women. Geeta Press based in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, is the largest supplier of this kind of literature. It publishes literature espousing the 'Hindu' way of life for women on a very large scale. The low-priced publications are available throughout the country, especially the Hindi belt, and are even sold through Government allotted stalls at railway stations and government roadways stands
On The Interrelationship Between Bovine And Human Beings By Subhash Gatade
As things stand today it appears that the people in power seem to be more concerned with making the desi-videsi moneybags happy to maintain a conducive atmosphere for bringing in new investments and also catering to 'sentiments' of a dominant section of people around cow. It is just another way to say that while human beings will have to wait but the bovine cannot
Surveillance Cameras In Classrooms: Trust V/S Security By Ms.Swaleha Sindhi
Each student brings knowledge to the school and the schools must validate their ideas, this will encourage students of different levels of ability to keep sharing their knowledge. Students must be provided a safe space in which they can grow, thrive, question, analyse, think critically, and take risks. Schools can have their own ways of monitoring discipline by making the discipline incharges or the school Principals do patrolling in the corridor while the classes are going on. Camera is just another thing for students (especially adolescents) to play with
15 March, 2015
During the past few days, German Economic News has specifically identified the following EU nations that are strongly opposed to this supplying of weapons to Ukraine: Spain, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, France, and Slovakia. Furthermore, Italy is increasing its cooperation with Russia
If I had to express my hope in one sentence it would be this. A fourth term as prime minister for Netanyahu would see Israel becoming more and more isolated and could improve the chances of Western governments being moved to use the leverage they have to cause the Zionist (not Jewish) state to end its defiance of international law and denial of the Palestinian claim for justice. Another way to put it would be to say Netanyahu is a disaster for Zionism so let's have more of him
International Court, Hague, Rules in Favor of Ecuador in its Case Against U.S. Oil Giant, Chevron By Robert Barsocchini
The International Court of Justice (CIJ) ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-based oil company Chevron US $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld. The money will benefit about 30,000 Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous
China's Dirty Coal Plants Face Climate Risk, Investors Warned By Megan Darby
Many of China's dirtiest coal plants could be forced to close early as regulations to curb greenhouse gases, air pollution and water stress tighten. That is the outlook described in the most comprehensive assessment to date of the risk of "stranded assets" to investors in coal power worldwide. Seven of the 10 companies with the biggest portfolios of "subcritical" coal plants - the least efficient kind - are Chinese, according to research from Oxford University. The US is next, taking six of the top 20 slots
47 Years Ago In My Lai: 'We Were There To Kill Ideology' By Mickey Z.
Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children. Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in. With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23. Never forget, comrades: This is how we can choose to be
A Blueprint For Ending War By World Beyond War
It is no longer sufficient to end a particular war or particular weapons system if we want peace. The entire cultural complex of the War System must be replaced with a different system for managing conflict. Fortunately, as we shall see, such a system is already developing in the real world. The War System is a choice. The gate to the iron cage is, in fact, open and we can walk out whenever we choose
With the 51 day Israeli attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014 that killed over 2,200, wounded 11,000, destroyed 20,000 homes and displaced 500,000, the closing to humanitarian organizations of the border with Gaza by the Egyptian government, continuing Israeli attacks on fishermen and others, and the lack of international aid through UNWRA for the rebuilding of Gaza, the international Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition has decided to again challenge Israel's naval blockade of Gaza in an effort to gain publicity for the critical necessity of ending the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the isolation of the people of Gaza
The Politics of Extinction By William deBuys
Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy By Jon V Kofas
The great challenge of our time is social and geographic inequality that threatens not only the system of capitalism creating inequality, but the democratic political regime under which capitalism has thrived in the last one hundred years
Review: "Genocide In Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration Of AModern State" By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani By Dr Gideon Polya
Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani have published "Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State" , a carefully documented, must-read account of the Zionist-backed US Alliance destruction of Iraq and the killing of millions of Iraqis over the last quarter century for oil, US hegemony and for military dominance of the Middle East by a nuclear-armed, genocidally racist Apartheid Israel. This is a damning case that everyone should read to prevent recurrence (history ignored yields history repeated) and for ultimate legal recourse and Nuremberg-style justice for the Iraqi people
Afzal Guru's Mortal Remains Must Reach His Family By Dr. Paramjit Singh Sahni & Shobha Aggarwal
In all situations the body of the deceased must reach the family. This alone would satisfy and soothe the collective conscience of the society
Release Of Political Detenues By Abdul Majid Zargar
If India hopes to achieve an acceptable political solution to the long festering problem then it is imperative that all political prisoners are set free and a congenial & conducive atmosphere prepared for holding talks with all the stake-holders. That was also stated by the group of interlocutors appointed by Govt. Of India in 2010 to explore a political solution to the issue
The Two Conferences Of Jammu And Kashmir By Yasir Altaf Zargar
In Jammu and Kashmir both the conference's had different aspiration for J&K'S status. The Muslim conference was favouring joining Pakistan while national conference was opposing it
AAP's Divide And Rule By Satya Sagar
Whatever potential AAP has, for genuine countrywide transformation, on the class or caste front, cannot be achieved by mechanically expanding the Delhi model across the national landscape like a rubber mask. That will only result in the hasty induction of a lot of people wearing the mask of Kejriwal, without possessing any of his talents while retaining at least a few of his vices! Rather, the process will have to be an organic one, with dozens and scores of local Kejriwals springing up from the grassroots, taking up the issues that AAP has raised in Delhi but with both the causes and methods tailored to context - what I would call the 'Apne AAP' movement. Every anonymous volunteer who is part of AAP, and indeed its core strength, has the potential to be a Kejriwal, YY or PB
Why Science Is Closer To Morality Than Religion By Amritanshu Pandey
India's fundamentalist moral brigade has shifted gears since the advent of Acche Din, and we are subject to daily reports of the moral police's enthusiasm, derived largely from our substantial pool of religion and culture. In this regard India is no different to religious societies around the world, where faith and its institutions provide the basis for our moral compass. If your dominant religion disavows of homosexuality, for example, then it can be guaranteed that your society's outlook will be that homosexuality is immoral
Kanshiram Declassed Ambedkarite Politics By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Understand Kanshiram's mantra that key to power come from the poor and they are vast and we need to change our perceptions and strengthen their struggle and leadership. We can not ask people to sacrifice their lives for 'leaders'. Those time have gone. Give space as you want elsewhere and provide a healing touch to people where community leaders have not yet reached
14 March, 2015
Having reached a tenuous peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia (without the US), Germany is realizing and announcing that, indeed, the US does not seem intent on peace. McClatchy reports that German government officials have "recently referred to U.S. statements of Russian involvement in the Ukraine fighting as 'dangerous propaganda'". In light of US propaganda and military support for Kiev, Germany even asked outright whether "the Americans want to sabotage the European mediation attempts in Ukraine led by Chancellor Merkel?"
On this video from Fox 'News': At 3:30, Lou Dobbs asks the Fox Noise military analyst: "What do you expect" in Ukraine? At 3:35 he answers: "In the Ukraine, the only way that the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians ... killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags."
Fishermen, Are They Criminals? An Open Letter To Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka And India By Ravi Nitesh
I demand Sri Lankan PM to express his apology over the statement to shoot Indian fishermen because it was against humanitarian approach, against UN sea laws and most importantly against the unity of fishermen. He must apologise that he see fishermen not as 'criminals'. He must also apologise to people of Sri Lanka that he doesn't believe what he said is a common belief of Sri Lanka's people and fishermen. We know that even fishermen of Sri Lanka will never support his statement
Feeding A Warmer, Riskier World By Jose Graziano da Silva
Artificial meat. Indoor aquaculture. Vertical farms. Irrigation drones. Once in the realm of science fiction, these are now fact. Food production is going high-tech, at least in some places. But the vast majority of the world's farmers still face that old, fundamental fact: Their crops, their very livelihoods, depend on how Mother Nature treats them. Over 80 percent of world agriculture today remains dependent on the rains, just as it did 10,000 years ago
Showing Chicago a whole different concept of governing, and an appreciation for the people of our city, Chuy Garcia came to Logan Square on March 12th and received a enthusiastic welcome from the several hundred people who turned out to greet him and support his campaign for Mayor
With Enemies Like This, Imperialism Doesn't Need Friends By Dan Glazebrook
'Can non-Europeans Think?' by Hamid Dabashi declares the end of the colonial domination of knowledge, but the author effectively aligns himself with the West's very real war against the developing world
Venezuela - A Threat? By Chandra Muzaffar
So far the US has not provided any tangible evidence of how Venezuelan officials have violated human rights or indulged in public corruption. Its reckless allegations have been effectively refuted by the Caracas government. Even leaders from other Latin American countries have condemned the statements emanating from Washington DC
There were astronomers like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, mathematicians like Bhaskara I and Baudhayana, physicians like Charaka and surgeons like Sushrutha in ancient India, but the work of these men of science has nothing to do with Hinduism or Hindutva. It is absurd, therefore, of Hindutva politicians to associate the work of these scientists with "Hinduism" or "Hindutva" and quite disgraceful of them to claim credit for the ingenuity, hard work and courageous assertions of ancient Indian scientists, many of whom, like the astronomer Aryabhata, had to face the ire of Brahminical orthodoxy to make these assertions
Frontier, probably, the thinnest and the most-plain appearing English weekly from Kolkata, a city with protest and politics, resistance and revolution faces an imminent threat of eviction
13 March, 2015
Danger Of War With Russia Grows As US Sends Military Equipement To Ukraine By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier
Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO's ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power. The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry
Ukraine's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Declares War On Russia By Eric Zuesse
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, "Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation. Hostile countries over the past decade have spent billions of dollars rearming it."
Oil Demand Could Fall Without Climate Solution, Warns Shell By Ed King
Demand for oil and gas could fall if major producers fail to find economically viable and publicly acceptable ways of cutting their climate-warming gas emissions, Shell has warned. The oil giant revealed its fears in its Strategic Report, released on March 12, 2015, telling investors that new climate change regulations "may result in project delays and higher costs."
Bangladesh To Use SERVIR Satellite-Based Flood Forecasting, Warning System By Janet Anderson
Bangladesh officials have announced plans to expand a satellite-based flood forecasting and warning system developed by SERVIR to aid an area where floodwaters inundate from 1/3 to 2/3 of the country annually, killing hundreds of people and affecting millions. The system, which relies on river level data provided by the Jason-2 satellite, last year provided the longest lead time for flood warnings ever produced in Bangladesh
Dissatisfaction With U.S. Government Soars By Eric Zuesse
The latest Gallup poll shows that even as Americans are more satisfied with the American economy, they are more dissatisfied with the government; and that this government-dissatisfaction is so high that for the first time while Gallup has been following this matter, the ratio of dissatisfaction with government is swamping the ratio of dissatisfaction with both of the other two matters that Americans are dissatisfied with: the economy, and unemployment
The CIA And America's Presidents: Some Rarely Discussed Truths Shaping Contemporary American Democracy By John Chuckman
When people write of America's secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone's being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President's case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end
The Growth Schism: Greater Israel At Odds With U.S Decline In The Middle East By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner
In an attempt to put Netanyahu's Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline
Secret History Of My Geography Teacher, Also Cofounder Of Hamas By Ramzy Baroud
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle
Ending sanctions on Cuba in the name of a new foreign policy while at the same time imposing sanctions on Venezuela because of supposed government repression is indeed laughable. It makes absolutely no sense if we take seriously the narrative on human rights and democracy peddled by the White House and echoed in the media. But it makes perfect sense if we view it as a cynical, realpolitik attempt to undermine the threat of a good example and a way of reestablishing American influence in the Caribbean through an increased presence in Cuba. Taking into account these factors, we can see there is no new, enlightened dawn in US policy, rather a switching of targets. It is, lamentably, business as usual
Unite! Let's Make Sure That Kandhamals Are Not Repeated By Medha Patkar
My friends, let me stop my speech by saying that it is time that the displaced people and the marginalized people come together as a strong force, so that these forms of injustice can be effectively dealt with in a united manner
In a shocking incident, over 30 Dalit and Adivasi students and activists were arrested this afternoon from Shastri Bhavan in New Delhi when they demanded to meet the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, over unfair budgetary allocations in education of Dalit and Adivasi students. At the time of the arrest, the delegation, including N Paul Diwakar, well-known Dalit activist and general secretary of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), were about to submit a Memorandum of Demands to the Minister asking for reallocation of funds. The activists were taken to Parliament Police station where another Dalit activist Beena Pallical was forcefully dragged taken inside the police station
Essential Elements That Can Give Rise To A New Kind Of Politics By Dr. Satinath Choudhary
It would have been ideal for all of legislators to continue to have equal power with no chief minister, ministers or deputy-ministers. Various legislators could join collectives interested in guiding various departments of the government. For different decisions different small collectives could be formed even in the same department. However, the decisions of the collectives would have to be approved by the whole legislature. In case there more than one collective dealing with the same issue, they can meet with each other to iron out their differences before or/and after they present their proposals to the full legislative body. Full legislature would be the supreme body to put final seal of approval on any issue or legislation
12 March, 2015
Over the past two months, Geneva offered two opportunities for governments to deepen their understanding of the interplay between human rights and climate action. The coming months will now be critical to determine whether, through the UN climate body and the Human Rights Council, states are willing to commit to take steps towards ensuring that climate policies address climate change in a way that promotes human rights at the same time
The Real Story Behind The Oil Price Collapse By Michael T. Klare
Those of you currently staying strong and paying close attention are probably already astonished that we're on the brink of social, economic, and environmental collapse. Hopefully, you're also telling everyone you know. But then what?
Stop The Fast Track To A Future Of Global Corporate Rule By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers
Several major international agreements are under negotiation which would greatly empower multinational corporations and the World Economic Forum is promoting a new model of global governance that creates a hybrid government-corporate structure. Humankind is proceeding on a path to global corporate rule where transnational corporations would not just influence public policy, they would write the policies and vote on them. The power of nation-states and people to determine their futures would be weakened in a system of corporate rule
Vietnam: Some History By Andy Piascik
Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with death so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the role we play in the world will have to come from us
Understanding Nelson Mandela's Complex Legacy Honors Him The Most By Doug Allen
It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed "the struggle is my life." In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses
Avigdor Lieberman, ISIS, And The Saudi Regime By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
A country pretending to share the same "values" as the U. S. and the other Western democracies allows itself a Foreign Minister who calls for the beheading of its own Palestinian citizens! In 2014, the Saudi Arabian regime beheaded 83 people. The beheadings of ISIS exceeds 100, while the dark figure may be much higher. Will the Israel government follow the advice of its foreign minister, and who will do the job?
Roots Of Modern Terrorism And Religious Fundamentalism By G. Asgar Mitha
Saudi Arabia and other Monarchist Arab Wahhabist countries have been natural economic allies of America and its European vassals as they are weak and in need of protection. America continues to support the Saudis in exporting their perverted religious dogma across the Muslim countries in order to breed religious intolerance, cruelty and terrorism. Some of the countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine have been war victims, others like Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt have survived upon American and Saudi aids. Iran is the only Muslim country where America and the Saudi monarchy have failed for exporting terrorism and religious extremism and both fear it as a regional power
If you see Iran through that left-Democratic lens, that is if you are opposed to Republican efforts to start yet another unnecessary catastrophic war, this one with Iran, I have a few ideas I'd like to run by you
Arab World: Political Disintegration And Search For Reason By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The Arab masses long for political change and a promising future based on peaceful co-existence with others. In view of the unstoppable cycle of sectarian killings and daily bloodbaths in so many Arab states - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and spill-over to other oil producing Arab nations - and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures - is the Arab world coming to its own end? The Arab rulers and the masses live and breathe in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented governance - the essence of Islamic system of governance. The worst is yet to come as the wars continue, surrender to foreign forces as there are no leaders to think of the future, no Arab armies to defend the people and no sustainable socio-economic infrastructures intact to support the masses
Sleepwalking Into World War Three? Why The Independent Media Is Vital By Colin Todhunter
The corporate media have a narrative and the truth does not fit into it. If this tells us anything it is that sites like the one you are reading this particular article on are essential for informing the public about the reality of the aggression that could be sleepwalking the world towards humanity's final war. And while the mainstream media might still be 'main', in as much as that is where most people still turn to for information, there is nothing to keep the alternative web-based media from becoming 'mainstream'
Understanding Women's Labour Book Review By Suparna Banerjee
This book is an analysis of the dialectic of women's labour and the processes of capital accumulation in Asian economies -- an analysis that blends empirical research with theoretical reflections. Indeed, one of the book's stated aims is to examine the relationship between Marxist political and economic theories with feminism, and the author offers theoretical corrections -- based on empirical data -- to Marx's and Proudhon's theories on women's labour and on women's roles in society
Kashmir's Polite, Mad Revolutionary, India's Bogeyman By Radha Surya
Two cheers for Indian democracy. For now the dust has settled. The Kashmir issue has dropped from the headlines of the Indian news media. The politicians and the deshbakts can return to the self-serving pretence about the decline of pro-azaadi sentiment in Kashmir. It's now back to believing that Kashmir is identical to every other Indian state and that its problems have to do with governance and development. No need to confront the troublesome fact that divided Kashmir lies at the heart of an international dispute
Of Masrat Alam Drama And Beyond By Dr. Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
Masrat Alam's row just seems a drama scripted by some hidden and veiled writers with Modi, (Prime Minister of India) Rajnath, (Home Minister) and Mufti Syed,(Chief Minister) as important characters. The drama has been played with Mufti's role as survivor, Avatar, and Messiah for the people of Kashmir and sensational with PM Modi's remarks "I share the opposition's aakrosh (anger)". While as Rajnath Singh, has attempted a new twist to the drama by asking a written report from the state government. The beginning of the drama is so sensational and twisting; God knows what would be the end
In response to beef ban law thousands of workers of Devnar abattoir (Mumbai), who will be losing their jobs came on the streets to protest against this move of the government (March 11). Many traders, from different religion also came to Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest this communal act of the Maharashtra Government. In a PIL filed in the Bombay High Court the petitioner argues that this ban on beef infringes on the fundamental right of citizens to choose meat of their choice is fundamental. The hope is that the society overcomes such abuse of 'identity issues' for political goals and lets the people have their own choices in matters of food habits, and let those who are making their living from this trade do so peacefully
The 'President' Of Egalitarian India By Aishik Chanda
Dressed in blue full-sleeve shirt and grey trousers, Sachin Prabhakar Sawant, excitedly explains his roadmap for an egalitarian India. An engineer by education, the Mira Road resident who is sitting on a dharna for over a year at Azad Maidan in south Bombay, declared himself the President of India on March 23, 2014. Since then, he has made a corner at Azad Maidan his home, demanding implementation of the constitution 'religiously'. Sawant, the President of Independent Candidates' Party (ICP), says he wants to establish Buddhist system in the country and destroy all forms of casteism, sectarianism and communalism from their roots
11 March, 2015
Just ahead of the four-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, five organizations have issued a message that the only way to avert climate disaster is by embracing a clean energy future. It was March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan earthquake caused a massive tsunami which triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and destroyed thousands of lives and livelihoods
Carbon Emissions Could Dramatically Increase Risk Of U.S. Megadroughts By Steve Cole & Leslie McCarthy
Droughts in the US Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. The study, published [in February] in the journal Science Advances, is based on projections from several climate models, including one sponsored by NASA. The research found continued increases in human-produced greenhouse gas emissions drives up the risk of severe droughts in these regions
New Carbon Accounting Method Proposed By Countercurrents.org
Consumption-based accounting, also known as carbon footprints, has been suggested as an alternative to today's production-based accounting. With carbon footprints, each country must account for all emissions that are caused by its final consumption -- regardless of where the goods were produced. This has been called a fairer way of measuring emissions, potentially avoiding so-called carbon leakage, where rich, developed countries can reduce their domestic emissions by shifting carbon-intensive production abroad
The political and military maneuvers now going on in the Ukraine have the potential of escalating out of control. If we don't understand the actual reality that has brought about this crisis there is no hope of being able to prevent this escalation. In order to understand this reality we must refrain from simple minded finger pointing at one side or the other and assigning complete responsibility for the crisis to one of the parties in the dispute, although one side may be disproportionately responsible
What we have is an extensive set of lies of omission: the Tribune and Sun-Times have not investigated the story, obviously hoping it would go away. Because of their inaction, it appears that there were hopes that it would not become an issue in the mayoral run-off. The mainstream media "dam" seems to be giving away, though, as activists and the alternative media in Chicago, including Substancenews.net, keep this issue alive. Whether it gets more fully into the mayoral campaign or not, police maleficence in Chicago--as well as across the United States--is going to continue to be challenged
Getting Serious About Terrorism By Andy Piascik
Last month, President Obama convened a summit at the White House to discuss terrorism. As could easily have been predicted, the focus was entirely on those the United States deems official enemies. Conversely and equally predictably, the two best and most obvious ways the United States can combat terrorism - stop doing it and stop giving arms, money and diplomatic cover to others who do - were not on the agenda
This past week, Laura Poitras's documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His "sole motive", he wrote, was "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes - the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge."
All capitals strive to be showcases, sure, but very few, or perhaps none, is as successful at blocking out its nation's true ugliness and failures. This sleight of hand, though, also works on many of the residents of this near perfect square inside a near perfect circle. The hell they've created keeps seeping in, however, and soon enough, it will overwhelm, if not explode, this Potemkin village of a city. This smug bubble will burst
Violence Against Women: Why We Keep Getting It Wrong By Robert J. Burrowes
With the passing of another International Women's Day, during which much attention around the world has again been focused on tackling violence against women, I would like to explain why none of the initiatives currently being proposed will achieve anything unless we acknowledge, and act on, the cause of this violence
Top 'News' Executives Suppress Key Facts; The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture. Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail
Feeding The Vultures, While Starving Agriculture: Capitalism's Great Indian Con-Trick By Colin Todhunter
India's development is being hijacked by the country's wealthy ruling class and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are now swooping. Meanwhile, the genuine wealth creators, the entrepreneurs who work the fields and have been custodians of the land and seeds for centuries, are being sold out to corporate interests whose only concern is to how best loot the economy
The influence in the news coverage at different times in the Middle East, illustrates that new media helped the people of Middle-East in getting their voices heard, and did help in advocacy efforts at times when state tried to block the access but at the same time everyone had eye on the developments taking place in that part of the world
Deprecate Lynching Of A Muslim Youth At Dimapur Of Nagaland By Lateef Mohammed Khan
It is Crime against Humanity based upon political motivation - Judiciary, State and Central Government are culpable
10 March, 2015
We humans are amazingly creative and resourceful and have emerged successfully from many dire situations. We can easily create this on the ground, while we work on the big problem of transferring from the negative emotional condition of the death culture- civilization- to the positive emotional condition of a life nurturing survival
Venezuela, A Security Threat, Declares US By Countercurrents.org
The US has declared Venezuela is a national security threat. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order on March 9, 2015 slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security". President Nicolas Maduro a few days ago revealed new evidence on the coup plot against his administration revealing that much of it was planned in the US
President Obama Picks Another Fight, This Time Venezuela By Eric Zuesse
The Obama Administration, which in 2009 provided the crucial assistance that enabled the progressive democratic President of Honduras to be overthrown and a junta of oligarchs to replace him; and which in 2014 perpetrated a bloody coup that replaced the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian equally corrupt Government, and thus sparked Ukraine's civil war against the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for Yanukovych; is now again trying to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro
Possibility Of Escape By Kathy Kelly
I'm here among women, some of whom, I've been told, are supposed to be "hardened criminals." Fellow activists incarcerated in men's prisons likewise concur that the system is futile, merciless and wrongheaded. Our jailers, I'm convinced, can see this. Men like Governor Rauner, it seems, can see it, or his advisers can. Where are the inflexible ones keeping women like Marlo isolated from and lost to the world, trembling for their future for the next five years? I would like to make an appeal to you, and to myself two months from now when I've left here and once more rejoined the polite society of these women's "inflexible jailers." I choose to believe that we can be moved and these women can escape. I am writing this, as many have written and will write, to see if we're easier to move than iron and stone
Far from the east coast metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, in the western region of Xinjiang (referred to as East Turkestan by Uyghurs), the Muslim Uyghur minority has long been struggling under the repressive rule of the Communist Party (CCP). The Uyghurs - who speak a Turkic language and have much more culturally in common with their Central Asian neighbours - want independence from China. For the CCP, who see itself as the guardian of the civilisation-state, this kind of 'separatism' is unacceptable: It poses an existential threat to China because its borders pre-date the modern nation-state system and any challenge to that could precipitate other territorial disputes that could make her like any other country - that's to say, arbitrary lines on a map
An Interview with Mona Oudeh an Ahwazi Arab activist
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, on average, US police piled up the bodies of 928 US citizens per year between 2003-2009 and 2011
So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It's been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue
If the United States is ever to become a democratic society, and if we are ever to enter the international community as a responsible party willing to wage peace instead of war, to foster cooperation and mutual aid rather than domination, we will have to account for the crimes of those who claim to act in our names like Kissinger. Our outrage at the crimes of murderous thugs who are official enemies like Pol Pot is not enough. A cabal of American mis-leaders from Kennedy on caused for far more Indochinese deaths than the Khmer Rouge, after all, and those responsible should be judged and treated accordingly
Australia's Sovereignty Severely Compromised For US-Israeli Designs By Dr. Daud Batchelor
As Australia's international standing has risen, the country's sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites:the disproportionately influential military-industrial complex and Zionist lobbies.Australia's sovereignty is being compromised by the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former PM Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we "have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war"
Transformation By Gaither Stewart
I return again and again to the Russian example because just as the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia set its stamp on the development of the idea of Socialism there (in the end making the greatest revolution of modern times), when the propitious moment arrives, when what was inexpressible becomes expressible, when events have created a universal mood of revolutionary discontent with the existing system, when tensions reach the boiling point, the American intelligentsia, together with the American wage earners and the growing, multiplying, ever angrier and, one hopes, awakening middle class, will rise against the capitalist system, salvage the positive parts of America and bring about that transformation I am speaking of
Fact Finding Report On Communal Violence in Bharuch District, Gujarat By PUCL
Today PUCL, Gujarat Submitted a fact finding Report to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), National Commission for Minorities, Chief Minister and Minister of Home and Revenue (Gujarat), Director General of Police (Gujarat) demanding urgent action in cases of Violation of Right to Life and Liberties, Right to livelihood of the affected people in the villages of Hansot Block, District Bharuch, Gujarat due to communal violence and ineffective/biased state action from December 2014 onwards
Women's emancipation entails changing the mindset, initiating revolution and bringing radical transformation in the ways contemporary capitalist patriarchal society operates. It demands meaningful understanding and interventions in day to day to struggles of women situated in different contextual background. Focusing on prejudices, stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes that have denied women of their constitutional or human rights is essential. The women's liberation movement in the modern Indian society needs to focus on the issues relating to struggle for substantive equality, freedom from violence and survival issues. Commercialization is not a solution; the answer lies in political and social mobilization around everyday issues relating to women lives on daily basis. The need is to strive for dignity and respect at the work place, within homes and public spaces and reimagining the new world order based on social justice
This film, 'India's Daughter', except for Mukesh Singh has nothing. Only Nirbhaya's mother is sole person who is countering the criminal and the lawyers. The criminals are in jail and the lawyer, specifically Mohan Sharma, is sitting in chair, very calmly, with the uniform, inside his own chamber, is spreading nothing but 'hatred' towards Nirbhaya! As a human being I can't accept this
Nation's Honour, 'IBIs' And The Dimapur Lynching By Bonojit Hussain
While there is little doubt that the mob lynching would not have been possible without complicity of the police force at various levels, Nagaland Chief Minister TR Zeliang in a kneejerk reaction has blamed social media users for the flare-up and the subsequent lynching. It would do well to both CM TR Zeliang and Naga society at large if he musters the courage to condemn and initiate action against the leaders of those civil society organizations that made libelous and false statements and calling for mob (in) justice
Hacking Consciousness: The Stanford University Video Series Reviewed by William T. Hathaway
This new Stanford video series investigates consciousness as the source of not only the human mind but also of all energy and matter. Consciousness is seen as the essence of the universe, a unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena. Five scientists from different disciplines describe how we can contact this field and use it to improve our lives. The series, designed by Michael Heinrich, is now available free on YouTube
09 March, 2015
With Saturday's execution of an Islamist defendant, the first state killing of the hundreds of people sentenced to death in mass show trials following the July 2013 military coup, the US-backed Egyptian junta is stepping up its campaign of police-state terror against the people
ISIS Destroys Ancient Sites Near Mosul By Sandy English
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC
The 'new Cold War,' against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it's already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government's chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it's a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it's 'the Western Alliance,' after all
Putin Wants To Eat Your Children By David Swanson
It's Vladimir Putin's turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer
A Global Security System: An Alternative To War By David Swanson
World Beyond War, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending all war, published this week a guide toward that end, a short book titled A Global Security System: An Alternative to War
Right To Insult or The Responsibility Principle? -- Thoughts On The Charlie-Hebdo-Massacre By Saral Sarkar
One thing can probably be regarded as indisputable: One cannot get any positive results through insults and provocations. On the contrary, they only stir up hatred and violence. We have observed that in the last 25 years. With this method one can only start a new conflict again and again
How I Saw The Light With Daylight Saving Time! By Gary Corseri
I thought that it had all been like that: that we had all lost our minds in a "wild romance" of life on a whirling, little, momentary planet of might-have-beens and should-have-beens. And I wept. And understood
The forthcoming state visit of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sri Lanka and the red carpet welcome accorded to him, including the ceremonial speech to the Sri Lanka's parliament are indeed a bad omen for all the democratic, left and progressive forces of this country. The March 13-14 visit is the first standalone trip by an Indian PM to Sri Lanka in 28 years
Greece: Limited Options, Limited Prospects By Jon V Kofas
The day after the Greek left-center party SYRIZA won the election of January 2015, optimism ran across Europe's progressive quarters, while the conservatives and neoliberals acr4oss the world insisted the new regime was extreme left and it would invite disaster. Just a few short weeks after that election, the world knows that SYRIZA was indeed a center-left regime, one trying to introduce some modest reforms in a bankrupt nation whose future is really the past of even greater dependence instead of the future of greater national sovereignty in all domains from economy to defense
Preeti has conquered many male dominated bastions and treaded upon paths, which others would normally fear to step upon. She is at the forefront of spearheading demonstrations to fight for not only the rights of women farmers but of all the villagers--forcing authorities to get the drains cleaned, voters' list corrected, water-logging removed; ration cards anomalies rectified; freeing land from encroachers--the list can go on and on. No wonder that even people of her native town of Gorakhpur marvel at her achievements and look upon her with reverence
Forest Peoples Programme Complaint Against Golden Agri Resources Upheld By Forestpeoples.org
Palm oil conglomerate criticised for multiple violation of RSPO's requirements that lands only be acquired from indigenous peoples and local communities with their free, prior and informed consent
08 March, 2015
Mob (in)justice In Dimapur By Parvin Sultana
Dimapur is regarded as the business capital of Nagaland, a state in the Northeastern region of India. This small town was jolted by a series of horrific incidents that took place on 5th March, 2015. A man accused of raping a college student was murdered by a mob. Videos of the 35 year old Syed Farid Khan being paraded naked and beaten to death became viral. His lifeless blood drenched body was then hanged
Analysing The Dimapur Lynching By Sazzad Hussain
This modern day lynching was photographed by mobile wielding youth as souvenirs. The entire act was committed in broad day light where the police and the civil administration choose to remain nonchalant. The punch line of the narrative was that the "rapist", who was also an "illegal Bangladeshi immigrant", got his punishment in a country where the justice delivery system is very slow
EU Increasingly Abandons Obama On Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
As reported on Saturday March 7th by both German Economic News, and Spiegel magazine, the ongoing lies and arrogance from U.S. President Barack Obama's Administration regarding Ukraine and Russia have finally raised to the surface a long-mounting anger of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Government
Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food. As a result, India is facing a nutritional crisis: every fourth Indian goes hungry, and in 2011 alone, diabetes took the lives of 1 million Indians
Meet The Planet's Most Dangerous Nuclear Rogue State By Mickey Z.
We're told we can't allow just anyone (except allies like Israel, of course) to acquire such lethal technology -- and we can't let anyone help arm men so evil they might, well, use nuclear weapons on civilians. We hear this while pretending that our tax dollars aren't funding the forces that regularly use nuclear weapons on civilians
Palestinian Memory And Hope By Dan Lieberman
They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam's Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C
Ahab's Speech Before His Crew: The Face Of Falsehood By William A.Cook
A Reflection on the Congress of the United States
Sexual violence in the conflict zones are not an aberration. They are widespread. Yet, they do not evoke the same outrage that this particular incident in a non-conflict zone has received. The Government, the judiciary and even those people who are aware of this reality remain silent. Aren't these the daughters of India too? Aren't they women as well? This hypocrisy needs to be addressed. Respect and rights cannot be exclusive or the entitlement of only a particular section of women
Ahwazi Mass Demonstration In Front Of The European Parliament In Brussels By Rahim Hamid
The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz has organized a mass demonstration, under the title "We will never forget our Ahwazi people" in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, the Belgian Capital. The Demonstration took place on Friday 6th of March to condemn the policies of Iranian occupation and the ongoing anti-human atrocities against the Arab people of Ahwaz
07 March, 2015
Europe depends on Russia for gas. It is supplied by Gazprom, a state monopoly. It was delivered for some years through Ukraine, but not without difficulties even before the civil war. Russia decided to join a dozen other European countries in building South Stream, under the Black Sea, into Bulgaria. The European Union attempted to impose its antitrust policy on Russia. On 1 December 2014 Russia abandoned South Stream and announced an agreement with Turkey to supply Europe at the Turkish-Greek border, through the New Black Sea Pipeline, leaving the necessary infrastructure from there to the care of the Union.
The 'Democrat' Brzezinski Says Russia's Putin Wants To Invade NATO By Eric Zuesse
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama's friend and advisor on Russia, has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "seized" Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine
Europe Blocks U.S. From Racing To War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
According to German Economic News, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande are balking at the speed of Obama's rush to war against Russia. Earlier, some of the smaller national economies in the European Union -- the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece -- dissented from America's effort to increase economic sanctions and military measures against Russia. But there is now increasing pressure upon the leaders in Germany, France, and Italy, also to separate the EU from the American rush to war against Russia
Germany's Balancing Act By William T. Hathaway
Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population
The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism
While stone statues of the female form (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga/Kali) are worshipped in temples and religious rituals, a large number of those made of flesh and blood face violence on the streets and in homes, and encounter discrimination throughout their lives that begins at (or even before) birth, and continues during childhood, adolescence and adulthood
Women's Empowerment: Not A Copy Paste Model By Dr.Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
There is no denying that the condition of women in West is relatively better than India but not so excellent that we will blindly follow it and become one dimensional. Before following or adopting any model of women empowerment we must understand its positives and negatives as well. The only model of women empowerment which seems suitable to any context is sociological model of development. Which aims inclusive empowerment, in social sphere, economic sphere, and political sphere, moreover empowerment associated with critical thinking and consciousness raising
ISIS And Its Faulty Logic (PDF) By Mirza Yawar Baig
Peace is the effect of justice. Those who like to talk about peace must ensure that justice is established. Until that is done, any apparent peace is only a recess between wars. We. All of us. White or black. Christian, Jew, Hindu or Muslim or of any faith. We who believe in goodness and are against exploitation of all kinds. We the people of the world. We need to take it back from the hands of those who want to exploit it and us for their own ends. We have to stand together
AAP As A Start-up And The New 'App' By Anand Teltumbde
The biggest challenge before a start-up is to scale up or be gobbled up by the big fish. Remember what Microsoft did to Netscape. In the absence of practical ideas about how to scale up, start-ups only end up swelling the coffers of venture capitalists and promoters
A Short Note On 'India's Daughter' By V. Arun Kumar
I recently watched the BCC's documentary 'India's Daughter' made by LesleeUdwin. The document is strong one exposing the misogynist and male chauvinism mind-set existing in our society. Banning of this documentary is idiotic, but I have certain reservations
Coalition And Controversies By Abdul Majid Zargar
So the BJP-PDP coalition is a fait-accompli now In Jammu & Kashmir. Mufti Mohammad Syed has assumed the reins of coalition Govt. on the assurance of a full six year term as Chief Minster. The oath of office was administered by Governor Vohra on 1st March 2015. A galaxy of leaders from BJP were present on the dias. Congress & NC boycotted the function
06 March, 2015
Press Release
"Indian courts have stated on multiple occasions that mere possession of certain literature cannot be considered a crime. The National Human Rights Commission has asked for a report from the Kerala police on the arrests. Authorities must ensure that the two men are protected from torture and other ill-treatment," said Shemeer Babu, Programmes Director, Amnesty International India
The documentary `India's Daughter' made by Leslee Udwin about the rape that shook Delhi in December 2012 raised a lot of debate, outrage and furor in Parliament, in media and in general. The police filed a FIR and the broadcast of this documentary is banned in India. Statements were issued by groups in favour and against such ban. However, what is being overlooked amidst this debate is the reality of women's lives in India. A woman in India faces this patriarchal misogynist attitude every day - at home and at public spaces, through her entire life in different ways. The documentary pointed to this regressive attitude and subjugating culture that needs to be addressed. Prohibiting the documentary is futile as shying away from such questions that pertains to reality of women's live or living in denial that misogyny exists or closing eyes to realities is hardly helpful to bring about social transformation. The need is to strike at the roots and confront the sexist and patriarchal violent culture in a mature manner
Is 'India's Daughter' A Victim Of Corporate Media War ? By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
BBC's film failed to expose India's caste impunity, which rapes women at their whims and fancies to assert its supremacy in India's villages. It is sad that our activists and human rights 'champion' did not have time to narrate things when they critique the film, instead the farce of nationalism and technicalities of the matter are being raised and that shows the hollowness of the protests and the human rights movement itself which keep quiet on the violence against Dalit women and make it just a plain gender issue. India will never answer that. BBC documentary failed us in that but nevertheless it is a milestone as it still exposes Indian society and its hypocrisy in dealing with the issue
Muzzling India's Daughters By Farzana Versey
Soon after December 16, 2012, India became international news for a rape. Intellectuals and the political class had at the time lapped up the attention, to the extent of participating in the globalisation of Delhi as the rape capital. The shame they felt came with the caveat of their moral superiority. Today, when it comes back full circle to mock them they stand more exposed than what they are exposing. They had called her India's daughter, and now they object to the title of a documentary using it. India has banned the film
Why The Rise Of Fascism Is Again The Issue By John Pilger
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons
Let's End The New Cold War Before It Heats Up By Ernest Partridge
The United States and Russia are rushing, relentlessly, toward war, unless cooler voices are heard and heeded. Those voices are not being heard in our mass media or heeded by our politicians. The familiar historical indicators of a march to war are apparent to all with eyes to see: arms buildup, depersonalization of the "enemy," demonization of its leaders, marginalizing of moderate voices, suppression of dissent, refusal to negotiate and compromise in good faith, deliberate failure to recognize the concerns and interests of "the other."
Wars may be how Americans learn geography, but do they always learn the history of how the geography was shaped by wars? I've just read Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years by John McHugo. It's very heavy on the wars, which is always a problem with how we tell history, since it convinces people that war is normal. But it also makes clear that war wasn't always normal in Syria
All Buildings In Debaltseve Ukraine Were Destroyed Or Damaged By The Occupying Ukrainian Army By Eric Zuesse
According to the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Ukraine, no usable buildings survive in the town of Debaltseve, the crucial railroad junction that was long fought over between the occupying Ukrainian army and the town's residents. The OSCE official, Michael Bociurkiw, said on Wednesday March 4th, "The violence must be stopped, as it is developing into a real disaster in some areas. As for Debaltseve, for example, our representatives have said that there was no house left that was not destroyed or damaged by shelling."
Greece Injured By EU By Andre Vltchek
Greece is in a cage; it is a hostage. The door is actually open. But the country is scared to walk out and face the world. It still prefers to suffer from familiar tyrants, than to encounter the unknown
An open letter and a challenge to the Royal Society
Justice: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Different nations and systems that exist in today's world are based on some sort of principle or framework, but the underlying fact is that if any such nation or system is based on justice, then only one expects good results out of it, otherwise it is not going to last for long, and history is witness, how such nations and systems collapse as, Malcolm-X, once said, "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." Excerpts of a short conversation with my friend over a cup of tea, here is what he thinks
05 March, 2015
New documents from the cache of files leaked by Edward Snowden show that New Zealand's intelligence agency has been collecting in bulk the cell phone, email, and internet files of people across the Pacific Island nations and handing that data over to the U.S. National Security Agency in an operation one angered lawmaker now describes as a "giant vaccum cleaner of information
This communication, we are sending after viewing the documentary film, which ironically, you had proposed to telecast on 8th March 2015, on the occasion of InternationalWomen's Day. We are writing to you to express our serious concerns about some aspects of this film which, as a responsible channel, we fully expect that you will take on board and postpone the broadcast of this film, till all legal processes and proceedings pertaining to the 16 December 2012 case have concluded
"India's Daughter" : A Ban Is Not The Solution By National Federation Of Indian Women
National Federation Of Indian Women (NFIW) strongly opposes the banning of the documentary India's Daughter. The 'objectionable' portions of the documentary not only expose the mentality of the rapist, they are also a reflection of the mentality and attitude of the Indian patriarchal society towards women
"India's Daughter": Blanket Ban An Attack On The Freedom Of Expression By All India Democratic Women's Association
All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled "India's Daughter" made by BBC 4. This is a knee jerk reaction that constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression
Netanyahu's Farcical Fear Mongering By Alan Hart
Netanyahu's portrayal of an Iran on course to possess nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel, plus the standing ovations and the applause his performance received, might well have pleased enough brainwashed Israeli Jews to vote in ways that guarantee he will emerge from Israel's upcoming elections in a position to cobble together the next coalition government and serve a fourth term as prime minister
Compete To Possess And Die Out, or Be Fair To Survive By Lionel Anet
Atmospheric scientists have estimated that, with the carbon we have emitted, we can expect a 3 metre ocean rise by the end of this century. We are in big trouble and continual reliance on growth will end up killing everyone. The task ahead of us is the most difficult ever and to deal with it will take a united effort. So the ball is in their court, the 1%,has to decide to live as one of us or die.Nevertheless they can't see the choice they have on their own; we must show them the choices they have, to save ourselves
US Considering Openly Arming Syrian al-Qaeda Faction, al-Nusra By Robert Barsocchini
As reported at Antiwar.com, the US and some of its regional client dictatorships are prodding the major al-Qaeda faction operating in Syria, a brutal terrorist group called al-Nusra, to "re-brand" so the US can openly arm it
A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
Not Science, Just Lies And Propaganda: The Massive Fraud Behind GMOs Exposed By Colin Todhunter
'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' is a new book by the US public interest lawyer Steve Druker. The book is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who initiated a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing
Fast Food Nations: Selling Out To Junk Food, Illness And Food Insecurity By Colin Todhunter
Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture and food sectors, including the subsequent impact on the livelihoods of hundreds of millions
The claim of the Hindutva gang that Dr BR Ambedkar endorsed the Hindutva project and opposed beef-eating as cow was sacred to Hinduism is a terrible travesty of facts. Dr Ambedkar, a great researcher, produced a brilliant essay on the subject titled 'Did The Hindus Never Eat Beef?' All those who are really interested in understanding the Indian past and wish to challenge the supremacist myth making for cleansing and marginalizing minorities must read the above-mentioned work which is being reproduced here
An Underground Radioactive Waste Laboratory Coming Up In Gogi Village In Yadgir District Of Karnataka By VT Padmanabhan & Joseph Makkolil
In March last year, we reported a secret move by the DAE to set up a repository (DGR) for storing high level radioactive waste (HLW) under the hills of Idukki-Theni districts in Kerala-Tamil Nadu. TIFR published a blanket denial saying that INO has nothing to do with radioactive waste. Our contention was that radioactive waste repository was a separate project, co-located at the same site. Now we report a similar effort to build an underground research laboratory (URL) in Gogi village of Yadgir district in Karnataka
Noted social activist Medha Patkar joined hands with MDMK leader Vaiko to oppose the proposed neutrino observatory project in Theni district, saying that it would cause large-scale environmental damages. "Nature will suffer major damages if India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is set up. Radiation from it will affect people in the area. The central government does not seem to care about the people's livelihood. The INO project will not benefit India either," Patkar said
Sour Grapes In 'Wine Country'-- Intense Challenges To Wineries Erupt By Shepherd Bliss
A movement against the expansion of rural wineries grows throughout the North Bay. Residents demand that applications should include an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and conform to the rules of CEQA (California Environment Quality Act). Demands grow for moratoriums on all new wineries in Sonoma and Napa Counties, especially those seeking to be industrial, commercial event centers, located away from urban centers, compromising the quality of rural life and nature
04 March, 2015
Netanyahu Delivers Anti-Iran Tirade To US Congress By Bill Van Auken
The speech delivered Tuesday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress consisted of a hysterical anti-Iran tirade and an implicit denunciation of the Obama administration for what was portrayed as an outright betrayal of the security interests of both Israel and the US
Benjamin Netanyahu's Fantasy World By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Netanyahu's speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years
Netanyahu Invokes Biblical Myths And Islamophobia To Derail US Diplomacy On Iran By Ali Abunimah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his much trailed and politically divisive speech to the US Congress today, forcefully denouncing a possible international agreement that would place Iran's civilian nuclear energy program under strict supervision. Immediately afterwards, I spoke to The Real News Network's Paul Jay to analyze the speech, including Netanyahu's appeal to Biblical myths and Islamophobia in his attempt to derail US diplomacy
Netanyahu Addresses "His" Congress By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
By sabotaging of the agreement between the US and Iran, Israel intends to maintain its nuclear hegemony in the region and impose its will upon his neighbors. It can massacre the people in the Gaza Strip with impunity because the US holds its protective hand over Israel and prevents any resolution critical of Israel in the UN Security Council. How long will Americans let Israel humiliate them and their President? Do Obama and his staff have no self-esteem? And why are the richest Americans keeping quiet?
Gitmo In Chicago By Stephen Lendman
On February 24, The Guardian headlined "The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site.' " It's an "off-the-books (Homan Square) interrogation compound," said the Guardian - some miles west from where this writer lives. A "nondescript warehouse (is) the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." People are lawlessly arrested, detained, denied access to lawyers up to 24 hours, and tortured during secret interrogations
"Collective Psychopathology" And US Police State Methods By Jon V Kofas
In February 2015, The Guardian published a couple of new stories about the connection between the Chicago police department "black site" at Homan Square and the Guantanamo prison where terror suspects have been kept as political prisoners without ever been charged. Neither the national media in the US nor the Chicago media organizations, including African-American, have pursued this story. Even after the British paper brought these issues to the attention of the public, the mainstream media in Chicago and across the US are ignoring the revelations, a subject in itself revealing about the role of the US media in a democratic society where human rights and civil rights violations occur
History without the moral leadership of intellectuals is devoid of meaning, chaotic and unpredictable. But this is a period of seismic historical transition, and it must eventually yield the kind of intellectual who will break free from the confines of the ego, regimes, self-serving politics, sects, ideologies and geography
The West had their chance to show what their democracy looks like when they applied it to Russia in the 1990's. Their methods have not changed since then. There is nothing new that could be offered, and the Russian people have declared that they do not want another round of the old. The best thing to do is to let them be. Only when the external pressure subsides will they be able to address their own problems without being accused, sometimes rightfully and sometimes inaccurately, of working for or being exploited by foreign governments
Wealth Of World's Billionaires Surges Past $7 Trillion By Joseph Kishore
The combined net worth of the world's billionaires has reached a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion, according to the latest compilation published by Forbes magazine on Monday. There are a record 1,826 billionaires, each with an average wealth of $3.8 billion. Relative to last year, the world's billionaires have increased their combined wealth by more than 10 percent, from $6.4 trillion in 2014, while the total number of billionaires has grown by 11 percent
Greatest Generation? What Happened 70 Years Ago Will Change Your Mind! By Mickey Z.
By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Cheered on by the likes of Time magazine -- which explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves" -- the U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians. Read that again: The U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians
"Tears in Paradise. Suffering and struggle of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004" by Rajendra Prasad tells the story of Indian indentured labour ("5 year slaves") taken to Fiji from British-occupied India in the period 1879-1916 and brutally exploited on British- and Australian-run sugar cane plantations. The last "5 year slaves" were finally released from bondage in 1920, 87 years after slavery was supposedly banned in the British Empire. Today effective Third World slavery is rampant through globalization
We Are All Mukto-Mona ! The Challenge Of Unreason In South Asia By Subhash Gatade
Humayun Azad, Salman Tasser, Ahmad Rajib Haider, Dr Dabholkar, Com Pansare and now Avijit Roy. Thanks to religious fervour and growth of extremism of every kind in this part of South Asia, where forces of darkness seem to be on the ascendance, it may just create a feeling that we have reached a dead end as we are losing people one by one who were 'a beacon of hope and light in these dreadful times'. Should we then say that whatever 'little hope we saw in the horizon will it wither away?' We have no other option than to remain eternal optimist with a sincere hope that their 'mettle will be passed onto new generation.'
A Bear Hug! By Mohammad Ashraf
Modi-Mufti hug reminded one of the famous Kashmiri proverbs about bear hugs and friendships. One hopes it turns out to be positive and does not end in the proverbial endings!
03 March, 2015
The National Human Rights Commission of India has taken suo motu cognizance of a media report that the Kerala Government was targeting human rights defenders and rights activists by labeling them as 'Maoists sympathizers'. Human rights defenders and advocates Tushar Nirmal Sarathy and Jaison C. Cooper had been arrested under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in Kerala and were in jail since the 30th January, 2015
China Warns U.S. To Stop Its Ukrainian Proxy War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
A much-ignored huge news report from Reuters on Friday, February 27th, was headlined "Chinese diplomat tells West to consider Russia's security concerns over Ukraine." China's Ambassador to Belgium (which has the capital of the EU) said that the "nature and root cause" of the Ukrainian conflict is "the West," and that "The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration."
Two Different Approaches, Two Different Results In Fighting Ebola By Matt Peppe
In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident. These countries are the mighty USA and little Cuba
The Obama Administration, Shell, and the Fate of the Arctic Ocean
"Before Our Eyes": The Future Of The Middle East By Thierry Meyssan
For several months, Barack Obama has been trying to change US policy in the Middle East in order to eliminate the Islamic Emirate with the help of Syria. But he cannot do this, partly because he has been saying for years that President Assad must go, and secondly because his regional allies support the Islamic Emirate against Syria. However, things are slowly evolving so he should be able to do so soon. Thus, it appears that all States that supported the Islamic Emirate have ceased to do so, opening the way for a redistribution of the cards
Do Not Give The Thieves The Key To Your Home: Stop The TTIP By Colin Todhunter
Some 375 civil society organisations from across Europe have today called on EU decision-makers to protect citizens, workers, and the environment from threats the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) it poses
Gandhi As An Economist By John Scales Avery
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are
The Politics of Food: Palestinians Exhibit Culture, Identity At JNU Food Festival By Abhay Kumar
As the dusk of Republic Day fell and dazzling lights began to flood the Jhelum Lawn of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), hundreds of students thronged International Food Festival. I, too, joined the crowd and walked along one stall after another, looking at mouthwatering cuisines. But later the evening, before I came out of the festival's marquee, I had felt that the venue displayed not only foods but also aspiration, identity, struggle and culture of a subjugated people. One of the participants in the annual festival was Palestine. As the illegal Israeli occupation continues, the festival served as an important space for Palestinians to assert their identity
Occupation: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Some call it, occupation, others invasion, conquest, or control of a nation or territory by foreigners. Whatever you call it, it doesn't sound comfortable at all. Have you ever felt, or tried to feel how it is like, to be living in occupation. How is it to be occupied? Ask someone who has experienced occupation. I had a chance to sit with a friend of mine, David (name changed) for a cup of tea, which he has lived most of his life under occupation. He answered me some unanswered questions, and explained the real meaning of occupation. Here are some excerpts of our conversation
Time For Teachers To Let Go Classroom Management And Focus On Classroom Interactions By Ms. Swaleha Sindhi
Most of teachers plan to create calm and productive classrooms. But such sight is not seen in all the classes. Things don't always go as planned with teachers. Teachers might be using great selection of classroom management tools to get students attention. But sometimes when teachers are so focused on classroom management, entire period is spent trying to get students on task. This proves to be exhausting for both teachers and students, so in cases where teachers are teaching some heavy subjects when they need to put their energies towards content then they can give classroom management a back seat. If most of the class is ready to learn and there are minimal distractions, then teachers can give themselves permission to focus on the content. Thus, a teacher is expected to use different strategies and bring a balance in classrooms
With its wealth of detail, its fascinating insights, its bold critique of radical Islamist discourse and politics, its helpful and much-needed articulation of an Islamic understanding of peace and inter-community harmony and dialogue, and the hope that it offers us, this book is definitely a must-read for anyone concerned with what is admittedly one of the most widely-discussed and hotly-debated subjects across the world today
02 March, 2015
The assassination, latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years, occurred in the backdrop of on-going political disturbance carried by the opponents of Sheikh Hasina government as her government publicly announced its policy of zero-tolerance to religious extremism, and is strong handedly trying to weed out the religious extremists. There have been a series of similar attacks in recent years blamed on the Islamic militants
The Saudi Hypocrisy By Mazin Qumsiyeh
The kingdom of "Saudi Arabia" is going to behead a man for "apostacy" (renouncing his belief in Islam and the Quran) while welcoming Egyptian Al-Sisi whose security forces are torturing people to death in Egypt for being supportive of an Islamic political system more moderate than that of that Kingdom!
Almost all Republicans, plus the top level of the Democratic Party such as Obama, hate Russia, even after communism ended and the Soviet Union broke up. They are simply obsessed with destroying Russia. So: although Bush was weak against Al Qaeda, he was strong against Russia: he brought into NATO, the military club against Russia, the following seven nations: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia -- six of which seven nations had formerly been members of the Warsaw Pact along with the U.S.S.R., against the U.S. The reality is: Obama, like Republicans generally, hates Russia
The Ten Commandments for a Better American World
ISIS 101: What's Really Terrifying About This Threat By John Chuckman
The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths
Review of 'Confessions Of A Terrorist - A Novel' By Anita McKone
If you have ever asked 'Why?... How could they do this?' in response to the latest report of terrorism, then 'Confessions of a Terrorist' is the novel for you. But only if you genuinely want to find out the answers
How To Stop Bogus Wars And Articulate Global Peacemaking? By Mahboob A. Khawaja
Islamophobia is on the rise. Few reactionary instances of individual madness are used by the Western strategists to blame Muslims and Islam as the focal point of their perpetuated belligerency
Quotas Aren't Negating Merit And Efficiency By V.M.Yazhmozhi
Though caste based reservation is an affirmative action to uplift the socially and educationally oppressed classes and to bring forth social justice, critics often argue that "Quotas are a negation of merit and efficiency". A paper published by Ashwini Deshpande, Professor at the Delhi School of Economics and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan has defeated this ideology
01 March, 2015
Rapid melting of Antarctic ice could push sea levels up 10 feet worldwide within two centuries, "recurving" heavily populated coastlines and essentially reshaping the world, the Associated Press reported. Parts of Antarctica are thawing so quickly, the continent has become "ground zero of global climate change without a doubt," Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica told AP
Killing Of Boris Nemtso Has Relevance For World Politics By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
Killing of Boris Nemtso, a strong critic of Putin in Moscow is shocking, sad and highly difficult to figure out, who killed? Why was he killed? And what will be its political fallout for Putin and for Russia as a whole?
Is he a smooth-talking, disingenuous, cunning salesman who knows that everything he asserts about Israel being in danger of annihilation and not having a Palestinian partner for peace is propaganda nonsense, or, does he really believe what he says?
What appears to be happening is that Obama is easing off the US aggression throttle towards Iran, while Israel is simultaneously on the precipice of teaming up with Saudi Arabia (another close US client/ally) to aggressively bomb Iran - the top international crime
Skipping Netanyahu's Speech For All The Wrong Reasons By David Swanson
Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said
The post-coup leaders of Ukraine have routinely said that Ukraine should destroy Russia; and, now, starting on February 24th, they are placing into position the key prerequisite for doing so, which is the advanced Anti-Ballistic-Missile, or ABM, system, S-300
On February 22nd, NBC's "Meet the Press" presented reporter Richard Engel in a terrific four-minute documentary on Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's catastrophic policy-results in Libya. (You can watch it by clicking on that link.) The segment concluded that Obama and his Administration (including Hillary Clinton) didn't know where they were going in this operation
The Entire Case For Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies By Eric Zuesse
U.S. President Barack Obama has stated many times his case against Russia -- the reason for the economic sanctions. In his National Security Strategy 2015, he uses the term "aggression" 18 times, and 17 of them are referring specifically to only one country as "aggressive": Russia. However, not once does he say there what the "aggression" consisted of: what its target was, or what it itself was. He's vague there on everything except his own target: Russia
When Growth Trumps Freedom: The Chill In Canada Comes From Our Government, Not The Weather By James Magnus-Johnston
With the introduction of Canada's so-called "secret police" bill, there is increasing concern the rights of the oil patch will trump the rights of ordinary citizens in a new and chilling way-through the kinds of fear tactics you'd sooner expect in Soviet Russia than a western liberal democracy
The 'Star-Spangled Banner' Lyrics That Get Swept Under The Rug By Robert Barsocchini
The US national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner", has four verses, though only one is commonly sung or discussed. The reason for this becomes apparent when the lyrics are read and the history behind them known
Bitter Lakes - "McJihad" By US And Saudi Arabia By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
Adam Curties' documentary "Bitter Lake" documents brilliantly the total failure of the US intervention and the arrogance of its Western stooges in Afghanistan
Did you know that the American Dream now comes in the form of a miracle pill? A recent marketing and advertising trend is peddling what they call the "smart pill", presumably a brain pill that not only makes you smart, it can also make you rich because you optimize your brain capacity! This is essentially a vitamin supplement that claims to boost memory, energy, and creativity, but it can also make you rich, very rich because it allows you to use your head more effectively when making those difficult career and investment decisions. You too can realize the "American Dream" just by taking this pill, without going to college, without working hard, without any effort on your part
GMOs And Green Blob Hallucinations: The Twisted World Of Mr Paterson By Colin Todhunter
Speaking last week in Pretoria, former UK Environment Minister Owen Paterson described critics of GMOs as comprising part of a privileged class that increasingly fetishizes food and seeks to turn their personal preferences into policy proscriptions for the rest of us. He called them backward-looking and regressive. He claimed their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment because of their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques
Postcard From The End Of America: Center City, Philadelphia By Linh Dinh
Though the most visible homeless are still the old and middle-aged, they are becoming younger and younger, and the other day, I met 30-year-old Stephanie sitting behind a plastic cup with a sign, "HOMELESS AND HUNGRY / ANYTHING HELPS / THANK YOU."
Check Your Privilege, Become An Ally By Mickey Z.
In a society built upon a foundation of hierarchy, declaring "we're all one" -- regardless of our intentions -- is yet another example of privilege run amok. If we wish to profoundly connect with our fellow humans, we must become allies... not "one."It takes no extra time to choose solidarity instead of privilege. The payoff for this transition is not only a richer, more compassionate life for yourself but also, a deeper commitment to collective liberation
We are once again reminded of the goondaism that prevails in regions like these, where communities face threats of abuse, intimidation and forced eviction due to mining and other so called development projects; where human right defenders and activists who believe in and abide by the law are made to feel like criminals and where the rich corporates who violate the law, rule the land
Budget 2015 : A Step Towards Inequality By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
The abolition of Wealth Tax, with a reduction in rate of corporate tax to 25% over next four years may have its own spiraling effects. There is always talks to reduce subsidy in the agricultural sector but benefits to corporate groups may outnumber the subsidy benefits to rural people
From Barpeta To Lucknow: Journey Of Waste-Pickers By Dr. Roli Misra & Parvin Sultana
Internal migration from Assam to other parts of India for a better livelihood is very common. But the condition of these waste pickers worsen once they move from Barpeta to Lucknow. Poverty, issues of identity circumscribed by larger question of illegal immigration makes it harder for them to work and sustain themselves. What is required is a move from rhetorical politics and a humanitarian take on the issue of these people who are stuck in the lowest rung of social ladder. Only then policies will be successful in true sense and people can break free from stigmas and move ahead
In Jammu and Kashmir, everything has significance and worth of something even the foot-ware that one purchases from the market but 'Human Lives' remain valueless. So outlandish that we didn't ascertain the connotation of famous maxim 'health is wealth.'
Condemn The Brutal Murder Of Avijit Roy By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism strongly condemns the brutal murder of Mr Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi secular blogger and author on 26th February in Dhaka. His wife Ms Rafida Anwar Banna has suffered grievous injuries in the attack. Mr Roy was a popular blogger and author who wrote a number of books against religious extremism and the threat to human dignity and democracy from it. He had been on the hit list of Islamic fundamentalists for a number of years
Release 145 Undertrial Maruti Workers On Bail By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR welcomes the bail granted by the Supreme Court to Sunil s/o Satpal and Kanwaljeet Singh, two of the Maruti workers on February 23, 2015. Sunil and Kanwaljeet are among the 147 workers who were arrested in the aftermath of the violence on July 18, 2012, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana which led to the death of the factory's HR manager Awaneesh Kumar Deb. However it is hardly a cause for celebration given that the bail was long overdue, and the other 145 workers still continue to languish in jail
Narmada Jeevanshala's Balmela: From The (Play) Ground By National Alliance of People's Movements
The Narmada Jeevanshalas (Schools of Life) celebrated its 16th annual Balmela (Children's fair), from 12th February to 15thFebruary at a resettlement site of the Project Affected Families (PAFs) of the Narmada - Sardar Sarovar Dam |
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Reuters: Obama backers show signs of disappointment . "Gay rights supporters, abortion rights activists, environmentalists and backers of immigration reform all have seen their agendas stalled, with watered-down healthcare the main accomplishment of Obama's once-ambitious agenda."
New mini-episodes of True Blood to begin airing .
Leaping whale blamed for drowning death off Provincetown.
FOX News' Greg Gutfeld: Gay Obama hecklers did it because they are racist . "But I wonder, couldn't this heckling be a precursor to violent extremism? And could this agitation toward our president, said to be based on policy, really be thinly veiled racism? I mean, the president did say he agreed with this gay group and yet they still heckled."
Bobby Trendy pumps gas .
Annie Lennox: HIV-positive for Idol Gives Back. Video .
Walter "Bud" Pidgeon, president of the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, demands Bluewater Productions withdraw the new comic book featuring Ellen Degeneres because she is gay and supports animal rights : "As emails flooded Bluewater's server from USSA's members castigating him for 'elevating' gays, supporting 'less than acceptable lifestyles', and for honoring Ellen's request that issue proceeds go the to U.S. Humane Society he quickly discovered Pidgeon was a real person and had in fact called upon his 3 million members to take action against Bluewater."
Congress to hold hearing on gay aging .
China to drop ban on HIV-positive tourists: "'The ban was imposed in the 1980s because of a lack of knowledge and is now obsolete and discriminatory,' said He Xiong, deputy head of the Beijing centre for disease prevention and control. 'HIV/Aids cases have been seen in all of China's provinces and a travel ban on foreigners will not help improve local public health,' he said. China has 740,000 people who are HIV-positive and is one of 60 countries that denies entry to sufferers of the disease."
This was my favorite magazine too.
Boy George on prison fashion : "You have to wear these really horrible denim trousers and a stripy shirt tucked in. I looked like a lesbian. You wear your own clothes in the daytime - nothing too fancy - you're not allowed hoods. Hoodies are banned. It wasn't anything like the new Lady Gaga video: it was not like that at all."
UK travel show reality stars gay bashed even though they're not gay : "The two men, Romane Hole and Nathan Evans, are both straight and are just friends, but they jokingly held hands when they boarded the bus at the start of the journey, which commenced in Athens.
'We had no idea how gay we were going to look by holding hands,' said Evans. 'Then all the way through the series, the [episodes] seem to have been edited to make us look as if we are a homosexual couple, rather than a pair of straight friends.'
... Some viewers not only have gotten the wrong idea about the men, but have allegedly acted in violently homophobic ways based on that impression. |
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Bob Feldman The Electronic Intifada 28 March 2005
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website at www.israelsoldiers.org . With annual revenues of $15,112,321 and assets of $10,936,961 in 2002, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces group assists members of the North American public in providing financial support for certain designated programs of the Association for Welfare of Soldiers in Israel.
At its $1,000-a-plate 2005 New York Gala Dinner on March 15, for instance, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces New York chapter "will once again honor the soldiers" in "the largest single fundraising event" for the U.S.-based IDF support group, according to its website at www.israelsoldiers.org . The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website also notes that "we plan to once again send our message of support to the soldiers of the IDF , and let them know that we appreciate all that they do."
Benny Shabtai The chairman of the 2005 dinner, a member of the national board of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces named Benny Shabtai, is a former bodyguard at the Israeli embassy in Paris and former member of the Israeli army. After immigrating to the United States, Shabtai became the exclusive distributor of Raymond Weil watches from Switzerland. In its March 12, 2004 issue, Forbes magazine made the following reference to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces Dinner Chairman Shabtai:
"Benny Shabtai, the Israeli businessman who is president of Raymond Weil USA , is selling his Upper East Side townhouse for $23 million, according to The New York Observer... Shabtai bought it in 2000 for $8.2 million... Shabtai, who was born in Tel Aviv, keeps a fairly low profile, but he is rumored to have dabbled in or funded a wide variety of businesses. According to one report, he controls Aryt Industries, an Israeli holding company of various high-tech industrial and defense businesses... A few years ago, he entertained Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Michael Jackson at a reception at his home in New York..."
Part of the $15 million that chapters of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces raise in the U.S. each year goes to fund "capital campaign projects," such as a planned $1 million project in Jerusalem to build "The Cultural Well-being and Sports Center" in the Israeli Army's Border Control Base. Among the completed "capital campaign projects" funded in the past was a $250,000 project "located near the Lebanese border and serving combat soldiers in the Northern Command" to refurbish the Israeli soldiers' homes in Kyriat Shmoneh.
According to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces website, "last summer, Israel's Defense Minister, Lieutenant General L. Shaul Mofaz, spent 15 days on a whirlwind coast-to-coast tour with Friends of the IDF ," "tirelessly campaigned to raise money and awareness of the plight of IDF Soldiers" and raised over $4,000,000 at the annual dinner of the group's Cleveland chapter.
The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces also conducts 9-Day "Mission To Israel" guided tours for U.S. citizens that feature "visits to strategic IDF command posts." Day 4 of its "Mission To Israel" tour, for instance, includes a "briefing at Central Command Headquarters," a visit to " IDF units around Ramallah" and a "tour at the Ammunition Hill." On Day 5, the "Mission To Israel" tour, entitled "Visit the Northern Command," consists of a visit to Chaunt Hashomer "to meet soldiers," a visit to "Division #36 at the Golan Heights," a "lookout from an IDF post onto the Golan Heights," a "briefing on daily life close to the Lebanese border" and a "night tour to the `Secret Tunnel.'" Day 6 of the Friends of the IDF tour includes a visit at Ramat David Air Force Base and a visit to "the Navy base in Haifa;" and Day 7 includes a visit to the "Engineering training school including display of land mine exercises," according to the FIDC website.
Besides Raymond Weil USA President Shabtai, the national board of the Friends of the IDF also includes NYU School of Law Board of Trustees Chairman and Centre Partners Management Managing Director Lester Pollack--a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations' pro-Israeli Establishment pressure group. In addition, FIDF board member Pollack also sits on the corporate board of Bank Leumi USA . The $3 billion portfolio of Pollack's Centre Partners Management firm includes investments in stock of the Firearms Training Systems Inc., a leading provider of small arms training systems to the military, and in stock of Maverick Media, a U.S. media firm that owns radio stations.
Unlike the U.S. citizens who are involved in the Manhattan-based Friends of the Israel Defense Forces group, most U.S. anti-war activists have been morally opposed to the actions in recent years of the IDF in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In his 2003 Verso book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against The Palestinians, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor of Sociology Baruch Kimmerling described some of these morally objectionable actions:
"Waves of tank and infantry units, supported by Apache helicopters, rolled into the PNA -controlled West Bank and later Gaza Strip territories, cities, refugee camps, and even villages [on March 29, 2002]... They captured and imprisoned thousands of suspects in detention camps... This operation not only destroyed political organizations and their facilities, but civilian institutions like universities, schools, clinics, churches, and mosques...
"...On December 17, 2000, Israel initiated a policy of extra-judicial executions (called targeted killings)... The operations... killed... innocent individuals... Some members of the Israeli public openly labeled such actions war crimes..."
After some Israeli draftees began refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, most U.S. anti-war activists began to express political support for the Refuser Solidarity Network, whose website is www.refusersolidarity.net .
According to the www.guidestar.org website, the Manhattan office of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces has been located on the 5th floor of 298 Fifth Avenue in recent years.
Bob Feldman is an anti-war Movement writer and activist who contributed "Inspecting Nuclear Israel" and "The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934" to Counterpunch magazine. He is an occasional contributor to EI . Facebook Google+ Twitter |
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The International Organization for Migration reported on Monday that an airstrike on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in Yemen's Hajjah Province killed at least forty people and injured two hundred others. The attack occurred on the fifth consecutive day of airstrikes carried out by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by intelligence and logistical support from the United States
The Imploding Middle East, Saudi Kingdom And Pakistan By Haris Khurshid
In latest turn of the events in Middle East now Pakistan is at crossroads to get embroiled in a distant conflict involving its Muslim benefactor Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or extricate itself from an avoidable war looming on the horizon of Yemen. The region is experiencing new wave of violence and disintegration in less stable parts mainly drawn by Shia Sunni sectarian and ethnic prejudice
Even America's 'Media Watchdogs' Hide U.S.'s Ukrainian Nazification & Ethnic Cleansing By Eric Zuesse
The U.S.'news' media are so censored and controlled, so that even America's 'media watchdog' organizations -- mediamatters.org and fair.org on the left; and aim.org and mrc.org on the right -- have hidden from the American public President Barack Obama's Ukrainian coup in February 2014 that violently overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President and replaced him with a Ukrainian nazi (racist-fascist) rabidly eliminationist anti-Russian, police-state regime in Kiev
Accountability Must Be At The Heart Of The Paris Climate Pact By Harro van Asselt, Hakon Saelen and Pieter Pauw
Slowly but surely, the first climate pledges for the 2015 agreement - or, in UN-speak, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) - have started to trickle in. Mexico and Norway were the latest countries to formally announce their pledges, with the United States and Russia also expected to submit their offers this week. Under the 2015 agreement, the hope is that INDCs will prove to be crucial instruments in preventing dangerous climate change. Yet a key element is still missing
Pakistan has halted work on six coal-fired power projects of some 14,000 megawatts due to environmental concerns, lack of needed infrastructure and foreign investment
Surviving Climate Disaster In Africa's Sahel By Thomas C. Mountain
After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government of Eritrea initiated a major water conservation plan that along with reforestation and soil conservation is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted
We Are Losing The Oceans By Paul Craig Roberts
From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored
Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country's major patron of the last 13 years -- and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces
Two Muslims Lynched In Two Different Cities Of The World Incited Two Different Reactions By Abdul Rashid Agwan
The gory events of Kabul and Dimapur expose modern hypocrisy where both civilizational zeal and barbaric spree are going hand in hand, where religions fail to stimulate respect for human dignity in their followers and where the rule of law is yet not honored by those who are supposed to be its vouched guardians
Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers By Matt Peppe
In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out. Last week, in an act of mass murder with more than 12 times the number of victims, 27-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided the plane he was flying straight into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board. Yet it is only the former murderous act that has been described by politicians and portrayed in the media as an existential threat and an example of terrorism
Television Commercial In California Asks Drone Pilots To Stop Killing By David Swanson
This may be a first: a television ad campaign in a U.S. state capitol appealing to someone to stop murdering human beings who have, in most cases, already been born. A new 15-second television ad, a variation on one that's aired in Las Vegas near Creech Air Force Base, is debuting this week in Sacramento, Calif.
BOOKS: Occupy These Photos By Mickey Z.
Now, I'm asking you to be part of that mission. Occupy These Photos is a book born on the streets and we're seeking funding in the same DIY manner: from the ground up. Please click here to find out how you can get involved! Thanks in advance for your support. Without you, this book would not have happened.
Indian Parliamentarian Doubts If Tobacco Kills! Do Not Reinvent The Wheel By Bobby Ramakant
Indian parliamentarian who is chairing the committee which told the government not to implement stronger pictorial graphic health warnings on tobacco packs (and raise the warning size from 40% to 85%) from 1st April 2015, casted doubts whether tobacco causes cancer. India is at risk of reversing the gains made in saving lives from tobacco! He is the same parliamentarian who had raised similar questions in the parliament in 2011 and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India had given him detailed response underlining the alarming magnitude of the tobacco pandemic in the country
30 March, 2015
Yemen: Saudi-Led Airstrikes Take Civilian Toll By Human Rights Watch
The Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab countries that conducted airstrikes in Yemen on March 26 and 27, 2015, killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 34 civilians during the first day of bombings in Sanaa, the capital, Human Rights Watch said today. The 11 dead included 2 children and 2 women. Saudi and other warplanes also carried out strikes on apparent targets in the cities of Saada, Hodaida, Taiz, and Aden
Yemen: No Military Solution By Chandra Muzaffar
To bring order and stability to a nation which is in such a terrible mess, one has to persuade all the relevant players to talk to one another, to negotiate, to compromise. The peaceful, non-violent approach to conflict resolution has not been given enough space and scope to succeed in Yemen. The UN has been trying to play a role in a very difficult situation. The UN should be given full support by all the contending forces
A Middle East Holocaust By Paul Craig Roberts
How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression? Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the bombers. Iran is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and China can destroy the US and all of Washington's vassal states. The intensity of Washington's propaganda war is driving the world to destruction
A Pakistani Woman named Aafia Siddiqui was abducted from a taxi in Karachi, Pakistan along with her 3 children 12 years ago on March 30, 2003. At the time she was vulnerable, recently divorced from an abusive husband; living with her mother; her father had just died of a heart attack. The youngest child was an infant. Following her abduction, Aafia Siddiqui and her children disappeared from view for 5 years. She spent those years in US Black Site prisons in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One can only imagine the torment she suffered there, in a system created to enable the torture and abuse of terrorism suspects. She was a woman alone. They took her children, and threatened them when personal torture was not enough to gain her acquiescence
A study published in the journal Science found government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. Now, the question is: Whether to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions?
Does Civilisation Mean Insanity And Violence? By Sukumaran C. V.
Biodiversity is the prime necessity for the continuance of Life on Earth, and the humans destroy the very thing which helps them survive on earth
Postcard From The End Of America: Carlisle, PA By Linh Dinh
Black, white, brown or yellow, anyone who's dwelling within these Disunited States will be thoroughly nicked up, if not buried alive, from the coming collapse and turmoil, and it's telling that our final chapter started with a double castrations that was broadcast, live, to the entire world, and that one of our bravest dissidents, Bradley Manning, also wishes to have nothing between his legs, and that our present day Jim Thorpe, one Bruce Jenner, also dreams of the day he will finally be emasculated. Don't worry, it's coming
Gendered Dis-preference In Indian Society By Roli Misra
In present context with the advent of new technology the practice of female infanticide has been replaced by genocide of millions of women known as female foeticide - denying the girl its very right to take birth. The rapid spread of the use of ultrasounds and amniocentesis for sex determination followed by sex selective induced abortions has created a situation of daughter drought with tragic consequences
Lambs To The Slaughter: The Dying Future Of Higher Education By P K Vijayan
For the sake of our professional integrity, then, for the sake of our students, for the sake of the institutions that we have studied and worked in, for the sake of the society to which we belong and to which we are accountable - for everyone's sake, and not just our own, it is time for the teachers' movement to come together once again, and give an exemplary response to the forces that seek to grind us down
Attacking The Cross: Rise In Anti Christian Violence By Ram Puniyani
Julio Ribeiro is one of the best known police officers in India. Recently (March 16, 2015) he wrote in his article that he is feeling like a stranger in this country. 'I feel threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in my own country'. This pain and anguish of a distinguished citizen, an outstanding police officer has to be seen against the backdrop of the rising attacks on Churches and rape of the 71 year old nun in Kolkata. All over the country the rage amongst the Christian community is there to be seen in the form of silent marches, candle light vigils and peaceful protests
Islam, Peace, Justice & Dialogue By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's Interaction Interaction with a group of Catholic priests and nuns, New Delhi
The Healing Power Of Meditation By William T. Hathaway
TM produces mental and physical rest that is twice as deep as in sleep, although we're fully awake. This rejuvenating state enables the body's self-healing mechanism to repair the damage from traumatic events and illnesses. With these blockages gone we are more able to develop our full capabilities
29 March, 2015
Arab leaders have agreed to form a joint military force at a Sharm el-Sheikh summit, hosting Egyptian President Abdel Sisi has announced. The meeting was dominated by the situation in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia leads a bombing campaign against rebels
The US is now openly coordinating another act of naked aggression committed by a tandem force of two US-collaborator countries competing for the title of world's worst domestic dictatorship: Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Shell's Climate Change Strategy: Narcissistic, Paranoid, And Psychopathic By John Ashton
In an open letter to Shell's Ben Van Beurden, the UK's former top climate envoy says now is the time for him to show leadership
A week with Wyden shows a secret fundraiser for a secretly negotiated corporate agreement
Stop Smoking The Democrack By Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
The U.S. government is toying with a war with nuclear Russia while already waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having done severe damage to Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Military spending is climbing ever higher. Presidential war powers are ever more extreme. The proliferation of nuclear technology is combining with the ease and secrecy of drone wars to raise the risk of a Dr. Strangelove finish to the human species. And, let's face it, you had more time to give a damn when the president was a Republican
Scientists and scientific organisations around the world call on Government of India to withdraw a flawed study on chrysotile asbestos and stop blocking UN Convention
Re-Probe Hashimpura Killing Case By Syed Ali Mujtaba
It's bolt on India's democracy that the murders of Hashimpura are let out for want of evidence. There is hardly any hue and cry, local and international pressure being built for re-probe. The evidences are abundant, it needs to pieced together and bring it for the judicial scrutiny. Re-probe of Hashimpura carnage alone can instill confidence among the minority community in the country
Tobacco or Health! U Turn On Pictorial Warning On Tobacco Products By Subhash Gatade
Government is set to defer indefinitely the implementation of notification for increasing the size of pictorial warning on tobacco products beyond April one, when it was to come into force. ..The notification regarding amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules, 2008 sought increase in the size of specified health warning from the current 40 per cent to 85 per cent of the principal display area of the package of tobacco products
28 March, 2015
Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched airstrikes in Yemen against rebel Shiite Houthi forces gaining more ground. The mainly Gulf coalition, which also includes the US, is trying to help embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Twenty-four people were killed and 43 injured as a result of Saudi-led airstrikes over the last 24 hours, Yemen's Saba state news agency reported the Interior Ministry saying in a statement
Nuclear Threat Escalating Beyond Political Rhetoric By Thalif Deen
As a new cold war between the United States and Russia picks up steam, the nuclear threat is in danger of escalating - perhaps far beyond political rhetoric
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth's Ability To Support Life By Paul Craig Roberts
David Ray Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin's book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? The book is a carefully researched document
No Ban On Coal Finance As Green Climate Fund Eyes First Projects By Megan Darby
The Green Climate Fund has not ruled out backing coal plants after a protracted three-day board meeting in Songdo, South Korea. Tense negotiations ended at 04 20 on Thursday with agreement on seven intermediaries to disburse funds for low carbon development and climate adaptation in poor countries
Two Degree Celsius Climate Change Target 'Utterly Inadequate By Countercurrents.org
The official global target of a 2degC temperature rise is 'utterly inadequate' for protecting those at most risk from climate change, says a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), writing a commentary in the open access journal Climate Change Responses. The commentary presents a rare inside-view of a two-day discussion at the Lima Conference of the Parties (COP) on the likely consequences of accepting an average global warming target of 2degC versus 1.5degC
The Czech Republic And The Fine Art Of Collaboration By Andre Vltchek
The US military convoy will soon be passing through the Czech territory, from the Baltics and Poland, to its permanent base in Bavaria, Germany. That is bad enough. The Czechs should not have allowed the convoy to pass. Provoking Russia and moving closer and closer to the fascist Empire is a shameless and cowardly act
Coming Home By William T. Hathaway
From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War. RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from antiwar activists, the true stories of their efforts to change our warrior culture. In this chapter a mother tells of her son's return from combat. She wishes to remain anonymous
Cultural Hegemony And Social Change: 2015 By Jon Kofas
There are conservative analysts who assume that more than anything people crave safety and security. Cultural hegemony rests on the fears of the people who have been conditioned to accept the status quo and avert risk when it comes to securing a new social contract that would represent all people. Some advocates of democracy argue that actualizing their potential is just as important for human beings, but this entails having an institutional structure that permits and promotes those possibilities. I have argued in the past that uprisings are very possible in the 21st century, especially after the next inevitable deep recession, but systemic change is highly unlikely
It's been a bad couple of weeks for Monsanto. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines for not reporting hundreds of uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals at its eastern Idaho phosphate plant. It also paid out a string of lawsuit settlements totaling $350,000 as a result of its GMOs tainting wheat in seven US states. Such amounts represent little more than a tap on the wrist for a company that rakes in sales of almost $16 billion dollars annually
Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict By William James Martin
The Palestinians have little to offer Obama. Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term. If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice
Brutal Lathi Charge On Workers Outside Delhi Secretariat By Abhinav Sinha
Complete account of the brutal lathi charge on workers outside Delhi Secretariat on the orders of Kejriwal Government on March 25, 2015
Human Rights Violations by the Punjab Government and Punjab Police regarding the Surat Singh Khalsa fast unto death
27 March, 2015
Airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by other members of Gulf Cooperating Council and the U.S. government, continued to hit Yemen on Thursday as the situation in one of the world's most impoverished, yet strategically important countries continues to unravel amid what can only be described now as all-out war. Reports indicate that a first wave of bombings overnight which resulted in a number of civilian deaths--including entire families trapped in flattened houses--have spurred widespread anger in Sanaa and other targeted cities, even among members of the population opposed to the Houthi rebels
Saudi Arabia, Egypt Prepare US-Backed Invasion Of Yemen By Niles Williamson
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are preparing a US-backed military invasion of Yemen aimed at pushing back the Houthi militia that has taken over much of the country and reasserting the control of besieged President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that the three-pronged assault would come from Saudi Arabia in the north and from the Red Sea in the west and the Arabian Sea in the south. As many as five Egyptian troop ships have been stationed off the coast of Yemen. The officials said that the assault would begin after airstrikes had sufficiently weakened the Houthi rebels
5 Facts You Need To Know About Yemen And Its Conflicts By Russia Today
One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players - and some of the world's most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation's conflicts
US Warplanes Attack Targets In Center Of Tikrit By Patrick Martin
US warplanes began air strikes on Islamic State positions in the center of Tikrit Wednesday night, the first involvement of US forces in the bloody fighting in that Iraqi city, the hometown of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Military sources said at least 180 targets were struck in one of the most ferocious bombardments since the US resumed military operations in Iraq last August
Far from being a "Sunni jihadist group", ISIS is yet another creation of botched up U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World. Attributing anything Islamic to the group is as ridiculous as attributing American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and illegal detention of "illegal combatants" at Guantanamo Bay to Christianity. Nevertheless, ISIS is an enigma, a by-product of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war, and last but not least, an integral part of Washington's false flag operation in the Muslim World
Europe Must Not Be Forced Into A Nuclear War With Russia By John Scales Avery
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it. Europe must not be the close ally (or vassal) of the world's greatest purveyor of violence and war
The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU's Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013 By Eric Zuesse
So: now you know why Yanukovych, the very next day after his learning about the $160B price tag of the EU's offer, turned it down, and also why this revelation is still news, more than a year later -- just as it was news to me until I happened upon it only today
Amnesty: Gaza Firing Of Indiscriminate Rockets Is War Crime By Robert Barsocchini
Amnesty notes in a new report that attacks by Gazans resisting Israeli occupation, invasion, and terrorist attacks amount to war crimes, due to the uncontrollable nature of the rudimentary projectiles Gazans are forced to use because of the Israeli occupation and siege keeping Gaza isolated from the rest of the world. "According to UN data, more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel during the conflict." But the western media is silent on the number of casualty caused by these projectiles compared to the overwhelming death and destruction caused by Israel's assualt on Gaza
New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During And After WWII By Robert Barsocchini
Germany's The Local reports: Professor Miriam Gebhardt's book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin
A Different Form Of Holocaust Denial By Mickey Z.
The use of the word "holocaust" in relation to factory farming is semantically accurate but horribly insensitive and demonstrably ineffectiv
Volume Loss From Antarctic Ice Shelves Is Accelerating, Finds Study By Countercurrents.org
Scientists have warned: The ice around the edge of Antarctica is melting faster than previously thought, potentially unlocking meters of sea-level rise in the long-term
Vast Majority Of Americans Believe That The Climate Is Changing By Ian James
Stanford University professor Jon Krosnick has been studying Americans' attitudes about global warming for nearly two decades and has found in repeated polls that a large majority see climate change as a threat to future generations that should be addressed
In tracing the rapid deterioration of the legal intellect in Sri Lanka, the extrajudicial killings committed by the State should be scrutinised as one of the most significant factors for such deterioration
The Supreme Court's scrapping of Section 66 A of the Information Technology Act for being "unconstitutional in entirety" is indeed a great moment in the life of the democracy. The Act did, in fact, invade citizenry's right of free speech "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately". However, is this really a moment to celebrate in the life of a republic whose criminal justice system is rotten to the core? Will it really lead to any exercise of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, in a land where ordinary citizens fear the police more than the criminals?
Revisiting The Caste Question By Priyanka Dass Saharia
How is modern form of caste in contemporary times? Nicholas Dirks had argued on colonial power knowledge complexes instrumental in reifying it within bureaucratic structures and discourses. The various institutions of caste were used as tools to manage the divide and rule policies perpetuated by the British. The question then becomes as to what form did these changes take? In what ways did the imported modernity of colonialism changed the 'registers' of belief and social reality in India?
Examinations And Professional Competence By S.G.Vombatkere
The recent news reports of wholesale cheating in matriculation examinations in Bihar, with pictures of accomplices dangerously climbing the walls of buildings in which examinations were being held, to hand over cheating-aids to candidates, are horrifying. The physical risk taken by the accomplices shows that the cash paid to them - by parents who are okay with cheating, and making arrangements to "help" their wards - is adequate
26 March, 2015
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared "to protect and defend the legitimate government" of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi
US Airstrikes, Coupled With Iran-Backed Militias And Iraqi Forces, Target ISIS In Tikrit By Jon Queally
As Middle East historian Juan Cole points out, the U.S. military on Wednesday into Thursday was assisting the Saudi bombing of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, while simultaneously collaborating (at least indirectly) with Iranian military advisors from the Iranian Republican Guard Corp in the operation against ISIS in Tikrit. "The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region," he writes. "But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran."
Washington's Two Air Wars: With Iran In Iraq, With Saudis (Against Iran) In Yemen By Juan Cole
The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region. But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran
"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
Obama Now Sides w. Poroshenko & EU To End Ukraine's War By Eric Zuesse
Obama has other fish to fry with them -- such as his proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), to grant international corporations effective control over the environmental, labor, and product-safety regulations of participating countries. He seems to have decided (at least for the time being) to pursue -- via other routes than Ukraine -- his war against Russia
Agent Orange Funding Opens Door To US Militarism And Covert Action In Vietnam By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Is the United States finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country's affairs as part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" strategy?
Globalization and cheater economics have been destroying the world's great rivers and their fisheries. Most people know about the devastation of rivers from water pollution, but not as many are aware of the significant impacts of big dams, river engineering, and real estate development in and on top of rivers. These activities can seriously damage fisheries and impair the natural functions of riverine ecosystems. A true-cost, steady state economy would, for the most part, avoid the continuing tragic dismantlement of rivers and fisheries
Imagine if an American presidential candidate made a plea to his supporters on election day with the following statement: "The Republican administration is in danger. Black voters are going en masse to the polls. Liberal NGOs are bringing them on buses." Even in a country where Chris Matthews is a media celebrity and Pamela Geller is an intellectual, the statement would be scandalous, a political death wish even. In Israel, however, the opposite is true. In a message delivered in a video on Facebook, incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a sinister call appealing to ingrained racism in Israeli society: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses."
Despite Protests, Japan Diverts Funds Earmarked To Fight Climate Change To Finance Coal Plants In India, Bangladesh By Countercurrents.org
Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, reported the Associated Press
Premises On The Question Of Political Crisis In Bangladesh By Farooque Chowdhury
Today's Bangladesh faces political crisis as scores of news-reports and views claim [an end-note to this article cites headings/excerpts of a few of those], and today's Bangladesh doesn't face political crisis as one can claim periods of turmoil are not crisis, can cite a few data from economy, and can also refer to a lull within a long period of crisis. Both the statements, one can claim, are correct in relative terms. On the other hand, any of the two cancels the other. Only a scientific approach to the question - crisis - can provide a reliable answer. The approach should look into all related aspects instead of making sweeping remarks based on superficial observations and shallow search that ignores basic elements of crisis
Pads Against Sexism Campaign - Some Issues By Parvin Sultana
Elone Kastratia started a unique street art protest using Sanitary napkins with messages against sexual violence in her hometown Krlsruhe, Germany which went viral in social media. With rapidly spreading across to other countries, it was picked up by students of universities like Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They put up sanitary napkins in various spots in the universities. The idea behind using sanitary napkins to start such awareness campaign was to use blunt hard hitting methods in starting a dialogue around sexual harassment of women. The means used raised many eyebrows in a society where sexism continues to be rampant
A Deeper Look At Vedic History Suggests A Tribal Melting Pot That May Surprise The Hindu Nationalist By Amritanshu Pandey
While the nationalists speak of a golden past the truth is that ancient India may very well have been the equivalent of a medieval Arabia! Realisation of this could help us better accept India's vast cultural diversity, and prevent us from engaging in acts such as the ban on beef-production simply because it offends the culture of a select group. The truth is that there could have been several ancient Indian tribes that relished beef, while others abstained from its consumption. Which of them represent the real India, and who are we truly descended from?
The Fear Factor In Indian Republic By Parvez Alam
I am tempted to write because I am feeling insecure. May be I shouldn't write because it becomes easy for them to identify me and kill me. They can kill me any time anywhere, in day light, at mid night, in Hashimpura or in Sopore or in Batla House. What is the purpose of these institutions, only killing and intimidating or something else? Why have we made our society in such a way that police and army symbolize only fear? Why we train security personnel in the fashion which create them spineless robots who just do not feel any acquiescence with thinking and judging? Why are we not agitating against the acts of violence, denial of justice, inhumanity and banality of evil? Why are we so silent when we are feeling so disturbed inside?
A Guide To Understanding Our Times - Review of Recollection of Things Learned By Gaither Stewart By William T. Hathaway
G aither Stewart is a man of passions. In The Europe Trilogy he shared with us his passion for international espionage and intrigue. In Voices from Pisalocca he shared his passion for village life in his adoptive country, Italy. In The Fifth Sun he shared his passion for Native-American mythology. Now in Recollection of Things Learned he shares his passion for socialism, both the complexity of its theory and the clash of its praxis.
25March, 2015
The issue of rising food Prices across the globe is a matter of great concern, and is being discussed on many international forums. Studies show that, since households in developing countries spend most of their income on food items, rising food prices affect them significantly more than households in developed countries
Hold The Rich Accountable In New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs By Thalif Deen
The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments - this time particularly by the rich - if the UN's 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed
Two Towns Face The Fallout As Himalayan Glaciers Melt By Daniel Grossman
For two towns in northern India, melting glaciers have had very different impacts -- one town has benefited from flowing streams and bountiful harvests; but the other has seen its water supplies dry up and now is being forced to relocate
U.S.-v.-Russia: Even Stephen Cohen Is Starting To Speak The Truth By Eric Zuesse
An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) "for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real," and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this "possibly a fateful turning-point in history." He also says "it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance."
How The US Government And US Military Became Murder, Inc. By Paul Craig Roberts
The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war. If the crazed Russophobic US generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will be destroyed. The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war nuclear
Resisting Israeli Politics By Brenda Heard
Six months prior to the upcoming UK general election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published its "2015 General Election Jewish Manifesto." This forty-page document urges both existing and prospective members of the UK Parliament to support various "policy asks" and to "champion these causes." The Manifesto was styled after a very similar one created for the 2014 EU elections. Indeed their goals appear the same: to ensure a pro-Israeli agenda in the House of Commons and beyond
Supreme Court Decision On Section 66A Lays The Basis Of Fifth Pillar Of Democracy By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
India has now unrestricted freedom to speak and express on social sites, albeit qualified by the reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Art. 19 of the constitution. This development makes India one of the most advanced countries in the world where people can release their grievances against the system, and against the leaders who for no attainments still glorify themselves. It gives Indian people a tool to create public opinion on any issue. Internet is now a force with a capacity to channelize the people's anger, desires, and expectations in unified manner towards its destination
Our educational system needs a radical change
24 March, 2015
As U.S. military convoy pushes through countries in eastern Europe while cash contribution to Clinton Foundation gets exposed. Activists are protesting the U.S. military march. An AP report said: A U.S. army infantry convoy is driving through eastern Europe seeking to provide reassurance to a region concerned that the Ukraine conflict threatens its securit
IMF: Ukraine Must Now Steal $1.5 Billion+ From Russia To Buy Arms By German Economic News
The IMF has developed a program for Ukraine, under which the current financial hole is to be filled in the amount $40 billion. The due debts [the senior debt] are part of the plan, and will be restructured, according to the IMF. Exactly how it is to happen, the IMF does not explain. Experts say that the IMF believes that Russia should participate in a haircut
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record - while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years
World's Richest One Percent Undermine Fight Against Economic Inequalities By Thalif Deen
The growing economic inequalities between rich and poor - and the lopsided concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the world's one percent - are undermining international efforts to fight global poverty, environmental degradation and social injustice, according to a civil society alliance
Empire And Colonialism: Rich Men In London Still Deciding Africa's Future By Colin Todhunter
Some PS600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce
Herbicide US Sprays Over Millions Of Acres In Columbia "Drug War" Linked To Cancer By Robert Barsocchini
The Associated Press reports that "the world's most-popular weed killer" has been discovered to be "a likely cause of cancer": The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a French-based research arm of the World Health Organization, has reclassified the herbicide glyphosate as a result of what it said is convincing evidence the chemical produces cancer in lab animals and more limited findings it causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in humans. ...the glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup [made by Monsanto] is a mainstay of industrial agriculture
To coincide with the IARC's findings, public promoter of GM golden rice Patrick Moore recently said during an interview on French TV that: "I do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing cancer. You can drink a whole quart and it won't hurt you." On being repeatedly asked to back up his statement Moore walked out of the interview
Sixty Percent Of Global Drone Exports Come From Israel -- New Data By Rania Khalek
Israel has supplied 60.7 percent of the world's drones since 1985, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. As a result, Israel is the single greatest source of drone proliferation in the world
Secrecy And Democracy Are Incompatible By John Scales Avery
It is obvious, almost by definition, that excessive governmental secrecy and true democracy are incompatible. If the people of a country have no idea what their government is doing, they cannot possibly have the influence on decisions that the word "democracy" implies
A Liberal Lawyer Gives Up On Preventing Murder By David Swanson
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called "There is no such thing as peacetime." Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder
Wait For Justice To Victims Of Hashimpura Has Become Much Longer By Subash Gatade
After around 28 years of the gruesome massacre allegedly by the personnel of the much feared PAC ( Provincial Armed Constabulary) for its biased approach , the Delhi court acquitted all 16 accused on 'benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused'. There have been very few massacres in post-independent India which have shaken the civil society to the core and have propelled it to come forward and raise its voice. And the Hashimpura killings happen to be one such episode
America's Global Dominance (Since WW II) Has Just Ended By Eric Zuesse
Obama's arrogance is what's driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase "the ugly American." In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America's problem, but perhaps they won't become the world's, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won't. And that's today's big news-story
Barbarians Are Coming - Western or Arabs? By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The US and the Europeans see war as an instrument of political hegemony and control over the precious natural resources of the Arab-Muslim world. The super-ego American and the allied Europeans are missing sense of guilt for the vice and ruins of decade long occupation and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan
Vietnam's Major Regional Thrust For A Malaria-Free Asia Pacific By 2030 By Citizen News Service (CNS)
Vietnam signals greater regional leadership in malaria elimination by hosting health officials and experts to discuss challenges to achieving a malaria-free Asia Pacific by 2030. This week, Vietnam will host Ministry of Health officials from the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN); a group of 17 countries in Asia Pacific who each share the ultimate goal to become malaria-free
23 March, 2015
Houthi militia members seized the military airport in Taiz on Saturday without any resistance from Yemeni military forces. The capture of Taiz brings the Houthi forces within 180 kilometers of the southern port city of Aden, the hometown and stronghold of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.Fighters from the Special Security Forces reportedly fired their automatic weapons and volleys of tear gas to disperse large crowds of protesters who turned out to oppose the Houthis' presence in the country's third largest city. Amid the country's descent into sectarian conflict, the United States announced that it was evacuating approximately 100 US Special Operations soldiers who had been stationed at the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province. They cited security threats after Al Qaeda militants briefly seized control of the nearby city of Al Houta on Friday
12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion - 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation By Dr Gideon Polya
Those with consciences recently marked the 12th anniversary on 19 March 2015 of the illegal and war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on false assertions of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was conducted in the absence of UN sanction or Iraqi threat to the invading nations, and led to 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million). The West has now commenced its Seventh Iraq War since 1914 in over a century of Western violence in which Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation have totalled 9 million. However Western Mainstream media have resolutely ignored the carnage, this tragically illustrating the adage "History ignored yields history repeated
The crisis that struck Ukraine last year-- the overthrow of the elected president, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in the Russian speaking eastern provinces-- was the result of problems that had been festering, not only in Ukraine but all along the former frontiers of the USSR since the end of the cold war and the collapse of eastern European socialism over twenty some years previously
For Hamza: Arms Sanctions Against Israel's Everyday Terrorism By Vacy Vlazna
Meet little Hamza Mus'ab Almadani of Khan Younis, Gaza. Look carefully, look tenderly, don't turn away. Please don't turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, turned away from Palestine. Hamza is Palestine. Look carefully at Israel's savage violation to his once perfect little body when on the 25th July 2014, Israel's soldiers loaded and fired pale blue artillery shells that discharged white incendiary rain on Gaza in hundreds of phosphorous-impregnated felt wedges as Hamza and his family slept. Imagine the agony Hamza suffered from the moment the white phosphorous struck and burrowed through his soft three year old skin. Phosphorous burns are only contained by blocking off oxygen but the extreme pain and, as you can see, the horrific tissue damage endures
Middle Income Nations Home To Half The World's Hungry By Thalif Deen
Nearly half of the world's hungry, about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Senator Cotton, Hitler, And 'Appeasement' By Mickey Z.
There are many issues swirling about the current situation in Iran but invoking Churchill, Hitler, and the A Word activates the following historical facade: by whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the United States and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being questioned... especially when every enemy of the United States is likened to Hitler
Jump Out Of The Pot! By William T. Hathaway
Like the frogs in a simmering water pot, we are provided with pictures, music, and other pleasures to distract us from the worsening conditions of our lives and render us incapable of changing them. These entertainments lull us with subjective emotions that offer solace and escape from our objective reality. They range from the crude to the refined, but all are characterized by glorifying the inner life of the supposedly sovereign individual
Declaring Dr. Chia Thye Poh As A Singaporean Hero Is A Better Way To Commemorate The Death Of Lee Kuan Yew A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
Many, including President Barack Obama, have been paying glowing tributes to Lee Kuan Yew since the announcement of his death this morning, 23rd March 2015. However, recalling what Lee Kuan Yew did to Dr. Chia Thye Poh and many other persons who aspired for multi-party democracy and respect for the freedom of expression in Singapore is a better way to remember Lee Kuan Yew. It is the least that can be done to fight back against the terrible legacy he has bequeathed
What Happened In Hashimpura 28 Years Ago? By Vibhuti Narain Rai
There are some experiences that stick with you throughout your life. They always stay with you like a nightmare and sometimes are like debts on your shoulders. The experience at Hashimpura Massacre was such an experience for me, says Vibhuti Narayan Rai, then Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, UP. On 22 May 1987, in Hashimpura, a locality in the Meerut City, 42 innocent Muslims were killed in cold blood by the personnel of Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC)
Police Firing On Women On International Women's Day In Odisha By Ganatantrik Adhikar Surakhya Sangathan
On 8th March 2015, when the world was observing International Women's Day, Odisha police fired upon women agitators at Namatara village of Rajakanika block of Kendrapada district and injured 16 villagers, mostly women. Out of those injured people, 9 villagers (five women, two girl children and 2 men) got admitted in Cuttak Medical College because of serious bullet injury. Now the police have already arrested 6 people for attacking the police and have filed cases against 60 people also. Namatara village having 200 houses are mostly of dalit communities
The Need For A New Approach To Adivasi Development By Gladson Dungdung
It is quite clear that the Tribal Sub-Plan has failed to achieve its objectives due to lack of community participation, transparency and accountability since it was implemented in 1974-75. This is why the Government of India should replace it with a Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP), which would ensure respect, preserve and protect their identity, autonomy, culture and traditional system of governance. Tribals should be given the right to choose their own path of development. The new Tribal Sustainable Development Plan (TSDP) would ensure full and effective participation of Adivasis in their own development
Ambedkar: Reimagining The Image By B.Prabakaran
Some years back Gopal Guru wrote an article on how Dalits especially lower middleclass and middle class Dalits have understood Ambedkar and in what form have they established him. With this background of spate of recent attacks, equally important and pertinent question to ask now would be how Ambedkar has been understood in the larger social arena and what he really means to them?
Winemaker Paul Hobbs, Repeat Offender, Violates Agreements Again By Shepherd Bliss
San Francisco's North Bay large winemakers routinely violate the weak rules regarding their practices and are seldom fined, according to the daily Press Democrat, March 11, 2015. Those rules need to be enforced and strengthened, especially as we enter an even more-dry drought
22 March, 2015
Why are so few talking about coal's impact on already scarce water resources? Despite the global water crisis being identified as the top risk to people across the globe, very few are taking a stand to protect dwindling water resources from the huge planned global growth of coal-fired power stations
The "Naturalness" Of The Commons By David de Ugarte
Agricultural and hunting commons are the original form of ownership and work, long prior to State property and private property... and for the time being, the most persistent: commons institutions remained vigorous throughout the world up through the Middle Ages and resisted Modernity with relative strength until the "amortization" of nineteenth-century liberalism forced them to evolve into modern cooperativism. But don't be fooled: even today, there are large European regions, like Galicia, where more of the 25% of the territory is made up of common lands. We have always been surrounded by the commons and by community values. Our culture kept more than just the formula for us
Food Democracy South And North: From Food Sovereignty To Transition Initiatives By Olivier De Schutter
People seek to co-design food systems, to participate in shaping them, to recapture them. We were familiar with the slogan of workplace democracy; we must now open up our eyes to food democracy
Only Less Will Do By Richard Heinberg
As we collide with Earth's limits, many people's first reflex response will be to try to find someone to blame. The result could be wars and witch-hunts. But social and international conflict will only deepen our misery. One thing that could help would be the widely disseminated knowledge that our predicament is mostly the result of increasing human numbers and increasing appetites confronting disappearing resources, and that only cooperative self-limitation will avert a fight to the bitter end. We can learn; history shows that. But in this instance we need to learn fast
Why The Western Alliance Is Ending By Eric Zuesse
It's well-known that only aristocrats profit from wars. And O'Bomba represents them just as much as his Republican 'opposition' do. But, now, even the aristocrats in other nations are increasingly abandoning him. All he evidently still has going for him is liberal and Democratic fools in the United States, who haven't yet figured out that he's a Manchurian candidate, Trojan horse, 'Democrat,' who (like the Clintons) would have FDR twisting in his grave if only he saw this. Fortunately, Roosevelt isn't around to see it
Netanyahu Victory, Saudi Arabia And Iran By G. Asgar Mitha
The failure of the N-talks and Iran not getting the concessions - economic, easing sanctions and political - it is seeking on its terms is that the US, Israel and EU3 may well start a catastrophic war in the Middle East, likely between Iran and ISIS. If it wins, then certainly Iran will be recognized as the balancing force in the Middle East - a defeat for both Israel and Saudi Arabia
What Do The Opponents Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran Really Want? By Dr. John Duke Anthony
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is once again in Switzerland with his British, Chinese, French, German, and Russian counterparts to continue negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Whether the respective diplomatic and national security negotiators will succeed remains to be seen. To be sure, a mutually acceptable agreement with Iran by six among the world's most powerful and influential nations, on one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other, is no small matter. In substance as well as in procedure and desired outcome, the goals - ensuring that Iran does not produce a nuclear bomb and, to that end, agreeing on as intrusive a nature and range of inspections as any in history - are as laudable as they are in many ways timely, urgent, and necessary
Babloo Loitongbam: Three Decades Of Building Human Rights Solidarity An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam By Abhay Kumar
An Interview With Babloo Loitongbam, pre-eminent human rights activist, who for the past three decades is striving hard to bring justice for those in North East India whose rights are being violated on a daily basis especially under the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
On Tuesday 17th March, Violent clashes erupted between Iranian security forces and Ahwazi Arab civilians after the end of the football match between Foulad Al-Ahwaz FC and Al-Hilal Saudi FC. One young fan has allegedly been shot dead by the Iranian anti-riot forces who used live ammunition targeting Ahwazi fans
Condemn Acquittal Of 16 PAC Personnel Accused In The Hashimpura Massacre By People's Union for Democratic Rights
On 22 May 1987, PAC personnel of UP reached Hashimpura, Meerut, took away about 50 Muslim men from a crowd outside a mosque, shot dead at least 42 of the men, and threw their bodies into a canal. On 21 March 2015, a Delhi Sessions Court accepted that the PAC personnel had committed these murders, but acquitted the policemen charged on account of insufficient evidence. Twenty eight years after the brutal massacre of Muslims by state forces, the guilty in uniform have not been identified and are roaming free
21 March, 2015
Ban Ki-moon's special envoy on climate change voiced support for the fossil fuel divestment movement at an event in London on Friday. Mary Robinson, leading climate justice campaigner and former president of Ireland, said it was "very interesting" to see the movement grow in impact. For any fund, "it is almost a due diligence requirement" to consider ending investment in dirty energy companies, she said
Geoengineering May Backfire, Find Scientists By Countercurrents.org
To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are proposals involving using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. But a new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters
The Messages From Israel's Election By Ilan Pappe
The conclusion for the international community should be clear now. Only decolonization of the settler state can lead to reconciliation. And the only way to kick off this decolonization is by employing the same means exercised against the other long-standing settler state of the twentieth century: apartheid South Africa
Russia Under Attack By Paul Craig Roberts
While Washington works assiduously to undermine the Minsk agreement that German chancellor Merkel and French president Hollande achieved in order to halt the military conflict in Ukraine, Washington has sent Victoria Nuland to Armenia to organize a "color revolution" or coup there, has sent Richard Miles as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to do the same there, and has sent Pamela Spratlen as ambassador to Uzbekistan to purchase that government's allegiance away from Russia. The result would be to break up the Collective Security Treaty Organization and present Russia and China with destabilization where they can least afford it
Europe: Old Friendships, Hesitant Alliances By Gaither Stewart
You can't ignore the reality that perhaps never before has a fine knowledge of geography been more important than today. It is a geographical fact that Eurasia exists. However any gung ho American neocon policy that aims at American control over that vast area rings like an Earth power claiming control, or aspiring to the control of, say, the planet Uranus. Fortunately, Europe understands the idiocy of neocon belief in America's invincibility and Exceptionalism ... or perhaps Europe is finally beginning to understand
Opposing War With A Smile By David Swanson
Big changes will be needed in our politics, our economy, our energy use, our culture, and in the stories we tell each other about the world. But these changes can come step-by-step and advance self-aware toward complete replacement of the war system with a peace system. Attempting such a change, which is in some ways well underway already, can hardly be less sensible than the knowing failure of war
The Collapse Of French Intellectual Diversity By Andre Vltchek
If you think that France is not as much a police state, as the UK or the US, think twice. Heavily armed military and police are visible at all train stations and many intersections, even at some narrow alleys. Internet providers are openly spying on their costumers. Mass media is self-censoring its reports. The regime's propaganda is in "top gear". But the people of France, at least the great majority of them, believe that they live in an 'open and democratic society.' If asked, they cannot prove it; they have no arguments. They are simply told that they are free, and so they believe it
The Great GMO Legitimation Crisis By Colin Todhunter
Author of 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' Steven Druker recently talked of how back in the seventies a group of molecular biologists formed part of a scientific elite that sought to allay fears about genetic engineering by putting a positive spin on it. At the same time, critics of this emerging technology were increasingly depicted as being little more than non-scientists who expressed ignorant but well-meaning concerns about science and genetic engineering. This continues today, but the attacks on critics are becoming more vicious
From Basic Income To Social Dividends: Sharing The Value Of Common Resources By Rajesh Makwana
It's time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part IV By Jon V Kofas
The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan's Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate
Public Hero: Paying For Honesty By S.G.Vombatkere
One hopes that Ravi's death will trigger a wave of honest officials and public-spirited citizens who will support each other in the best interest of the people of our sovereign socialist secular democratic Republic
The Maharashra Beef Ban Is Unconstitutional By Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights
The CPDR holds that the Maharashtra Animal Protection (Amendment) Act, 1995 is not in consonance with Article 48 when this is viewed in conjunction with the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. This Act is not even based on Hindu religious faith. Contrary to Hinduism, which is a conglomerate of beliefs and faiths aimed at achieving spiritual salvation, the ideology of the majority in the Maharashtra Assembly that enacted this law in 1995 is that of Hindutva, which is aimed at attaining political power, and is the Indian variant of Nazism. The Act is aimed at depriving the Other of her livelihood and way of life, which must be condemned by all those who stand for pluralism, secularism and democratic rights
The Dimapur Lynch Mob And Violence Of Hurt Sentiments By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
While community politics creates unbridgeable walls between citizens, the fluidity of opportunities under modernity generates another world outside communities. The man killed by the Naga mob in Dimapur was actually married to a Naga woman. Their girl child, half Naga-half Cachharree Muslim, and hence neither Naga, nor Cachharee Muslim, faces an uncertain future. It depends crucially on the future of democracy in the country whether she spends her life in trauma in the barrenness of no-man's land between communities, or she grows up to live full life of a citizen without fear, hatred and suspicion
Documenting Hate And Communal Violence Under The Modi Regime By John Dayal
The 300 days have also seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rightsorganizations and Rights Defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and the systems if the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act and the Passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, Fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. This report is focused on issues of communally targeted violence and the politics of hate and divisiveness that emanates from a thesis of religious nationalism
Progress Made But Work Remains On Firewalling Health Policy From Tobacco Industry By Shobha Shukla
Considerable progress has been made in different countries globally in protecting public health policy from tobacco industry interference, but certainly lot more work needs to be done. 2012 World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) Declaration called on all governments to establish a national coordinating mechanism of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which is fully firewalled from the tobacco industry
South Asian region has very high levels of tobacco use, and thus not surprisingly, rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other tobacco related illnesses rage high. Nepal is in spotlight in South Asian region by demonstrating high commitment to tobacco control and also acting on the ground! Recognizing Nepal's leadership, the country was awarded the prestigious 'Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control' at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH 2015)
20 March, 2015
Crosscurrents By Kathy Kelly
By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee
To Survive, We Must Act Now On Global Warming By Lionel Anet
To ensure that our offspring can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that's to have a worldwide united action to stop that dangerous warming. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth;we must showthe unavoidable disaster they will face in pursuing this ridicules goal. They must see their wealth will be useless in the future on our lifeless planet
Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe By The Danish Pugwash Group
The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe
19 March, 2015
Unless Obama can summon up the will and the courage to publicly tell Israel that enough is enough and then back his words with actions, the answer to Lerman's question is that nobody can stop Netanyahu advancing the doomsday clock. My guess is that Obama will wash his hands of the conflict and walk away from it. In that event he'll deserve a place in history as the American president who gave Zionism the green light to take the region and possibly the whole world to hell. I hope, Mr. President, that I am wrong about you and your intentions
Israel Votes Apartheid By Neve Gordon
Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu's secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier's votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center). The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid
Israelis Vote To Abandon All Pretence Of Seeking Peace By Dan Glazebrook
Israelis went to the polls the other day in an election which, defying all predictions, saw the 'left-wing' of Zionism - genocide with a human face - soundly beaten by its more honest 'right wing', whose commitment to the total eradication of the Palestinians as any kind of political entity is openly stated
Netanyahu Victory Opens Door For One-State Solution By Francis Boyle
Before the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988, the position of the Palestine National Council and the Palestine Liberation Organization was that there should be only one, democratic and secular state for the entire mandate for Palestine, which would include Israel within it. It was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat himself who encouraged the Palestine National Council to accept the two-state solution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988. After 27 years of fruitlessly trying to pursue a two-state solution, it is now time for the Palestine National Council and the PLO to reconsider their options
On Wednesday, March 18th, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of Ukraine -- who was selected for that post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the U.S. coup that installed him into this office -- told his cabinet meeting, "Our goal is to regain control of Donetsk and Lugansk." Those are the two districts comprising Donbass, the self-proclaimed independent region of Ukraine, which now calls itself "The People's Republic" and sometimes "Novorossiya," and which rejects the coup and its coup-imposed Government
Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator's forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin's defense of Crimeans' democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal
Countries Agree On UN Plan In Sendai To Save Lives From Disasters By Megan Darby
Twelve hours behind schedule, 187 countries agreed a deal in Sendai on Wednesday to reduce death and economic damage from natural disasters.The Sendai Framework set seven targets and four priorities for the next fifteen years. These include plans to "substantially reduce" loss of life from 2005-15 levels in 2020-30 and to reduce economic losses as a proportion of global GDP by 2030
The time has come for the Indian Railways to seize the day, and scale up its investment in solar power
1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of "We the People"
'Islamic State' As A Western Phenomenon? Reimagining The IS Debate By Ramzy Baroud
No matter how one attempts to wrangle with the so-called 'Islamic State' (IS) rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up
The Veggie Pride Talk I Didn't Give By Mickey Z.
For the first time in many years, I've declined an offer to be the lead speaker at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC's Union Square Park. I learned the hard way that although the cheers have been loud, the local vegan/animal rights scene wasn't actually hearing me. Since I've opted to no longer howl into an echo chamber, I'll share my thoughts here instead
Ahwazis Call The Amnesty International To Urge Iran To Stop Persecution By Amir Saedi
Ahwazi Community in the UK demonstrated in front of the Amnesty International on Tuesday 17 March 2015 against the persecution of the Arabs by the Iranian regime. Following the protest a group of Ahwazi activists met with Mrs Hassiba Hadh Sahraoui, the Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa Programme
Condemn The Gang-Rape In Nadia And Continuing Attacks On Christians By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR expresses outrage at the gang-rape of a 71 year old nun by a gang of "dacoits" inside a convent in Gangnapur village, Nadia district, West Bengal on 14th March 2015. The men reportedly raided and desecrated the convent before taking away 12 lakhs.Clearly, the motive was not merely to rob and decamp but to punish the school and the community through this horrendous gang-rape. In this connection, PUDR wishes to draw attention to the disturbing trend of attacks on Christians, including their institutions and places of worship, in recent times
The Hindutva Algebra Of Nation-Making By Braj Ranjan Mani
Remembering Martin Niemoller's famous poem, I am tempted to think that if Martin had been an Indian--alive today--he would certainly have scribbled something like the following
Hold Tobacco Industry Liable: Turn The Cost-Benefit Ratio Upside Down By Shobha Shukla
WHO FCTC Article 19 envisions a world where governments hold the power to protect people from harmful products like tobacco, can recover the costs of treating tobacco-related disease from the tobacco industry, and can use their legal systems to ensure their right to do so
18 March, 2015
Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed victory after a closely contested national election in Israel. According to unofficial figures released by the Israeli election committee, Netanyahu's Likud Party has won at least 29 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, putting it in a strong position to form a ruling coalition. Likud's main challenger, the Zionist Union, won 24 seats. Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog has called Netanyahu to concede defeat. President Reuven Rivlin, a longtime Likud loyalist, will designate Netanyahu to form the next government once the distribution of seats is finalized among the ten parties that reached the threshold of 3.25 percent of the vote
Why I'm Relieved Netanyahu Won By Ali Abunimah
The Israeli Jewish public's choice to re-elect Netanyahu should make it clear to people around the world that Israel does not seek peace and does not seek justice. It will continue to oppress and ethnically cleanse Palestinians until it is stopped. Negotiating with such a regime is pointless when its power over its victims remains vast and unchecked. The message we should take away is simple: the proper treatment for a polity committed to occupation, apartheid and ethno-racial supremacy is to isolate it until it recognizes that it must abandon those commitments. Palestinians have asked the world to do that through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Netanyahu makes the case a little easier, so it's time to step it up
Thousands March In Caracas Protesting US Interference,Solidarity Concert In Havana By Countercurrents.org
In the face of imperialist intervention Venezuelan people are mobilizing themselves. Thousands of citizens in capital Caracas have joined in marches protesting US interference in Venezuela. Venezuelan social movements took to the streets to oppose US aggression. Over 100,000 Venezuelans were mobilized throughout the country for a series of national military exercises in defense of their national sovereignty. A contingent of Russian soldiers and naval craft participated in the exercise. And, thousands of Cubans gathered at the University of Havana's Grand Stairway to express their unconditional solidarity with Venezuela and opposition to US aggression
Latin America again sets example of solidarity and unity against imperialist intervention as the Empire threatens Venezuela with sanctions. In this moment of anti-imperialist struggle, Fidel Castro expresses solidarity to Venezuela
Writer and researcher Colin Todhunter takes apart the arguments of pro-GMO lobbyist Anthony Trewavas
Inequality And The Crisis of Capitalism And Democracy: Part III By Jon V Kofas
Can Democracy Be Viable with a Wide Gap between Rich and Poor?
Marijuana: Legalize--Don't Advertise By William John Cox
The War on Drugs has proven to be a monstrous mistake resulting in the waste of a trillion dollars and the shameful criminal conviction and incarceration of thousands of Americans. While the end to drug prohibition may not be entirely possible, the more limited movement to decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana is gaining momentum. Those who support ending drug prohibition, but continue to believe drug use is harmful, have the responsibility to find ways to avoid the advertising and promotion of legalized marijuana
Two distinguished Ahwazi former prisoners named "Ramadan Nasseri" and "Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari" in their interviews with human rights organizations and Arab Media agencies revealed flagrant human rights violations that the Iranian occupying government has exercised against Ahwazi Arab prisoners in Al-Ahwaz
Doms In Varanasi Seek Justice Through Honorable Rehabilitation By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Domraj often come in mythologies and they continue to do the task of burning dead bodies at the Ghats and cleaning human excreta in the city. Most of the land meant for them is already occupied and big ghats have erupted on the bank. Nothing has changed for them. In fact, they reflect the criminal civilization which kept them subjugated for thousands of years and the independence that we got in 1947 has no meaning for them as the community remains untouchables among untouchables absolutely ostracized and thoroughly disenfranchised in the holy city
Where There Is A Will There Is A Way: Teeja Devi By Shobha Shukla
According to Teeja, "There has been a lot of change in my life since the time I came to this village as a child bride. Women are in a better position today to improve their lives and also to fight for their rights, although I have been doing that from the very beginning. From personal experiences I can say that women have the capacity to fight for their rights. But unless they come out of their houses, meet other people, and voice their opinions, they will not be able to progress. I am just literate enough to sign my name but I am very much aware of my and other people's rights and am ready to fight for them
No Country For Art? By Arshie Qureshi
Call it official High headedness or the apathy of the people, anyone who watched the vandalism at art gallery in Kashmir last month will point to you the underlying reality about art ignorance in the valley. It almost seems ironical that on one hand we dwell in a part of the world which is historically a crucible of rich cultural heritage, merging a strong sense of mysticism with the delicacies of nature. A place where everything manifests the divinity. And on the other hand, a man with a clueless look on his face frantically drags the delicate figurine out of the gallery and smashes it without a pang of remorse
17 March, 2015
Nearly a quarter of damages wrought by natural disasters on the developing world are borne by the agricultural sector, finds a new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) study released in Sendai, Japan on March 17, 2015 at the UN World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction. $70 billion in damages to crops and livestock over a 10 year period
While the whole country was celebrating Holi, a joyous festival of colours, three farmers that were contemplating suicide in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh went ahead and took their own lives. One of them, wearing the same colour soaked dress he had celebrated the festival in, hung himself to a tree
Agricultural Crisis And Remedial Pathways For India By Dr Sunny Sandhu
NaMo model of development has already spelt doom for the farmers , its clear that its pro corporate and anti farmer government , like the previous government as well . Changing of Land laws in favor of corporates is the start . GM crops are being cleared at an alarming rate . Lip service is being done to promote organic and natural farming . We the youth of india has to rise to this toxic challenge and ensure to safeguard our ecosystems , biodiversity , bhoomi , river goddesses and beej (seeds)
Nandigram today is a sad picture of rejection. Women, who were the integral part of the movement and were at the forefront of the anti-acquistion stir that eventually catapulted the Trinamool Congress into power in West Bengal are now confined to their homes and are subjected to all kind of oppression
Cropping Africa's Wet Savannas Would Bring High Environmental Costs By Countercurrents.org
Converting Africa's wet savannas into farmland would come at a high environmental cost and, in some cases, fail to meet existing standards for renewable fuels, finds a new report published in the journal Nature Climate Change. With the global population rising, Africa's vast wet savannas have been targeted as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at low environmental costs
An Open Letter To Subramanian Swamy By Shehzad Poonawalla
Mr.Swamy, you continue to remain an accused out on bail and the law will catch up with you eventually, notwithstanding the Delhi Police dragging its feet. The kind of politics you subscribe to is also subject to the law of diminishing returns in the long run. Even Mr. Modi has begun to realize that and every now and then, he and his good friend "Barack" throw in a word of caution, for your ilk, even if it is only for symbolism. Frankly, Harvard can and did prevent you from wearing its name. I only wish secular, tolerant Hindus and Indians could have had that authority and choice too
Book Review: The Dispensable Nation - American Foreign Policy in Retreat By Vali Nasr Reviewed By Jim Miles
U.S. foreign policy is not in retreat, perhaps in tatters and rags, wrapped in a flag stained in the blood of far too many millions of people around the world. Works such as "The Dispensable Nation" simply highlight the arrogance and hubris of an empire in decline
Obama And The 'News' Media Continue To Falsify About Obamacare By Eric Zuesse
This "universal healthcare" thing is an ongoing lie from Obama, because there is no way that the plan that he proposed, nor the one that he selected Senator Max Baucus to design to meet his intentions and ram through Congress, could even possibly produce a 100% insureds-rate, or "universal coverage." The rest of the industrialized world has it (and has better healthcare at lower prices), but we still don't
Stratfor: "US Aims To Prevent A German-Russian Alliance" By German Economic News
The head of the private intelligence agency Stratfor has for the first time publicly said that the US government considers to be its overriding strategic objective the prevention of a German-Russian alliance. Blocking that alliance is the only way to prevent an alternative world power capable of challenging extension of the American position of being the world's lone superpower
In the end, maybe the Big Dick School of Patriotism comes down to this: we embrace the idea of an all-powerful military because at a time when the world seems such a fragile and hostile place, if even our military won't keep us safe, who will? Unless there just might be a better way to go through the world than by carrying a big dick?
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy : PART II By Jon V Kofas
Attitudes of the Rich toward the Poor and Working Poor
Each understands according To things misunderstood: A shadow-world in dumb-show Where "evil" contends with "good."
Crisis In The AAP Casts Shadows On Civil-Society Meet On Alternative Politics By Abhay Kumar
Linking the current contestation in the AAP to its inability to take a firm stance on secularism, senior advocate and president of PUCL (Delhi), N. D. Pancholi pulled up AAP for raising the "divisive" slogan of Vandre Matram, which, in his view, had a major contribution to the partition of the country. 'Vande Matram creates suspicion among Muslims,' Pancholi contended
Is it time to have few more paid/payable (read credible) news channels in various regional languages, which can survive with contributions from the subscribers?
16 March, 2015
Poor countries should receive between US$400 billion and US$2 trillion per year from rich countries by 2050 to help them cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fight climate crisis, finds a new paper published on March 16, 2015 by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science
The American Government's Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
The American Government's biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine -- and it's even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that's totally unnecessary for America's national-security, and that actually places all of our nation's security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats ("oligarchs") in both the U.S. and Ukraine -- not for any real reasons of the American people, at all
The Misrepresentation Of Israeli Aggression As Self-Defense By Matt Peppe
The media and the public will uncritically support the position of American and Israeli power. Thousands of Palestinians will be indiscriminately killed, but not because Israel is defending itself. Palestinians will be killed because the U.S. government refuses to protect them from a belligerent and aggressive regime, and refuses even to recognize their right to protect themselves
The Realpolitik Of Revolution By William T. Hathaway
What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution
Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman In America By Chris Hedges
Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bete noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party
Truth Is Our Country By Paul Craig Roberts
Press Club Of Mexico Awards Paul Craig Roberts International Medal For Journalism Excellence
An Ahwazi Arab street vendor by the name of Younes Asakere from Mohammareh city has set himself on fire in protest against the action of the Occupying municipal officials who confiscated his small grocer's stall
Religion, Politics And Society: A Birds Eye View By Ram Puniyani
What has religion to do with politics? What has violence to do with religion? And how does the expression of major political agenda shape itself in contemporary times? Roughly speaking it seems that the religion is being used as a cover for many a political phenomenon. This seems to be the observation more so from South Asian-West Asian perspective
Veloor Swaminathan is no more. He left Plachimada forever on March 14, 2015. Swaminathan along with Mylamma were the initial foundations of the historic struggle of Plachimada in Kerala. The struggle initiated by a small group of these Adivasis with Dalits and farmers forced one of the largest corporate powers in the world, Coca Cola to bend down and quit Plachimada. If anybody asks, how did such a small force of marginalised people achieve such a herculean task, I would say, study Mylamma and Swaminathan, for any strategy for any people's movement raising issues of marginalisation
Another Church Attacked In Haryana: Holy Cross Replaced With A Hanuman Idol By Shehzad Poonawalla
Petition registered with NCM (National Commission for Minorities) To draw attention to and direct action on the constant spree of attacks and vandalism on churches (7th in 4 months) including the latest one in Kaimri village near Hisar, Haryana where the Holy Cross was replaced with a Hanuman Idol
Rapist Mukesh Singh Is Not Alone In Denigrating Women By Shamsul Islam
It is true that Mukesh made reprehensible statements about women in general and rape victim in particular. It is debatable whether banning a film containing such statements is the solution but fact is that rapist Mukesh is not alone in holding male chauvinistic views denigrating women.India is flooded with popular religious literature denigrating women. Geeta Press based in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, is the largest supplier of this kind of literature. It publishes literature espousing the 'Hindu' way of life for women on a very large scale. The low-priced publications are available throughout the country, especially the Hindi belt, and are even sold through Government allotted stalls at railway stations and government roadways stands
On The Interrelationship Between Bovine And Human Beings By Subhash Gatade
As things stand today it appears that the people in power seem to be more concerned with making the desi-videsi moneybags happy to maintain a conducive atmosphere for bringing in new investments and also catering to 'sentiments' of a dominant section of people around cow. It is just another way to say that while human beings will have to wait but the bovine cannot
Surveillance Cameras In Classrooms: Trust V/S Security By Ms.Swaleha Sindhi
Each student brings knowledge to the school and the schools must validate their ideas, this will encourage students of different levels of ability to keep sharing their knowledge. Students must be provided a safe space in which they can grow, thrive, question, analyse, think critically, and take risks. Schools can have their own ways of monitoring discipline by making the discipline incharges or the school Principals do patrolling in the corridor while the classes are going on. Camera is just another thing for students (especially adolescents) to play with
15 March, 2015
During the past few days, German Economic News has specifically identified the following EU nations that are strongly opposed to this supplying of weapons to Ukraine: Spain, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, France, and Slovakia. Furthermore, Italy is increasing its cooperation with Russia
If I had to express my hope in one sentence it would be this. A fourth term as prime minister for Netanyahu would see Israel becoming more and more isolated and could improve the chances of Western governments being moved to use the leverage they have to cause the Zionist (not Jewish) state to end its defiance of international law and denial of the Palestinian claim for justice. Another way to put it would be to say Netanyahu is a disaster for Zionism so let's have more of him
International Court, Hague, Rules in Favor of Ecuador in its Case Against U.S. Oil Giant, Chevron By Robert Barsocchini
The International Court of Justice (CIJ) ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-based oil company Chevron US $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld. The money will benefit about 30,000 Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous
China's Dirty Coal Plants Face Climate Risk, Investors Warned By Megan Darby
Many of China's dirtiest coal plants could be forced to close early as regulations to curb greenhouse gases, air pollution and water stress tighten. That is the outlook described in the most comprehensive assessment to date of the risk of "stranded assets" to investors in coal power worldwide. Seven of the 10 companies with the biggest portfolios of "subcritical" coal plants - the least efficient kind - are Chinese, according to research from Oxford University. The US is next, taking six of the top 20 slots
47 Years Ago In My Lai: 'We Were There To Kill Ideology' By Mickey Z.
Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children. Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in. With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23. Never forget, comrades: This is how we can choose to be
A Blueprint For Ending War By World Beyond War
It is no longer sufficient to end a particular war or particular weapons system if we want peace. The entire cultural complex of the War System must be replaced with a different system for managing conflict. Fortunately, as we shall see, such a system is already developing in the real world. The War System is a choice. The gate to the iron cage is, in fact, open and we can walk out whenever we choose
With the 51 day Israeli attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014 that killed over 2,200, wounded 11,000, destroyed 20,000 homes and displaced 500,000, the closing to humanitarian organizations of the border with Gaza by the Egyptian government, continuing Israeli attacks on fishermen and others, and the lack of international aid through UNWRA for the rebuilding of Gaza, the international Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition has decided to again challenge Israel's naval blockade of Gaza in an effort to gain publicity for the critical necessity of ending the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the isolation of the people of Gaza
The Politics of Extinction By William deBuys
Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010
Inequality And The Crisis Of Capitalism And Democracy By Jon V Kofas
The great challenge of our time is social and geographic inequality that threatens not only the system of capitalism creating inequality, but the democratic political regime under which capitalism has thrived in the last one hundred years
Review: "Genocide In Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration Of AModern State" By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani By Dr Gideon Polya
Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani have published "Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State" , a carefully documented, must-read account of the Zionist-backed US Alliance destruction of Iraq and the killing of millions of Iraqis over the last quarter century for oil, US hegemony and for military dominance of the Middle East by a nuclear-armed, genocidally racist Apartheid Israel. This is a damning case that everyone should read to prevent recurrence (history ignored yields history repeated) and for ultimate legal recourse and Nuremberg-style justice for the Iraqi people
Afzal Guru's Mortal Remains Must Reach His Family By Dr. Paramjit Singh Sahni & Shobha Aggarwal
In all situations the body of the deceased must reach the family. This alone would satisfy and soothe the collective conscience of the society
Release Of Political Detenues By Abdul Majid Zargar
If India hopes to achieve an acceptable political solution to the long festering problem then it is imperative that all political prisoners are set free and a congenial & conducive atmosphere prepared for holding talks with all the stake-holders. That was also stated by the group of interlocutors appointed by Govt. Of India in 2010 to explore a political solution to the issue
The Two Conferences Of Jammu And Kashmir By Yasir Altaf Zargar
In Jammu and Kashmir both the conference's had different aspiration for J&K'S status. The Muslim conference was favouring joining Pakistan while national conference was opposing it
AAP's Divide And Rule By Satya Sagar
Whatever potential AAP has, for genuine countrywide transformation, on the class or caste front, cannot be achieved by mechanically expanding the Delhi model across the national landscape like a rubber mask. That will only result in the hasty induction of a lot of people wearing the mask of Kejriwal, without possessing any of his talents while retaining at least a few of his vices! Rather, the process will have to be an organic one, with dozens and scores of local Kejriwals springing up from the grassroots, taking up the issues that AAP has raised in Delhi but with both the causes and methods tailored to context - what I would call the 'Apne AAP' movement. Every anonymous volunteer who is part of AAP, and indeed its core strength, has the potential to be a Kejriwal, YY or PB
Why Science Is Closer To Morality Than Religion By Amritanshu Pandey
India's fundamentalist moral brigade has shifted gears since the advent of Acche Din, and we are subject to daily reports of the moral police's enthusiasm, derived largely from our substantial pool of religion and culture. In this regard India is no different to religious societies around the world, where faith and its institutions provide the basis for our moral compass. If your dominant religion disavows of homosexuality, for example, then it can be guaranteed that your society's outlook will be that homosexuality is immoral
Kanshiram Declassed Ambedkarite Politics By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Understand Kanshiram's mantra that key to power come from the poor and they are vast and we need to change our perceptions and strengthen their struggle and leadership. We can not ask people to sacrifice their lives for 'leaders'. Those time have gone. Give space as you want elsewhere and provide a healing touch to people where community leaders have not yet reached
14 March, 2015
Having reached a tenuous peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia (without the US), Germany is realizing and announcing that, indeed, the US does not seem intent on peace. McClatchy reports that German government officials have "recently referred to U.S. statements of Russian involvement in the Ukraine fighting as 'dangerous propaganda'". In light of US propaganda and military support for Kiev, Germany even asked outright whether "the Americans want to sabotage the European mediation attempts in Ukraine led by Chancellor Merkel?"
On this video from Fox 'News': At 3:30, Lou Dobbs asks the Fox Noise military analyst: "What do you expect" in Ukraine? At 3:35 he answers: "In the Ukraine, the only way that the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians ... killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags."
Fishermen, Are They Criminals? An Open Letter To Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka And India By Ravi Nitesh
I demand Sri Lankan PM to express his apology over the statement to shoot Indian fishermen because it was against humanitarian approach, against UN sea laws and most importantly against the unity of fishermen. He must apologise that he see fishermen not as 'criminals'. He must also apologise to people of Sri Lanka that he doesn't believe what he said is a common belief of Sri Lanka's people and fishermen. We know that even fishermen of Sri Lanka will never support his statement
Feeding A Warmer, Riskier World By Jose Graziano da Silva
Artificial meat. Indoor aquaculture. Vertical farms. Irrigation drones. Once in the realm of science fiction, these are now fact. Food production is going high-tech, at least in some places. But the vast majority of the world's farmers still face that old, fundamental fact: Their crops, their very livelihoods, depend on how Mother Nature treats them. Over 80 percent of world agriculture today remains dependent on the rains, just as it did 10,000 years ago
Showing Chicago a whole different concept of governing, and an appreciation for the people of our city, Chuy Garcia came to Logan Square on March 12th and received a enthusiastic welcome from the several hundred people who turned out to greet him and support his campaign for Mayor
With Enemies Like This, Imperialism Doesn't Need Friends By Dan Glazebrook
'Can non-Europeans Think?' by Hamid Dabashi declares the end of the colonial domination of knowledge, but the author effectively aligns himself with the West's very real war against the developing world
Venezuela - A Threat? By Chandra Muzaffar
So far the US has not provided any tangible evidence of how Venezuelan officials have violated human rights or indulged in public corruption. Its reckless allegations have been effectively refuted by the Caracas government. Even leaders from other Latin American countries have condemned the statements emanating from Washington DC
There were astronomers like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, mathematicians like Bhaskara I and Baudhayana, physicians like Charaka and surgeons like Sushrutha in ancient India, but the work of these men of science has nothing to do with Hinduism or Hindutva. It is absurd, therefore, of Hindutva politicians to associate the work of these scientists with "Hinduism" or "Hindutva" and quite disgraceful of them to claim credit for the ingenuity, hard work and courageous assertions of ancient Indian scientists, many of whom, like the astronomer Aryabhata, had to face the ire of Brahminical orthodoxy to make these assertions
Frontier, probably, the thinnest and the most-plain appearing English weekly from Kolkata, a city with protest and politics, resistance and revolution faces an imminent threat of eviction
13 March, 2015
Danger Of War With Russia Grows As US Sends Military Equipement To Ukraine By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier
Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO's ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power. The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry
Ukraine's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Declares War On Russia By Eric Zuesse
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, "Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation. Hostile countries over the past decade have spent billions of dollars rearming it."
Oil Demand Could Fall Without Climate Solution, Warns Shell By Ed King
Demand for oil and gas could fall if major producers fail to find economically viable and publicly acceptable ways of cutting their climate-warming gas emissions, Shell has warned. The oil giant revealed its fears in its Strategic Report, released on March 12, 2015, telling investors that new climate change regulations "may result in project delays and higher costs."
Bangladesh To Use SERVIR Satellite-Based Flood Forecasting, Warning System By Janet Anderson
Bangladesh officials have announced plans to expand a satellite-based flood forecasting and warning system developed by SERVIR to aid an area where floodwaters inundate from 1/3 to 2/3 of the country annually, killing hundreds of people and affecting millions. The system, which relies on river level data provided by the Jason-2 satellite, last year provided the longest lead time for flood warnings ever produced in Bangladesh
Dissatisfaction With U.S. Government Soars By Eric Zuesse
The latest Gallup poll shows that even as Americans are more satisfied with the American economy, they are more dissatisfied with the government; and that this government-dissatisfaction is so high that for the first time while Gallup has been following this matter, the ratio of dissatisfaction with government is swamping the ratio of dissatisfaction with both of the other two matters that Americans are dissatisfied with: the economy, and unemployment
The CIA And America's Presidents: Some Rarely Discussed Truths Shaping Contemporary American Democracy By John Chuckman
When people write of America's secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone's being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President's case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end
The Growth Schism: Greater Israel At Odds With U.S Decline In The Middle East By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner
In an attempt to put Netanyahu's Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline
Secret History Of My Geography Teacher, Also Cofounder Of Hamas By Ramzy Baroud
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle
Ending sanctions on Cuba in the name of a new foreign policy while at the same time imposing sanctions on Venezuela because of supposed government repression is indeed laughable. It makes absolutely no sense if we take seriously the narrative on human rights and democracy peddled by the White House and echoed in the media. But it makes perfect sense if we view it as a cynical, realpolitik attempt to undermine the threat of a good example and a way of reestablishing American influence in the Caribbean through an increased presence in Cuba. Taking into account these factors, we can see there is no new, enlightened dawn in US policy, rather a switching of targets. It is, lamentably, business as usual
Unite! Let's Make Sure That Kandhamals Are Not Repeated By Medha Patkar
My friends, let me stop my speech by saying that it is time that the displaced people and the marginalized people come together as a strong force, so that these forms of injustice can be effectively dealt with in a united manner
In a shocking incident, over 30 Dalit and Adivasi students and activists were arrested this afternoon from Shastri Bhavan in New Delhi when they demanded to meet the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, over unfair budgetary allocations in education of Dalit and Adivasi students. At the time of the arrest, the delegation, including N Paul Diwakar, well-known Dalit activist and general secretary of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), were about to submit a Memorandum of Demands to the Minister asking for reallocation of funds. The activists were taken to Parliament Police station where another Dalit activist Beena Pallical was forcefully dragged taken inside the police station
Essential Elements That Can Give Rise To A New Kind Of Politics By Dr. Satinath Choudhary
It would have been ideal for all of legislators to continue to have equal power with no chief minister, ministers or deputy-ministers. Various legislators could join collectives interested in guiding various departments of the government. For different decisions different small collectives could be formed even in the same department. However, the decisions of the collectives would have to be approved by the whole legislature. In case there more than one collective dealing with the same issue, they can meet with each other to iron out their differences before or/and after they present their proposals to the full legislative body. Full legislature would be the supreme body to put final seal of approval on any issue or legislation
12 March, 2015
Over the past two months, Geneva offered two opportunities for governments to deepen their understanding of the interplay between human rights and climate action. The coming months will now be critical to determine whether, through the UN climate body and the Human Rights Council, states are willing to commit to take steps towards ensuring that climate policies address climate change in a way that promotes human rights at the same time
The Real Story Behind The Oil Price Collapse By Michael T. Klare
Those of you currently staying strong and paying close attention are probably already astonished that we're on the brink of social, economic, and environmental collapse. Hopefully, you're also telling everyone you know. But then what?
Stop The Fast Track To A Future Of Global Corporate Rule By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers
Several major international agreements are under negotiation which would greatly empower multinational corporations and the World Economic Forum is promoting a new model of global governance that creates a hybrid government-corporate structure. Humankind is proceeding on a path to global corporate rule where transnational corporations would not just influence public policy, they would write the policies and vote on them. The power of nation-states and people to determine their futures would be weakened in a system of corporate rule
Vietnam: Some History By Andy Piascik
Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with death so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the role we play in the world will have to come from us
Understanding Nelson Mandela's Complex Legacy Honors Him The Most By Doug Allen
It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed "the struggle is my life." In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses
Avigdor Lieberman, ISIS, And The Saudi Regime By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
A country pretending to share the same "values" as the U. S. and the other Western democracies allows itself a Foreign Minister who calls for the beheading of its own Palestinian citizens! In 2014, the Saudi Arabian regime beheaded 83 people. The beheadings of ISIS exceeds 100, while the dark figure may be much higher. Will the Israel government follow the advice of its foreign minister, and who will do the job?
Roots Of Modern Terrorism And Religious Fundamentalism By G. Asgar Mitha
Saudi Arabia and other Monarchist Arab Wahhabist countries have been natural economic allies of America and its European vassals as they are weak and in need of protection. America continues to support the Saudis in exporting their perverted religious dogma across the Muslim countries in order to breed religious intolerance, cruelty and terrorism. Some of the countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine have been war victims, others like Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt have survived upon American and Saudi aids. Iran is the only Muslim country where America and the Saudi monarchy have failed for exporting terrorism and religious extremism and both fear it as a regional power
If you see Iran through that left-Democratic lens, that is if you are opposed to Republican efforts to start yet another unnecessary catastrophic war, this one with Iran, I have a few ideas I'd like to run by you
Arab World: Political Disintegration And Search For Reason By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
The Arab masses long for political change and a promising future based on peaceful co-existence with others. In view of the unstoppable cycle of sectarian killings and daily bloodbaths in so many Arab states - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and spill-over to other oil producing Arab nations - and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures - is the Arab world coming to its own end? The Arab rulers and the masses live and breathe in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented governance - the essence of Islamic system of governance. The worst is yet to come as the wars continue, surrender to foreign forces as there are no leaders to think of the future, no Arab armies to defend the people and no sustainable socio-economic infrastructures intact to support the masses
Sleepwalking Into World War Three? Why The Independent Media Is Vital By Colin Todhunter
The corporate media have a narrative and the truth does not fit into it. If this tells us anything it is that sites like the one you are reading this particular article on are essential for informing the public about the reality of the aggression that could be sleepwalking the world towards humanity's final war. And while the mainstream media might still be 'main', in as much as that is where most people still turn to for information, there is nothing to keep the alternative web-based media from becoming 'mainstream'
Understanding Women's Labour Book Review By Suparna Banerjee
This book is an analysis of the dialectic of women's labour and the processes of capital accumulation in Asian economies -- an analysis that blends empirical research with theoretical reflections. Indeed, one of the book's stated aims is to examine the relationship between Marxist political and economic theories with feminism, and the author offers theoretical corrections -- based on empirical data -- to Marx's and Proudhon's theories on women's labour and on women's roles in society
Kashmir's Polite, Mad Revolutionary, India's Bogeyman By Radha Surya
Two cheers for Indian democracy. For now the dust has settled. The Kashmir issue has dropped from the headlines of the Indian news media. The politicians and the deshbakts can return to the self-serving pretence about the decline of pro-azaadi sentiment in Kashmir. It's now back to believing that Kashmir is identical to every other Indian state and that its problems have to do with governance and development. No need to confront the troublesome fact that divided Kashmir lies at the heart of an international dispute
Of Masrat Alam Drama And Beyond By Dr. Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
Masrat Alam's row just seems a drama scripted by some hidden and veiled writers with Modi, (Prime Minister of India) Rajnath, (Home Minister) and Mufti Syed,(Chief Minister) as important characters. The drama has been played with Mufti's role as survivor, Avatar, and Messiah for the people of Kashmir and sensational with PM Modi's remarks "I share the opposition's aakrosh (anger)". While as Rajnath Singh, has attempted a new twist to the drama by asking a written report from the state government. The beginning of the drama is so sensational and twisting; God knows what would be the end
In response to beef ban law thousands of workers of Devnar abattoir (Mumbai), who will be losing their jobs came on the streets to protest against this move of the government (March 11). Many traders, from different religion also came to Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest this communal act of the Maharashtra Government. In a PIL filed in the Bombay High Court the petitioner argues that this ban on beef infringes on the fundamental right of citizens to choose meat of their choice is fundamental. The hope is that the society overcomes such abuse of 'identity issues' for political goals and lets the people have their own choices in matters of food habits, and let those who are making their living from this trade do so peacefully
The 'President' Of Egalitarian India By Aishik Chanda
Dressed in blue full-sleeve shirt and grey trousers, Sachin Prabhakar Sawant, excitedly explains his roadmap for an egalitarian India. An engineer by education, the Mira Road resident who is sitting on a dharna for over a year at Azad Maidan in south Bombay, declared himself the President of India on March 23, 2014. Since then, he has made a corner at Azad Maidan his home, demanding implementation of the constitution 'religiously'. Sawant, the President of Independent Candidates' Party (ICP), says he wants to establish Buddhist system in the country and destroy all forms of casteism, sectarianism and communalism from their roots
11 March, 2015
Just ahead of the four-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, five organizations have issued a message that the only way to avert climate disaster is by embracing a clean energy future. It was March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan earthquake caused a massive tsunami which triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and destroyed thousands of lives and livelihoods
Carbon Emissions Could Dramatically Increase Risk Of U.S. Megadroughts By Steve Cole & Leslie McCarthy
Droughts in the US Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. The study, published [in February] in the journal Science Advances, is based on projections from several climate models, including one sponsored by NASA. The research found continued increases in human-produced greenhouse gas emissions drives up the risk of severe droughts in these regions
New Carbon Accounting Method Proposed By Countercurrents.org
Consumption-based accounting, also known as carbon footprints, has been suggested as an alternative to today's production-based accounting. With carbon footprints, each country must account for all emissions that are caused by its final consumption -- regardless of where the goods were produced. This has been called a fairer way of measuring emissions, potentially avoiding so-called carbon leakage, where rich, developed countries can reduce their domestic emissions by shifting carbon-intensive production abroad
The political and military maneuvers now going on in the Ukraine have the potential of escalating out of control. If we don't understand the actual reality that has brought about this crisis there is no hope of being able to prevent this escalation. In order to understand this reality we must refrain from simple minded finger pointing at one side or the other and assigning complete responsibility for the crisis to one of the parties in the dispute, although one side may be disproportionately responsible
What we have is an extensive set of lies of omission: the Tribune and Sun-Times have not investigated the story, obviously hoping it would go away. Because of their inaction, it appears that there were hopes that it would not become an issue in the mayoral run-off. The mainstream media "dam" seems to be giving away, though, as activists and the alternative media in Chicago, including Substancenews.net, keep this issue alive. Whether it gets more fully into the mayoral campaign or not, police maleficence in Chicago--as well as across the United States--is going to continue to be challenged
Getting Serious About Terrorism By Andy Piascik
Last month, President Obama convened a summit at the White House to discuss terrorism. As could easily have been predicted, the focus was entirely on those the United States deems official enemies. Conversely and equally predictably, the two best and most obvious ways the United States can combat terrorism - stop doing it and stop giving arms, money and diplomatic cover to others who do - were not on the agenda
This past week, Laura Poitras's documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His "sole motive", he wrote, was "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes - the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge."
All capitals strive to be showcases, sure, but very few, or perhaps none, is as successful at blocking out its nation's true ugliness and failures. This sleight of hand, though, also works on many of the residents of this near perfect square inside a near perfect circle. The hell they've created keeps seeping in, however, and soon enough, it will overwhelm, if not explode, this Potemkin village of a city. This smug bubble will burst
Violence Against Women: Why We Keep Getting It Wrong By Robert J. Burrowes
With the passing of another International Women's Day, during which much attention around the world has again been focused on tackling violence against women, I would like to explain why none of the initiatives currently being proposed will achieve anything unless we acknowledge, and act on, the cause of this violence
Top 'News' Executives Suppress Key Facts; The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture. Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail
Feeding The Vultures, While Starving Agriculture: Capitalism's Great Indian Con-Trick By Colin Todhunter
India's development is being hijacked by the country's wealthy ruling class and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are now swooping. Meanwhile, the genuine wealth creators, the entrepreneurs who work the fields and have been custodians of the land and seeds for centuries, are being sold out to corporate interests whose only concern is to how best loot the economy
The influence in the news coverage at different times in the Middle East, illustrates that new media helped the people of Middle-East in getting their voices heard, and did help in advocacy efforts at times when state tried to block the access but at the same time everyone had eye on the developments taking place in that part of the world
Deprecate Lynching Of A Muslim Youth At Dimapur Of Nagaland By Lateef Mohammed Khan
It is Crime against Humanity based upon political motivation - Judiciary, State and Central Government are culpable
10 March, 2015
We humans are amazingly creative and resourceful and have emerged successfully from many dire situations. We can easily create this on the ground, while we work on the big problem of transferring from the negative emotional condition of the death culture- civilization- to the positive emotional condition of a life nurturing survival
Venezuela, A Security Threat, Declares US By Countercurrents.org
The US has declared Venezuela is a national security threat. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order on March 9, 2015 slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security". President Nicolas Maduro a few days ago revealed new evidence on the coup plot against his administration revealing that much of it was planned in the US
President Obama Picks Another Fight, This Time Venezuela By Eric Zuesse
The Obama Administration, which in 2009 provided the crucial assistance that enabled the progressive democratic President of Honduras to be overthrown and a junta of oligarchs to replace him; and which in 2014 perpetrated a bloody coup that replaced the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian equally corrupt Government, and thus sparked Ukraine's civil war against the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for Yanukovych; is now again trying to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro
Possibility Of Escape By Kathy Kelly
I'm here among women, some of whom, I've been told, are supposed to be "hardened criminals." Fellow activists incarcerated in men's prisons likewise concur that the system is futile, merciless and wrongheaded. Our jailers, I'm convinced, can see this. Men like Governor Rauner, it seems, can see it, or his advisers can. Where are the inflexible ones keeping women like Marlo isolated from and lost to the world, trembling for their future for the next five years? I would like to make an appeal to you, and to myself two months from now when I've left here and once more rejoined the polite society of these women's "inflexible jailers." I choose to believe that we can be moved and these women can escape. I am writing this, as many have written and will write, to see if we're easier to move than iron and stone
Far from the east coast metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, in the western region of Xinjiang (referred to as East Turkestan by Uyghurs), the Muslim Uyghur minority has long been struggling under the repressive rule of the Communist Party (CCP). The Uyghurs - who speak a Turkic language and have much more culturally in common with their Central Asian neighbours - want independence from China. For the CCP, who see itself as the guardian of the civilisation-state, this kind of 'separatism' is unacceptable: It poses an existential threat to China because its borders pre-date the modern nation-state system and any challenge to that could precipitate other territorial disputes that could make her like any other country - that's to say, arbitrary lines on a map
An Interview with Mona Oudeh an Ahwazi Arab activist
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, on average, US police piled up the bodies of 928 US citizens per year between 2003-2009 and 2011
So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It's been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue
If the United States is ever to become a democratic society, and if we are ever to enter the international community as a responsible party willing to wage peace instead of war, to foster cooperation and mutual aid rather than domination, we will have to account for the crimes of those who claim to act in our names like Kissinger. Our outrage at the crimes of murderous thugs who are official enemies like Pol Pot is not enough. A cabal of American mis-leaders from Kennedy on caused for far more Indochinese deaths than the Khmer Rouge, after all, and those responsible should be judged and treated accordingly
Australia's Sovereignty Severely Compromised For US-Israeli Designs By Dr. Daud Batchelor
As Australia's international standing has risen, the country's sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites:the disproportionately influential military-industrial complex and Zionist lobbies.Australia's sovereignty is being compromised by the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former PM Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we "have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war"
Transformation By Gaither Stewart
I return again and again to the Russian example because just as the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia set its stamp on the development of the idea of Socialism there (in the end making the greatest revolution of modern times), when the propitious moment arrives, when what was inexpressible becomes expressible, when events have created a universal mood of revolutionary discontent with the existing system, when tensions reach the boiling point, the American intelligentsia, together with the American wage earners and the growing, multiplying, ever angrier and, one hopes, awakening middle class, will rise against the capitalist system, salvage the positive parts of America and bring about that transformation I am speaking of
Fact Finding Report On Communal Violence in Bharuch District, Gujarat By PUCL
Today PUCL, Gujarat Submitted a fact finding Report to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), National Commission for Minorities, Chief Minister and Minister of Home and Revenue (Gujarat), Director General of Police (Gujarat) demanding urgent action in cases of Violation of Right to Life and Liberties, Right to livelihood of the affected people in the villages of Hansot Block, District Bharuch, Gujarat due to communal violence and ineffective/biased state action from December 2014 onwards
Women's emancipation entails changing the mindset, initiating revolution and bringing radical transformation in the ways contemporary capitalist patriarchal society operates. It demands meaningful understanding and interventions in day to day to struggles of women situated in different contextual background. Focusing on prejudices, stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes that have denied women of their constitutional or human rights is essential. The women's liberation movement in the modern Indian society needs to focus on the issues relating to struggle for substantive equality, freedom from violence and survival issues. Commercialization is not a solution; the answer lies in political and social mobilization around everyday issues relating to women lives on daily basis. The need is to strive for dignity and respect at the work place, within homes and public spaces and reimagining the new world order based on social justice
This film, 'India's Daughter', except for Mukesh Singh has nothing. Only Nirbhaya's mother is sole person who is countering the criminal and the lawyers. The criminals are in jail and the lawyer, specifically Mohan Sharma, is sitting in chair, very calmly, with the uniform, inside his own chamber, is spreading nothing but 'hatred' towards Nirbhaya! As a human being I can't accept this
Nation's Honour, 'IBIs' And The Dimapur Lynching By Bonojit Hussain
While there is little doubt that the mob lynching would not have been possible without complicity of the police force at various levels, Nagaland Chief Minister TR Zeliang in a kneejerk reaction has blamed social media users for the flare-up and the subsequent lynching. It would do well to both CM TR Zeliang and Naga society at large if he musters the courage to condemn and initiate action against the leaders of those civil society organizations that made libelous and false statements and calling for mob (in) justice
Hacking Consciousness: The Stanford University Video Series Reviewed by William T. Hathaway
This new Stanford video series investigates consciousness as the source of not only the human mind but also of all energy and matter. Consciousness is seen as the essence of the universe, a unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena. Five scientists from different disciplines describe how we can contact this field and use it to improve our lives. The series, designed by Michael Heinrich, is now available free on YouTube
09 March, 2015
With Saturday's execution of an Islamist defendant, the first state killing of the hundreds of people sentenced to death in mass show trials following the July 2013 military coup, the US-backed Egyptian junta is stepping up its campaign of police-state terror against the people
ISIS Destroys Ancient Sites Near Mosul By Sandy English
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC
The 'new Cold War,' against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it's already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government's chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it's a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it's 'the Western Alliance,' after all
Putin Wants To Eat Your Children By David Swanson
It's Vladimir Putin's turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer
A Global Security System: An Alternative To War By David Swanson
World Beyond War, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending all war, published this week a guide toward that end, a short book titled A Global Security System: An Alternative to War
Right To Insult or The Responsibility Principle? -- Thoughts On The Charlie-Hebdo-Massacre By Saral Sarkar
One thing can probably be regarded as indisputable: One cannot get any positive results through insults and provocations. On the contrary, they only stir up hatred and violence. We have observed that in the last 25 years. With this method one can only start a new conflict again and again
How I Saw The Light With Daylight Saving Time! By Gary Corseri
I thought that it had all been like that: that we had all lost our minds in a "wild romance" of life on a whirling, little, momentary planet of might-have-beens and should-have-beens. And I wept. And understood
The forthcoming state visit of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sri Lanka and the red carpet welcome accorded to him, including the ceremonial speech to the Sri Lanka's parliament are indeed a bad omen for all the democratic, left and progressive forces of this country. The March 13-14 visit is the first standalone trip by an Indian PM to Sri Lanka in 28 years
Greece: Limited Options, Limited Prospects By Jon V Kofas
The day after the Greek left-center party SYRIZA won the election of January 2015, optimism ran across Europe's progressive quarters, while the conservatives and neoliberals acr4oss the world insisted the new regime was extreme left and it would invite disaster. Just a few short weeks after that election, the world knows that SYRIZA was indeed a center-left regime, one trying to introduce some modest reforms in a bankrupt nation whose future is really the past of even greater dependence instead of the future of greater national sovereignty in all domains from economy to defense
Preeti has conquered many male dominated bastions and treaded upon paths, which others would normally fear to step upon. She is at the forefront of spearheading demonstrations to fight for not only the rights of women farmers but of all the villagers--forcing authorities to get the drains cleaned, voters' list corrected, water-logging removed; ration cards anomalies rectified; freeing land from encroachers--the list can go on and on. No wonder that even people of her native town of Gorakhpur marvel at her achievements and look upon her with reverence
Forest Peoples Programme Complaint Against Golden Agri Resources Upheld By Forestpeoples.org
Palm oil conglomerate criticised for multiple violation of RSPO's requirements that lands only be acquired from indigenous peoples and local communities with their free, prior and informed consent
08 March, 2015
Mob (in)justice In Dimapur By Parvin Sultana
Dimapur is regarded as the business capital of Nagaland, a state in the Northeastern region of India. This small town was jolted by a series of horrific incidents that took place on 5th March, 2015. A man accused of raping a college student was murdered by a mob. Videos of the 35 year old Syed Farid Khan being paraded naked and beaten to death became viral. His lifeless blood drenched body was then hanged
Analysing The Dimapur Lynching By Sazzad Hussain
This modern day lynching was photographed by mobile wielding youth as souvenirs. The entire act was committed in broad day light where the police and the civil administration choose to remain nonchalant. The punch line of the narrative was that the "rapist", who was also an "illegal Bangladeshi immigrant", got his punishment in a country where the justice delivery system is very slow
EU Increasingly Abandons Obama On Ukraine By Eric Zuesse
As reported on Saturday March 7th by both German Economic News, and Spiegel magazine, the ongoing lies and arrogance from U.S. President Barack Obama's Administration regarding Ukraine and Russia have finally raised to the surface a long-mounting anger of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Government
Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food. As a result, India is facing a nutritional crisis: every fourth Indian goes hungry, and in 2011 alone, diabetes took the lives of 1 million Indians
Meet The Planet's Most Dangerous Nuclear Rogue State By Mickey Z.
We're told we can't allow just anyone (except allies like Israel, of course) to acquire such lethal technology -- and we can't let anyone help arm men so evil they might, well, use nuclear weapons on civilians. We hear this while pretending that our tax dollars aren't funding the forces that regularly use nuclear weapons on civilians
Palestinian Memory And Hope By Dan Lieberman
They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam's Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C
Ahab's Speech Before His Crew: The Face Of Falsehood By William A.Cook
A Reflection on the Congress of the United States
Sexual violence in the conflict zones are not an aberration. They are widespread. Yet, they do not evoke the same outrage that this particular incident in a non-conflict zone has received. The Government, the judiciary and even those people who are aware of this reality remain silent. Aren't these the daughters of India too? Aren't they women as well? This hypocrisy needs to be addressed. Respect and rights cannot be exclusive or the entitlement of only a particular section of women
Ahwazi Mass Demonstration In Front Of The European Parliament In Brussels By Rahim Hamid
The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz has organized a mass demonstration, under the title "We will never forget our Ahwazi people" in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, the Belgian Capital. The Demonstration took place on Friday 6th of March to condemn the policies of Iranian occupation and the ongoing anti-human atrocities against the Arab people of Ahwaz
07 March, 2015
Europe depends on Russia for gas. It is supplied by Gazprom, a state monopoly. It was delivered for some years through Ukraine, but not without difficulties even before the civil war. Russia decided to join a dozen other European countries in building South Stream, under the Black Sea, into Bulgaria. The European Union attempted to impose its antitrust policy on Russia. On 1 December 2014 Russia abandoned South Stream and announced an agreement with Turkey to supply Europe at the Turkish-Greek border, through the New Black Sea Pipeline, leaving the necessary infrastructure from there to the care of the Union.
The 'Democrat' Brzezinski Says Russia's Putin Wants To Invade NATO By Eric Zuesse
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama's friend and advisor on Russia, has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "seized" Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine
Europe Blocks U.S. From Racing To War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
According to German Economic News, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande are balking at the speed of Obama's rush to war against Russia. Earlier, some of the smaller national economies in the European Union -- the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece -- dissented from America's effort to increase economic sanctions and military measures against Russia. But there is now increasing pressure upon the leaders in Germany, France, and Italy, also to separate the EU from the American rush to war against Russia
Germany's Balancing Act By William T. Hathaway
Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population
The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism
While stone statues of the female form (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga/Kali) are worshipped in temples and religious rituals, a large number of those made of flesh and blood face violence on the streets and in homes, and encounter discrimination throughout their lives that begins at (or even before) birth, and continues during childhood, adolescence and adulthood
Women's Empowerment: Not A Copy Paste Model By Dr.Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
There is no denying that the condition of women in West is relatively better than India but not so excellent that we will blindly follow it and become one dimensional. Before following or adopting any model of women empowerment we must understand its positives and negatives as well. The only model of women empowerment which seems suitable to any context is sociological model of development. Which aims inclusive empowerment, in social sphere, economic sphere, and political sphere, moreover empowerment associated with critical thinking and consciousness raising
ISIS And Its Faulty Logic (PDF) By Mirza Yawar Baig
Peace is the effect of justice. Those who like to talk about peace must ensure that justice is established. Until that is done, any apparent peace is only a recess between wars. We. All of us. White or black. Christian, Jew, Hindu or Muslim or of any faith. We who believe in goodness and are against exploitation of all kinds. We the people of the world. We need to take it back from the hands of those who want to exploit it and us for their own ends. We have to stand together
AAP As A Start-up And The New 'App' By Anand Teltumbde
The biggest challenge before a start-up is to scale up or be gobbled up by the big fish. Remember what Microsoft did to Netscape. In the absence of practical ideas about how to scale up, start-ups only end up swelling the coffers of venture capitalists and promoters
A Short Note On 'India's Daughter' By V. Arun Kumar
I recently watched the BCC's documentary 'India's Daughter' made by LesleeUdwin. The document is strong one exposing the misogynist and male chauvinism mind-set existing in our society. Banning of this documentary is idiotic, but I have certain reservations
Coalition And Controversies By Abdul Majid Zargar
So the BJP-PDP coalition is a fait-accompli now In Jammu & Kashmir. Mufti Mohammad Syed has assumed the reins of coalition Govt. on the assurance of a full six year term as Chief Minster. The oath of office was administered by Governor Vohra on 1st March 2015. A galaxy of leaders from BJP were present on the dias. Congress & NC boycotted the function
06 March, 2015
Press Release
"Indian courts have stated on multiple occasions that mere possession of certain literature cannot be considered a crime. The National Human Rights Commission has asked for a report from the Kerala police on the arrests. Authorities must ensure that the two men are protected from torture and other ill-treatment," said Shemeer Babu, Programmes Director, Amnesty International India
The documentary `India's Daughter' made by Leslee Udwin about the rape that shook Delhi in December 2012 raised a lot of debate, outrage and furor in Parliament, in media and in general. The police filed a FIR and the broadcast of this documentary is banned in India. Statements were issued by groups in favour and against such ban. However, what is being overlooked amidst this debate is the reality of women's lives in India. A woman in India faces this patriarchal misogynist attitude every day - at home and at public spaces, through her entire life in different ways. The documentary pointed to this regressive attitude and subjugating culture that needs to be addressed. Prohibiting the documentary is futile as shying away from such questions that pertains to reality of women's live or living in denial that misogyny exists or closing eyes to realities is hardly helpful to bring about social transformation. The need is to strike at the roots and confront the sexist and patriarchal violent culture in a mature manner
Is 'India's Daughter' A Victim Of Corporate Media War ? By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
BBC's film failed to expose India's caste impunity, which rapes women at their whims and fancies to assert its supremacy in India's villages. It is sad that our activists and human rights 'champion' did not have time to narrate things when they critique the film, instead the farce of nationalism and technicalities of the matter are being raised and that shows the hollowness of the protests and the human rights movement itself which keep quiet on the violence against Dalit women and make it just a plain gender issue. India will never answer that. BBC documentary failed us in that but nevertheless it is a milestone as it still exposes Indian society and its hypocrisy in dealing with the issue
Muzzling India's Daughters By Farzana Versey
Soon after December 16, 2012, India became international news for a rape. Intellectuals and the political class had at the time lapped up the attention, to the extent of participating in the globalisation of Delhi as the rape capital. The shame they felt came with the caveat of their moral superiority. Today, when it comes back full circle to mock them they stand more exposed than what they are exposing. They had called her India's daughter, and now they object to the title of a documentary using it. India has banned the film
Why The Rise Of Fascism Is Again The Issue By John Pilger
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons
Let's End The New Cold War Before It Heats Up By Ernest Partridge
The United States and Russia are rushing, relentlessly, toward war, unless cooler voices are heard and heeded. Those voices are not being heard in our mass media or heeded by our politicians. The familiar historical indicators of a march to war are apparent to all with eyes to see: arms buildup, depersonalization of the "enemy," demonization of its leaders, marginalizing of moderate voices, suppression of dissent, refusal to negotiate and compromise in good faith, deliberate failure to recognize the concerns and interests of "the other."
Wars may be how Americans learn geography, but do they always learn the history of how the geography was shaped by wars? I've just read Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years by John McHugo. It's very heavy on the wars, which is always a problem with how we tell history, since it convinces people that war is normal. But it also makes clear that war wasn't always normal in Syria
All Buildings In Debaltseve Ukraine Were Destroyed Or Damaged By The Occupying Ukrainian Army By Eric Zuesse
According to the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Ukraine, no usable buildings survive in the town of Debaltseve, the crucial railroad junction that was long fought over between the occupying Ukrainian army and the town's residents. The OSCE official, Michael Bociurkiw, said on Wednesday March 4th, "The violence must be stopped, as it is developing into a real disaster in some areas. As for Debaltseve, for example, our representatives have said that there was no house left that was not destroyed or damaged by shelling."
Greece Injured By EU By Andre Vltchek
Greece is in a cage; it is a hostage. The door is actually open. But the country is scared to walk out and face the world. It still prefers to suffer from familiar tyrants, than to encounter the unknown
An open letter and a challenge to the Royal Society
Justice: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Different nations and systems that exist in today's world are based on some sort of principle or framework, but the underlying fact is that if any such nation or system is based on justice, then only one expects good results out of it, otherwise it is not going to last for long, and history is witness, how such nations and systems collapse as, Malcolm-X, once said, "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." Excerpts of a short conversation with my friend over a cup of tea, here is what he thinks
05 March, 2015
New documents from the cache of files leaked by Edward Snowden show that New Zealand's intelligence agency has been collecting in bulk the cell phone, email, and internet files of people across the Pacific Island nations and handing that data over to the U.S. National Security Agency in an operation one angered lawmaker now describes as a "giant vaccum cleaner of information
This communication, we are sending after viewing the documentary film, which ironically, you had proposed to telecast on 8th March 2015, on the occasion of InternationalWomen's Day. We are writing to you to express our serious concerns about some aspects of this film which, as a responsible channel, we fully expect that you will take on board and postpone the broadcast of this film, till all legal processes and proceedings pertaining to the 16 December 2012 case have concluded
"India's Daughter" : A Ban Is Not The Solution By National Federation Of Indian Women
National Federation Of Indian Women (NFIW) strongly opposes the banning of the documentary India's Daughter. The 'objectionable' portions of the documentary not only expose the mentality of the rapist, they are also a reflection of the mentality and attitude of the Indian patriarchal society towards women
"India's Daughter": Blanket Ban An Attack On The Freedom Of Expression By All India Democratic Women's Association
All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled "India's Daughter" made by BBC 4. This is a knee jerk reaction that constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression
Netanyahu's Farcical Fear Mongering By Alan Hart
Netanyahu's portrayal of an Iran on course to possess nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel, plus the standing ovations and the applause his performance received, might well have pleased enough brainwashed Israeli Jews to vote in ways that guarantee he will emerge from Israel's upcoming elections in a position to cobble together the next coalition government and serve a fourth term as prime minister
Compete To Possess And Die Out, or Be Fair To Survive By Lionel Anet
Atmospheric scientists have estimated that, with the carbon we have emitted, we can expect a 3 metre ocean rise by the end of this century. We are in big trouble and continual reliance on growth will end up killing everyone. The task ahead of us is the most difficult ever and to deal with it will take a united effort. So the ball is in their court, the 1%,has to decide to live as one of us or die.Nevertheless they can't see the choice they have on their own; we must show them the choices they have, to save ourselves
US Considering Openly Arming Syrian al-Qaeda Faction, al-Nusra By Robert Barsocchini
As reported at Antiwar.com, the US and some of its regional client dictatorships are prodding the major al-Qaeda faction operating in Syria, a brutal terrorist group called al-Nusra, to "re-brand" so the US can openly arm it
A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
Not Science, Just Lies And Propaganda: The Massive Fraud Behind GMOs Exposed By Colin Todhunter
'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' is a new book by the US public interest lawyer Steve Druker. The book is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who initiated a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing
Fast Food Nations: Selling Out To Junk Food, Illness And Food Insecurity By Colin Todhunter
Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture and food sectors, including the subsequent impact on the livelihoods of hundreds of millions
The claim of the Hindutva gang that Dr BR Ambedkar endorsed the Hindutva project and opposed beef-eating as cow was sacred to Hinduism is a terrible travesty of facts. Dr Ambedkar, a great researcher, produced a brilliant essay on the subject titled 'Did The Hindus Never Eat Beef?' All those who are really interested in understanding the Indian past and wish to challenge the supremacist myth making for cleansing and marginalizing minorities must read the above-mentioned work which is being reproduced here
An Underground Radioactive Waste Laboratory Coming Up In Gogi Village In Yadgir District Of Karnataka By VT Padmanabhan & Joseph Makkolil
In March last year, we reported a secret move by the DAE to set up a repository (DGR) for storing high level radioactive waste (HLW) under the hills of Idukki-Theni districts in Kerala-Tamil Nadu. TIFR published a blanket denial saying that INO has nothing to do with radioactive waste. Our contention was that radioactive waste repository was a separate project, co-located at the same site. Now we report a similar effort to build an underground research laboratory (URL) in Gogi village of Yadgir district in Karnataka
Noted social activist Medha Patkar joined hands with MDMK leader Vaiko to oppose the proposed neutrino observatory project in Theni district, saying that it would cause large-scale environmental damages. "Nature will suffer major damages if India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is set up. Radiation from it will affect people in the area. The central government does not seem to care about the people's livelihood. The INO project will not benefit India either," Patkar said
Sour Grapes In 'Wine Country'-- Intense Challenges To Wineries Erupt By Shepherd Bliss
A movement against the expansion of rural wineries grows throughout the North Bay. Residents demand that applications should include an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and conform to the rules of CEQA (California Environment Quality Act). Demands grow for moratoriums on all new wineries in Sonoma and Napa Counties, especially those seeking to be industrial, commercial event centers, located away from urban centers, compromising the quality of rural life and nature
04 March, 2015
Netanyahu Delivers Anti-Iran Tirade To US Congress By Bill Van Auken
The speech delivered Tuesday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress consisted of a hysterical anti-Iran tirade and an implicit denunciation of the Obama administration for what was portrayed as an outright betrayal of the security interests of both Israel and the US
Benjamin Netanyahu's Fantasy World By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Netanyahu's speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years
Netanyahu Invokes Biblical Myths And Islamophobia To Derail US Diplomacy On Iran By Ali Abunimah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his much trailed and politically divisive speech to the US Congress today, forcefully denouncing a possible international agreement that would place Iran's civilian nuclear energy program under strict supervision. Immediately afterwards, I spoke to The Real News Network's Paul Jay to analyze the speech, including Netanyahu's appeal to Biblical myths and Islamophobia in his attempt to derail US diplomacy
Netanyahu Addresses "His" Congress By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
By sabotaging of the agreement between the US and Iran, Israel intends to maintain its nuclear hegemony in the region and impose its will upon his neighbors. It can massacre the people in the Gaza Strip with impunity because the US holds its protective hand over Israel and prevents any resolution critical of Israel in the UN Security Council. How long will Americans let Israel humiliate them and their President? Do Obama and his staff have no self-esteem? And why are the richest Americans keeping quiet?
Gitmo In Chicago By Stephen Lendman
On February 24, The Guardian headlined "The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site.' " It's an "off-the-books (Homan Square) interrogation compound," said the Guardian - some miles west from where this writer lives. A "nondescript warehouse (is) the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." People are lawlessly arrested, detained, denied access to lawyers up to 24 hours, and tortured during secret interrogations
"Collective Psychopathology" And US Police State Methods By Jon V Kofas
In February 2015, The Guardian published a couple of new stories about the connection between the Chicago police department "black site" at Homan Square and the Guantanamo prison where terror suspects have been kept as political prisoners without ever been charged. Neither the national media in the US nor the Chicago media organizations, including African-American, have pursued this story. Even after the British paper brought these issues to the attention of the public, the mainstream media in Chicago and across the US are ignoring the revelations, a subject in itself revealing about the role of the US media in a democratic society where human rights and civil rights violations occur
History without the moral leadership of intellectuals is devoid of meaning, chaotic and unpredictable. But this is a period of seismic historical transition, and it must eventually yield the kind of intellectual who will break free from the confines of the ego, regimes, self-serving politics, sects, ideologies and geography
The West had their chance to show what their democracy looks like when they applied it to Russia in the 1990's. Their methods have not changed since then. There is nothing new that could be offered, and the Russian people have declared that they do not want another round of the old. The best thing to do is to let them be. Only when the external pressure subsides will they be able to address their own problems without being accused, sometimes rightfully and sometimes inaccurately, of working for or being exploited by foreign governments
Wealth Of World's Billionaires Surges Past $7 Trillion By Joseph Kishore
The combined net worth of the world's billionaires has reached a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion, according to the latest compilation published by Forbes magazine on Monday. There are a record 1,826 billionaires, each with an average wealth of $3.8 billion. Relative to last year, the world's billionaires have increased their combined wealth by more than 10 percent, from $6.4 trillion in 2014, while the total number of billionaires has grown by 11 percent
Greatest Generation? What Happened 70 Years Ago Will Change Your Mind! By Mickey Z.
By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Cheered on by the likes of Time magazine -- which explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves" -- the U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians. Read that again: The U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians
"Tears in Paradise. Suffering and struggle of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004" by Rajendra Prasad tells the story of Indian indentured labour ("5 year slaves") taken to Fiji from British-occupied India in the period 1879-1916 and brutally exploited on British- and Australian-run sugar cane plantations. The last "5 year slaves" were finally released from bondage in 1920, 87 years after slavery was supposedly banned in the British Empire. Today effective Third World slavery is rampant through globalization
We Are All Mukto-Mona ! The Challenge Of Unreason In South Asia By Subhash Gatade
Humayun Azad, Salman Tasser, Ahmad Rajib Haider, Dr Dabholkar, Com Pansare and now Avijit Roy. Thanks to religious fervour and growth of extremism of every kind in this part of South Asia, where forces of darkness seem to be on the ascendance, it may just create a feeling that we have reached a dead end as we are losing people one by one who were 'a beacon of hope and light in these dreadful times'. Should we then say that whatever 'little hope we saw in the horizon will it wither away?' We have no other option than to remain eternal optimist with a sincere hope that their 'mettle will be passed onto new generation.'
A Bear Hug! By Mohammad Ashraf
Modi-Mufti hug reminded one of the famous Kashmiri proverbs about bear hugs and friendships. One hopes it turns out to be positive and does not end in the proverbial endings!
03 March, 2015
The National Human Rights Commission of India has taken suo motu cognizance of a media report that the Kerala Government was targeting human rights defenders and rights activists by labeling them as 'Maoists sympathizers'. Human rights defenders and advocates Tushar Nirmal Sarathy and Jaison C. Cooper had been arrested under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in Kerala and were in jail since the 30th January, 2015
China Warns U.S. To Stop Its Ukrainian Proxy War Against Russia By Eric Zuesse
A much-ignored huge news report from Reuters on Friday, February 27th, was headlined "Chinese diplomat tells West to consider Russia's security concerns over Ukraine." China's Ambassador to Belgium (which has the capital of the EU) said that the "nature and root cause" of the Ukrainian conflict is "the West," and that "The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration."
Two Different Approaches, Two Different Results In Fighting Ebola By Matt Peppe
In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident. These countries are the mighty USA and little Cuba
The Obama Administration, Shell, and the Fate of the Arctic Ocean
"Before Our Eyes": The Future Of The Middle East By Thierry Meyssan
For several months, Barack Obama has been trying to change US policy in the Middle East in order to eliminate the Islamic Emirate with the help of Syria. But he cannot do this, partly because he has been saying for years that President Assad must go, and secondly because his regional allies support the Islamic Emirate against Syria. However, things are slowly evolving so he should be able to do so soon. Thus, it appears that all States that supported the Islamic Emirate have ceased to do so, opening the way for a redistribution of the cards
Do Not Give The Thieves The Key To Your Home: Stop The TTIP By Colin Todhunter
Some 375 civil society organisations from across Europe have today called on EU decision-makers to protect citizens, workers, and the environment from threats the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) it poses
Gandhi As An Economist By John Scales Avery
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are
The Politics of Food: Palestinians Exhibit Culture, Identity At JNU Food Festival By Abhay Kumar
As the dusk of Republic Day fell and dazzling lights began to flood the Jhelum Lawn of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), hundreds of students thronged International Food Festival. I, too, joined the crowd and walked along one stall after another, looking at mouthwatering cuisines. But later the evening, before I came out of the festival's marquee, I had felt that the venue displayed not only foods but also aspiration, identity, struggle and culture of a subjugated people. One of the participants in the annual festival was Palestine. As the illegal Israeli occupation continues, the festival served as an important space for Palestinians to assert their identity
Occupation: A Short Conversation By Kashoo Tawseef
Some call it, occupation, others invasion, conquest, or control of a nation or territory by foreigners. Whatever you call it, it doesn't sound comfortable at all. Have you ever felt, or tried to feel how it is like, to be living in occupation. How is it to be occupied? Ask someone who has experienced occupation. I had a chance to sit with a friend of mine, David (name changed) for a cup of tea, which he has lived most of his life under occupation. He answered me some unanswered questions, and explained the real meaning of occupation. Here are some excerpts of our conversation
Time For Teachers To Let Go Classroom Management And Focus On Classroom Interactions By Ms. Swaleha Sindhi
Most of teachers plan to create calm and productive classrooms. But such sight is not seen in all the classes. Things don't always go as planned with teachers. Teachers might be using great selection of classroom management tools to get students attention. But sometimes when teachers are so focused on classroom management, entire period is spent trying to get students on task. This proves to be exhausting for both teachers and students, so in cases where teachers are teaching some heavy subjects when they need to put their energies towards content then they can give classroom management a back seat. If most of the class is ready to learn and there are minimal distractions, then teachers can give themselves permission to focus on the content. Thus, a teacher is expected to use different strategies and bring a balance in classrooms
With its wealth of detail, its fascinating insights, its bold critique of radical Islamist discourse and politics, its helpful and much-needed articulation of an Islamic understanding of peace and inter-community harmony and dialogue, and the hope that it offers us, this book is definitely a must-read for anyone concerned with what is admittedly one of the most widely-discussed and hotly-debated subjects across the world today
02 March, 2015
The assassination, latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years, occurred in the backdrop of on-going political disturbance carried by the opponents of Sheikh Hasina government as her government publicly announced its policy of zero-tolerance to religious extremism, and is strong handedly trying to weed out the religious extremists. There have been a series of similar attacks in recent years blamed on the Islamic militants
The Saudi Hypocrisy By Mazin Qumsiyeh
The kingdom of "Saudi Arabia" is going to behead a man for "apostacy" (renouncing his belief in Islam and the Quran) while welcoming Egyptian Al-Sisi whose security forces are torturing people to death in Egypt for being supportive of an Islamic political system more moderate than that of that Kingdom!
Almost all Republicans, plus the top level of the Democratic Party such as Obama, hate Russia, even after communism ended and the Soviet Union broke up. They are simply obsessed with destroying Russia. So: although Bush was weak against Al Qaeda, he was strong against Russia: he brought into NATO, the military club against Russia, the following seven nations: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia -- six of which seven nations had formerly been members of the Warsaw Pact along with the U.S.S.R., against the U.S. The reality is: Obama, like Republicans generally, hates Russia
The Ten Commandments for a Better American World
ISIS 101: What's Really Terrifying About This Threat By John Chuckman
The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths
Review of 'Confessions Of A Terrorist - A Novel' By Anita McKone
If you have ever asked 'Why?... How could they do this?' in response to the latest report of terrorism, then 'Confessions of a Terrorist' is the novel for you. But only if you genuinely want to find out the answers
How To Stop Bogus Wars And Articulate Global Peacemaking? By Mahboob A. Khawaja
Islamophobia is on the rise. Few reactionary instances of individual madness are used by the Western strategists to blame Muslims and Islam as the focal point of their perpetuated belligerency
Quotas Aren't Negating Merit And Efficiency By V.M.Yazhmozhi
Though caste based reservation is an affirmative action to uplift the socially and educationally oppressed classes and to bring forth social justice, critics often argue that "Quotas are a negation of merit and efficiency". A paper published by Ashwini Deshpande, Professor at the Delhi School of Economics and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan has defeated this ideology
01 March, 2015
Rapid melting of Antarctic ice could push sea levels up 10 feet worldwide within two centuries, "recurving" heavily populated coastlines and essentially reshaping the world, the Associated Press reported. Parts of Antarctica are thawing so quickly, the continent has become "ground zero of global climate change without a doubt," Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica told AP
Killing Of Boris Nemtso Has Relevance For World Politics By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
Killing of Boris Nemtso, a strong critic of Putin in Moscow is shocking, sad and highly difficult to figure out, who killed? Why was he killed? And what will be its political fallout for Putin and for Russia as a whole?
Is he a smooth-talking, disingenuous, cunning salesman who knows that everything he asserts about Israel being in danger of annihilation and not having a Palestinian partner for peace is propaganda nonsense, or, does he really believe what he says?
What appears to be happening is that Obama is easing off the US aggression throttle towards Iran, while Israel is simultaneously on the precipice of teaming up with Saudi Arabia (another close US client/ally) to aggressively bomb Iran - the top international crime
Skipping Netanyahu's Speech For All The Wrong Reasons By David Swanson
Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said
The post-coup leaders of Ukraine have routinely said that Ukraine should destroy Russia; and, now, starting on February 24th, they are placing into position the key prerequisite for doing so, which is the advanced Anti-Ballistic-Missile, or ABM, system, S-300
On February 22nd, NBC's "Meet the Press" presented reporter Richard Engel in a terrific four-minute documentary on Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's catastrophic policy-results in Libya. (You can watch it by clicking on that link.) The segment concluded that Obama and his Administration (including Hillary Clinton) didn't know where they were going in this operation
The Entire Case For Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies By Eric Zuesse
U.S. President Barack Obama has stated many times his case against Russia -- the reason for the economic sanctions. In his National Security Strategy 2015, he uses the term "aggression" 18 times, and 17 of them are referring specifically to only one country as "aggressive": Russia. However, not once does he say there what the "aggression" consisted of: what its target was, or what it itself was. He's vague there on everything except his own target: Russia
When Growth Trumps Freedom: The Chill In Canada Comes From Our Government, Not The Weather By James Magnus-Johnston
With the introduction of Canada's so-called "secret police" bill, there is increasing concern the rights of the oil patch will trump the rights of ordinary citizens in a new and chilling way-through the kinds of fear tactics you'd sooner expect in Soviet Russia than a western liberal democracy
The 'Star-Spangled Banner' Lyrics That Get Swept Under The Rug By Robert Barsocchini
The US national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner", has four verses, though only one is commonly sung or discussed. The reason for this becomes apparent when the lyrics are read and the history behind them known
Bitter Lakes - "McJihad" By US And Saudi Arabia By Dr. Ludwig Watzal
Adam Curties' documentary "Bitter Lake" documents brilliantly the total failure of the US intervention and the arrogance of its Western stooges in Afghanistan
Did you know that the American Dream now comes in the form of a miracle pill? A recent marketing and advertising trend is peddling what they call the "smart pill", presumably a brain pill that not only makes you smart, it can also make you rich because you optimize your brain capacity! This is essentially a vitamin supplement that claims to boost memory, energy, and creativity, but it can also make you rich, very rich because it allows you to use your head more effectively when making those difficult career and investment decisions. You too can realize the "American Dream" just by taking this pill, without going to college, without working hard, without any effort on your part
GMOs And Green Blob Hallucinations: The Twisted World Of Mr Paterson By Colin Todhunter
Speaking last week in Pretoria, former UK Environment Minister Owen Paterson described critics of GMOs as comprising part of a privileged class that increasingly fetishizes food and seeks to turn their personal preferences into policy proscriptions for the rest of us. He called them backward-looking and regressive. He claimed their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment because of their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques
Postcard From The End Of America: Center City, Philadelphia By Linh Dinh
Though the most visible homeless are still the old and middle-aged, they are becoming younger and younger, and the other day, I met 30-year-old Stephanie sitting behind a plastic cup with a sign, "HOMELESS AND HUNGRY / ANYTHING HELPS / THANK YOU."
Check Your Privilege, Become An Ally By Mickey Z.
In a society built upon a foundation of hierarchy, declaring "we're all one" -- regardless of our intentions -- is yet another example of privilege run amok. If we wish to profoundly connect with our fellow humans, we must become allies... not "one."It takes no extra time to choose solidarity instead of privilege. The payoff for this transition is not only a richer, more compassionate life for yourself but also, a deeper commitment to collective liberation
We are once again reminded of the goondaism that prevails in regions like these, where communities face threats of abuse, intimidation and forced eviction due to mining and other so called development projects; where human right defenders and activists who believe in and abide by the law are made to feel like criminals and where the rich corporates who violate the law, rule the land
Budget 2015 : A Step Towards Inequality By Dr. Vivek Kumar Srivastava
The abolition of Wealth Tax, with a reduction in rate of corporate tax to 25% over next four years may have its own spiraling effects. There is always talks to reduce subsidy in the agricultural sector but benefits to corporate groups may outnumber the subsidy benefits to rural people
From Barpeta To Lucknow: Journey Of Waste-Pickers By Dr. Roli Misra & Parvin Sultana
Internal migration from Assam to other parts of India for a better livelihood is very common. But the condition of these waste pickers worsen once they move from Barpeta to Lucknow. Poverty, issues of identity circumscribed by larger question of illegal immigration makes it harder for them to work and sustain themselves. What is required is a move from rhetorical politics and a humanitarian take on the issue of these people who are stuck in the lowest rung of social ladder. Only then policies will be successful in true sense and people can break free from stigmas and move ahead
In Jammu and Kashmir, everything has significance and worth of something even the foot-ware that one purchases from the market but 'Human Lives' remain valueless. So outlandish that we didn't ascertain the connotation of famous maxim 'health is wealth.'
Condemn The Brutal Murder Of Avijit Roy By People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism strongly condemns the brutal murder of Mr Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi secular blogger and author on 26th February in Dhaka. His wife Ms Rafida Anwar Banna has suffered grievous injuries in the attack. Mr Roy was a popular blogger and author who wrote a number of books against religious extremism and the threat to human dignity and democracy from it. He had been on the hit list of Islamic fundamentalists for a number of years
Release 145 Undertrial Maruti Workers On Bail By People's Union for Democratic Rights
PUDR welcomes the bail granted by the Supreme Court to Sunil s/o Satpal and Kanwaljeet Singh, two of the Maruti workers on February 23, 2015. Sunil and Kanwaljeet are among the 147 workers who were arrested in the aftermath of the violence on July 18, 2012, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana which led to the death of the factory's HR manager Awaneesh Kumar Deb. However it is hardly a cause for celebration given that the bail was long overdue, and the other 145 workers still continue to languish in jail
Narmada Jeevanshala's Balmela: From The (Play) Ground By National Alliance of People's Movements
The Narmada Jeevanshalas (Schools of Life) celebrated its 16th annual Balmela (Children's fair), from 12th February to 15thFebruary at a resettlement site of the Project Affected Families (PAFs) of the Narmada - Sardar Sarovar Dam |
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No. 20: LeBron's Decision
LeBron James went from being one of sports' most celebrated figures to one of its most hated after he announced his departure from the Cleveland Cavaliers on an overhyped live television program that proved embarrassing for almost everyone involved. Cleveland fans now hate James, who joined the Miami Heat, and James himself has said that he would leave differently if he had it to do over. Nevertheless, some African Americans couldn't help seeing a problem with a young black man taking so much flak for simply guiding his own destiny.
Captions by Cord Jefferson
No. 19: Tiger Woods Returns to Golf
After getting caught cheating on his wife , Elin Nordegren, in late 2009 with dozens of women, Tiger Woods went to rehab for sex addiction and dropped out of the PGA Tour indefinitely. He lost $22 million in endorsement deals almost immediately, and Nordegren moved back to Sweden. The divorce became official in August of this year. Woods announced his return to golf in March, of course, but he's since found it difficult to win any tournaments with the deftness of prior years.
No. 18: The Curious Case of Kanye West
Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out to rave reviews in November, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. As usual, however, West found a way to mar his successes with increasingly erratic behavior. In a confusing interview with Today prior to its release, West apologized for saying that President Bush didn't care about black people, but then he lashed out at host Matt Lauer. He subsequently canceled a performance on the program, claiming that he'd been tricked into looking foolish.
No. 17: South Africa Hosts the World Cup
For the first time in its 80-year history, soccer's World Cup championship happened in an African nation. This summer, South Africa hosted the tournament , and six African teams made the finals: Algeria, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. Though the world loved watching the games, the jury is still out on whether South Africa liked hosting them. According to new figures, the nation has recouped just a tenth of what it cost to host the tournament.
No. 16: Tyler Perry Does 'For Colored Girls'
Tyler Perry isn't known for his subtlety. It holds, then, that the writer and star of runaway hits like Madea's Family Reunion -- in which Perry cross-dresses in a busty latex suit -- was not the obvious choice to adapt and direct the screen version of Ntozake Shange's beloved play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf . Rumor even had it that Oprah called Perry personally and questioned his ability to do the play justice. Still, Perry went through with it, and the result got mixed reviews .
No. 15: Desiree Rogers Resigns
A smart, fashionable social doyenne from Chicago, Desiree Rogers seemed to be the perfect White House social secretary. A longtime friend of the Obamas, she aimed to add more ethnic art to the White House's official collection and spice up administration events. But all of that came to a crashing halt when, one year into Rogers' tenure, Real Housewives of DC's Michaele and Tareq Salahi were able to crash a White House state dinner and cozy up to President Obama himself. Rogers resigned three months later, in February. She is now the CEO of Johnson Publishing.
No. 14: Alvin Greene's Primary Win
On June 8, 33-year-old novice politician Alvin Greene defeated veteran South Carolina legislator Vic Rawl in the Democratic Senate primary, despite the fact that Greene literally hadn't campaigned at all . How did he do it? After a series of rambling interviews, it was clear that Greene himself barely knew. Later, it came out that Greene faced a sexual harassment charge, and he was handily defeated by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint in the general election -- though he did walk away with nearly 30 percent of the vote.
No. 13: Bishop Eddie Long Sued
Eddie Long is the much esteemed head of the New Birth Missionary Baptist mega-church in Lithonia, Ga., where he presides over 25,000 worshippers weekly. An advocate of "curing" homosexuality, Long surprised his congregation when, in September, news broke that he faced accusations of sexual coercion from four young men, who claim Long used his power to intimidate them into sexual relationships. Long denied all the charges, but he recently opted for a private mediation , meaning that the public won't hear his defense or any additional details.
No. 12: Charlie Rangel Censured
After being found guilty of 11 infractions by the House ethics committee -- including not paying taxes and not disclosing hundreds of thousands in assets -- 21-term Rep. Charles Rangel was censured in December by a vote of 333 to 79. A censure is the most serious punishment, short of expulsion, that a congressperson can face. Rangel admitted to violating House rules but pleaded for leniency and said that he never maliciously tried to "enrich" himself. The scandal forced him from his post atop the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
No. 11: Kamala Harris Breaks Barriers
With the election for California attorney general too close to call for weeks, Republican Steve Cooley finally conceded to Kamala Harris on Nov. 24, making Harris the first African-American attorney general (and first female attorney general) in the state's history. Cooley had initially declared victory, but when the numbers showed that he was trailing by more than 50,000 votes, he bowed out. Harris, who had been San Francisco's district attorney, is biracial, which also makes her America's first Indian-American attorney general.
No. 10: Drug-Sentence Disparity Narrowed
In August of this year, President Obama signed a bill that was a long time coming for many black nonviolent drug offenders. Introduced in late 2009, the Fair Sentencing Act narrowed, but didn't eliminate, the sentencing disparity for possession of crack and powder cocaine. Since 1986 the disparity had been 100 to 1 in an effort to curtail the crack epidemic of the late '80s. Now the disparity is 18 to 1. Republican Senate Judiciary committee members refused to agree to eliminate the disparity completely .
No. 9: Fenty Goes Down in D.C.
He drastically (and controversially) revamped District schools and revitalized blighted areas, but Adrian Fenty was unable to coax a second term out of Washington, D.C., voters. The capital's youngest mayor ever, Fenty lost the Democratic primary to D.C. City Council Chairman Vince Gray. The embarrassing defeat solidified what many had surmised: Black voters were turning away from Fenty, who some perceived as arrogant -- this in a city that re-elected Marion Barry after he was caught smoking crack with prostitutes.
No. 8: The NAACP Takes on the Tea Party
At a convention in Kansas City, Mo., in July, the NAACP passed a resolution condemning "extremist elements within the Tea Party." Though largely ceremonial, the resolution sparked outrage by Tea Party leaders, some of whom accused the NAACP of being racist. Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams had to step down after saying that the NAACP should go to "the trash heap of history" and writing a racist "satirical" open letter. Though highly publicized, the resolution couldn't stop the Tea Party's momentum with voters .
No. 7: A Sky-High Black Jobless Rate
Though the economic slowdown has caused devastation across the globe, no group in America has been hit harder than the black community. Overall, the national unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for months now, but black unemployment is significantly higher, at 16 percent. And for black men, that number jumps to more than 20 percent . With jobs numbers looking grim , 2011 is looking to be another bad year for African Americans seeking work.
No. 6b: Black Republicans Enter Races and Win
When 32 black Republicans threw their hats into the ring for the congressional midterm elections, media outlets everywhere went hog wild with the "year of the black Republican" theme. Eventually all but two were defeated -- Tim Scott in South Carolina and Allen West in Florida -- but their victories weren't insignificant. Both men are the first black Republicans representing their states in Congress since Reconstruction, and Scott actually beat political heavyweight Strom Thurmond's son, Paul, to win the GOP nomination in his state.
No. 6a: A Senate 'Blackout'
On the other hand, Roland Burris, who replaced Barack Obama as Illinois senator, lost to Republican Mark Kirk this year. This left no African-American lawmakers in the nation's most powerful legislative house. In his farewell speech, Burris said, "[W]hen the 112th Congress is sworn in this coming January, there will not be a single black American who takes the oath of office in this chamber. This is simply unacceptable." Since Reconstruction, the Senate has housed only four black senators.
No. 5: Sherrod-Gate
On July 19, USDA executive Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign after a video of her surfaced on far-right activist Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, in which she appeared to be making racist comments. The NAACP denounced her, and she was hastily canned. Sherrod was exonerated when the original video emerged, showing that Breitbart had manipulated footage to smear her. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered her a new position, but she rejected it . The NAACP apologized, too. Sherrod now travels the country speaking about diversity.
No. 4: Health Care Reform Passes
Nearly 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt made health care reform a major thrust of his campaign for president on the Progressive Party ticket. Though Roosevelt and subsequent presidents were unsuccessful, Obama picked up where his forward-thinking predecessors left off, and in March, the Affordable Care Act became law. The law includes several programs that will be especially beneficial to African Americans. The government estimates that more than 30 million more people will get medical insurance because of health care reform.
No. 3: Republicans' Midterm Gains
Just two years after putting Barack Obama into office, American voters took to the polls on Nov. 2 and voted roundly against his party , spurred on by months of fringe fearmongering and concerns about the economy. In the end, the Democrats lost just six Senate seats, keeping their majority, but gave up 63 House seats, tipping the balance of power in Congress back to the GOP. For the next two years, expect a monolithic Republican voting bloc to promote gridlock and thwart the president's ambitions.
No. 2: BP Oil Spill
Beginning with an explosion that killed 11 people in April, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gushed for three months before it was capped. By that time, almost 200 million gallons of oil had been dumped into the fauna-rich Gulf of Mexico. The region's fishermen found their catches mostly inedible, with some fisheries and oyster houses actually forced to shutter, making our nation's greatest environmental tragedy a financial catastrophe as well. The cleanup created jobs, but few of those went to minorities .
No. 1: Earthquake in Haiti
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12 was a grim way to ring in 2010. Almost a quarter million perished, with hundreds of thousands more sustaining brutal injuries. Of those lucky enough not to lose their lives, 1 million lost their homes, flooding Haiti's countryside with the displaced. In the aftermath, the costs of confronting a cholera epidemic and rebuilding still-leveled city centers are quickly outstripping foreign aid. Sadly, the Haiti-quake aftermath is bound to be a 2011 story as well.
What would you add to this list? Weigh in below.
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By John Oliver "The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste." HBO: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Native Advertising
By Cathy Stripe Lester On August 5, Michigan taxpayers will be asked to vote on Proposition 1, which is being presented in commercials as a way to "help small businesses and create 15,000 new jobs ... without raising taxes!" If that sounds like a conjuring trick, it is - smoke'n'mirrors, my friends. And if you [...]
By Victor Argo "For them, a stable country is a country with a strong government favorable to the United States": When Western governments pompously talk about "stability in the Middle East", the interest and the security of the people of the region are seldom on their minds, writes Victor Argo. Stability, stability, stability. Comments on [...]
By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch For America's national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in [...]
By Tina Casey via Cleantechnica File this one under E for ewps, at least as far as the export market for US fracked natural gas goes. The US natural gas industry has been leaning thishard on the Obama Administration to approve more overseas sales, but international fossil fuel giant Saudi Aramco has just announced big [...]
By Michael T. Klare via Tomdispatch Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share [...]
CNN: "A highway patrol officer was caught on camera hitting a woman with what a witness says were "knockout punches." Aviva Shen at Thinkprogress writes: "The officer said the woman was walking barefoot along the freeway on Tuesday and refused to stop when asked. The video shows the cop tackle her, pin her down, and [...]
By Noam Chomsky via Tomdispatch The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in [...] |
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Initially, I wasn't going to recommend this film. I still cannot really do so for the most persons, and that is not in my book a sign that it is great cinematic art. I am happy, for example, to recommend MUD, the film most scandalously left off this year''s list of Oscar-nominees for Best Picture, to any movie-lover.
My initial ambivalence surprised me, because as regular Carl's Rock Songbook readers know, I have a thing for re-living and re-thinking the 60s music scenes, and have given special attention to Joan , Bob , and the folkie phenomenon. And ever since some comments here got me digging deep into TRUE GRIT, I've learned to respect the cult of the Coen Brothers, and to approach their films with high expectations. I've been further encouraged in this by some of the philosophy-prof essays here , and especially by observations from a friend of mine I'll call my "Coen Brothers guy." So, I figured I must be just about the perfect potential audience member for this film.
And yet, it left me puzzled and put off. For one, it doesn't have much of a plot. It was also egregiously depressing--not in the usual tragic, existential, or axe-grinding modes, but in some unique Coen-mode of everyday futility.
But I eventually realized that this is a film that keeps working in your head--it contains puzzles, mysteries, and haunting images, and these eventually drew me to see it again.
What INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS does is jump into an ongoing story of failure, that of a folk singer. The major reasons for the failure are elusive, but some of the minor reasons are just matters of bad luck. The singer is Llewyn Davis, a composite of various folkies, but particularly modeled upon Dave Van Ronk, the subject of the book The Mayor of MacDougal Street. The Coens have said Ronk was "...probably the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up. But in our minds he was the folk singer, 'the generic folk singer...'" As the final scene underlines, he was in the same spot and time Dylan was when he was discovered. The film conveys that musically, Davis (i.e., Van Ronk) had extremely high-quality stuff, in Joan's and Bob's league, or just below theirs, with the slight inferiority perhaps due to it lacking certain markers of distinctiveness. Surely there were and are some folk fans who regard it as in fact superior.
But contrary to some of its marketing, this film is not a celebration of the Greenwich Village scene or the late 50s/early 60s folk movement. It assumes you know something about those already, and if it does give you some solid portrayals of folk-music performance, what it more typically does is show you the most unflattering aspects of whole scene.
American Bohemia is presented as a kind of special hell within the larger uncaring and over-commercialized American society of the early 60s. We meet at least three pretty despicable bohemian persons, Davis's ex-lover Jean, the club owner, and the famous folk impresario Bud Grossman; and on a road-trip Davis takes to Chicago, we meet two decidedly monstrous ones, an incommunicative hoody young beat-poet, and a demonically arrogant elder jazz musician addicted to heroin. Even the folk-music loving academic couple that lets Davis crash at their place is revealed to have an exploitative side to their sunny niceness. And Davis himself isn't terribly admirable.
The legendary bohemian practice of living hand-to-mouth, sleeping on couch after couch, which hagiographic accounts of Dylan often underline, is shown to involve degrading and tension-producing relations for all concerned. We get that flat-out denial of the retrospective romanticization of this period again and again: the road trip across America is awful, meeting Bud Grossman at the famous Gate of Horn is awful, being signed with a legendary ma and pa folk record company is awful, and so on.
You know the cover of the second Dylan LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, where you see young Bob in the rusty suede highways-and-byways-evoking jacket with the bohemian girlfriend on his arm, as they walk down a Village street covered with grimy snow?
Well, imagine that without Bob and his smiling Suzi, so that all we're left with is the grimy cold street, and maybe somewhere in the corner we see some shivering and beat-up guy with his back half-turned to us. That's the world of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. What it's telling us, perhaps even too insistently, is that the since-lionized folk/beatnik Bohemia was a cold and dreary place for most of its aspiring artists.
This is perhaps most underlined when, after Davis has undergone his horrific road-trip to Chicago for the sake of playing for Bud Grossman, he finally gets to. The song he plays is beautiful, and Grossman listens intently, but with an unreadable face. We're so ready for the redemption moment, for Davis's suffering to pay off. He's just spilled out the treasures of his soul! And Grossman, without changing expression, says, "I don't see a lot of money in this." But words cannot convey how brutal the moment feels.
It's a deliberately anti-iconic film.
The lesson from Davis's failure? Well, I suppose I could quote Tocqueville about equality making each of us fairly-talented ones thinking the democratic world is going to make us stars, or at least reward us with some paying gig, but maybe, there is no lesson . The Coen's common tack of forcing the audience to confront the possibility of nihilism being true , of human life being essentially meaningless, which for them has usually played out within a crime drama, here occurs in a mundane set of events.
The failure seems fated, as Davis cannot even succeed in getting out of the folk-singer life: when he tries to give up and rejoin the merchant-marine, a nobody's-fault mishaps (along with corrupt union rules) keep him from being able to. And one scene initially appearing to be a repeat of an earlier one, along with another actually being such, make it seem as if Davis is caught in a time-loop. That''s how cyclical and pointless his life is.
Most of what happens to Davis we can hardly say he is responsible for. Nor does it matter much how he deals with it. He's no whiner, but his usually toughing things out stoically doesn't make him a winner. Yes, in two scenes he takes out his anger on persons who don't deserve it, but there is no suggestion that if had been nice he would have gotten a break. There's no apparent moral to his story.
In sum, it's an egregiously depressing story, and pointless beyond reminding us that life often feel pointlessly random, that only the Coens could get away with putting on film.
That's what put me off. I was focusing too much on the "career" story, or to paraphrase a repeated line in the film, the "what-you-do?" story.
I hadn't yet digested the significance of the cats and abortions.
Initially, there are two abortions, and two cats, to consider. Subtly but nonetheless insistently, the film suggests that Davis's responses to them matter, and regardless of how the story of his folk-music career turns out.
Well, actually, there are two abortions that turn out to be only one, and one cat that turns out to be really two.
And actually, careful viewers come to realize that the two cats turn out to be three.
In the most haunting scene in the film, sometime in the middle of the wintry night after he drives by Akron, Ohio, where he knows his two-year old child lives, whom he until recently thought was aborted, Davis encounters one of those cats again, apparently one he abandoned, when it darts out in front of his car. He hits it, stops, and he briefly sees it slightly bloodied and limping off into the night. There is some connection between him having abandoned a child of his to die, by an abortion that never happened, to his having abandoned and now wounded a cat. Both will be wounded for life.
That's how the cats and the abortions come together, outside the similar confusion about how many of each there really are. But let's take them in turn.
The most notable instance of energy-wasting mishaps occurring in Davis's life is when a cat darts out of one the apartments he's crashing at, and while he runs to grab it, the apartment door locks behind, and he's thus forced to keep the cat with him in his errands across NYC until those apartment owners return. But the cat escapes while he's staying at another apartment, because he opened a window to smoke. But, later--saved!--he sees the cat strolling by a cafe, and snatches it up.
But, as we later learn in a pretty funny scene, that was actually a different cat, a look-alike. So then he's stuck with this second cat--he doesn't know who it belongs to. Davis is a compassionate enough guy that he keeps it with him, even as he journeys to Chicago. However, on this road-trip, he finds himself in a situation where he has to hitch-hike in the wintery dawn, or face possible police-entanglements, and it simply won't work to be thumbing rides, while trying to hold onto a guitar-case and a cat. He leaves it in the car where the creepy addict character is passed out. It poignantly looks into his eyes, and he turns away.
The film in a sense punishes that abandonment, by having him hit apparently the same cat, when he's driving back the other way from Chicago. What are the chances of that?
Well, they are actually zero, since some earlier dialogue let us know that when he abandoned the cat, the car was less than three driving hours from Chicago. And where does he hit it? Somewhere further past Akron, Ohio, on the way back to NYC. I checked, and the driving distance from Akron to Chicago is 365 miles, likely six hours driving time. Davis has only been in Chicago one day. That means that when he hits what looks like the same cat, he is a minimum 180 miles further East from where he abandoned it about 24 hours before. So, whatever Davis thinks, and whatever the film makes us initially think, it is in fact a third look-alike cat!
But the Coens do their best to keep the puzzle and possibility open, as we later learn that the first cat Davis lost miraculously made its way from Greenwich Village back uptown to Washington Heights, and at one point Davis's eye fixes on a poster for Disney's INCREDIBLE JOURNEY, the one where pets find their way home across hundreds of miles of wilderness. So maybe that second cat could have travelled that far on the interstate?
Well, I am ashamed to say that I now have done the internet research to know that among the documented stories of amazing pet return-home journeys, no cat has ever covered 180 miles in a day.
Llewyn Davis has a reputation, to some degree exaggerated by the jealous suspicions of others, for sleeping around. A fact of bohemian life, we might say, of the revolution soon to be mainstreamed. Arguably, a key piece of the male folk-singer mystique.
Two years previously, he arranged and paid for, with what I guess counts as bohemian chivalry, a woman he impregnated to get an abortion (then illegal) from a competent doctor, and in the film we see him do the same for Jean. So it seems we are dealing with a man responsible for two abortions.
But when he goes to arrange the second, in a scene also remarkable for the ridiculous lengths to which the doctor resorts to euphemism to speak of anything but "baby, "birth," and "abortion," he learns that the first was never done. His old lover decided to go back to her hometown Akron and have the baby, without telling him. He's a father.
Could INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS be an anti-abortion film? Well, we can't tell whether it endorses the moderate pro-choice position of wanting abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare," but it is almost certainly against abortion itself.
There is only one way it could not be, and that is if you decide that it teaches that nihilism is the truth, revealed here by the pointless failure of Davis's career, so that his having to obtain abortions for women he impregnated is just another absurd, annoying, and energy-sapping aspect of that, his irrational guilt instincts causing him to have to scrounge for money, and so that his learning that one of these abortions didn't occur is just another sort of misfortune, saddling him with sentiments that he will have no way to really act upon (it is unlikely the that the mother of the child wants to see him), and probably causing him to draw some kind of superstitious karmic connection between a random coincidence of having hit a cat that looks just like one he abandoned, and his driving by the town his child may be living in. And besides, we know it is only the Coens who have set up the set of coincidences. It is only in movies and old religious tales that such connections are so neat. The truth the film is onto is that even something as apparently momentous as birth and abortion is a function of arbitrary factors. We know the film is onto such truths because it indicates that the very connection Llewyn likely draws between hitting the cat and passing by Akron is based on a factual error.
Well, that's pretty stretched, and it's flying in the face of lots of hints from the film.
Item: regardless of the mistake about the cat identity, the film clearly invites us to judge Llewyn poorly for abandoning the second cat, to associate that with his abandoning these two children to death or fatherlessness, and to see the hitting of the cat as a sign of his sin, and of how the one child will be wounded for life by it.
Item: the film clearly portrays Llewyn as considering whether to spontaneously take the off-ramp to Akron, where he has every reason to think his two-year old child is. The accident with the cat is the next scene.
Item: despite the title of the film, which is that of Davis's solo LP, what is "inside Llewyn Davis" remains pretty unknown to us. However, there is a moment that seems to offer it up, which is when Bud Grossman oddly, perhaps mockingly, says, "play something from Inside Llewyn Davis ." Davis's choice is an old folk song, "The Death of Queen Jane," in which a long-in-labor Jane asks for her side to be cut open to save her baby. That is, the heroine asks for her life to be taken for the sake of the baby's, the very opposite of what is enacted by an abortion. Thinking about such, perhaps even subconsciously, is one of the main things inside Llewyn Davis.
Item: the Saturday night Davis gets beat up by the cowboy-like guy who strangely asks him "what you do?" is the night of Jean's abortion. This is also the conclusion of the film--so more significant than it ending with Dylan''s first performance in Greenwich Village, is it ending (and beginning) on the evening of the day of the abortion, the one that really happens.
The career of Davis, i.e., the apparent "what he does," is not what really matters. Earlier in the film, when his sister suggests, that perhaps he should give up on the music thing, he protests the idea by saying, "And what, just exist ?"
The anti-abortion message hidden within INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is that making the way for, and taking the responsibility for, others to exist, may be more important than the apparent path of what is best for one's "doing," even for one's artistic creative doing. Davis should have risked going to Akron to see his child. And he should never have lived in a way that risked bringing children into the world (i.e., conceived), that he was implicitly resolved to either abandon or abort, in the first place.
This seems a bit too pat, however, as if Davis could have applied these lessons and made things right. Or as if a younger Davis could have ever even known these lessons, and thus not have become the Davis we meet. I think what the Coens actually offer, through the strange incidents involving cats, is an opportunity for Davis, and thus us, to glimpse the mystery that lies outside the cyclical trap of a life he was living. They are not saying his pulling off into Akron would have lead to anything solid or otherwise easily got him out of that life. But they really are wanting us to see that missing out on being a father in some unfamous place like Akron is a greater and more poignant loss than missing out on being the likes of Bob Dylan.
Well, we''ll see what my "Coen Brothers guy" makes of all of this. But those of you who have seen it, what do you say? |
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What INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS does is jump into an ongoing story of failure, that of a folk singer. |
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By Roger Sheety
A June, 2013 speech by Bill Clinton honoring war criminal Shimon Peres has highlighted the extent to which Israeli anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bigotry has become acceptable within Western mainstream discourse.
In a racist echo of Golda Meir, who once admitted that she had trouble sleeping because of the number of Palestinian babies being conceived, Clinton said: "No matter how many settlers you put out there [in the West Bank], the Palestinians are having more babies than the Israelis as a whole.... You've got an existential question to answer."
Clinton, who was reportedly paid $500,000 to publicly share his hatred of Palestinian babies, couched his bigotry as part of a speech on "peace" and the bankrupt "two-state solution." Said Clinton: "If you don't have a vision of where you want to wind up, bad things are going to happen sooner or later.... You have a better chance if you are driven by a vision of peace and reconciliation." In plain language, if Israel does not return a mere 22 percent of the 100 percent of Palestinian land it stole, it will soon (horror of horrors) be overrun with Palestinian children.
Clinton's racist comments, reported worldwide by mainstream media mostly without irony, were also an extension of current U.S. President Barack Obama's own fear and hatred of Palestinian children, which he expressed clearly in May of 2011 to the delight and cheers of his American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) audience in Washington:
"Here are the facts we all must confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder--without a peace deal--to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state."
For Palestinians, of course, neither Clinton's nor Obama's morally abhorrent remarks come as a surprise since they have long been accustomed to Israeli racism and its accompanying violence and brutality. Racist terms like "demographic bomb" and "demographic threat" are so common in Israeli media and discourse that they barely register any protest in the so-called "Jewish and democratic state."
We are not talking about Israeli soccer fans thuggishly chanting "death to Arabs" at sporting events (a common occurrence these days), but rather racist incitement from the highest elected officials. Both Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, have used the phrase "demographic threat" in public statements regarding Palestinian citizens of the state. In 2003, as finance minister, Netanyahu would say, "If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens" ("Netanyahu: Israel's Arabs are the real demographic threat," Haaretz, December 18, 2003).
Similarly, Peres would publicly muse in 1977 on the "problem" of the growing Palestinian population of Jerusalem: "I do not want to wake up one morning to discover that Jerusalem is subject to the demographic fate of [the] Galilee" ("Israel's Geographic-Demographic Threat to Identity," Royal United Services Institute News Brief, January, 2011). Ehud Olmert, as well, in a speech to the Knesset in 2007, would speak in alarming tones of a pending "demographic battle drowned in blood and tears."
In 2009, Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Atias would instigate hatred against Palestinian citizens of the state and justify apartheid in a speech to the Israel Bar Association. "I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel," said Atias. Speaking in particular against the Palestinian population of the Galilee, he added: "If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don't think that it is appropriate [for Arabs and Israeli Jews] to live together" ("Housing Minister: Spread of Arab population must be stopped," Haaretz, July, 2009).
Michael Oren, the current Israeli Ambassador (and chief propagandist) to the U.S., would even write a lengthy and deeply racist article published in Commentary magazine in 2009, titled "Seven Existential Threats," and which included the sub-heading "The Arab Demographic Threat." He would opine in a grave, apocalyptic voice that "the Palestinian population on both sides of the 1949 armistice lines is expanding far more rapidly than the Jewish sector and will surpass it in less than a decade."
This trend must not continue, continues Oren, because "Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist."
Israeli academics and intellectuals, too, have joined the racist chorus of incitement and, simultaneously, of justification of war crimes against Palestinians. So Benny Morris, for example, after documenting the destruction of Palestine, the massive ethnic cleansing, the theft of land, and the massacres and rapes of innocents, would then vindicate every crime of the Zionist colonial-settler state from 1948 to the present.
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing," said Morris in a 2004 interview with Ari Shavit. "That is what Zionism faced [in 1948]. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."
Then, jumping ahead six decades, he refers to Palestinian citizens of the state, who were not ethnically cleansed, in typically racist terms: "The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state" ("An interview with Benny Morris," Counterpunch.org, January, 2004). Morris would thus set the stage for future ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including the current operation in the Naqab ("Negev") where tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin have been targeted for forcible removal from their ancestral lands.
Furthermore, these terms, once used exclusively against Palestinians, are now also utilized by both Israeli officials and citizens to shamelessly incite hatred against African asylum seekers, as well as African Jews who are, nominally, citizens of the state. As reported by Haaretz in 2010, for instance, Netanyahu said, the "flood of illegal workers infiltrating from Africa [was] a concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country." Without skipping a beat, he would then associate asylum seekers with smuggling of drugs, terrorism, and general decadence, and so justifying the building of yet another apartheid wall to keep out the unwanted ("Netanyahu: Illegal African immigrants--a threat to Israel's Jewish character," Haaretz, July, 2010). See, in addition, the superb work of David Sheen who has meticulously documented recent shockingly fanatical anti-African marches in Tel Aviv, organized and led by elected Israeli officials and community leaders, in dozens of official reports, interviews, and video testimonies (www.davidsheen.com/racism/).
It is impossible to imagine Clinton, Obama, or any major political figure for that matter, talking about any other national, ethnic, or religious group in such unapologetically racist terms. Would either have made analogous comments regarding, for example, indigenous South Africans during the days of South African Apartheid? Or against North American First Nation peoples today? Would an Australian or Canadian housing minister ever speak about a minority group within their countries with the same unabashed hatred as Ariel Atias? Had they done so, the response of Western liberal pundits and intellectuals would have been swift and indignant--and rightfully so.
Ethnic cleansing, land theft, destruction of hundreds of ancient towns and villages, massacres, military occupation, and apartheid over six and a half decades in Palestine are all deeply tied together with Israeli/Zionist racism. Indeed, Israeli bigotry has often been and continues to be used to sanction and sanctify Israeli crimes against humanity; thus do attitudes and actions simultaneously fuel and feed off each other. That even supposed progressives have adopted Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians in their public statements as their own (with little or no controversy), and therefore also excusing Israeli crimes, shows the vile depths to which mainstream media discourse has sunk.
- Roger Sheety is an independent writer and researcher. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
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10 Things You Can Do to Prevent War
Preventing war can be a citizen activity! Read how you can participate in the growing anti-war movement.
1. Educate yourself on the issues. To stop terror and avoid war, we must first understand what causes it, and what approaches have, and haven't, been successful in the past. So far, America's "War On Terrorism" seems to be focused exclusively on the movement that has apparently spawned the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks: radical, violent fringe conservative Sunni Muslims, from an area that stretches geographically from Northwest Africa to Southeast Asia. It can only help if we learn more about the history, culture, religions and economies of those parts of the world; the West's historic and current religious, military, political and economic relationships with them and with Islam; and how those conditions, from colonialism through global economic changes and geopolitical rivalies, have contributed to poverty, desperation, hatred and, at times, religious fanaticism today. Part of how we've gotten here is the West's tendency to impose our own cultures, values and expectations on these regions without taking the time to understand where the people we're dealing with are coming from. People interested in stopping terror and avoiding war cannot afford to repeat that mistake. 2. Develop a closer, more respectful relationship to Muslims and the Islamic world. As the world shrinks, this is actually something we should be doing with all cultures and religions, but for the purposes of our current War on Terrorism, it is particularly important that, much as Christianity and Judaism have learned to live in greater harmony after two millenia of tension, Western cultures and religions must find and develop our common interests with the Islamic world. Just as with any minority or "other," the more we each work with and understand people of the Islamic faith, the less they will seem strange and threatening and the more we will recognize each other as individuals and as human beings. 3. Communicate! Don't be afraid to speak out, and to listen: talk with your neighbors, your friends, relatives, co-workers, classmates. Learn from the people you disagree with, but don't shy away from voicing your opinions in places where they're unpopular. Call in to radio and television talk shows. Write letters to the editor and opinion articles for your local community newspapers. Visit their editorial boards. 4. Take your case to the community. Set up community forums, teach-ins and panels, to educate the public, to air out differing opinions and to force politicians to go on the record with their beliefs. Table at community events. Write and circulate flyers, with information on the issue, lobbying and contact information, publicizing events or putting out powerful graphic images. Circulate petitions that you can then use both to notify people of future events (and to recruit volunteers to help organize them!) and to lobby elected officials or other prominent community figures. Take out ads in your local newspapers. Make your advocacy visible, so people will think -- even if local media is hostile -- that your cause is popular and widespread. Set up and publicize your own web site or list-serve. 5. Raise money for the Third World. Rather than collecting money for survivors' families or to rebuild the World Trade Center, send it where it's more desperately needed: to the countries whose crushing poverty helps spawn terrorism. A more economically just world will be one with less terror. Donate your own money, or organize events where your whole community can pitch in and help: benefits, readings, raffles, auctions, walk-a-thons and so forth. Consider working jointly with a local mosque or Third World community center. 6. Publicize and oppose racial profiling, the curbing of civil liberties and the backlash against immigrants. This is both a local and a national issue, involving everything from new INS and Justice Department programs and regulations to local police behavior and cases of isolated bigotry. While this is in many ways a separate issue, bear in mind that it's easier for our government to pursue an irresponsible or counter-productive military-oriented solution if more of the public hates and fears people who look like the enemy. When civil liberties are taken away in an emergency, they're rarely restored afterwards; and when a precedent is set whereby constitutional rights can be denied to any one group, you could be next. 7. Lobby for Congress and the White House to pursue policies that minimize civilian deaths; rethink our national defense and foreign policy priorities; and change global economic institutions and trade agreements so that they create less, not more, poverty and death. Send a letter (preferably handwritten) or card, make a phone call (faxes and emails are less effective, but better than nothing), go to the forums of public officials, visit their offices. Much of our ability to minimize future terrorist activity depends not just on better security at home, but policies abroad that work consistently to promote the ideals of freedom and democracy America stands for. Powerful special interests often keep the White House and Congress from doing the right thing; it's up to us, the public, to require that when they act in our name, they treat others the way we would want to be treated. We, the public, are the people whose lives are on the line in this conflict; we have a right to demand that the people acting for us make our safety a priority, and not put us in further jeopardy by making matters worse. 8. Participate in or create visible public events for the same goals. It's not enough to send a letter. To create the public momentum to convince an elected official to do something s/he might think isn't in his personal best interest, s/he has to think it's the right thing to do and that a lot of people agree with them. Attend or organize vigils, rallies, marches, parades, art festivals, music events, nonviolent direct actions or civil disobedience. Be creative, have fun, be visible, get the word out. 9. Work the media, or be the media. Send out press releases, talk with reporters and editors, make sure when you're doing public events that local media outlets know about it, and offer something they'll want to cover. Train yourself to give interviews and be articulate. Start your own newsletter or radio or cable access TV show, or contribute to others. Support independent media that's willing to provide critical information and alternative viewpoints not as easily available in big mainstream outlets. 10. Reclaim patriotism! We all want the most effective possible course for stopping terrorism. Disagreeing with our government's proposed strategies isn't treason -- it's the highest form of citizenship in a participatory democracy. We're becoming activists on this issue because we love our country, as well as our community and the world. Don't let anybody claim that you're "blaming America" or "betraying the President." We're proud to live in a country where we have the right, and the obligation, to speak out when our government is wrong. We're speaking out because we care. Unthinking obedience is the point at which our democracy has broken down. Geov Parrish is a political columnist for WorkingforChange.com and a longtime peace activist.
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[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]
. . . [E]very one of these candidates says, "Obama's weak, Putin's kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he's going to straighten out." And then it turns out, they can't handle a bunch of CNBC moderators. If you can't handle those guys, I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
Thus spoke President Obama, who, along with Hillary Clinton, has refused ever to participate in a debate on Fox News, presumably because Democrats quake in fear of questions from Megyn Kelly.
After the laughable, unprofessional performance by CNBC "moderators" ("extreminators"??) during last week's Republican debate, there's been a lot of discussion about changing the rules for future debates. There was even a summit outside D.C. bring together representatives from most of the presidential campaigns, to work out a set of rules/demands such as a ban on "gotcha" questions (however one defines the term).
It's not the first time people have considered reforms of a broken system, in which leftists and partisan Democrats (the vast majority of political reporters at the national level) ask mostly supportive questions at Democratic debates and, at Republican debates, try to make the candidates look silly or extreme. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (for whom I worked as senior researcher in the 2012 campaign) once suggested that the candidates themselves conduct the back-and-forth during a presidential debate, with a moderator present only to keep things moving along.
The problem of news media bias has been obvious for years--decades--but, in the context of the debates, it wasn't dealt with at an earlier point because the Republican Party hierarchy has been focused on its main priority, preventing the nomination of a candidate from the mainstream/grassroots/Reagan/Tea Party wing of the party. GOP bigwigs fiddled with the debate system for this election, but with the intention of ensuring that the nomination would quickly fall to a candidate with high name ID and lots of money. (The plan was to help Jeb Bush or, if he failed, another Establishment candidate, but that plan didn't work very well in the Age of Trump.)
The Left dominates the news media (along with the entertainment media, the academic/pseudointellectual world, and the Too Big to Fail businesses that depend on government cronyism and are perfectly willing to cut deals with the Obama/Clinton/Sanders crowd if money is to be made). News media bias provides the Left with a tremendous advantage, one akin to a sport team having all the game officials on its side. Every activist on the conservative, libertarian, or free-market side has to deal with this bias throughout the day every day.
At least there are alternative sources of information today. In the dawn of the conservative movement, in the late '50s and early '60s, liberals could slime conservatives to their hearts' content without fear of being contradicted in the media. Conservatives were usually ignored in the media, and when they weren't ignored, they were depicted as bigots and fascists.
In 1964, when Republicans gathered in San Francisco to nominate conservative Barry Goldwater for president, CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr suggested on the air that Goldwater's upcoming trip to a U.S. military installation in Germany was part of an effort to hook up with likeminded Nazi sympathizers. Drew Pearson, the leading investigative columnist of the day, noted that "The smell of fascism has been in the air at this convention."
It's no surprise that California Governor Pat Brown said he detected the "stench of fascism" in the air, adding: "All we needed to hear was 'Heil Hitler.'" Or that George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, said he saw "a parallel between Senator Barry Goldwater and Adolph Hitler." But most of the news media actually took such insanity seriously and passed it along as if such comments represented sanity, just as today they take seriously the GOP's War on Women, the GOP's War on People of Color, the GOP's War on Science, and so on.
Cast study: Oklahoma City
Flash forward 31 years from 1964, to 1995, and we saw the madness of the media in the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who had no coherent political philosophy.
Supposed white supremacists, they committed the bombing in revenge for the deaths of members of the Branch Davidian cult--most of whom were "people of color." McVeigh, who today is often cited as an exemplar of Christian terrorism, was an agnostic. He was also a supporter of animal rights and a critic of free trade, but, despite massive efforts, no one has been able to attach to him any sort of coherent philosophy. Nevertheless, the Left pounced, with President Clinton attempting to blame the bombing on talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. The media did their part to help [quotes collected in 1995 by the Media Research Center].
"In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast." -- Time Senior Writer Richard Lacayo, May 8, 1995.
"Mr. Panetta [White House chief of staff Leon Panetta], there's been a lot of anti-government rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act, do they feed on that kind of rhetoric, and what impact do you think it's had?" -- CBS's Bob Schieffer, April 23 Face the Nation .
"The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that's been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men. While no one's suggesting right-wing radio jocks approve of violence, the extent to which their approach fosters violence is being questioned by many observers, including the President. . . . Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: detail a problem, blame the government or a group, and invite invective from like-minded people. Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue." -- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, April 25.
"The Oklahoma City attack on federal workers and their children also alters the once-easy dynamic between charismatic talk show host and adoring audience. Hosts who routinely espouse the same anti-government themes as the militia movement now must walk a fine line between inspiring their audience -- and inciting the most radical among them." -- Los Angeles Times staff writer Nina J. Easton, April 26.
"The bombing shows how dangerous it really is to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies. For two years, Rush Limbaugh described this nation as `America held hostage' to the policies of the liberal Democrats, as if the duly elected President and Congress were equivalent to the regime in Tehran. I think there will be less tolerance and fewer cheers for that kind of rhetoric." -- Washington Post reporter David Broder in his April 25 column.
"It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, and you know, gone berserk . . . This is the essence of the angry white men taken to some extreme, some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that. But it's the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington." -- Washington Post reporter Juan Williams [now Fox News] on CNN's Capital Gang , April 23.
"To what extent, if any, do you think the political rhetoric to which you just referred has helped cause a climate in which people could go in that direction? In other words, the rhetoric which says, not just against big government, or liberal government, or dishonest government, but `I'm against government, government is the enemy?'" -- Sam Donaldson to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Morris Dees, April 23 This Week with David Brinkley .
"Unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say `Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?', you know we're going to have some more events. I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles . . . creates a climate of violence in America." [referring to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole] -- Columnist Carl Rowan, April 25 Washington Post story.
"Public antagonism toward government has been one of the principal themes of American political discourse for nearly two decades, growing in shrillness in the past year. This sentiment has been voiced and amplified by the new Republican House, which just this month completed its 100 days of action, much of it aimed at paring back the growth of the federal government. But now that an attack on a government building has left scores dead, including children, the allure is coming off the anti-government rhetoric." -- Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief David Shribman in a front-page "news analysis," April 25.
"If the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing really view government as the people's enemy, the burden of fostering that delusion is borne not just by the nut cases who preach conspiracy but also to some extent by those who erode faith in our governance in the pursuit of their own ambitions." -- Time Senior Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, May 1.
"Who has played the politics of paranoia better in this country in the last twenty or thirty years? Answer? Republican Party . . . Politically, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republicans have very skillfully exploited fear." -- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas on Inside Washington , April 29.
The Giffords smear
It's a pattern we've seen again and again. When U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords (D-Arizona) and others were shot by a Bush-hating madman in 2011, it was blamed again on the rhetoric of conservatives and their allies. Specifically, it was blamed preposterously on Sarah Palin, on the ground that one of the staffers at her PAC had used printers' registration marks, resembling crosshairs, to make "target districts" where Republicans might pick up seats in the next election. (The marks did not target individuals, as was obvious from the fact that one of the targets was a district where the Congressman was retiring. And, of course, "targeting" states or districts is something that every party does in every election; the term is akin to, say, a restaurant chain "targeting" families as potential customers.)
The smear of Palin was particular vile in that, as I reported that day, it was led by people from the left-wing Daily Kos website, which had recently declared Giffords, in a headline, "DEAD TO ME" for supposedly betraying her party by voting against radical Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. Yes: The closest thing to a death threat against Giffords was issued by the people who, within minutes after the shooting, falsely blamed Palin for issuing what they claimed amounted to a death threat. And the major media not only accepted the Palin smear as reasonable, and repeated it endlessly, but they made it the focus of all the major Sunday morning "news" interview shows that followed the tragedy.
No diversity
The fact is that the elite media are themselves far outside the mainstream of American thought. There has always been media bias - reporters helped cover up FDR's loss of mental faculties and JFK's pathological recklessness - but, in the past, even the highest levels of the media included a few conservatives. Today, decades of blacklisting (banning conservatives) and graylisting (hiring them only on very rare occasions) have left us with countless newsrooms in which opinions range from liberal to Far Left. Diversity has vanished from the newsroom, replaced with pseudo-diversity--people with different skin colors who pretty much think alike.
From 1970 to 2013, the Washington Post has an ombudsman, someone whose job was to serve as an in-house critic and to represent readers in dealing with the paper's content creators such as editors and writers. In one of the last columns by the last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, he dealt with readers' allegation of bias on the issue of same-sex marriage ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/patrick-pexton-is-the-post-pro-gay/2013/02/22/fab8235c-7c53-11e2-a044-676856536b40_print.html ).
I get a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls from readers who assert that The Post has a "pro-gay agenda" and publishes too many "puffy" stories about gay marriage, and that it even allows too many same-sex couples to appear in the Date Lab feature in Sunday's WP Magazine . [In Date Lab, the Post sets up and covers a couple on a blind date. --SJA ]
"The conservative, pro-family side gets short shrift," as one reader recently put it, and The Post "caters slavishly to Dupont Circle." [That's the famously gay neighborhood in D.C. near CRC headquarters. --SJA ]
Indeed, that reader got into a vigorous three-way e-mail dialogue with a Post reporter and me over the issue, an exchange that goes to the heart of the question of whether The Post, and journalists in general, are hopelessly liberal and genetically tone-deaf to social conservatives.
Here are excerpts from that dialogue, with the reader's and reporter's names kept out of it at their requests.
The reader wrote that Post stories too often minimize the conservative argument: "The overlooked 'other side' on the gay issue is quite legitimate, and includes the Pope, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, evangelist Billy Graham, scholars such as Robert George of Princeton, and the millions of Americans who believe in traditional marriage and oppose redefining marriage into nothingness. ... Is there no room in The Post for those who support the male-female, procreative model of marriage?"
Replied the reporter: "The reason that legitimate media outlets routinely cover gays is because it is the civil rights issue of our time. Journalism, at its core, is about justice and fairness, and that's the 'view of the world' that we espouse; therefore, journalists are going to cover the segment of society that is still not treated equally under the law."
The reader: "Contrary to what you say, the mission of journalism is not justice. Defining justice is a political matter, not journalistic. Journalism should be about accuracy and fairness.
"Good journalism also means not demeaning conservatives as 'haters.' "
The reporter: "As for accuracy, should the media make room for racists, i.e. those people who believe that black people shouldn't marry white people? Any story on African-Americans wouldn't be wholly accurate without the opinion of a racist, right?
"Of course I have a bias. I have a bias toward fairness," the reporter continued. "The true conservative would have the same bias. The true conservative would want the government out of people's bedrooms, and religion out of government."
That discussion is most revealing about journalists.
Most journalists believe that through writing about life as it is, showing people's struggles and contradictions, we get closer to the truth. The democracy, being more fully informed, then makes better decisions, and perhaps people's lives improve as a result.
Alongside that do-gooder instinct is a strong desire for fairness because, being out in the world, reporters encounter a great deal of unfairness. We want to expose that and even rub your noses in it. In a way, we're shouting, through our stories: "This is unfair! Somebody do something!" Conservative and liberal journalists alike feel this way.
And because our profession lives and dies on the First Amendment -- one of the libertarian cornerstones of the Constitution -- most journalists have a problem with religionists telling people what they can and cannot do. We want to write words, read books, watch movies, listen to music, and have sex and babies pretty much when, where and how we choose.
Yet many Americans feel that allowing gay men and lesbians to marry diminishes the value of their heterosexual marriages. I don't understand this. The lesbian couple down the street raising two kids or the two men across the hall in your condominium -- how do those unions take anything away from the sanctity, fidelity or joy you take in your heterosexual marriage? Isn't your marriage, at root, based on the love and commitment you have for your spouse, not what you think about the neighbors?
That's why many journalists have a hard time giving much voice to those opposed to gay marriage. They see people opposed to gay rights today as cousins, perhaps distant cousins, of people in the 1950s and 1960s who, citing God and the Bible, opposed black people sitting in the bus seat, or dining at the lunch counter, of their choosing.
Still, just as I have written that The Post should do a better job of covering and understanding the anti-abortion movement , The Post should do a better job of understanding and conveying to readers, with detachment and objectivity, the beliefs and the fears of social conservatives.
Wow.
In other words: We don't have same-sex marriage opponents in our newsroom 'cause we don't hire bigots. But don't worry: Our lack of bigots in the newsroom won't stop us from covering the same-sex marriage issue fairly.
Regardless of what one thinks on the issue of same-sex marriage, those comments reveal the Post newsroom's lack of diversity--true diversity, including political orientation. How many Posties are Republicans, or traditionalist conservatives, or supporters of the Tea Party movement? (The issue is not just political orientation. For example, I wonder how many Posties come from Baptist families. Do you think it's close to Baptists' 11 percent of the population? Ha!)
When you watch something like the CNBC debate, and you see nothing but contempt directed at Republican candidates, while, at Democratic debates, a socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and an on-the-take pathological liar are treated as serious, thoughtful candidates for the nation's highest office, you shouldn't be surprised.
And when their stories depict Republicans as weirdo extremist creeps and Democrats as saviors of the planet and lovers of the downtrodden, they're just being objective, just reflecting the reality in which they live. |
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Canadian band The Grey can't enter the US for five years because they told US border guards they weren't playing a gig in the US. The guards checked the band's online touring schedule and went ballistic.
We were treated as terrorists at first. When we first went, one by one, into the room with the interrogating officer they used that line about "America is at war, and Canada may not take that seriously..." and "since 9-11, we take these things seriously." Then they realized that we were not making any money doing what we do, and that we were more naive than anything else. Some of the other guards even told us that the whole thing was bullshit, and that it was overzealous and a waste of paperwork.
The decision to deport and ban us from the US was made entirely by officer Kurt Tennat, the supervising officer. He said he had consulted his supervisor by phone, but we don't know for sure. No court proceedings, no legalities, no chance.
Reader comment: Michael Sider says:
Bands travelling from the U.S. to Canada often have had similar experiences, even long before 9-11. I brought many U.S. bands to Vancouver in the early 90's and they were mercilessly hassled, often turned back to the U.S. We kept trying to determine what exactly the rules were, but every response was different. We managed to contact someone high up in Canadian Immigration through a friend of a friend, and their response was that the laws are intentionally ambiguous so that it is up to the discretion of individual border guards whether ANYONE crosses the border, and no recourse if you don't like their conclusion. One trick that often worked was if the band told the border guards that they were coming to Canada to record (helps to have someone in Canada willing to confirm the story), as this means they are going to be spending money in Canada rather than earning it... may work for bands going to the U.S. as well, don't know. |
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The government will dole out nearly 2 million work permits this year to immigrants who for the most part came to the country illegally or have some other tentative status, but who have been granted a foothold in the U.S. thanks to a loose immigration policy, according to statistics released last week.
Almost all of those permits are discretionary, meaning the government could deny them if officials choose.
Meanwhile, the country's main technology guest-worker program has essentially become a pipeline for Indians to gain a foothold in the U.S. job market, according to the statistics, which show that people from India filed nearly 75 percent of all applications this year for H-1B worker petitions, the main high-skilled guest-worker program.
The statistics were released as part of President Trump's commitment to more transparency in the immigration system, under the terms of his April "Buy American and Hire American" executive order, and are giving researchers new insights into how the legal immigration system affects the job market.
The most striking data set involves employment authorization documents, or EADs, which are the work permits the Homeland Security Department gives to asylum seekers, refugees, certain foreign students and others -- including those who qualified for the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty for so-called Dreamers -- who are in the country under something other than the traditional employment-based visa system.
According to the new data, the government doled out EADs at a rate of more than 160,000 a month in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2017, which works out to a rate of nearly 2 million for the whole year. The numbers run through June and span the Obama and Trump administrations, so it's impossible to say whether the new administration has changed the trajectory.
Nearly 90 percent of the permits are discretionary, meaning that in 2017 alone, some 1.7 million workers are likely to be added to the job market -- equivalent to a full 25 percent of the unemployment rate in September.
"The fact that more than a million and a half work permits were issued to people outside of the regular legal immigration and guest-worker programs is alarming, and cannot help but have an impact on U.S. workers," said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, who has studied EAD numbers.
About 17 percent of the EADs issued this year are asylum seekers inside the U.S. Their numbers have more than tripled in the past few years as illegal immigrants figure out how to game the system, analysts said.
The biggest chunk of EADs -- nearly a quarter -- were granted to illegal immigrant Dreamers who have been approved for the DACA program.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has argued that Dreamers are hurting American workers by competing for jobs.
Immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, argue that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is a boon to the economy. They point to high rates of education, workforce engagement, homeownership and other yardsticks of economic progress. Business groups also say they have come to rely on the Dreamers' impact on the workforce, which they said will be worth $460 billion to the U.S. economy over the next decade.
Mr. Trump last month announced he was phasing out the legally questionable DACA program rather than have a court impose an abrupt halt to it. Now Congress is debating whether and how to go about granting the 700,000 people currently protected by DACA, and perhaps 1.5 million other self-described Dreamers, full legal protections.
Ms. Vaughan said the total number of EADs issued in 2017 is about equal to the level of legal immigration and guest workers in any one year, signaling just how much of the foreign work system is done on an ad hoc basis.
By contrast, the H-1B program and L1 visa programs, whose new numbers also were released, were established by Congress to bring in workers with specialized skills.
Tech companies in particular have made use of the visas. Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd. are the top users of both programs, helping siphon hundreds of thousands of workers from India.
Matthew J. O'Brien, research director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said tech companies have figured out how to harness the H-1B program to undercut American workers, tapping a pipeline of people from overseas who are willing to work in the U.S. in order to gain a legal foothold.
"This creates an incentive for people to accept lower wages in exchange for being in the United States and having a shot at an employment-based green card," he said.
A final set of data released last week exposed how employers used new seasonal worker permits that the Trump administration approved, under intense pressure from Congress and summer resort and landscaping industries.
The H-2B visa program sparked a major fight in Washington this year, with some members of Congress pushing to more than double of the number of permits that could be issued in 2017, from 66,000 to more than 135,000. In the end, Congress left the final decision to the Homeland Security Department, which allowed just 15,000 additional permits.
The new data detail 12,384 of those permits, which are supposed to be used for seasonal nonagricultural work. Businesses in Texas and Virginia were the biggest users of the program, accounting for more than a quarter of the special permits.
North Carolina was surprisingly only a middle-of-the-pack user of the program. One of the state's members of Congress, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, had blocked action on Mr. Trump's pick to head the legal immigration agency over the summer to try to force Homeland Security to approve more permits, and to do it faster.
Jobs can be taken by H-2B workers only if a company has first tried to hire an American at the local prevailing wage.
While most of the visas were scooped up by groundskeepers, hunters, laborers and food service workers -- all traditional occupations for the H-2B program -- 29 visas were issued for people in "marketing and sales," 12 were issued to foreign workers classified as "private household servant," and 23 were mechanics.
(c) Copyright (c) 2017 News World Communications, Inc.
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
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By Sheila Kennedy [Originally published at SheilaKennedy.net on January 25, 2015] Pew's Research Center recently noted that financial insecurity has a range of what it called "secondary effects" for communities, including diminished participation in civic and political life. The question that immediately occurred to me was: is this a feature, or a bug? Ever since Ronald Reagan identified government as the problem rather [...] Continue reading >>
By Sheila Kennedy [Originally published at SheilaKennedy.net on December 14, 2014] A recent opinion column on Talking Points Memo began On Tuesday, CNBC asked, if housing is getting more affordable, "why aren't Millennials buying?" A piece in USA Today last month called us "skittish from the recession"--Hmm, wonder why?--and Bloomberg Businessweek thinks we're just discerning shoppers. The most egregious of the what's-up-with-Millennials articles, [...] Continue reading >> |
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While the left talks a lot about tolerance, it seems they don't understand the meaning of the word. They expect people to be "tolerant" of whatever they support when in actuality they want cheerful acceptance and approval. Meanwhile, they refuse to tolerate anyone from any favored group who supports gun rights.
Particularly women.
As claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault by famous men-the vast majority of whom are well-known liberals-continues to rip through the headlines, the mainstream media seems indifferent to a different brand of #MeToo. In this case, it's something far more horrifying that sexual harassment or even some very inappropriate behavior.
Pro-gun women are getting death threats by the peaceful, tolerant progressive.
Over at the Washington Free Beacon, Steven Gutowski writes about the travails of some pro-gun women , writer Steven Gutowski who have faced not just sexual harassment due to their stance on guns, but violent ones as well, and these are names you're likely to recognize.
First, Gutowski writes about rape survivor Kimberly Corban, who has had some horrific things said to her, not just regarding guns but also her rape. After all, they seem to figure, the fact that she was raped was the catalyst for her becoming a firearm advocate apparently makes that fair game in their warped, demented little world.
Next, he brings up NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch who famously was forced to move back in October after the harassment reached truly terrifying levels. That included being sent a photograph of her home, for crying out loud.
Last, is a name that should be familiar to longtime readers of Bearing Arms , and that is former editor Jenn Jacques. (Language warning in what follows)
"Stick that gun in your cunt bitch and pull the trigger," Twitter user John T. McFarland said to Jenn Jacques in September 2015.
Jenn Jacques, a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum and editor at large for BreachBangClear.com who has been recognized by the National Shooting Sports Foundation for her work promoting gun safety, said she's often stunned by the hypocrisy of the harassers and thinks online anonymity enables their behavior.
"I've heard a lot of 'do us all a favor and swallow your gun,'" she said. "It's just so bad. The thing is they all claim to be against gun violence. They all claim to be the tolerant left but they are literally the most violent, heinous people out there. I'm sure a lot of it is that they're hiding behind a computer screen."
After Bob Owens, a respected gun writer who worked closely with Jacques at BearingArms.com, took his own life in May , Jacques said she received a wave of harassment. While most reacted to Owens's passing with grace and compassion, a group of gun-control activists reacted by tormenting his friends and family through vile messages on Twitter and Facebook. Jacques said some even encouraged her to kill herself.
"After Bob died, people would be like 'one down, one to go,'" she said. "How could you say that to anyone?"
This is the level of discourse we often see from the left toward women.
While I've gotten some of that from time to time, especially the time Piers Morgan retweeted my New Years wish that he'd go back to England where the gun laws were more to his liking, it's nowhere near this level. Plenty wished me or my children to be the victim of a shooting, but I don't remember anyone ordering me to shoot myself, and absolutely no one wanted me raped and brutalized in the process.
Townhall's Matt Vespa commented that he's never gotten a death threat despite extensively writing about Second Amendment issues. Since I've started writing for Bearing Arms , where my entire focus is on guns and gun rights issues, I haven't either.
But neither Vespa nor I are women, and that makes a difference.
The fact of the matter is that progressive despise anyone who goes off the reservation. If you're part of a group they declare is "theirs," then doing anything other than voting Democrat is grounds for anything and everything. At least in some of their minds.
The tolerant left has proven they're not that tolerant. They don't want to tolerate anything. Like I said, it's like they don't even understand the meaning of the word.
Author's Bio: Tom Knighton Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/ |
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This week has seen a rash of upsetting Supreme Court rulings, including the upholding of Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban , deciding misleadingly named "crisis pregnancy centers" don't have to reveal their anti-abortion agendas, and issuing a damaging blow to unions' negotiating power . It may have felt like SCOTUS news couldn't have gotten any worse. I miss that feeling.
Wednesday afternoon it was announced that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be retiring next month, after 30 years on the bench. The 81-year-old is currently the court's longest-serving Justice, and has frequently been the swing vote in landmark ideological cases. He voted to legalize same-sex marriage , as well as to preserve Roe v. Wade on numerous occasions . Not that Kennedy is a sure champion for liberal causes. He was, after all, appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan, and has been behind plenty of less-than-left rulings, most notably having written the majority opinion on the Citizens United case , which restructured campaign finance law in a way that essentially led to the creation of super PACs. He also voted in favor of all three of those aforementioned rulings this week.
Nonetheless, his departure from the bench will be devastating. After Republicans refused to allow President Obama to nominate Justice Scalia's replacement in 2016, Trump was able to appoint the ultra-conservative and relatively ultra-young Neil Gorsuch. This is a man who once described LGBTQ rights as part of liberals' social agenda and who has repeatedly favored "religious freedom" over reproductive rights.
Do we dare imagine that when nominating a replacement for the bench, there might be a chance Trump would choose a moderate successor, similar to Kennedy himself, rather than another far-right socially conservative judge like Gorsuch? It doesn't seem likely. Knowing how fixated Trump is on "loyalty," it's not surprising that he has railed against Gorsuch on the issues where they've disagreed. It's not far-fetched to imagine Trump will be vetting his shortlist names based on where they stand in regard to his own existing stances, such as his "zero policy" immigration tactics.
And then there's issue of abortion. Both parties have long made this their ride-or-die issue, and with Republicans in full control of the government, already controlling the House, Senate, and presidency--not to mention seeing the rise in power of Mike Pence, whose lifelong goal is to outlaw abortion once and for all--reproductive rights have been heavily under attack. Now that Trump has the power to fully flip the ideology of the Supreme Court, what better way to win the favor of his Republican base than to be the administration that reversed Roe v. Wade?
Trump has said that he'll pick Kennedy's replacement from the same shortlist he used to nominate Gorsuch. Looking over the names listed, it's a depressing bunch. Nearly all of them have lengthy track records of opposing reproductive rights. One of them voted against the recent decision to allow a detained immigrant teenager to seek an abortion. Another called Roe v. Wade the "worst abomination in the history of constitutional law." Another nominee is the man who coined the term "partial-birth abortion."
Vox has a great in-depth breakdown of all the ways in which "an America after Anthony Kennedy looks significantly different from America before," and the issues this new court is likely to face, from reproductive rights to capital punishment to affirmative action to civil rights for various communities.
This news is bleak. It feels like a giant step towards the very real Handmaid's Tale scenario we fear and it's hard not to burn with rage at everyone who contributed to Trump's rise to power, starting with every single Jill Stein voter and the infamous 53% of white women who outed themselves as full-on Serena Joys in their complicity.
I'm not going to tell you not to feel that rage. I'm feeling it, along with intense fear. I wish I could offer some sort of hope or solution, but really, all I've got is the reminder to know your representatives and to call them often. It really does matter. Follow groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL on Twitter or sign up for their email newsletters. Stay informed and stay active.
(image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site !
-- The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone , hate speech, and trolling.-- |
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Trump has said that he'll pick Kennedy's replacement from the same shortlist he used to nominate Gorsuch. Looking over the names listed, it's a depressing bunch. Nearly all of them have lengthy track records of opposing reproductive rights. One of them voted against the recent decision to allow a detained immigrant teenager to seek an abortion. |
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Photograph: Michael B Thomas / AFP / Getty
An 18-hour ride on an old - and late - charter bus would be enough to fill the most seasoned traveler with apprehension and anxiety. But waiting to board exactly such a bus with 40 other black people, mostly strangers, to ride halfway across the country to St Louis, Missiouri, we were praying for more than just functioning air conditioning.
On our way to Ferguson as part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) ride, we were hoping for safe travels: some of us were aware that hundreds of black people traveling long distances could easily be cause for police stops; others had stories to tell about their encounters with police . When we arrived and met people who had been on the road for 36 hours or more, we were hardly even tired, despite the uncomfortable rest. But we were all rightfully enraged, and ready to fight for justice.
The BLM Ride was organized in the spirit of the early 1960s interstate Freedom Rides in the racially segregated south, after the visuals of Michael Brown's lifeless and blood-drenched body brought to mind images of lifeless black bodies hanging from lynching trees in the all-too-recent past, after the militarized police forces looked all too similar to the response of police to protestors during the civil rights movement.
The ride was a call to action for black people and their allies to fight for justice - not just for Brown and his family, but for all of us. It was a tangible example of self-determination in the face of anti-black violence on the part of Ferguson residents and those of us who traveled from across the country to join them.
But the real work begins now: Nearly a month after Brown's brutal killing, after the camera crews have left and in a moment when justice has yet to be realized, many more of us have decided that we could not allow Ferguson to be portrayed as an aberration in America: it must remain understood as a microcosm of the effects of anti-black racism.
So, many activist groups have returned to our local communities prepared to fight for justice. Several hundred BLM Riders - many of whom possess expertise in community organizing, law, youth development, public policy, media, the arts and more - will actively support the demands set forth by the local Ferguson community and will work both within our respective communities and nationally to address blue-on-black violence.
We may have ridden home by now, too, but we won't forget Ferguson: We will seek justice for Brown's family by petitioning for the immediate arrest of officer Darren Wilson and the dismissal of county prosecutor Robert McCullough . Groups that are part of the local Hands Up Don't Shoot Coalition have already called for Wilson's swift arrest, and some BLM riders also canvassed McCullough's neighborhood as a way of raising the public's awareness of the case. We will help develop a network of organizations and advocates to form a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the US. The Justice Department's new investigation into St Louis-area police departments is a good start, but it's not enough. Our ride was endorsed by a few dozen local, regional and national organizations across the country - like the National Organization for Women (Now) and Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation - who, while maintaining different missions, have demonstrated unprecedented solidarity in response to anti-black police violence. We hope to encourage more organizations to endorse and participate in a network with a renewed purpose of conceptualizing policy recommendations. We will also demand, through the network, that the federal government discontinue its supply of military weaponry and equipment to local law enforcement . And though Congress seems to finally be considering measures in this regard, it remains essential to monitor the demilitarization processes and the corporate sectors that financially benefit from the sale of military tools to police. We will call on the office of US attorney general Eric Holder to release the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years, both while on patrol and in custody, so they can be brought to justice - if they haven't already. And we will advocate for a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools. This money should be redirected to those federal departments charged with providing employment, housing and educational services.
We have to move out of our myopic understanding of local organizing and build a national and international movement that prioritizes all black life. Local, community-based advocacy organizations like the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, as well as groups organized by fearless young activists like Lost Voices, have committed to fighting until justice is served for Mike Brown. Our group is proof that dedicated and skilled black folks can work - together - to end state violence, homelessness, joblessness, imprisonment and more inside black communities.
We have a moment, inspired by those working on the ground in Ferguson, to transform black people's relationship to this country. The time is now. If we don't pick up the mantle for justice, we will miss it yet again. |
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Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian held talks on Syrian situation with Mikhail Bogdanov, Putin's special envoy to Middle East, and UN Special Envoy to Syria Stafan De Mistura, in a trilateral meeting in the Austrian capital of Vienna on Saturday.
Amir-Abdollahian referred to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut , adding "the occurrence of these tragic disasters attest to the fact that adopting double standards in countering terrorism and dividing this scourge into good and bad, will cause severe consequences for the whole region and the world; no country will ever benefit from strengthening terrorism."
The Iranian official highlighted the need for focusing this round of Vienna Syria talks on resolute and effective actions against terrorism and sending a firm and strong message to terrorist groups on countries' collective efforts to battle terrorism.
Amir-Abdollahian also met with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on the sidelines of Vienna talks, condemning the Friday terrorist attacks in Paris and extending his condolences to the government of France.
Fabius said on Saturday that he would return back to France after the meeting on Syrian settlement to attend to the emergency situation in his country following the seven attacks that killed 130 people and wounded several dozens. ISIL terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif heading a delegation comprised of Abbas Araghchi and Hamid Baeidinejad, left Tehran for Vienna to join the peace talks on Syria this morning. Zarif's attendance was announced after President Rouhani's visits to France and Italy were postponed due to Friday's deadly terror attacks in Paris.
The Vienna discussions will bring together about 20 countries and international bodies to reach a road-map for peace to end Syria's more than four-year civil war.
The Saturday talks are overshadowed by the recent terrorist attacks carried out in Paris and Beirut, which led to the death and injury of several innocent civilians.
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Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian |
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FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Intelligence on Iran Fails the Smell Test
Mr. President:
As the George W. Bush administration revved up to attack Iraq 15 years ago, we could see no compelling reason for war. We decided, though, to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on the chance he had been sandbagged by Vice President Dick Cheney and others. We chose to allow for the possibility that he actually believed the "intelligence" that Colin Powell presented to the UN as providing "irrefutable and undeniable" proof of WMD in Iraq and a "sinister nexus" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
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To us in VIPS it was clear, however, that the "intelligence" Powell adduced was bogus. Thus, that same afternoon (Feb. 5, 2003) we prepared and sent to President Bush a Memorandum like this one , urging him to seek counsel beyond the "circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
We take no satisfaction at having been correct -- though disregarded -- in predicting the political and humanitarian disaster in Iraq. Most Americans have been told the intelligence was "mistaken." It was not; it was out-and-out fraud, in which, sadly, some of our former colleagues took part.
Five years after Powell's speech, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee minced few words in announcing the main bipartisan finding of a five-year investigation. He said : "In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."
Iran Now in Gunsight
As drums beat again for a military attack -- this time on Iran, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and other experienced, objective analysts are, by all appearances, being disregarded again. And, this time, we fear the consequences will be all-caps CATASTROPHIC -- in comparison with the catastrophe of Iraq.
In memoranda to you over the past year and a half we have pointed out that (1) Iran's current support for international terrorism is far short of what it was decades ago; and (2) that you are being played by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claims about Iran: they are based on intelligence exposed as fraudulent several years ago. Tellingly, Netanyahu waited for your new national security adviser to be in place for three weeks before performing his April 30 slide show alleging that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program. On the chance that our analysis of Netanyahu's show-and-tell failed to reach you, please know that the Israeli prime minister was recycling information from proven forgeries, which we reported in a Memorandum to you early last spring.
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If our Memorandum of May 7 fell through some cracks in the West Wing, here are its main findings:
The evidence displayed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 in what he called his "Iranian atomic archive" showed blatant signs of fabrication. That evidence is linked to documents presented by the Bush Administration more than a decade earlier as "proof" of a covert Iran nuclear weapons program. Those documents were clearly fabricated, as well.
In our May 7, 2018 Memorandum we also asserted: "We can prove that the actual documents originally came not from Iran but from Israel. Moreover, the documents were never authenticated by the CIA or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."
Iran: Almost Targeted in 2008 |
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Anthony Gockowski Jan 20, 2016 at 11:28 AM EDT
Peter Fricke Jan 18, 2016 at 2:11 PM EDT
"EFF therefore respectfully requests that any future guidance issued by the Department uphold all of the civil and constitutional rights of those who attend colleges or universities, including both freedom from harassment and freedom of anonymous speech."
Anthony Gockowski Jan 14, 2016 at 2:23 PM EDT
Peter Fricke Jan 11, 2016 at 1:59 PM EDT
The first graduates of an educational doctorate program at the University of Washington-Tacoma credit the experience with inspiring them to fight "religious bigotry" and promote racial diversity.
Peter Fricke Jan 11, 2016 at 12:16 PM EDT
Peter Fricke Jan 08, 2016 at 4:04 PM EDT |
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Comedy actor Seth Rogen can make almost any story sound funny, but it helps when you have great material to work with. One personal story he told...
A mom shared a photo on Instagram in which she is nursing her three year old daughter. The mom reveals she is an extended nurser, and her older...
A little boy who was having a meltdown at school collapsed in a heap on the floor. The boy sat with his back against the wall and his head in his...
There was a time when people kept photo albums for their precious memories. Now, we have Instagram. One young couple on a date at a football game...
A Missouri couple has been arrested after it was discovered that they kept four children locked up in plywood boxes for weeks. The children were...
A father was sentenced to 75 years in prison for sexually abusing his daughter. The 12-year-old perished in a house fire with her 16-year-old...
A North Carolina man is feeling vindicated after successfully suing his wife's lover. The wife was having an illicit affair with another man...
Angelina Jolie filed papers with court on Tuesday alleging that her estranged husband hasn't paid any 'meaningful' child support since the couple...
A flight cleaning crew in LaGuardia Airport in New York were shocked on Tuesday morning when they discovered a dead fetus on an American Airlines...
A woman who worked in a Mexican restaurant more than 20 years ago stole from her boss. She has carried a guilty conscience ever since, and finally...
(c)2014-2017 AllThatsFab All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of AllThatsFab terms of service and privacy policy. The material on this site is for informational and entertainment purposes only.
(c)2017 B3 Media |
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Religion | Document suggests Mars Hill Church bought its pastor's spot on the New York Times best-seller list
Warren Cole Smith | 3/05/14, 12:11 pm
Seattle's Mars Hill Church paid a California-based marketing company at least $210,000 in 2011 and 2012 to ensure that Real Marriage , a book written by Mark Driscoll, the church's founding pastor, and his wife Grace, made the New York Times best-seller list.
Christina Darnell & Lynde Langdon | 3/04/14, 02:45 pm
CHARLOTTE, N.C.--This town has more than 800 churches, but many of them struggle to reach the vast population of twenty- and thirty-something residents. One group seems to be figuring it out, though. On the first and third Tuesdays of the month, more than 400 young adults convene at First United Methodist Church on Tryon Street for CharlotteONE, a citywide ministry to young adults.
Keith Miller | 3/01/14, 09:30 am
"Am I too white to be your pastor?"
That's the question posed in a recent promotional campaign for River Pointe Church in suburban Houston. The church published full-page color ads featuring a picture of their pastor, Patrick Kelley, holding a sign bearing the borderline-bombastic message in the Houston Chronicle , encouraging people to attend their special Sunday worship service marking Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend. |
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MSNBC host and hack Toure let his vile show again this morning. He not only retweeted a disgusting tweet that said "Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win," but he doubled down on the moral bankruptcy by adding "this" in front of his retweet.
Twitter users were quick to react to this revolting remark.
Eeks! @TwitchyTeam @michellemalkin Toure agreeing people need to "get their abortions in now in case Reps win" https://t.co/iPMFmqI3
Kidding me right? RT @Toure : This!!! RT @IamEnidColeslaw : Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win
-- Shawn (@LivesInThought) September 4, 2012
@kenndawg1 Please tell me this was a poor attempt at a joke. @Toure @IamEnidColeslaw
To the Left, the killing of innocent children is hilarious. And celebrated. This utter disregard for not only women, but for life itself, is repugnant.
https://twitter.com/ManAhMean/status/243005725343891456
@toure Do the women who get abortions get a signed letter of congratulations from #obama2012 or is it auto pen?
-- Hockey Dad (@SafeSchoolsCzar) September 4, 2012
"Girls," hurry up and dispose of your child; you don't want to be "punished" with one, right?" Plus, you silly girls are probably too incompetent to handle a child. It takes a village to raise a child, if the Left believes you deserve one and are fit enough.
Revolting.
https://twitter.com/kristinaguess/status/243008888817987584
And they are using children, and pushing the killing of them, in order to scare women from leaving the Democrat plantation. Economy, shmonomy! "Girls" should only care about their fancy wombs and should despicably believe that their rights are solely predicated on the legal ability to abort their unborn children.
Oh, and Toure? Why are you so racist? Hurry up, girls, and kill those black babies! After all, the majority of babies killed in the womb are minority babies. In New York City alone, nearly 60% of unborn African-American children were aborted . Perhaps he is following in the footsteps of Ezra Klein, who said that pesky babies should be aborted because they are oh-so-pricey. Or in the despicable footsteps of Hillary Clinton, who also seeks to use the killing of the unborn as a cost-saving tool .
Toure pitifully plays the race card and whines about people calling President Obama "angry. " Totally racist! But the genocide of black children? Hunky-dory and should be encouraged. |
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Earlier this week, a viral video of a child who cried about his cleft lip went viral. Now both the child and his family have become targets of online bullying.
In the heartbreaking video, 11-year-old Keaton Jones sobbed about the experience with his mother, Kimberly Jones, which she later put online at his urging.
In true Internet fashion, the video made the rounds on social media, garnering support and sympathy for young Keaton. Many, including athletes and celebrities like Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown and Captain America himself, Chris Evans, sent the child virtual hugs and invited him to join them at movie premiers, football games, and more.
The video served to highlight the issue of bullying. In the video, Keaton tearfully told his mother how students taunted his appearance, poured milk on him, and put food down his shirt. They told him he had no friends.
"I don't like that they do it to me," said Keaton. "And I, for sure, don't like that they do it to other people, cause it's not OK! People that are different don't need to be criticized about it. It's not their fault."
This is Keaton Jones, he lives in Knoxville and he has a little something to say about bullying. https://t.co/coyQxFp33V
Following the outpouring of sympathy, a man named Joseph Lam set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations for the family. It received over $57,000 before being put on hold.
Now both Keaton and his family has become the target of bullying as accusations of racism are being hurled at him. The Univision-owned African American culture website the Root accused Kimberly Jones of being a "racist money grabber."
The article cited MMA fighter Joe Schilling, who spoke to a person pretending to be Jones, who made references to "us whites," and demanded he give the family money instead of tickets to shows and other non-monetary gifts.
Further investigation reveals that the account once belonged to a teenager unconnected to the Jones family.
Schilling recorded the conversation with the fake "Kimberly Jones," creating no small amount of outrage toward the family after he published it on Instagram. He deleted it after learning of the hoax, and urged his followers to donate to the Speak Out Against Bullying non-profit organization.
Despite the update, the anger against the Jones family remains unabated.
In the post, the Root 's Yesha Callahan claims, without much evidence, that Keaton "may have called a few classmates the n-word," describing his mother Kimberly as "using his pain for her own interests."
Callahan cited a post purportedly made by Kimberly Jones on Facebook, in which the Tennessean mom wrote a short rant about "butt hurt Americans" upset by politics. In the post, some of her family members held up the American flag, while others carried the Confederate flag.
"It's ironic that she's willing to accept money from black athletes and other celebrities that she would probably consider 'butt hurt Americans,'" writes Callahan, even though Jones never set up the GoFundMe donation drive herself.
Professional race baiter Tariq Nasheed joined the chorus of condemnation against the Jones family, describing the mother as a "suspected racist who makes very problematic posts bullying Black protesters." His tweet was accompanied by several photos of the Jones family standing next to the Confederate flag, and has since gone viral with over 19,500 retweets.
The tweet created significant outrage on Twitter, with many social justice warriors focusing their ire on Keaton himself.
Following the backlash, Kimberly Jones told CBS News in a segment that aired on Tuesday explaining the Facebook post, which she says were intended to be "ironic."
"(Those were) the only two photos on my entire planet where I am anywhere near a Confederate flag," said Jones, who added that she spent much of her life being bullied herself because she didn't share those racist views.
Jones reiterated her claim that it was Keaton's idea to make and upload the video. "I knew it could be great and I knew it could be awful, and it has been," she said.
On Twitter, Jones' daughter Lakyn said that the posts were not intended to be racist, and denied allegations that her brother Keaton used the "n-word."
The latest Tweets and replies from Lake (@Lakyn_Jones). It is what it is LMU'22. The 865
The efforts to torment and bully Keaton Jones only highlight the hypocrisy of so-called "social justice warriors," who adhere to no moral code--not even their own--targeting anybody or anything that may further the agenda, no matter the cost.
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In 2008 my wife, being 5 months pregnant, yes 5 months; decided to have an abortion because she discovered the sex of the child was a boy. I was out of town and on the way home and asked her to just wait until I could come home and talk with her. She has suffered depression and had several miscarriages in the past and was already a mother of two precious children. She was able to find a doctor that did not give her a psychiatric evaluation and performed an abortion on her with a day or two of seeing her. Immediately after the abortion she felt remorse and wish she had not murdered our unborn son. But the deed was done and I divorced her and gained full custody of my daughter but was not able to gain custody of my step-son. It is law that women have the choice to have an abortion if it is legal in their state, but this should never be allowed after 3 months of conception or even allowed without a psychiatric evaluation being done. My step-son, daughter, x-wife, and myself has forever had their life altered. I wish I knew of this site when I first lost my son, but I am happy to find it now because of "Caylee's Law" and pray you will sign this petition to bring my story into the public's eyes. Forever a grieving father... |
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We are a few weeks removed from the shootings in Orlando and freshly in the middle of Pride season.
The night before the shootings, I published a tongue-in-cheek article for Matador Network titled, "Dear Straight Allies, Please Don't Come to Pride Until You've Understood These 6 Things." I've been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for about 10 years now, but I've never received as much hate for an article as I did for that piece.
The biggest critique was about the tone of the article. While tone policing is annoying, I can see why people would have a hard time with a heavily sarcastic article in the wake of a national tragedy.
Rather than sulk, I put my knowledge of our community to work and created these recommendations for allies struggling with how they can help their LGBTQ+ friends:
1. Be empathetic, and lend a listening ear to those who are struggling.
Listening can be a very powerful medicine. Sometimes people just need someone to hear their truth.
2. Hire queer and transgender people.
There are no state-level laws protecting against sexual orientation discrimination in 28 of the 50 US states . In 33 of the 50 states , transgender people do not have employment protections either. This means employees can be fired for simply being themselves in those states legally.
LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, face massive employment discrimination and are less likely to be hired. Giving someone a job with a living wage gives someone a pathway to a better quality of life.
3. Buy from a queer entrepreneur.
Not everyone has the ability to hire someone for full-time employment, but most people can support queer-owned businesses by buying a product or service. LGBTQ+ people are in every area of commerce.
Looking for new clothes? Grab a T-shirt from Trans is Beautiful , have a suit made from Sharpe Suiting or order a funky dance costume from dystrucxion .
Looking for a photographer , designer or model? What about home decor ? How about booking your travel with a queer-owned tour operator , hotel or travel group ? The possibilities are endless.
4. Donate to the Orlando victims GoFundMe page.
This page is run by a local nonprofit and has pledged to cover funeral expenses and support the families.
5. Forward these phone numbers to someone who may need to talk.
The Disaster Distress Helpline is 1-800-985-5990. This helpline connects people with immediate counseling to anyone who needs help processing the tragedy in Orlando. It's a 24/7 resource that responds to people who need crisis counseling after experiencing a tragedy. The helpline can also be accessed here .
You can also contact the English and Spanish hotline of the New York City Anti-Violence Project at 212-714-1141. The Trevor Project is a youth lifeline that can also provide support at 866-488-7386 at The Trevor Product .
6. Seek out the LGBTQ+ community.
You can do this by attending Pride events, patronizing your local LGBTQ+ bar or supporting other events in your community. A quick Google search will help you figure out what's available.
7. Attend a candlelight vigil when tragedy strikes.
Vigils across the country are being held in remembrance of the victims of the Orlando shootings and can be found or submitted to We Are Orlando . You can also find current information about how best to help those directly impacted by the shooting.
Unfortunately, the Orlando shooting was not the first tragedy to strike the LGBTQ+ community, and candlelight vigils have become commonplace in the wake of hate crimes.
8. Participate in Transgender Day of Remembrance.
TDOR is an annual day set aside to remember the victims of anti-transgender hate crimes. It's held every November in honor of Rita Hester, who died in November 1998. Rita's murder, like most anti-transgender murders, is still unsolved. You can find events to attend on the official TDOR website .
9. Sign a petition.
You can find one such petition here on Americans for Responsible Solutions .
10. Learn more about the movement against gun violence.
Every day, 87 Americans are killed by gun violence. Americans for Responsible Solutions has a list of facts about the current state of gun violence in America, as well as solutions it is proposing to create change.
11. If you're an activist, be patient and create space for answering questions.
Oppressed groups have zero obligation to educate the majority. Not all LGBTQ+ people will want to talk about this, process it or educate, but those who can and are able may want to explain to others why this tragedy was so horrific for the LGBTQ+ community.
12. Learn about some of the 200+ anti-LGBT bills introduced this year.
Our love, dignity and self-worth has been discussed and voted on in our state capitals and local communities this year. Some of these laws vilify LGBTQ+ people and present us in a light that is damning and fraudulent. Find out what policy officials introduced, voted and supported these bills and initiatives and lobby for these bills in your state and vote them out.
13. Support LGBTQ+ organizations that are working to defend and preserve our rights and community.
Centerlink is a good place to start. It has a handy list of LGBTQ+ organizations and a search tool for finding local LGBTQ+ centers.
14. Send a Safe Space Kit to an educator or youth service worker.
GLSEN's Safe Space Kit is an educator's tool kit with lessons on how to work with LGBTQ+ young people. They can be purchased for $15 on GLSEN's website .
15. Discuss queer theory with someone who knows more than you.
If you can't find someone in real life, online communities are always an option.
16. Volunteer with the Trevor Project.
LGBTQ+ young people are four times more likely to attempt suicide than straight young people. Nearly one quarter of all transgender young people have attempted suicide. The Trevor Project is an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organization that uses volunteers across a variety of programs. Fill out their application form for information on opportunities.
17. Donate to local organizations that are benefiting LGBTQ+ people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of color.
National organizations are wonderful and do great work, but local organizations are the most direct route to changes in your community.
18. Support those in your community who are most at risk.
Transgender women of color, queer youth (particularly those with unstable housing and unsupportive parents), queer women of color who face discrimination, queer people with disabilities and those of lower socioeconomic status are more at risk for a host of negative life outcomes because of the oppression they face and the obstacles in obtaining employment.
19. Don't talk over or interrupt as someone is processing their identity.
Let your LGBTQ+ friend speak their truth before you add your experiences. Sure, you're entitled to your feelings, but let those most impacted process first.
20. Learn a bit about queer history.
Try to understand a bit about where we come from and how we got to be where we are today. This blog is an excellent source of American queer history, and it is one of my favorite free resources for people looking to learn more about the queer underpinnings of the US.
21. Understand why we need LGBTQ+ safe spaces.
The attack on Orlando feels extremely personal to the LGBTQ+ community because it was an attack on the only place where we feel 100 percent free to be who we are.
Bars are not just places to grab a drink for us; they're places that teach us how to love ourselves and our people. They're how we accept being rejected by our families and how we accept that which we cannot change and rally around that which we can.
22. Stop sharing theories about the Orlando shooter's sexuality and background.
It isn't productive, and it doesn't help the victims or community move forward. In fact, it further alienates LGBTQ+ Muslims, plays on old stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people as being mentally ill and creates alternate narratives that can be damaging for the LGBTQ+ community.
While saying all of this, conversations about self-loathing, homophobia and the relationship toxic homophobia plays in society are important dialogue to have when done in an informed way.
23. Reach out to an LGBTQ+ person you know.
When tragedy happens in the LGBTQ+ community, reach out to your LGBTQ+ friends. Check in with them, ask if they are OK, volunteer to watch their kids or pet or bring them a hot meal if they are struggling.
Don't assume that every LGBTQ+ person will feel deeply impacted by the shooting in Orlando or a hate crime that happens in your city. Some will, and some won't. We're a diverse group of people.
24. Stay focused on the issues that actually matter.
When you're discussing LGBTQ+ issues, recognize that equality has not been accomplished just by passing marriage reform. Don't get distracted by other narratives. |
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The IRS is abusing its authority once again by employing the help of a private law firm in its case against Microsoft.
By Peter Roff * USNews
If there is one federal agency that has clearly run amok during the Obama administration, it's the United States Internal Revenue Service. From the harassment of tea party groups applying for nonprofit status to the defiance of congressional subpoenas, it's an agency badly in need of a thorough housecleaning.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is already under threat of impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives. That might be a good start, but removing him won't fix the problems any more than the ouster of his predecessor did. The problems run too deep. Congress needs to act, not just by stepping up oversight of the tax collectors but by jerking their chain and narrowing their authority.
From top to bottom the agency is engaged in a wholesale abuse of its authority - and is defying attempts to investigate what it has been doing. Groups on the right are still reportedly having their applications for tax-exempt status slow-walked through the process. Confidential data is still leaking out and the auditing process is out of control. Continue reading -
by Randolph J. May and Seth L. Cooper * Free State Foundation
Securing protection of American intellectual property (IP) rights internationally is an economic imperative. It is also a constitutional duty. In today's information economy, copyrights and patent rights provide critical financial investment incentives for research and development of new products and services. And IP constitutes a potent source of economic value and prosperity. According to an official U.S. Department of Commerce report, IP-intensive industries in America generated an estimated $5 trillion in revenues in 2010 alone, providing over 27 million jobs. Since then, those figures almost certainly have grown. Another report estimated that the copyright industries alone contributed $1.1 trillion in value added to the U.S. economy and employed nearly 5.5 million workers in the U.S. in 2014.
As IP becomes increasingly vital to our nation's wealth and prosperity, the need to ensure its protection on a global basis increases correspondingly. The American economy suffers staggering losses each year to international IP theft. According to the IP Theft Commission (2013), these losses likely exceed $300 billion annually. IP theft is an injustice to the IP owners, diminishes economic prosperity, and undermines job opportunities. Indeed, this is a reason why it is so important to conclude international trade agreements, such as the recently-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, that contain meaningful intellectual property protections. Continue reading -
by Dorothy Rabinowitz * Wall Street Journal
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney at a news conference after the Jan. 8 shooting of a city police officer. Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press
It required only half a minute for the mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Jim Kenney, to achieve national fame. On Friday, an already sensation-crowded day, it fell to the mayor to take part in the official pronouncements on the attempted murder of city police officer Jesse Hartnett, shot and severely wounded as he sat in his patrol car when a would-be assassin emptied his gun at him--13 shots in all.
Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., appointed just three days earlier, delivered the details with noteworthy eloquence: The wounded officer, bleeding heavily from three wounds, one arm useless, had gotten himself out of the car, chased the attacker and shot him.
The drama of this recital needed no amplification, but there it was anyway: Clear security video images showed the assailant in his flowing white dishdasha--a robe favored by Muslim men--running toward the patrol car, shooting, sticking his hand in the window, and racing speedily away. Pictures too of the police officer lurching out of the car to give chase. Continue reading -
America dodged the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, but much has changed. Today's world economic slide is starting to hurt us.
by Ruchir Sharma * Wall Street Journal
Plunging stock prices and slowing economic growth in China have raised anew the question of how much events abroad really matter to the U.S. Many of the answers are quite placid, drawing on the precedents of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, when there was similar concern about impacts at home, which never came. The U.S. grew at a 4.5% annual pace during those two years. For much of 2015, when U.S. growth remained steady despite volatile and weak growth in the rest of the world, the optimists said it was like 1997-98 all over again.
That may be, but the world has changed a lot in two decades. After 1998, the U.S. share of global GDP topped out at 32% but has since fallen to 24%, based on my analysis of raw data from the International Monetary Fund, while the emerging-world share bottomed out at 20% but has since doubled to nearly 40%. In that time, China has supplanted the U.S. as the largest contributor to global growth. Continue reading -
by Michael Pento * CNBC
The S&P 500 has begun 2016 with its worst performance ever. This has prompted Wall Street apologists to come out in full force and try to explain why the chaos in global currencies and equities will not be a repeat of 2008. Nor do they want investors to believe this environment is commensurate with the dot-com bubble bursting. They claim the current turmoil in China is not even comparable to the 1997 Asian debt crisis.
Indeed, the unscrupulous individuals that dominate financial institutions and governments seldom predict a down-tick on Wall Street, so don't expect them to warn of the impending global recession and market mayhem.
But a recession has occurred in the U.S. about every five years, on average, since the end of WWII; and it has been seven years since the last one -- we are overdue. Most importantly, the average market drop during the peak to trough of the last 6 recessions has been 37 percent. That would take the S&P 500 down to 1,300; if this next recession were to be just of the average variety. Continue reading -
by Joel B. Pollak * Breitbart
President Barack Obama promised his final State of the Union address would be short. Dana Bash of CNN called it "low-energy." One thing it was not was accurate-or honest. Here are Obama's top ten lies, in chronological order.
1. "[W]e've done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters." This is pure fiction. Obama has doubled the national debt, and it's not because he cut the deficit. Rather, he spent staggering amounts of money in his first months in office-which he assigns, dishonestly, to the previous fiscal year, under George W. Bush. He "cut" (i.e. spent more gradually) from that spending, but only under protest, after Republicans took the House in 2010.
(Update: It is true that Obama's 2015 budget deficit was about 25% of his 2010 deficit. But he referred to "deficits," plural. Until last year, all of Obama's deficits were worse than all of Bush's deficits except for the last two.)
2. "Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction." With that line, Obama took a shot at his would-be Democratic successors, as well as his Republican critics. But the truth is that despite the slow recovery-the slowest since World War II-labor force participation is the lowest it has been in decades. Wages are stagnant, household incomes still have not recovered from the recession, and young people see a bleak future. Continue reading -
How come more people are retiring in their early 20s? Why are middle-age men becoming stay-at-home dads? What's keeping women out of the workforce other than illness, kids or school?
Those are some of the questions raised in a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report that shows changes over the past decade in why people stay out of the labor force. Finding answers is key for the Federal Reserve as it maps the contours of a job market that's becoming harder to predict with the aging of the baby boomers and shifting household priorities.
Here's what the bureau found, broadly: Thirty-five percent of the U.S. population wasn't in the labor force in 2014, up from 31.3 percent a decade earlier. (You're considered out of the workforce if you don't have a job and aren't looking for one. That's distinct from the official unemployment rate, which tracks those out of work who are actively job hunting.)
Drilling down into the numbers reveals more about the shifts in the reasons some people forego a paycheck. In all age groups, for instance, more people cited retirement as the reason for being out of the labor force, and it wasn't just older people. Continue reading -
Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.
by Joel Kotkin * The Daily Beast
The End of Localism
This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders--the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat--gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.
For many of the world's leading countries--China, Russia, Saudi Arabia--such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won't have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.
The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the "coercive power of the state" to make people live properly by his lights. California's high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters. Continue reading -
From immigration to abortion to the power of unions, the Supreme Court is entering this election year with a full plate of politically charged cases.
AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
by Sam Baker * NationalJournal
The Court hasn't officially agreed to hear this one yet, but most experts think it will--and that a decision will come by the end of June. That's certainly the Obama administration's hope; winning at the Supreme Court is the only way Obama will be able to implement his Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, or DAPA, which would allow some 4.3 million undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.
A ruling for the Obama administration would allow DAPA to take effect--and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has said she would stretch the policy even further. A loss for the administration, on the other hand, would vindicate Republican criticisms that DAPA went too far, and would give a Republican president a way out of the program without rolling back any legal protections himself. Continue reading -
By Stephen Moore * Washington Times
Photo by: Seth Wenig In this July 9, 2015 file photo, a Wall Street sign is seen near the New York Stock Exchange in New York. U.S. stocks moved lower on the last day of the year as the market headed for a sluggish end to 2015. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
The stock market closed down for 2015 reversing one of the few positive accomplishments under the Barack Obama presidency. This has been a pretty prosperous time for the top two percent. For most Americans though -- not so much.
A new report from Sentier Research based on Census data finds that median household income of $56,700 at the end of 2015 stood exactly where it was adjusted for inflation at the end of 2007.
That's eight years of virtually zero income gain. And President Obama and his Washington political pundits wonder why voters are in such a cranky mood.
Last week the Joint Economic Committee of Congress issued a report on the Obama recovery loaded with even more dismal news. On almost every measure examined, the 2009-15 recovery since the recovery ended in June of 2009 has been the meekest in more than 50 years. Continue reading - |
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Bedford police chief stresses crime prevention
By KATHY REMILLARD Union Leader Correspondent
BEDFORD - Despite high-profile crimes, the town of Bedford says it is continuing to make crime prevention a top priority, and the police department's Community Policing Program is at the heart of it. Chief John Bryfonski, who formalized the program about a year ago, said that while his department has to be good at solving crimes, it should also be able to thwart them whenever possible. "We should be focused on preventing crime," Bryfonski said, "and to do that, we have to engage the community in the process." The Community Policing Program is based on meeting the needs of residents in four groups, said Bryfonski - the elderly, children, businesses and neighborhood groups, with a crime prevention piece for each one. "It focuses on four groups that should really touch on every citizen in Bedford," he said. Town Manager Jessie Levine said the program provides an important connection between residents and the department. "In addition to crime prevention, I like the idea that our residents and businesses will get to know the men and women who work for our police department," she said. "I think it helps a community feel smaller when we can interact on a more personal level." For seniors, the Are You OK? program is one of the ways the elderly can have regular contact with the department. A computer-generated call is made to a registered residence, and if the phone is not answered, police pay a visit to the home. "This gives a sense of security not only to the participants, but also to their families," Bryfonski said. Bryfonski said the department also provides seminars on issues that may be important to Bedford's seniors, including scams that target the elderly. "We've done a lot of talks with seniors, they're really well-received and our officers love doing it," Bryfonski said. Children and youth can expect to see Bedford Police officers in their school communities as well. From reading stories to elementary students about strangers to joining older students at after-school sports programs, Bryfonski stressed the importance of kids having positive contact with his staff. "It allows them to interact on a different level," he said, adding that the casual atmosphere lends itself to more openness and engagement on the part of the students, and allows officers to be seen as role models. Police also work with businesses on issues such as shoplifting and robbery, as well as parking lot safety. An area that is seeing growth in terms of community policing is the Neighborhood Watch program, Bryfonski said. "The neighborhood watches have really taken off," he said. "It's been wonderful to see." Neighbors can meet with officers to get tips on safeguarding themselves and their properties. "We want them to 'harden their targets,' " Bryfonski said, by implementing safety measures such as deadbolts, motion sensor lights and securing window air conditioners. "A vast amount of the housing stock in Bedford is secluded," Bryfonski said, with many houses set back far from the road. "People don't always think of ways burglars can get into their houses," he said. With many residents working during the day, Bryfonski said most break-ins occur between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and residents should report anything that appears suspicious to the department immediately. Many people don't make a call when they see something suspicious because they don't want to bother the department, Bryfonski said. "But that is precisely what folks need to call us about," he said. Bryfonski said the department saw a slight spike in calls regarding suspicious activity after a home invasion on Proclamation Court in November that left an anesthesiologist and his wife seriously injured, but when the department rolled out its "See something, say something" campaign in early 2012, those calls tripled. "That's exactly what we want to see," he said. Levine said she appreciates the enthusiasm with which the patrol officers have embraced the neighborhood watch program and their eagerness to develop and embrace it. Bryfonski has also introduced a Meet the Chief program, which will be held the second Tuesday of each month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bedford Safety Complex. "I want folks to feel like they can contact any one of us any time," he said. "It's what we're here for - our first duty is to be public servants." kremillard@newstote.com |
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The former brick and mortar Sweetcakes by Melissa bakery. File
PORTLAND, Ore. -- An administrative law judge proposed Friday that the owners of a suburban Portland bakery pay $135,000 to a lesbian couple who were refused service more than two years ago.
The judge, Alan McCullough, ruled in January that Sweet Cakes by Melissa discriminated against Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer by refusing to bake them a wedding cake. The bakers cited their religious beliefs in a case that has been cited in the national debate over religious freedom and discrimination against gays.
Friday's proposed order, which runs 110 pages, dealt with the award for emotional suffering. The judge awarded $75,000 to Rachel Bowman-Cryer and $60,000 to her wife.
The sides will review the proposal and have the opportunity to file exceptions before Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian issues a final order.
A 2007 Oregon law protects the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in employment, housing and public accommodations. It provides an exemption for religious organizations but does not allow private businesses to discriminate based on sexual orientation.
Avakian's office said in a statement Friday that the facts "clearly demonstrate" that the Kleins unlawfully discriminated against the women.
Bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein closed their Gresham store in 2013 and operate their business from home. One of their attorneys, Anna Harmon, criticized the order, noting that same-sex marriage was not legal in Oregon at the time of the cake request.
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"This is a shocking result which shows the state's relentless campaign to punish Oregonians who live and work according to their faith," Harmon said.
"Aaron and Melissa have worked hard for what they have," she added. "They are living on the fruits of American entrepreneurship. Now the State of Oregon, through an administrative agency, has ordered that all they worked for should be taken away simply because they declined to participate in an event which violated their religious beliefs." |
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"I'm talking, b***h," comedian George Lopez said to a fan during a recent stand-up show after she rudely expressed opposition to one of his jokes.
Things got heated and disrespectful during a George Lopez stand-up comedy show in Phoenix over the weekend.
Apparently, a woman in the audience was offended by one of Lopez's racially-charged jokes, which sparked a confrontation that led to Lopez calling the woman a "b***h," The Huffington Post reports.
Read More
"There are only two rules in the Latino family. Don't marry somebody black, and don't park in front of our house," Lopez said during his set, to which the woman responded by raising her middle finger to him.
Video footage shows Lopez lost his cool as he began shouting, "Sit your f***ing a** down!"
"I'm talking, b***h," Lopez said during his profanity-laced rant. "Sit your f***ing a** down. You paid to see a show. Sit your a** down. You can't take a joke, you're in the wrong motherf***ing place... So, sit your f***ing a** down or get the f**k out of here."
"You got two choices," he continued. "Shut the f**k up, or get the f**k out. I'll tell you what: I'll make the choice for you. Get the f**k out of here. I'll make the choice for you. Bye. Bye. Bye."
Eventually, the woman and her friends vacated their seats and exited the show.
"Four seats just opened up front," Lopez said upon their departure.
While comedians are often known for making explicit and offensive jokes, racial tensions are extremely high right now. It becomes increasingly difficult to find that type of humor funny when the president of your country is literally signing racist executive orders to keep certain ethnicities out.
Lopez clearly struck a nerve with the woman in the audience, which is understandable given the sensitive subject matter; however, his tirade went way too far.
The woman probably should have just walked out of the show once she got offended instead of using a disrespectful gesture to illustrate her disapproval, but Lopez calling her such a derogatory term for women while continuing to heckle and embarrass her was uncalled for.
His lack of composure actually resembles behavior often shown by President Donald Trump , which is ironic considering that the comedian has previously expressed strong opposition our new POTUS , and even turned down an invitation to perform at his inauguration.
A photo posted by George ???? Lopez (@georgelopez) on Jan 2, 2017 at 2:13pm PST |
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Yoriko Gillard in a photo titled Hopes at Steveston. | Photo by Adela Chau
N ikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre is offering KIZUNA: Japanese Culture in English , a program that spans from May to July with varying themes, from language to culture, for everyone to participate in.
L eading the conversation of Japanese culture course at Nikkei's cultural centre, instructor Yoriko Gillard shares what will happen during the workshops and talk about her cultural background. The course starts on May 9 and will focus on creativity. Various activities will be present to encourage participants to discuss cultural aspects of daily life activities in Japan. Everyone is invited, with or without any prior knowledge of Japanese culture or language.
"The May sessions are focused on creativity and I will use many Japanese creative practices, both traditional and contemporary, such as origami , paper making, painting, flower arranging and others to discuss what could be Japanese culture and look at it from different perspectives, environments, experiences, knowledge and heritage," Gillard says.
Gillard is currently a Ph.D student in Language and Literacy Education at UBC and a faculty member at Capilano University and International House Vancouver teaching Japanese language. She is also an artist and poet researching Japanese culture, language pedagogy and human relationships based on a Japanese concept of kizuna , which translates to an affectionate and respectful, reciprocal relationship connecting everyone during times of hardship.
A passion for sharing
G illard has been organizing community events to support earthquake survivors, social activists, educators and cultural professionals in B.C. communities for the past seven years.
"Each time I met with enthusiastic and warm-hearted community leaders and I wanted to learn more about these people who have been working so hard to serve our society outside academy," says Gillard.
On coming to Vancouver to coordinate events, Gillard says that she is grateful to people of B.C. in regards to their help when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.
"I was not directly affected by the disaster but my heart was broken and B.C. communities showed great support for Japan. This moved me and brought up my spirit so I want to share how Japanese people in Japan also feel appreciative about the support they received from the world," she says. "There are many amazing stories that reminded us to respect one another in Japan and showed the world how our kizuna brought us together."
Although Gillard has offered many events including Japanese cultural context to collaborate with Japanese local Taiko groups, various artists, educators, community leaders, and students, this is her first time offering KIZUNA : Japanese Culture in English for anyone who wants to learn about Japanese culture.
"My reason for offering KIZUNA: Japanese Culture is to not only inform my knowledge, but also learn from my attendees," explains Gillard.
Her past experiences in events brings Gillard pleasant memories.
"My experience of organizing events is always a memorable one. I love working with honest and hardworking people," she says.
Interaction at the heart of workshops
G illard often invites artists, poets, community leaders and academic scholars to her events and asks them to let participants interact with them.
"I believe poetry can touch many of our hearts in gentle and sincere ways and this tradition has been an important one in Japan," she says.
Gillard's main philosophy for coordinating events is promoting active interactions with her participants.
"There are so many ways I tried to interact with my participants, as that is my core reason to organize anything in community," says Gillard.
F or more information, please visit www.centre.nikkeiplace.org . |
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Senator Ron Johnson sends a letter to current FBI Director Christopher Wray questioning the surrounding investigative details about how the James Comey (July 5th, 2016) exoneration manuscript was changed and sculpted. ( Full pdf below )
Within the letter Senator Johnson shares the changes that were made to the manuscript, and asks Wray if FBI officials are aware of who made the changes and why. Prior revelations from within an ongoing IG report showed FBI Counterintelligence Agent Peter Strzok participating in both the investigation of Hillary Clinton, and changing some of the manuscript to shape the narrative away from criminal conduct and toward Clinton's favor.
Earlier information showed, via text messages with FBI lawyer Lisa Page , the scope of FBI Agent Strzok's partisan efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election due to his personal political bias. Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe appeared to be coordinating together on the Clinton investigation toward a united outcome. Director James Comey delivered that outcome to the American electorate.
Essentially today Senator Johnson is asking current FBI Director Wray if he is aware of any further FBI officials that would have also participated in this coordinated effort; and what measures Director Wray is taking to look into the 'matter':
WASHINGTON - Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal that then-FBI Director James Comey's draft statement on the Hillary Clinton email probe was edited numerous times before his public announcement, in ways that seemed to water down the bureau's findings considerably.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the FBI on Thursday that shows the multiple edits to Comey's highly scrutinized statement.
In an early draft, Comey said it was "reasonably likely" that "hostile actors" gained access to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account. That was changed later to say the scenario was merely "possible."
Another edit showed language was changed to describe the actions of Clinton and her colleagues as "extremely careless" as opposed to "grossly negligent." This is a key legal distinction.
Johnson, writing about his concerns in a letter Thursday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, said the original "could be read as a finding of criminality in Secretary Clinton's handling of classified material." ( read more )
Recent alarming information surrounding the politicization of the FBI and DOJ:
Release #1 was the Agent Strzok and Attorney Lisa Page story ; and the repercussions from discovering their politically motivated bias in the 2015/2016 Clinton email investigation and 2016/2017 Russian Election investigation.
Release #2 outlined the depth of FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page's specific history in the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton to include the changing of the wording ["grossly negligent" to "extremely careless"] of the probe outcome delivered by FBI Director James Comey.
Release #3 was the information about DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr being in contact with Fusion GPS at the same time as the FISA application was submitted and granted by the FISA court; which authorized surveillance and wiretapping of candidate Donald Trump; that release also attached Bruce Ohr and Agent Strzok directly to the Steele Dossier .
Release #4 was information that Deputy Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was an actual contract employee of Fusion GPS , and was hired by F-GPS specifically to work on opposition research against candidate Donald Trump. Both Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr are attached to the origin of the Christopher Steele Russian Dossier.
Release #5 was the specific communication between FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page. The 10,000 text messages that included evidence of them both meeting with Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to discuss the "insurance policy" against candidate Donald Trump in August of 2016.
August 15, 2016 , FBI Agent Strzok tells FBI Lawyer Lisa Page:
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office that there's no way he gets elected - but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
What do you think the odds are that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will not show up next week in front of the House Judiciary Committee?
If he does indeed show up, that's probably the one congressional hearing this year that will be well worth watching live. |
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Will Oremus finds the prospects of geoengineering " terrifying " and supports "taking some more reasonable steps while we still have the chance." That chance is long past. It is far too late to worry only about reducing carbon emissions. If we care about defending fertile, densely populated low-lying lands and cities, we must turn immediately to geoengineering as well. Whether through solar reflectivity, for example cloud seeding and amplification, or through permanent and stable carbon sequestration (solids, not gases), or through other means, we have to do something . Some geoengineering ideas are indeed terrifying, but others are not. Just like the accelerated Manhattan and Apollo Projects, we will necessarily risk billions in dead ends along the way, but the financial savings and the defense of our lands are well worth it. |
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October 20, 2015 ( UnmaskingChoice ) -- Many people are looking for some encouragement after the election last night of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada. But for those who care about the moral fabric of our country, there's not much to be had. In all likelihood, the next four years are going to bring many setbacks to the pro-life and pro-family movement in Canada, and hopefully the huge numbers of Canadians who didn't show up to the polls, and even larger number of Canadians who have checked out of the culture wars, will realize what happens when we decline to fight for the country we believe in. In short: that country gets remade by those with radically different views. Here are just four things we can expect from Trudeau's tenure:
1. It's hard to make things worse when it comes to abortion in Canada--we haven't had a law restricting abortion since 1988. But Justin Trudeau will certainly try. He's already indicated that he would fund abortion overseas , and push to make sure abortion is more easily accessible in places like Prince Edward Island. Add to that the majority of Members of Parliament being either hardline pro-abortion or being forced to vote that way by Mr. Trudeau, and it won't be an easy four years for the pro-life movement.
2. A Trudeau Administration will usher in the legality of euthanasia--with the Supreme Court of Canada having overturned our laws against it in the Carter Case, the House of Commons, now dominated by Trudeau's Liberals, will have the chance to pass their own laws on euthanasia. The Liberal Party endorsed the decriminalization of euthanasia almost unanimously in 2014, only wanting some oversight of how doctors kill their patients. The motion was sponsored by Liberal delegate Wendy Robins, who has managed to create a version of the facts in which the Belgium euthanasia model-- already being used by perfectly healthy people --is not a dangerous one. For the record, Belgium allows the euthanizing--read "killing"-- of children , and there are already Belgian doctors pushing for the widespread acceptance of "involuntary euthanasia --read "killing of people who don't want to be killed." Canadian hospitals--especially with a rapidly aging population and a very strained and over-crowded healthcare system--are about to get very dangerous for the elderly and the vulnerable.
3. There is a very real danger that the brilliant legislation the Conservative Party passed against prostitution, based on the Nordic model of targeting pimps and johns, may get repealed by Justin Trudeau's new Liberal majority. Legalized prostitution has been a disaster wherever it has become established, with the victimization of women and girls and the flourishing of organized crime and human trafficking always figuring prominently in the equation. In Amsterdam's infamous Red Light District, for example, over 60% of sex workers report getting sexually assaulted, and even the brothels strenuously outfitted to avoid such events place panic buttons where the girls and women can immediately reach them. Amsterdam has been forced to shut down their prostitution district several times because they can't control the organized crime that legal prostitution inevitably attracts. This could very well come to Canada--with a majority, nothing is stopping Justin Trudeau.
Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE !
4. Trudeau will pull Canada out of the ongoing bombing mission against ISIS, as he's been promising for months. It boggles the mind that a leader could look at the blood-soaked orgy of crucifixion, torture, rape, and murder going on in Iraq and conclude that Canadian forces should do nothing to stop them. Trudeau musters more outrage about the meaningless niqab debate than he does about the ISIS butchers. He won't do anything to stop Christians and Yazidis in Iraq from filling body-bags, but he'll support your right to wear one in Canada. And while Trudeau is fully confident in his ability to face Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, that idea literally made the audience at the Munk debates roar with laughter. Now, it seems, the joke is on us.
There are solutions to many of these problems, although they will be much more difficult under a Liberal government. The vast majority of Canadians, at the end of the day, have never been exposed to a pro-life perspective, or shown what the reality of abortion is. The vast majority of Canadians have been slowly-but-surely backing euthanasia for years, without any widespread attempt at educating them on the results of this. The case against legal prostitution is air-tight, but it will have to be made, again and again, by those who fight tirelessly against human trafficking. The Canadian people proved last night that we have an enormous amount of work to do. Today is a good time to start.
And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.--Galatians 6:9
Reprinted with permission from CCBR . |
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SALAMA, Guatemala -- Just before departing for the rural town here where he performed charity eye surgeries over several days, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) caused a stir with an op-ed in Time about the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, calling for the police to be "demilitarized" and saying race skews the application of criminal justice in the U.S.
In an interview, he elaborated on his article and responded to critics on the right whom he said had misconstrued what he wrote.
"If you look at crime statistics, many people look at the crime statistics and say that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately incarcerated with regard to what percentage of time they're in for," Paul said. "With drug statistics, they say blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, but the prisons are three out of four people are black or brown. So it's not on purpose. It's not a purposeful racism. It's an inadvertent racial sort of outcome is what it is."
In the op-ed, Paul wrote that "Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them." Another sentence said, "Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention."
The remarks prompted a pushback from critics who said Paul had attributed racial motives to the police officer who shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown after a confrontation about which details remain murky, even after nearly two weeks of national debate on the incident.
For example, the Missouri GOP's executive director said Paul's comments were "unhelpful," and black conservative radio figure Larry Elder said that Paul's op-ed "lend[s] fuel to this notion that 'cops are out to get us,'" something Elder argued on Laura Ingraham's radio show hurts GOP efforts to reach potential black voters.
Paul said he wasn't accusing the Ferguson police of racism:
No, the point I'm making is that, let's say you're African American and you live in our country and see the statistics and see three out of four people in prison are black or brown, and you see whites are using drugs at the same rate, you'd say: 'Gosh it seems unfair.' Your perception would be that 'I'm unfairly being targeted' when in reality maybe it's poverty, maybe it's the police tend to patrol more in one area than another. What I was saying is that it's impossible for them not to feel [that way], and I think we put the word 'feel' for them to feel like they're not being targeted. But I wasn't saying that about this particular instance-I have no idea about the specifics of this. But you see how if a black community has a lot of their community in jail for drugs or whatever, that when a young black man is shot while unarmed, you could see how this is something that is just a big example of what is going on.
Regardless of the facts of the case, Paul says, "that's the perception."
Paul noted that, while President Obama "has recently started commuting some sentences of people in jail for crack cocaine," several people "who have 15 and 20-year sentences for crack cocaine are still in jail from even before we" changed the system to lessen the disparities between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.
"The disparity used to be 100:1 crack to powder, and five to 10 years ago we changed it to 18:1-they didn't grandfather in the people from before we changed it," Paul said. "There are many instances where a white kid goes to jail using powder cocaine and getting out in six months with a good attorney or never going to jail, and then someone with a similar weight of crack cocaine going to jail for 15 years."
Paul said that when young people go away for such long sentences for nonviolent crimes, they get sucked into the criminal justice system, something that's nearly impossible to break free from. "How do you get a job when you get out? It's almost impossible to get a job," he said. "It all adds together. There are statistics that back up that the criminal justice system and the war on drugs has disproportionately incarcerated Hispanics and African Americans, and that if you are an African American, and you see something happen, you think it's just one more thing piling on top."
"I have no idea about the intent about any of the people involved in this, and that ought to be judged by the people," Paul added. "But I can see why people would be unhappy." |
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This CNN segment went off the rails when the black liberal on the panel demanded that all the white people start yelling as loudly as she was that America was FOUNDED in . . .
As many suspected, Faisal Hussain, the Toronto killer, was looking at ISIS videos and may have supported the evil murderers online. From CBS News: Investigators in Canada have indications that Faisal Hussain . . .
This happened a little while ago. Trump got on Twitter and said he was worried about Russia getting involved in this year's election! He's worried that Russia will be trying to get . . .
Gov. Cuomo in New York is the epitome of what the Democrats have become during the age of Trump. Just today, via Free Beacon, Cuomo was in Puerto Rico saying that Trump . . .
Ivanka Trump has announced that she is shutting down her fashion company, just weeks after Hudson Bay announced it would no longer carry Ivanka's brand: #BREAKING - Ivanka Trump to shut down . . .
The normally activist 9th Circuit just issued a ruling that affirms the 2nd Amendment protections of the right of gun owners to carry guns in public, reversing a ruling by a Hawaii . . .
Great news everyone! Trump has devised the perfect plan to keep his trade war in full swing without farmer taking the brunt of it. He's going to spend billions in taxpayer money . . .
Paul Ryan just gave a pretty blunt assessment over Trump's threat to revoke security clearances from several former Obama administration members, including John Brennan. He claimed that Trump was just trolling the . . .
This morning Trump heralded his high tariffs as the greatest, saying they are forcing countries to negotiate and those who refuses to pay the price: Paul Ryan was asked about this a . . .
Erdogan is now accusing the Israeli government of having the same mindset as Hitler over their new law that officially makes Israel the "nation-sate of the Jewish people" and says that the . . .
A Syrian fighter jet flew into Israeli air space a little while ago and Israel was forced to shoot it down using their patriot missiles: Here's more: A Syrian warplane that Israel . . .
See, now this is one of those cases where you cannot judge a video based on what you see alone. You have to ask what happened BEFORE the video of one side . . .
Lindsey Graham is so sooper happy that the Trump admin is going after the Iranian regime, he can barely hold down his enthusiasm! Watch below: Graham literally calls the Iranian regime "religious . . .
Liberals have been trying to tie the NRA to collusion by pointing to their meeting with gun enthusiast and spying enthusiast Maria Butina. But as Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, . . .
According to a new report, North Korea has begun dismantling a missile testing site that it had agreed to dismantle at Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un: YONHAP - North Korea has . . .
There was a very weird shooting attack in Canadiastan last night, and many thought it might have been an Islamic attack. Well the perpetrator's name has been released: Here's more on the . . .
Today it's being reported that Tony Podesta's name is not on the list of those Mueller is requesting immunity to testify against Manafort: AXIOS - Special counsel Bob Mueller's request that five . . .
Earlier today we told that Rand Paul was going to bring up, in his meeting with Trump, revoking the security clearance of former CIA Chief John Brennan. But from what Press Secretary . . .
Andrew McCarthy gives us his take on the redacted FISA warrant documents that came out over the weekend, saying that the documents confirm that the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier as . . .
Liberals on Twitter are trying to get the social media giant to punish President Trump for his tweet to Iran last night. They claim, according to Free Beacon, that it violates Twitter's . . . |
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President Trump has an amazing knack for pushing leftist buttons. His trolling of the media is epic; they always bite, chasing his squirrels and making genuine donkeys of themselves in the process. The latest example of this involves a "saying 'Merry Christmas' again" tweet and an ad released by America First Policies. ...
Before America was free of the chains of unrepresented, overtaxed tyranny, we had to best the greatest army in the world. In a make or break moment for the Revolutionary War, General George Washington concocted a plan to cross the Delaware River and lead a surprise attack on the Hessians camped around...
New Zealand pop star Lorde gave into pressure from the anti-Israel activists and cancelled a planned concert in Tel Aviv this coming June. While the pop-star characterized herself as an "informed young citizen," the truth is she sided with the bigots as two other news stories that emerged over the weekend...
The government of Guatemala is going to follow the U.S. lead, and move its Embassy to Jerusalem, in recognition that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Ynet News reports: Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales announced in a Facebook post Sunday night his country will be transferring its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerus...
Cray Turmon, a homeless man living in Columbia, SC, rushed to the aid of a police woman who had been shoved to the ground by a suspect. With his assistance, the officer made the arrest, and Turman received a certificate recognizing his "extraordinary actions to preserve life and aid public safety." https://twitter.com/KTVU/status/943907801130090496 WLTX...
There has been a quite a bit of social media debate on Melania Trump's Christmas decor this year. America's glamorous First Lady focused on the magic of the season with her arrangements. "The White House at Christmas traditionally has been a magical place for children," The White House Historical Association explains. Since the...
Jake Tapper of CNN is one of the few mainstream media stars who is willing to occasionally question his industry's assumption and practice journalism as opposed to simply accepting predetermined narratives. On Thursday he continued this tradition by ripping Wednesday's United Nations General Assembly vote rejecting President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem...
One of my favorite things about Twitter is the hashtag games that pop up from time to time. I've very much enjoyed contributing to such classics as #ObamaDogRecipes and #ThankYouHillary, so it's not surprising that the latest #ThingsNotToSayToSanta hashtag caught my eye. I'm not going to include them all, just a sampling...
A woman named Jean Marie Simon was scheduled to take a United Airlines flight, booked into First Class using miles. Then she realized that United had bumped her from the seat, and given it to Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. The woman posted a photo on Twitter and also went public with her...
Of course they didn't mean it to be public, it was terrible. We covered the memo in question in an earlier post. Now the school is back-tracking. The College Fix reports: University of Minnesota says its anti-Christmas memo wasn't supposed to leak to the public The University of Minnesota has limited options in responding...
All of us in the Legal Insurrection family (and it is truly a family) wish you and yours the Happiest of Christmases and a wonderful holiday season. For you: our holiday memories, wishes, reflections, and thoughts. William Jacobson Today is a very special day for me. It's the day I get to cover for...
On Christmas Eve 1944, U.S. troops were in the freezing cold of the Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge, waist-high in snow. We have remembered and told that story on recent Christmas Eves: Christmas Eve in the Ardennes 1944 [2015] Christmas 1944: The Battle of the Bulge [2014] I encourage...
Legal Insurrection has posted some awesome Christmas videos over the years, and this is a great time to revisit them . . . and add a few. Music is such an integral part of the human experience, and our memories are so often connected directly to a particular tune or lyric. A...
Forget UFO's! On Friday night, SpaceX launched a satellite that lit the evening sky over Southern California, dazzling and amazing spectators in California and Arizona. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:27 p.m., was carrying 10 satellites to low-Earth orbit. The satellites will be part of a...
The PC, perpetually-offended crowd has struck again. This time in Pennsylvania where a homeowners' association ordered a family to remove a "Jesus" sign from their own property because someone claimed to be "offended" by its presence. Fox News reports: A Pennsylvania family was ordered by their homeowner's association to take down their Jesus...
It was hailed as the reunion of friends when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came calling on a historic visit to Israel in July--the first ever by a sitting Indian head of government. Media pundits in both Israel and India talked of genuine bond of friendship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
It'll be interesting to see if their efforts are successful. If so, maybe other schools will adopt the policy. Campus Reform reports: UNC cracks down on disruptions with new free speech policy The University of North Carolina Board of Governors passed a systemwide free speech policy Friday in response to demands from lawmakers that... |
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This internship program is a competitive experience designed for those students who are interested in learning more about our nation's legislative process, constituent services and the general day-to-day operations of a congressional office. Interns' tasks vary, but they include conducting tours of the United States Capitol building, drafting and presenting a policy proposal on a legislative topic of their choosing, assisting constituents with their various needs and requests, attending committee hearings, and more.
This summer, I was fortunate to have quite a few outstanding students serve as interns in my offices, and I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you more about these young men and women and their hard work on behalf of the people of Alabama's Second District.
In my Washington, D.C., office, over the summer we enjoyed having several impressive students join our team for a few weeks:
Agnes Armstrong is a graduate of the Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School. She is a junior at Auburn University where she studies Accounting and Nonprofit Studies.
Ford Cleveland is a graduate of the Montgomery Academy. He is a sophomore at the University of Virginia where he studies Chemistry.
Noah McNelley is a graduate of Trinity Presbyterian School. He is a junior at Auburn University where he studies Political Science, Business, and French.
Meredith Moore is a graduate of Trinity Presbyterian School. She is a junior at the University of Alabama where she studies Marketing and English.
Hayden Pruett is a graduate of the Loveless Academic Magnet Program (LAMP). She is a sophomore at the University of Alabama where she studies Political Science and Social Welfare.
Brandon Redman is a graduate of Prattville Christian Academy. He is a senior at Faulkner University where he studies Political Science.
William Chandler is a graduate of the Montgomery Academy. He is a junior at Sewanee where he is pursuing double majors in Politics and English.
Bates Herrick is a graduate of the Montgomery Academy. He is a senior at Sewanee where he studies Economics with double minors in Political Science and Business.
Hunter McEntire is a graduate of Houston Academy in Dothan. He attended Birmingham Southern College where he earned a degree in history with a minor in Political Science.
I was also glad to host some bright young men and women in my district offices over the summer:
Allyssa Morgan, a native of Opp, worked in my Andalusia district office. She received an Associate's degree from Lurleen B. Wallace Community College and is now attending Troy University.
Kimberlee Perry served as an intern in my Dothan district office. She graduated from New Brockton High School earlier this year, and she now attends George Wallace Community College.
Tyrese Lane, Savannah Williamson, and Spencer Andreades all held internships in my Montgomery district office. Tyrese, a Prattville native, is a graduate of Marbury High School and is currently a student at Marion Military Institute. Savannah, from Troy, is a graduate of Pike Liberal Arts and currently attends Auburn University. Spencer is a graduate of the Montgomery Academy and now attends the University of Alabama.
These students worked very hard for our district, and I really appreciate their dedication and eagerness to serve their communities. I'm confident they will be successful in whatever paths they pursue.
You can find out more about my internship program and the application process on my website . If you know a college-aged student who might be interested in being part of the legislative process for the summer, I hope you will pass this information along to them. I truly believe a congressional internship is a valuable way to gain firsthand exposure to the innerworkings of our nation's government.
U.S. Rep. Martha Roby is a Republican from Montgomery. |
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Since news broke Monday that the Obama Administration's National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the "unmasking" of NSA intercepts of Trump associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster report. CNN Tonight's Don Lemon [...]
Former President Barack Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce "detailed spreadsheets" of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney [...]
NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I. (AP) -- Should U.S. high school students know at least as much about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist papers as immigrants passing an American citizenship test? In a [...]
President Xi Jinping will limit his US visit next month to Palm Beach, Florida, and local US media are reporting that he won't stay at Mar-a-Lago, US President Donald Trump's exclusive Palm Beach residence. A [...]
CDs? What are they? Digital downloads? So 2010. For the first time ever, streaming music has eclipsed both of those ways to get music. Streaming from Spotify, Apple, Pandora, even Tidal now accounts for 51% [...]
April 2, 2017 vivaliberty 0
Three illegal alien MS-13 gang members are in a Virginia jail, charged with the murder of a teenager in Virginia. Prosecutors charged the three Salvadoran men that belong to the notoriously violent MS-13 street gang with [...]
President Trump's new budget proposal creates a new cabinet level agency with billions in initial funding for gun training, individual gun purchase grants, and support for groups like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of [...]
April 2, 2017 vivaliberty 0
A Friday breaking Fox News report on surveillance of President Trump's team that began before he became the Republican presidential nominee claimed a very senior intelligence official was responsible--as well as for the unmasking of the [...]
April 2, 2017 vivaliberty 0
Moments after North Carolina's thrilling 77-76 win over Oregon, the Tar Heels opened as 2-point favorites over Gonzaga in Monday's national championship game. The Westgate LV SuperBook, BookMaker.eu and BetOnline.ag all opened the final at [...]
April 1, 2017 vivaliberty 0
NBC, like all dishonest mainstream media outlets, are pushing fake news, designed to showcase and drive home their liberal narrative. The TRUTH is, America wants Gorsuch. Are you listening, Democrats? From News Busters Providing cover for [...] |
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Who is she to say whether a serially disrespectful, extramarital sexter who repeatedly lied to voters and whose campaign staff reflects his own deep respect for women by referring to its former female employees as "c*nt," "slutbag," "tw*ts" should or should not get out of the race for mayor of the country's biggest city, representing the party of which she's head?
She's not here to make judgments:
It's not like she'd make sweeping judgments about her opponents based on any figure using derogatory language about women, right? She did make a judgment call on Bob Filner, however, who she thinks should resign. Wasserman Schultz served alongside Filner for several years in the U.S. House. One wonders if it might be that time in his professional circle that allows her to make a more definitive call on his status. A follow-up on the subject would have been nice, but kudos to this MSNBC anchor for even bringing up Weiner and Filner:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy
And, while I'm giving credit where it's due, liberal women's group Ultraviolet went after both Weiner and his staff Wednesday:
A feminist group is taking a stand following mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner's spokeswoman's angry tirade against a former intern.
"The circus that is the Weiner campaign has crossed the final line: Sexist name-calling and slut shaming is outrageous, unacceptable, and has no place in any campaign," UltraViolet co-founder Nita Chaudhary said in a statement Wednesday.
Tuesday, Weiner spokeswoman Barbara Morgan offered a profanity-laced interview with Talking Points Memo about Olivia Nuzzi, a former campaign intern who wrote an unflattering article about the Weiner campaign for the New York Daily News, in which she claimed people only joined the campaign to curry favor with his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton...
"Barbara Morgan should be fired immediately. Adding fuel to the flames, the disturbing revelations that Anthony Weiner thinks it's somehow hilarious to refer to female interns as 'Monica' leads us to believe that his days in therapy are far from over," Chaudry said. "New York can do better than this, and quite frankly women everywhere deserve better than this."
Enjoy the always adorable Kristen Chenoweth's adaptation of "Popular" from "Wicked" from Jay Leno last night. Click to watch. "They'll think you've become a monk even though they've seen your junk!" |
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On July 20, 2005 Canada legalized same-sex marriage. At the time, it was one of only four countries in the world to do so. Already legalized in eight out of the ten provinces and one of the three territories by 2003, same-sex marriage had been a long time coming.
Most of the provincial legalization were due to high level court cases, arguing that to deny queer couples marriage would be discrimination in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many of the legal benefits that accompany marriage had applied to queer couples since 1999 for similar reasons.
Same-sex marriage was a huge victory for queer activists though some activists opposed marriage on the principle that it would convert queer people to a more heteronormative lifestyle.
Even now that it's in effect, the legislation has massive gaps , creating controversy over whether queer couples who come to Canada to marry can legally divorce . |
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AMY GOODMAN : We are joined now in our studio by sportswriter David Zirin. His new book is called What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . We welcome you to Democracy Now!
DAVID ZIRIN : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : Let's talk about that history of Olympics past.
DAVID ZIRIN : Well, the starting point is understanding that sports is a trillion dollar business worldwide, and the Olympics is like the ultimate prize. I mean, for the people who run a city, when they make their Olympic bids, getting the Olympics is like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa all rolled up into one for these guys. And when London got the Olympics for 2012, when they won that bid in a huge surprise over Paris, they were celebrating in the streets of London, particularly in the board rooms and the banks.
Also people in London wept when that occurred, because people in London had already started organizing about what they understand the Olympics coming to mean. Now, part of the reason why people have this idea about what it means for the Olympics to come to a given town is because of the history that does exist. I mean, when the Olympics come to an area, it may mean a corporate feeding frenzy, but what it also means is it means, as you put it, the utter emiseration of civil liberties, as well as attacks on working people and the poor. And history really does prove this out.
I mean, I'll just give some of the lowlights here. In 1936, this was probably one of the most infamous ones, when the Olympics were awarded to Berlin, even though it was known at the time the extent of Hitler's crimes and the crimes of the Nazis, there was a cleansing of the streets of Berlin, as it was put, to make the city look hospitable, as if Germany had emerged from the Depression. And that, of course, meant locking up dissidents, sending people to concentration camps. In 1968 in Mexico City there was the infamous massacre of 500 workers and students by Mexican security forces as they attempted to make their city, quote/unquote, "hospitable" for an international audience.
In 1984 in this country -- it's not just other countries by any stretch of the imagination -- in 1984 there were the infamous gang sweeps in Los Angeles, which involved people in the L.A. City Council reviving the 1916 Anti-Syndicalism Act, which was used in 1916 to go after the Industrial Workers of the World, which was a radical union at the time. And part of what this law said was that it outlawed certain hand signals and modes of dress that sort of denoted somebody as being in the I.W.W., and they just applied that to young black men in L.A. So if you were wearing certain colors or gave people a certain kind of high five, it was grounds to arrest people in 1984 in L.A. And those gang sweeps were immortalized in the NWA video "Straight Outta Compton," which was like a reenactment of the '84 gang sweeps, which people, you know, should check out. It's interesting.
In 1996 in Atlanta, keep it in this country. You had, according to the ACLU , 10,000 black homeless men arrested without cause, and you had a scandalous situation that they swept under the rug where police were found to fill out arrest slips in advance of arresting people, of, you know, black male -- you know, they had those filled out going into the streets to make Atlanta, you know, ironically this image of the new South that President Clinton attempted to project at the 1996 Olympics.
But in 2004 in Athens, I think we all saw it go to another level. Athens was the first post-9/11 Olympics. And what we saw there was something that you even hadn't seen in years past, and that was the presence of 50,000 paramilitary forces, not from Greece, but from the United States, Great Britain and Israel. And their presence was actually in violation of the Greek constitution, but it was welcomed by the Greek prime minister at the time because of that pressure to make Greece, quote/unquote, "hospitable" for an international audience. And that meant the mass arrest of thousands of ordinary people in Greece.
And so I think there is an awareness about what the Olympics bring, not to mention about the fact that they tend to suck municipalities dry of funds, which is why, interestingly, New York City, as you may know, was in the finals to get the Olympics. And something that ESPN radio reported with surprise and shock was that ESPN was being flooded with emails by people from New York, New Jersey area saying, "Please don't send the Olympics here. We don't want them in New York City. We don't want this stadium." And ESPN , you know, which is, of course, about promoting all things sports -- you know, working people be damned -- was absolutely flummoxed by this, like, 'Wow! People don't want the Olympics in New York City.' And they were just scratching their heads. But if they looked at history, they would see why.
AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to David Zirin. He's a sportswriter, and his book is called What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States Why the title?
DAVID ZIRIN : What's My Name, Fool? , first to be very clear, it's not a tribute to Mr. T. That was asked to me at one book reading. That would be "Pity the Fool." No, What's My Name, Fool? , it's a reference to really what the heart of the book is about. The book is about the intersection of radical politics and pro sports, about times when movements off the field found expression on the playing field, and to me the high point of that history was the time when the heavyweight champion of the world had one foot in the Black Freedom struggle and one foot in anti-war movement. And, of course, I'm talking about Muhammad Ali.
Now, when Ali changed his name, first from Cassius Clay and then to Cassius X, which a lot of people don't know -- he was shortly known as Cassius X -- and then to Muhammad Ali, when he did this, there was just no word for the firestorm that this caused, because, you know, the heavyweight champion of the world, that's supposed to be a symbol of all that's Americana, a symbol of, you know, masculinity and standing for the flag, and you had the heavyweight champion of the world join the organization of Malcolm X, join an organization in the Nation of Islam that believed in self-defense against racist attacks.
And I was -- you know, I'm trying to relay to an audience today about the firestorm that this caused, and the only thing I could think of is you have to imagine if, say, Jenna Bush joined the Iraqi resistance. I mean, that would be the only way that you could make a comparison to when Ali joined the Nation of Islam and forced people to confront that name change.
Now, overnight, whether you called the champion Clay or Ali, it said everything about you in the 1960s. It said what side you were on in the Black Freedom struggle, what side you were on in the Free Speech fights on college campuses, soon the war in Vietnam. And therefore, Ali's fights, they had this incredible morality plays, they became. You know, if the champion won, it wasn't just about an individual winning a sporting event, it was about the confidence of a new and rising movement in a way that people took very personally and very seriously.
Now, you go to the title, What's My Name, Fool?" , goes to when this name change controversy really was at its apex, and that's in November 1965, when Ali fought a former two-time champion named Floyd Patterson. And in the lead up to the fight, this is what Patterson said. He said, "I am fighting Clay, and, yes, his name is Clay," as a crusade to return the title to America and take it from the Black Muslims.
Now, Ali's response to this was really interesting, because he had no response. This is one of the most loquacious athletes ever. You know, the press called him the "Louisville Lip" and "Gaseous Cassius," because he liked to talk so much. But he didn't say anything in the lead up to the fight and actually in the fight itself he let his fighting do the talking. Observers say he could have knocked out Patterson in one round, but actually, he drew it out over nine rounds. Sportswriter Robert Lipsite described it as watching someone pick the wings off a butterfly. And as Ali peppered Patterson with jabs, what he said, and he said it in a loud clear voice so all of press row could hear, he said, "Come on, America, come on, white America, say my name. What's my name, fool?" And that's where I got the title of the book. And that's just the title. So, we got a lot in this book.
AMY GOODMAN : This is an excerpt of the remarkable film When We Were Kings , the documentary about Muhammad Ali's 1974 championship bout with George Foreman in Kinshasa that came to be known as "the Rumble in the Jungle."
MUHAMMAD ALI : Yeah, I'm in Africa. Yeah, Africa is my home. Damn America and what America thinks. Yeah, I live in America, but Africa is the home of the black man, and I was a slave 400 years ago, and I'm going back home to fight among my brothers.
AMY GOODMAN : That, a clip from When We Were Kings , Muhammad Ali. You talk about Muhammad Ali being at that time extremely political, outspoken, yet today young people might not know that at all, though Muhammad Ali is the most famous name in the world.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes, I mean, today, Muhammad Ali's image is used to sell everything from Sprite to Microsoft with the benefit of computer C.G.I. And there's no question that what's happened to Muhammad Ali, you know, is not dissimilar to what's happened to people like Malcolm X, who is now on a postage stamp, or Martin Luther King, whose image you can now get on a commemorative cup when you go into McDonald's on his birthday, in that Muhammad Ali's political teeth have largely been extracted.
And that's something that, with this book, I want to hope to return to the arena, is like the context of Ali's politics, because the tradition of Ali and that tradition of resistance is something that's, I think, very important for people to know. I mean, Ali was just named the number two most important athlete in history in ESPN's Top 100 Athletes of All Time. But when you saw their tribute to him, I mean, you would have left wondering, "Okay, well, what's so special about this guy?" And that's why it's so important to return to the arena, as we understand sports, that dynamic relationship between struggles on the streets, how it affected athletes, but then also how athletes then, in turn, affected those struggles.
AMY GOODMAN : Let's go back to another clip of When We Were Kings . Muhammad Ali was known as an anti-war symbol to some. This is a news clip from that film.
NEWS CLIP Cassius Clay, at a federal court in Houston, is found guilty of violating the U.S. Selective Service laws by refusing to be inducted. He is sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000.
AMY GOODMAN : What happened to Muhammad Ali then?
DAVID ZIRIN : Well, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title, and he was forced to report to a draft board in El Paso, Texas. Now, this was very interesting, because, you know, Ali was offered the same deal that many past heavyweight champions had been offered, which was, you know, that he could just -- you know, it's not like he was going to be sent to, you know, to Saigon or anything. He could have worn red, white, and blue trunks, boxed at some U.S.O. shows and kept the title.
But instead, what Ali said was -- he was quite clear -- he said, "The enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my people, my religion, or myself by fighting against other people" -- speaking about the National Liberation Front in Vietnam -- "who are fighting for their own freedom, justice and liberty." And so he came out very -- there was no mistaking where he stood on this.
So they stripped him of his title for his anti-war views, and he was sent down to the draft office there. And as he went down there, it wasn't known exactly what Ali was going to do when he got there, because he was facing a prison sentence of five years, you know, in a federal prison. So there was actually a rally outside the El Paso area that was organized by H. Rap Brown and the students at Texas Western, now Texas El Paso. And they were out there, a couple hundred of them, with a huge banner, and what it said was "Draft Beer, Not Ali." And when Ali went in there and when they called his name to take the step forward, I don't -- I mean, I don't know if this made a difference, but they made quite a mistake when they called his name in that they called for Cassius Clay to take a step forward, and he absolutely refused. Then they asked for Muhammad Ali to take a step forward, and he absolutely refused.
And there's a tremendous quote by a writer named Gerald Early who said that "when Ali refused to take that step forward, I felt more than pride in him, I felt as if my honor as a young black boy had been defended. He was the dragon slayer, and I went home into my room that night and I cried. I cried for myself and I cried for our black possibilities." I mean, that's just the power that that moment had for people was incalculable, but not something that's talked about when ESPN Classic does a look at Muhammad Ali.
AMY GOODMAN : Wasn't there a tradition of Black Muslim resistance to war, Elijah Muhammad being a war resister in World War II?
DAVID ZIRIN : Absolutely. I mean, the thing about Ali, though, was that nexus of him also being the heavyweight champion of the world. I mean, the tradition of athletes going to war is its own book in and of itself. And while there are some famous athletes -- you know, Ted Williams comes to mind -- who actually flew missions in the theater of war, more often than not, it was a ceremonial role. It was something that you did before the cameras to be on the newsreels before, you know, the film started. It was a way for you to show, you know, your patriotic duty or what not. And Ali just gave the stiff-arm to all of that stuff. He wanted no part of it. And there is this great clip of him in another documentary where he's just walking down the hall, and he's saying like 'I will not compromise myself for the white man's money,' and he's screaming this at the camera. And that's really where Ali stood.
And it's worth saying that now it's like we talk about this and, you know, obviously I'm greatly taken with his political stance in the 1960s, but at the time he was an absolutely reviled figure in the mainstream press. I mean, he was torn apart. He was popular on the left and on college campuses, in the black community, but in terms of, like, the media culture at the time -- sometimes we speak about the media today as if it's this corporate monolith, as if in the past it was somehow this arena of debate and discussion. But back then, oh, my goodness, there was no Democracy Now! back then. You know, he was absolutely destroyed.
And if I could, I would like to read a brief section of what sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, who was by far the most famous sportswriter of the era, what he wrote about Ali. And you gotta think that Jimmy Cannon is like Mike Lupica on steroids. I mean, he was huge. This is what he wrote about Ali. He wrote "Clay" -- of course, he calls him Clay -- "Clay fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles and Batman" -- I don't understand the Batman part -- "and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms and the revolt of students who get a check from dad and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered cult of the bored young." I mean, my goodness, if I read that you would think the Unabomber wrote that. It's this insane rant. But this was the most famous sportswriter in the United States, basically laying it down that Muhammad Ali was somehow less than a human being because he stood up to this war.
AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to David Zirin. What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States is the title of his book. When we come back, I want to ask you about Jackie Robinson, about the Williams sisters. I also want to ask you about Pat Tillman. I want to talk also about resistance today of sports athletes. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We're talking to Dave Zirin, sportswriter, author of What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . Pat Tillman?
DAVID ZIRIN : Pat Tillman. Pat Tillman was a man who was an overachiever as a football player. He went out of college undrafted. He went on to become an all-pro playing for the Arizona Cardinals. And as is well known, he left after 9/11, turned down a multimillion dollar contract to join the army rangers with his brother to fight in Afghanistan and eventually in Iraq, although at the time he thought he was just fighting in Afghanistan.
Now, the Tillman story is a tragic one for many reasons, and I would like to go through it a little bit. First and foremost, Pat Tillman was asked hundreds, thousands of times, according to his parents, to be a recruiter for the army, to go on commercials about join the army, army of one, Pat Tillman. They wanted to put his name on posters everywhere. And Tillman refused. Why did Tillman refuse? We don't know, because, I mean, he was very iconoclastic. He was known to have hair down to his behind. He did cliff diving, all kinds of stuff. He never came out and said, 'I'm going to go over there and occupy and kill,' and all this stuff. He kept his reasons to himself about why he was doing what he was doing. And that actually frustrated people in the Justice Department, in the Pentagon. They wanted to use this guy, and they weren't able to do it. And there are quotes about that, about their sort of frustration about that.
Pat Tillman, of course, died. He died in Afghanistan. He was shot and killed. At the time we were told that he died in the process of attempting to find bin Laden and to take a hill in the caves of Afghanistan. Now, there is a tragic element to this, of course. When Tillman died there was a nationally televised funeral that John McCain spoke at, as well as other politicians from Arizona. George W. Bush during the election campaign actually addressed the fans at the Arizona Cardinals game through the jumbotron to tell them about the heroism of Pat Tillman in attempting to take this hill.
There was only one problem with this scenario, and that's that it was a total, absolute lie. What happened to Pat Tillman was that he was killed by his own troops. I mean, you read reports of the incident. I mean, it's almost like a metaphor for the whole war. It is just so -- it's insane. I mean, their Humvee broke down. A section of them broke off to circle around and look for, you know, for help or what not, and they ended up circling around and firing at each other, and Pat Tillman died.
Now, what is so disgusting about this is that the Pentagon knew immediately that this had occurred. But they kept that information secret not only from the media, not only from Pat Tillman's parents, but also from his brother who was in the same battalion as him and was somewhere else at that time. They even kept the information from him. And, I mean, it's just -- it boggles the mind.
Now, what's important about this to say is that there is a lot of -- I mean, these are not conspiracy theories, but Pat Tillman's death happened at the same time that the photos around Abu Ghraib were released. And it's definitely thought now by Pat Tillman's parents that the reason why they hid the information was because they needed a P.R. boost in the wake of Abu Ghraib. And Pat and Mary Tillman -- Pat, Sr., his father -- have come out since then strongly and publicly against the Bush administration and against the lies that led, you know, to the lying about their son. They rightly are calling this an obscenity. They were used as props at their own son's funeral. And so it's like, what did Pat Tillman die for? He died for P.R. for this war. And that, I mean, I can't imagine being Pat or Mary Tillman. But they very private people, and they're coming forward and speaking out. And to that they deserve all of our support in that process.
AMY GOODMAN : David Zirin, I wanted to end by asking you about Jackie Robinson, another very well-known sports figure.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes. I would like to read a quote about Jackie Robinson, if I could, by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jackie Robinson was a political person. First of all, let's go with myth and reality about Jackie Robinson very briefly. Jackie Robinson the myth was that he was sort of like the quiet person who suffered in silence. Jackie Robinson once said, 'People see me as sort of the suffering freak black saint.' You know, the person who never talks, has nothing to say, but in reality Jackie Robinson was a very political person. He had a sports column in the New York Post , which was then a liberal publication. He wrote about issues like civil rights a great deal.
His politics were very complicated. He was a Republican, but that was because his family was chased out of Georgia by the Democrat Dixiecrats at a young age, and in his mind his whole life he saw the Democrats as being connected with segregation and Dixie.
But just -- when I'll read this quote -- like, a lot of people criticize Robinson for being political. And this is Dr. Martin Luther King in defense of him. He said, "Jackie Robinson has the right to be political, because back in the days when integration wasn't fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim that walks in the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides." And I think that nails it very well.
Jackie Robinson and this Brooklyn Dodgers team -- and I write about this in the book -- were in some respects a stalking horse for the whole civil rights movement. In the late 40s and early 50s, before Brown v. Board of Ed. , before Montgomery, they're going around and playing games in stadiums that are segregated throughout the South. You know, the Klan is threatening, you know, that they're gonna shoot all of the players if Jackie Robinson takes the field. And the players largely who were from the South stood with Jackie Robinson in this process.
And in the book, I interview a person who was at a lot of these games who is still alive, a sportswriter named Lester "Red" Rodney. And Lester Rodney, he has the most amazing stories about fans, white fans in the South starting to cheer for Robinson at the end of games, and this idea of seeing black and white play together on the field. That's why Roy Campanella once said, he said, "Hey, Brown v. Board of Ed. " -- Roy Campanella was the African American catcher of the Brooklyn Dodgers -- Roy Campanella said, Brown v. Board of Ed. gets all the credit, but we were doing Brown v. Board of Ed. on the playing field before the Supreme Court ever heard about it." You know, and that's what he said, and someone laughed, and he said, "What, you think I'm joking?"
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about Jackie Robinson's history. You talk about how he was a Republican, that he thought the Democrats represented segregation. What it meant for him to be a player, how he was seen, the McCarthy era, and then his relationship with Nixon and with Martin Luther King.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes. Well, it's complicated, definitely. I mean, Jackie Robinson was somebody who was never shy about expressing his political views. He was deeply political, deeply articulate. But he also was somebody who was a bit of a political cipher. He bounced around a lot between different views and opinions.
In the late 1940s during McCarthyism, Jackie Robinson had been so successful in integrating Major League Baseball that he was listed as the number two respected American in the United States behind Harry Truman in the late 1940s, despite the fact that he received thousands of death threats throughout the season.
Now, in 1949 Robinson was asked to actually speak at the House of Un-American Activities Committee in condemnation of the great activist, singer, actor and actually former great athlete, Paul Robeson. And it was very -- Robeson, just before Robinson came out there, had famously just taken the heads off of the House of the Un-American Activities Committee, I mean, the most blistering speech, where they basically told Robeson to go back to Russia, and Robeson said, you know, 'my family built this country from the bottom up, and no fascist-minded individuals like you are going to tell me what I can or can't do.' And this was really the first time that HUAC was punctured, you know, because before that there was a lot of, you know, 'I take the Fifth,' and people were remaining mum in the face of their intimidation and their might.
So they called up Branch Ricky, who was a staunch anti-communist. Branch Ricky was the general manager and part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and they said 'We need Robinson in here to condemn Robeson.' And Robinson -- Ricky actually wasn't wild about doing it. The NAACP offered to defend Robinson to say, 'You don't have to go in there and speak against Robeson.' But it has to be said that Robinson wanted to do it.
And once again, you get into a lot of conflicting views about why. And, I mean, the fact that Robinson did it, I would say, is unforgivable. It's a reason why a lot of activists in the 1960s, like Malcolm X, they pretty much tore Robinson up. Like Malcolm X once said, he said, "Cassius Clay" -- this was before the name change -- Malcolm X said, "Cassius Clay is our hero. He's the first real black sports hero. Jackie Robinson is a white man's hero." And he said that because of the Robeson incident.
But what Robinson did, if you read the whole transcript, I mean, he came there and he -- I mean, the speech is incredible, like he spoke out against HUAC , too. He basically said, 'Don't tell me about communism, don't tell me about any of this stuff, because communism isn't the reason that dogs are being sicked on us in the South. Communism isn't what's burning black churches.' You know, so he has this speech where basically he lays out to HUAC that racism is about America, not about agitators stirring people up. But then, at the same time, he did take a shot at Robeson, saying that -- that his people -- that he -- basically speaking for all African Americans said, are not going to give up our dreams of equality, as he put it, for a siren song sung in bass. And that's a famous quote, you know, because Paul Robeson had that famous basso profundo voice.
And, I mean, the tragedy of that was that the HUAC people and the media, as well, did not, could not care less about Robinson's eloquence about racism. They could not care less. What they did was they took the slap at Robeson and ran with it, and that was the headline in the papers the next day: "Robinson smacks down Robeson" was basically the headline. And that led to Robeson's -- it was a factor in Robeson's political isolation, and it's worth saying that Robeson was approached for a response to Robinson, and he refused to do it. And he said, 'I refuse to be part of this kind of internecine feud with Jackie Robinson.'
AMY GOODMAN : And yet, Robinson wrote in his memoir that he was sorry he spoke out.
DAVID ZIRIN : Deeply, deeply sorry. His greatest regret
AMY GOODMAN : When Martin Luther King went to jail?
DAVID ZIRIN : Ooh, when Martin Luther King went to jail --
AMY GOODMAN : Jackie Robinson's response?
DAVID ZIRIN : Yeah, Jackie Robinson came out strongly against it. I mean, Jackie Robinson had a very interesting relationship with Martin Luther King, that's very interesting, because Jackie Robinson, you read his writings on the time, he is always in support of Martin Luther King, always in support of everything King does, except on two questions that are very interesting. One question where he differs with Martin Luther King is on the question of violence and nonviolence. I mean, after one of the church burnings where four young African American girls were killed, Jackie Robinson wrote a column once again in the New York Post . And you always have to shake your head when you think of this stuff actually in the New York Post , because of the rag that it is today. But Robinson wrote that -- he said, "Martin Luther King has officially lost me due to his credo of nonviolence," he said, "because we cannot respond nonviolently when our children are being killed." The other instance where they differed -- and this is to me very fascinating -- is, you know, Jackie Robinson was a veteran, so when Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the war in Vietnam, Jackie Robinson wrote that it was a tragic mistake on behalf of King. And King actually called him up on the phone, and they had like a two-hour conversation on the phone. And when it was done, what Robinson said was he said 'Look, I may not agree with Dr. King on this question, but I will never speak out against him again on this issue.'
AMY GOODMAN : And he appealed to Nixon and asked him to -- we only have 30 seconds -- but asked him to release Martin Luther King.
DAVID ZIRIN : Yes, he did. Yes, he did. I mean, the Nixon relationship is a complicated one. At the end of his life Jackie Robinson was not a Nixon fan, as when he saw Nixon pursue the Southern strategy in 1968. But the important thing to remember about Jackie Robinson -- I'll end with this point -- is not to look at him for sort of a political lead, because he's all over the place politically. The point is that he represents part of a very real tradition of athletes having more than just bodies and brawn and sweat, but them having minds, as well. Athletes are part of our world. They have a relationship with our world, and it is important for us to engage with them, as we would engage with anybody, as people with thoughts, ideas, dreams and maybe even fighters alongside with us in the move towards a more just society.
AMY GOODMAN : David Zirin, I want to thank you for being with us. This is just part one of our conversation What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States . |
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"A nimal rights" is often conflated "animal welfare." But they are not the same--not even close.
Animal welfare accepts that we have the right to own and benefit from the use of animals. At the same time, it posits a positive duty upon us to conduct animal husbandry properly, meeting standards of care that have improved as we have learned more about the nature and capacities of animals. Animal welfare encompasses important issues, such as establishing legal standards for using animals in research, defining the parameters of what constitutes proper and improper care for animals, and establishing shelters for abandoned animals. In short, animal welfare does not ascribe "rights" to animals, but instead places on us--as an aspect of human exceptionalism--moral and legal duties to engage in proper husbandry practices.
In contrast, "animal rights" is an ideology that explicitly equates the moral value of animals with that of human beings. In animal-rights ideology, the ability to suffer , sometimes called "painience," is the attribute that accords any being--human or animal--value. Since human beings feel pain and cattle feel pain, the theory holds, we are equals; our differences are as insignificant as racial distinctions. Thus, in rightist ideology, cattle ranching is morally equivalent to slavery, which explains this bald assertion of PETA's odious " Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign ": "The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."
The ultimate goal of animal rights is not to improve our treatment of animals, but to end all animal domestication . PETA tends to obfuscate the pet issue because "animal liberation" is understood to be a multi-generational project and targeting pet ownership would compromise the organization's ability to get donations from loving dog and cat owners who think they believe in animal rights.
But this ultimate goal of animal rights is easy to see, if you know where to look. Gary Francione, a Rutgers University Law School professor, is one of the most vigorous and well-known animal-rights advocates in the world. He may also be the most candid. Francione leads the "abolitionist" movement --yes, the allusion to the anti-slavery movement is intentional--which holds that all "sentient" beings possess the fundamental "right not to be property."
This includes our beloved cats, dogs, birds, and other pets. Francione states this clearly--even though he adopts shelter dogs. (This isn't hypocritical: Francione wants no more dogs brought into the world but believes we have a duty to care for the ones already here, which is why he considers them "nonhuman refugees.")
Francione's most recent advocacy article tackles the "pet question" head-on. Typical of animal rightists, Francione assumes a misanthropic moral equivalence between human slavery and animal husbandry: Think about this matter in the human context. We are all generally agreed that all humans, irrespective of their particular characteristics, have the fundamental, pre-legal right not to be treated as chattel property. We all reject human chattel slavery. That is not to say that it doesn't still exist. It does. But no one defends it. The reason we reject chattel slavery is because a human who is a chattel slave is no longer treated as a person, by which we mean that the slave is no longer a being who matters morally. ... The same problem exists where non-humans are concerned. If animals are property, they can have no inherent or intrinsic value. They have only extrinsic or external value. They are things that we value. They have no rights; we have rights, as property owners, to value them . And we might choose to value them at zero.
No. Slavery is evil because it involves treating one's inherent equals --that is, other human beings--as objects. All human beings are subjects. That is not the case with animals, which (not who), contrary to Francione, are not "persons." Since animals are not our equals, owning an animal does not make one the moral equivalent of Simon Legree.
Usually, animal rightists avoid focusing on the "end all pets" part of their agenda, sticking with advocacy around making it more difficult to raise food animals, ruining the fur industry, or impeding medical research. Not Francione: With respect to domesticated animals, that means that we stop bringing them into existence altogether. We have a moral obligation to care for those right-holders we have here presently. But we have an obligation not to bring any more into existence. And this includes dogs, cats and other non-humans who serve as our "companions." ... We love our dogs, but recognize that, if the world were more just and fair, there would be no pets at all.
So, there you have it. Beneath the emotionalism and appeals to our empathy, animal rights is a hard ideology with a well-defined goal. It seeks an end to the ownership of animals, including pets. Remember that the next time you are tempted to support an animal-rights organization when you actually favor--as I do--the animal-welfare paradigm.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism and author of A Rat, is a Pig, is a Dog, is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. His latest book is Culture of Death: The Age of "Do Harm" Medicine.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter . |
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The Washington Post has a long article on President Obama's attitude toward military action. This issue is especially important because "the president faces mounting pressure to send more troops to Iraq to help in the battle against Islamic State extremists," as reporter Greg Jaffe puts it. The administration officials that Jaffe spoke to have an interesting explanation for the president's reluctance to intervene further in Iraq. It's all about the troops.
Jaffe's piece begins with a dramatic tale from 2012 regarding the president's meeting with a mortuary affairs team in Afghanistan, an experience, we are told, that was part of his growing reluctance to sacrifice American lives abroad:
Air Force One, its windows blacked out to guard against attack, touched down in Afghanistan well after dark.
President Obama's war-zone visits are usually short and ceremonial. In his six hours on the ground, he appeared alongside Afghanistan's leader, pinned Purple Hearts on the wounded and spoke to a hangar full of U.S. troops.
But Obama also made time for something else, something personal. Just after 2 a.m., the president slipped away for a meeting that he had deliberately kept off his public schedule.
In a small, private room, 15 mortuary affairs soldiers waited to greet him. These were the soldiers who prepared the bodies of troops killed in battle for their trip home. To blunt the overpowering stench of death, they wore masks when they worked, burned their uniforms regularly and dabbed Vicks VapoRub under their noses.
Now that they were about to meet Obama, members of a unit used to working in the isolation of war's grim aftermath all had the same question: Of all the soldiers in Afghanistan, why had the president asked to see them?
The inescapable Ben Rhodes, the White House's deputy national security adviser (and the only current administration official to speak on the record for the article) notes, "We believe it is a national security objective not to be losing service members in wars." In addition to being bad in and of themselves, he goes on, casualties provoke the American people into wanting more military action:
Obama set the limits on American military involvement [against the Islamic State] to prevent rash or unnecessary escalations that might result from U.S. casualties, said White House officials. "Whenever an American is harmed, it creates pressures to do something in response," Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said. "You saw that -- even though they were not service members -- with the hostages that were killed by [the Islamic State]."
The White House pushes the narrative in this piece that a thoughtful Obama--who once "asked his speechwriters pull together a packet of writings about war by people he admired: King, Gandhi, Churchill, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr"--has been sufficiently moved by his exposure to America's war dead as to now hesitate to send troops into battle. Thus, his reluctance to do much against the Islamic State, let alone to provoke Iran or Russia.
Whatever the truth of this, the troops don't seem to be returning the affection: a recent poll showed that Obama commands a truly miserable 15% approval rating among servicemen. Why?
Perhaps the troops don't appreciate the obvious cynicism of White House aides who paint Obama's dovish foreign policy as primarily a consequence of his dealings with America's war dead--a cynicism that includes the neat trick of telling Jaffe, the reporter, that these moments were "private" for Obama, while helping Jaffe obtain all of the details of what happened so they can be published in the Washington Post .
Obama's attitude toward casualties may or may not have evolved since 2009, but the narrative spun here certainly does track with another evolution that is much easier to verify: the ascendancy of the Ben Rhodes-Denis McDonough-Susan Rice foreign-policy wing over a more serious tendency led, at various times, by Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus. Obama's 2009 decision to surge troops to Afghanistan while imposing a deadline for their return represented an unstable compromise between the two wings.
As of 2015, there are no more compromises. From the total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 to the utterly token efforts against the Islamic State today, the doves are in charge. Because we aren't really doing anything serious to fight our enemies, the various fights are going terribly.
It may seem like the White House is delusional or deeply cynical or both--but there is an internal logic to all of these dovish policies, and it is more complicated than the concern for the troops that White House advisers peddle to the Washington Post . People on the right like to joke that Obama sees American conservatives as his true enemies, that he is less willing to negotiate with Congress than he is with Iran. Remarks like these are intended as a humorous overstatement, but there is more truth to them than is at first obvious--and it goes to the heart of the issue of why Obama will never be a popular commander in chief.
For Obama, the world is not divided, as it was for Bush, between nations that support a democratic and liberal world order and nations that oppose such a world, preferring jihad or dictatorship or exploitative hegemony. This president believes that the world is divided between those that support peace and those who, motivated by their irrational fears, will not give peace a chance. All nations are basically the same, and most people want basically the same thing. The United States is not morally better or worse than a regional hegemon like Iran. Most Americans, like most Iranians, just want to live in peace.
The true enemies are the hawks in both countries. If reasonable men like Obama and Rouhani and Putin could simply shut out the distractions, peace could be achieved.
As a consequence of such thinking, we get the bizarro-world breakdown of friends and enemies for the Obama administration. Enemies include Israel, eastern European nations, Gulf Arabs, conservatives in Taiwan and Japan, and of course the American right. All of these parties provoke countries like Russia and Iran and China into belligerent action. If instead of provoking these countries we offered them a hand, peace could be achieved. Sure, this peace wouldn't be very 'democratic,'--but an American-led democratic order is a bit of a sham, isn't it? After all, how can we criticize Iran when a Ferguson can happen right here in the USA?
The Obama administration is careful about making public too much of this worldview, because most Americans, and their representatives in Congress, think it is crazy. But the evidence that this is how the White House understands itself is abundant.
All of this brings to mind nothing so much as the breakdown of people in the movie American Sniper into sheep, sheep-dogs, and wolves--a division criticized by some of the left, and with recent origins in the writings of military scholar Dave Grossman (and with classical origins in Plato.) The idea is that most people are sheep, minding their own business and leading their lives, hoping to thrive without interference. A small minority are predatory wolves, who thrive on dominating others. Thus, for a free society to exist, another minority must be encouraged to defend the sheep--sheep dogs.
Americans love their soldiers--they have turned out in droves to see American Sniper --because they are grateful to them for, in a sense, playing their dangerous role as sheepdogs: taking great risks to defend those at home who are not directly in harm's way. I would wager that most in the military enjoy seeing themselves this way, too.
For Obama and the doves in the White House, this very way of understanding the world is the problem . There are no real wolves out there. Iran and Russia don't really want domination for its own sake. They want peace, and the only reason they act out is because those who insist on seeing themselves as sheepdogs insist on behaving provocatively.
There are many factors that contribute to Obama's unpopularity as commander-in-chief--but high up on the list must be the fact that those who have chosen the defense of America as their profession sense that they are being led by a man who sees the very instinct to defend the interests of a nation such as ours as problematic.
No number of stories in the Washington Post will fix that. Read Less |
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In an unprecedented move, Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns, both before the election and after his inauguration, perhaps hoping people would eventually forget about it and move on. But thousands of people showed up on Tax Day to prove that they have not forgotten, and they will not move on.
Donald Trump headed out of town to spend another long weekend at his Florida estate -- his seventh trip there since taking office -- at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $3.6 million.
Not that anyone would blame him for wanting to avoid the protesters who gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on April 15 to demand the president release his tax returns and show the public exactly what his super-secret and increasingly suspicious financial involvements -- and conflicts of interest -- really are.
Protesters held homemade signs, wore pink knitted hats, and demanded Trump's taxes, his impeachment, and transparency about his financial ties to Russia. Many remarked on Trump's failure to pay federal taxes.
Kaili Joy Gray | Shareblue Stephanie Diehl
"It just makes me angry," said Stephanie Diehl, a mother of two preschool-age children from Arlington, Virginia. "Ethics is the most important thing, whether you're the president or just an average American."
Diehl, who said she never cared about politics before this election, said this is her third march since Trump's inauguration.
"I resist everything about what the president is trying to do," she said. "He's a narcissist, a bully, and a cheater. He doesn't represent what's good about America. He's a national embarrassment."
Diehl added that she has been inspired to join the resistance to set an example for her children so when they are older and learn about the Trump administration, she can tell them she took a stand.
"I'm going to keep going as long as we have to," she said.
Matthew Chapman | Shareblue
Activists organized the Tax March in DC, with satellite marches around the country, to demand transparency from the president whose young administration is already embroiled in scandal, including serious questions about how he is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family. But it is also more than that.
"The Tax March signifies something more than thousands of people gathering across the country to demand transparency from the president in the form of Trump's tax returns," said Delvone Michael, Tax March Executive Committee member and senior political strategist with the Working Families Party, in a statement to Shareblue. "It shows that people are fired up about holding Trump accountable, and about achieving a fair tax system for our country. And it shows that we won't stop making our voices heard on the issues that matter to us."
As the group notes, Trump was the first major-party presidential candidate in 40 years to refuse to release his tax returns during the campaign, keeping his actual worth and investments a secret. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times tracker , he has thus far spent a third of his presidency at Trump-owned properties -- the Trump International Washington, Mar-a-Lago, and several private golf clubs that bear his name -- which gives enormous free publicity to his businesses.
The Tax March for transparency is especially timely, and not only because it is the day regular Americans must pay their taxes, despite having a president who bragged during the campaign that he has not paid federal income taxes in years.
Earlier in the week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the National Security Archive, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit seeking access to the White House visitor logs, which were made public under President Obama but have been kept secret since Trump took office. The White House later said it had no intention of releasing that information.
Then, on Friday , the administration announced it is shutting down Open.gov, the site that publicly tracks White House visitor records, staff financial disclosures, and appointments, supposedly as a cost-saving measure.
But as Shareblue reported, terminating the contract for Open.gov saves a mere $70,000 through 2020, a paltry sum compared with the money the Trump family is costing the taxpayers for frequent weekend trips, the additional cost for Melania Trump to maintain a separate residence in New York, and other expenses unique to this president.
The cost of Trump's vacations and frequent golf trips was a common talking point at the march, especially when Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), one of Trump's fiercest critics who has repeatedly called for his impeachment, took the stage to address the crowd.
"I want to thank the Resistance," she said. "We came to show Donald Trump we will not be quiet."
As the crowd cheered and chanted, she continued. "You can flip-flop and flop-flip, but we are on your behind!"
Waters left the stage to a passionate chant from the crowd: "Impeach 45! Impeach 45!"
Trump can continue to jet off to his home in Florida, on the taxpayers' dime, but he cannot avoid the multiple investigations, lawsuits, and mounting questions about his time in the Oval Office and the extremely concerning, and perhaps even treasonous, actions he might have taken to get there. |
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Brussels terror attacks: A continent-wide crisis that threatens core European ideals
By Fiona de Londras | March 24, 2016, 8:32 EDT
Printed from: http://newbostonpost.com/2016/03/24/brussels-terror-attacks-a-continent-wide-crisis-that-threatens-core-european-ideals/
German police officers guard a terminal of the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
The attacks of March 22 in Brussels were shocking, but not surprising. They reinforced what many have known for years: Belgium has a serious problem with terrorism.
For a long time, security analysts have expressed anxiety about the depth and extent of radicalization and fundamentalism in the country. It is thought that Belgium has the highest per capita rate of foreign terrorist fighters of any EU country. A February 2016 "high-end estimate" puts that number at 562 out of a population of just over 11 million.
Last November it was revealed that some of the Paris attackers had Belgian connections and were known to the security forces there , and Brussels was virtually locked down for almost a week.
Over recent years there have been attacks on Belgian museums, supermarkets and trains, raising questions about why the country cannot seem to effectively tackle the challenges of insecurity.
As ever, the answer is not a simple one. Rather, as observed by Tim King , Belgium's "failures are perhaps one part politics and government; one part police and justice; one part fiscal and economic. In combination they created the vacuum that is being exploited by jihadi terrorists".
A country divided
So-called Islamist extremism in Belgium can be traced back at least to the 1990s, when Algeria-related militant activity in France spilled over into the country. The failure to properly tackle extremism in the 1990s and early 2000s, and to effectively integrate the minority Muslim community, are important factors in understanding how Belgium became fertile ground for radicalization.
It seems increasingly likely that poorly resourced and fragmented policing at least partly explains the crystallization of this trend into fatal attacks in and beyond the country. And that is linked to the country's relative political instability.
Belgium has a sharply fragmented system of policing and justice. In Brussels alone there are six police forces covering 19 communes; an extraordinary system for a city of just under 1.5 million people. While the federal police system includes a counter-terrorism unit of around 500 officers, this seems simply insufficient when compared to the estimated scale of the problem.
Intelligence sharing with non-Belgian forces is also challenging, and remains so in spite of an agreement for enhanced cooperation with the French announced in early 2016 . That agreement followed a period of tension related to the role of Belgian and French security failures in respect of the Paris attacks.
Questions for the European Union
However, while the particularities of Belgian politics and policing are relevant to explaining the challenge there, the country is not entirely idiosyncratic. Its challenges are a sharpened manifestation of similar difficulties experienced across the EU.
Europe has an increasing amount of shared counter-terrorism law and institutions such as the European Counter Terrorism Centre within Europol, that are designed to help coordinate counter-terrorism. Yet it still struggles to share and process information across police and security forces. That is true within states, between member states, and between member states and EU institutions. Many individual European countries have long struggled to integrate marginalized populations and to counter radicalization, and their internal failures are becoming transnational problems.
It is also becoming clear that the ease with which people can travel across Europe, and the desire to maintain freedom of movement as a feature of European citizenship, must be addressed. There are real questions about security, but just as many about what imposing more onerous barriers to travel means for the values and freedoms that underpin the European Union as a political entity.
This points to the fundamental challenge that must, ultimately, be addressed by European leaders. Serious threats to European security are no longer merely external, nor are they confined to states. They are internal, they are serious, and they are difficult to detect. Tackling them effectively while retaining the core of the European political identity may require a fundamental reassessment of what Europe is, what it wants to be, and how that can be achieved.
Passing new counter-terrorism laws is a limited response in the face of this challenge. Domestic police and security forces urgently need effective resources to make it possible for them to enforce the powers they already hold. There needs to be significantly better intelligence sharing with and through institutions such as Europol. There needs to be deeper trust between EU member states. There needs to be a serious consideration of the extent to which movement within Europe can be both free and less risk-laden.
Figuring out ways of creating effective expectations that member states will ensure their domestic security challenges do not create Europe-wide vulnerabilities, while maintaining our identity as a law-based, rights-oriented Europe of freedoms must be the goal, but it is a difficult one to achieve.
The question now is whether Europe can resist compromising its commitment to freedom as it strives to improve its ability to deal with terrorism.
Fiona de Londras
Fiona de Londras , Professor of Global Legal Studies, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham |
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Open letter to Stephen Harper from AFN: Canada has not upheld its responsibilities to First Nations Assembly of First Nations | On behalf of the National Executive of the Assembly of First Nations, we write today regarding an urgent matter requiring immediate attention. press release December 14
First Nations to Harper government: Honour constitutional duty to consult on Canada-China FIPPA rabble staff | "Any further effort to ratify this agreement will adversely impact our inherent rights and territories forcing First Nations to take immediate legal action." politics December 14
Organize together to defeat the corporate agenda: The Port Elgin Coalition Proposal various | This November, 80 activists and representatives from across Canada met in Port Elgin, Ontario to discuss and strategize how progressive forces can organize more effectively. rabble news December 14
'Wall of opposition' to tar sands pipelines in B.C. grows stronger rabble staff | Mayor Gregor Robertson announced that December 13th had been officially designated as "Save the Fraser Declaration Day" by the City of Vancouver. rabble news December 14
The crisis in funding legal support for refugees Edward C. Corrigan | It is better to let a few questionable refugee claims through than to return refugees where they face a serious risk of persecution because of their race, nationality, religion or political opinion. politics December 14
Ghosts of Indigenous activism past, present, future: The transformative potential of #IdleNoMore Hayden King | Canada expects (and hopes) this movement will melt away. Making it sustainable and meaningful requires reflecting on past and current trends in activism. briefly December 13
Don't let Harper get away with this: Take action on the F-35s Steven Staples | Now, exposed as lying outright about the F-35, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be making more empty promises to review the F-35 program. rabble news December 13
Students across Ontario walk out against Bill 115 Mick Sweetman | Thousands of students across Ontario protested this week against the Liberals' Bill 115, also known as the "Putting Students First Act." rabble news December 13
Conservative government rams through anti-union Bill C-377 Lori Theresa Waller | So the Conservatives have a nice Christmas present to bring home for the holidays: a law that selectively tilts the playing field in the favour of employers over unions. rabble news December 12
New acts of repression target land defenders in Guatemala Grahame Russell | On December 7 and 8, 2012, there was yet another act of mining-related aggression against community members of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, 45 minutes outside of Guatemala City. briefly December 12
'Twas a Night in December: Dedicated to all who are standing Idle No More Robert Animikii Horton | Harper and his cronies were nestled all snug in their beds / As stolen lands and resources danced in their heads. arts/media December 12
Tolkien in the tar sands Keith Stewart | In this drama, Stephen Harper has taken on the role of Saruman-in-a-sweater-vest. But when it comes to the tar sands, we need to follow Bilbo's example and leave them in the ground. in their own words December 11
Standing up to Big Oil: How Coastal First Nations built tar sands pipeline resistance Art Sterritt | Along comes Enbridge and Northern Gateway and says, "We're going to put a pipeline here and we're going to run ships through your territory." And we said, "Well we're not so sure about that." briefly December 11
Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence begins hunger strike: 'I am willing to die for my people' rabble staff | Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence was in Ottawa today to announce the beginning of an indefinite hunger strike demanding justice and respect for her people and for all First Nations in Canada. profile December 11
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti: Canada's unconditional support for Israeli policy is 'astonishing' Steven Zhou | In a visit to Canada last weekend, Palestinian legislator and activist Dr. Mustafa Barghouti expressed his pessimism at the prospects of a future Palestinian state. in their own words December 10
Violence against women human rights defenders on the rise Laura Carlsen | Women human rights defenders are not only targeted by the interests they confront. They are also abandoned -- or worse, attacked -- by governments and sometimes by their own communities and families. opinion December 10
Kinder Morgan's pipeline project: Just as bad as Enbridge Ben West | Kinder Morgan is going to try to use a "divide and conquer" strategy by making the case that they are a better choice for B.C. than Enbridge. We can't let this happen. in their own words December 10
Devastation in wake of latest Israeli assault: Report back from Gaza Medea Benjamin | The fight was totally disproportionate. Israeli F-16s, drones and Apache helicopters unleashed their fury over this tiny strip of land, leaving 174 dead. opinion December 10
Trade agreements and the hypocrisy of 'free' market advocates Dave Coles | Many critics and most apologists focus on how "free" trade agreements are opening the economy up to the competitive market. rabble news December 10
Canada's secret trials, immigration policy under fire on Human Rights Day David P. Ball | Activists across the country are fighting back against security certificates, racial profiling, and other abuses. briefly December 7
F-35 fiasco: Harper needs to release the full KPMG report Steven Staples | The F-35 is an offensive weapon system, to be used for "shock-and-awe" bombing missions. Canada has no need for it! rabble news December 7
Bill C-377 update: MPs debate newly amended union disclosure bill Lori Theresa Waller | MPs fired their opening shots this week in the first hour of the final House of Commons debate on Bill C-377. rabble news December 7
Opposition, civil society groups condemn government approval of CNOOC Nexen takeover rabble staff | Today, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the approval of the controversial takeover of Nexen by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company. in their own words December 7
Civil society breaks the silence, confronts governments at climate negotiations Alana Westwood | This year's relatively quiet climate negotiations turned up the volume yesterday when two members of the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM) were arrested for holding up a banner. in their own words December 7
Queer visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine John Greyson | The Queer Visions group included sixteen activists from seven cities internationally. We gathered in Porto Alegre prior to the World Social Forum. rabble news December 6
What will the Conservatives' omnibus Bill C-45 mean for workers in Canada? Lori Theresa Waller | Bill C-45's changes to laws relating to workers are worth noting, especially within the context of the government's broader strategy on labour and employment. press release December 6
Canada the petrostate: The shocking numbers behind Big Oil's hold on Ottawa Polaris Institute | Six main oil industry players, including Enbridge and TransCanada, met with federal cabinet ministers 53 times between September 2011 and September 2012. in their own words December 6
Bolivia's address to UN climate talks: Defend Mother Earth against wasteful and greedy system JOSE ANTONIO ZAMORA GUTIERREZ | This beautiful human community inhabiting our Mother Earth is in danger due to the climate crisis. arts/media December 6
Film review: 'Last chance' looks at refugee claimants fleeing homophobia Humberto DaSilva | "Last Chance," an NFB film directed by Paul Emile d'Entremont, views the Canadian immigration refugee process through the eyes of four LGBT refugee status claimants. |
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the approval of the controversial takeover of Nexen by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company. |
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I woke up this morning, like I do most mornings, quickly scrolling through Twitter to get an overview of the occurrences of the night before and those I've missed earlier in the day. Initially, this morning was like every other -- I saw tweets from news personalities, passionate conservative activists, and the usual pundits I follow and engage with on a daily basis. I even saw tweets from Donald Trump as usual, not really giving much thought to them until I came across one of his tweets that had been re-tweeted by one of my close friends.
. @drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016
Now, I may be one at fault here for not being sensitive enough to the previous tirades of Mr. Trump, and the other people against whom he has spewed similar rhetoric, but this tweet particularly struck me. It's incredibly sad that a man of such wisdom and stature has been truly misrepresented on a national stage.
I don't intend this to be another "anti-Trump" tirade, as he already receives tolerable media coverage as it is, but rather I want to communicate the vast inaccuracy of this statement and give a small glimpse of the impact that Dr. Moore has on our world.
If Dr. Moore is not representative of Evangelicals, I don't know who is.
In six days, I start a nine-month internship with Dr. Moore and other executive leaders from The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission , the organization of which Dr. Moore is president.
For over a year, I have been anxiously awaiting the day that I would have the opportunity to intern with this organization that has had such an incredible impact on my life, equipping me with tools and resources needed to be a voice in sharing the Gospel with my generation and those in my circle of influence.
The ERLC is an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention , dedicated to engaging the public square with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Their vision -- kingdom, culture, and mission.
Dr. Moore has faithfully led the moral and public policy agency representing the 16 million members of America's largest Protestant denomination, the SBC, over the past three years.
He not only is widely sought after as a cultural commentator, but Dr. Moore is a God-fearing man who, despite his flaws and imperfections, strives to live a life that exhibits the light and love of Jesus Christ in everything he does.
Dr. Moore, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, effectively engages our culture without loosing the message of the Gospel -- a feat that, in this day in age, is becoming increasingly trying.
He is the author of several books including Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel , blogs on his personal website , and pens articles for some of the largest news publications in the country.
This clearly demonstrates the positive influence Dr. Moore has on people across the globe, of all ages and walks of life.
When I was in Washington D.C. several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the ERLC's policy office, and when I walked into Dr. Moore's personal office, the first things I noticed were the pictures of beautiful wife and five sons.
One of the most remarkable attributes of Dr. Moore is not the way he writes or speaks, although I deeply admire and even model my work after his, but the way he leads his own family. As a fierce advocate for families, Dr. Moore speaks to issues about marriage and families, and leads his family in the same way he encourages other men to as well.
He serves his wife and examples to his sons the grace and love that God demonstrates to us as His children.
David Closson, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary student, shares "I am incredibly thankful for Dr. Moore and his commitment to the Gospel and for speaking truth to power. Dr. Moore's theologically robust, kingdom first approach to political and cultural engagement has challenged me to make sure my priorities are in line."
"As a loyal Republican, it's tempting to think that American political parties are ultimate. But they aren't. The kingdom of God is ultimate and will outlast every political party in the world. Dr. Moore has helped me to see this," said Closson.
Dr. Moore is committed, passionate, faithful, and joyful.
He leads, chiefly, knowing where his value is found -- in our Father and the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed for him and all of us on the Cross.
C.J. Johnson, a member of one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist churches, articulates, "Christians should be proud of Dr. Russell Moore -- an individual who consistently defends Christian values in public forums. He continually stands for conservative ideals, and is a trusted and dependable voice representing faith voters."
"As a Southern Baptist, it's encouraging to have Dr. Moore defending not only the values of my denomination, but also the values held by people of faith nationwide," said Johnson.
If anything, Dr. Moore is one of the most qualified to represent Evangelicals on the national stage.
Conrad Close, a passionate supporter of Dr. Moore, writes "Far from being a "A nasty guy with no heart," Russell Moore is a deeply caring individual who has worked tirelessly to reach minorities and bring attention to the plight of persecuted Christians worldwide."
"And far from being "a terrible representative of Evangelicals," Moore is leading the church in the exact direction it needs to go -- away from the empty civil religion of the past. In a rapidly changing world, Moore is a voice of strength and encouragement inspiring the church to follow Christ onward to the future," shares Close.
Dr. Moore, thank you for your commitment to the spread of the Gospel. Thank you for continually encouraging my generation to engage our peers in Christ-centered conversations. Thank you for leading your family and for setting an example on how to love, sacrifice, and forgive like Christ. |
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Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has given strong hints a Somali refugee who says she was raped on Nauru and wants an abortion will be brought to Australia for the specialist treatment but has hit out at the public campaign supporting her request, saying it is of no help to her case.
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With Alabama poised to become the 37th state with marriage equality on Feb. 9, an association of probate judges announced Wednesday it will no longer stand in the way. The Alabama Probate Judges Association -- whose 67 members issue marriage li... Read
With Alabama poised to become the 37th state with marriage equality on Feb. 9, an association of probate judges announced Wednesday it will no longer stand in the way. The Alabama Probate Judges Association -- whose 67 members issue marriage li... Read
After nearly 11 months of searching, the Malaysian government has officially declared the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 an accident and has said that there were no survivors, CNN reports: The formal declaration, read Thursday by ci... Read
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore really, really dislikes gay marriage. We reported this week on how he's calling for the governor of Alabama to resist "judicial tyranny" and refuse to comply with a federal judge's ruling overtu... Read
Rachel Maddow is reporting tonight that Bryan Fischer, virulently anti-gay Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, has been fired from his position. Maddow reports that the firing was due to Israeli press reporting that Reinc... Read
NASA Astronaut Terry Virts, currently aboard the International Space Station as part of the Expedition 42 crew, shot some incredible images of the U.S. east coast last night including a time-lapse video from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the wint... Read
Domino's 50 Shades of Grey-themed Superbowl commercial is turning some heads. Tom Daley goes for a shirtless run on the treadmill. Michelle Obama's decision not to wear a head scarf on trip to Saudi Arabia for King Abdullah's funeral draw... Read
Domino's 50 Shades of Grey-themed Superbowl commercial is turning some heads. Tom Daley goes for a shirtless run on the treadmill. Michelle Obama's decision not to wear a head scarf on trip to Saudi Arabia for King Abdullah's funeral draw... Read
Lance Bass and now husband Michael Turchin appeared on Entertainment Tonight to chat with Nancy O'Dell about their wedding ahead of an E! special airing next month about it. The two married on Dec. 20 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Downtown Los Angel... Read
Madonna's 13th studio album Rebel Heart is not due until March 10 but an undoubtedly well-coordinated media blitz got underway this week in Australia, with an interview with Richard Wilkins on the Today show. At the beginning of the interview, Ma... Read |
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W. Eugene Smith/Magnum Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Eve Arnold/Magnum Black and white The Ku Klux Klan holds a rally in North Carolina in 1951; in Hue, Vietnam, a chaplain ministers to a casualty of the war in 1968; protesters carry anti-segregation signs in Virginia in 1960.
O n June 12, 1962, fifty-nine Americans--well-groomed young men in slim ties, and young women wearing tailored skirts or pantsuits, hair in bouffants, poodle cuts, or ponytails--gathered at the United Automobile Workers hall in Port Huron, Michigan, to hammer out a radical new politics. Among the group were a smattering of "red diaper babies," veterans of the nascent civil rights movement, older trade union activists, and several delegates from the Socialist Party. The majority, however, were university students from middle-class homes in Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The planning committee hailed from a fledgling New York-based movement, Students for a Democratic Society, which operated as a wing of the League for Industrial Democracy. lid was founded in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society by the novelist Upton Sinclair (Jack London was its first president), and counted among its early members such notable figures as Clarence Darrow, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed. (The philosopher Sidney Hook and union president Walter Reuther, best known for leading the United Auto Workers out of the afl-cio , would sign up after iss changed its name in 1921.)
The United States was by no means the first country to experience student unrest. On January 16, 1960, a thousand students occupied Tokyo airport to protest Japanese prime minister Nobusuke Kishi's decision to sign a security treaty with the US. Three days later in India, forty students protesting the closure of the University of Lucknow were arrested in Delhi. Following the Sharpville massacre in South Africa on March 21, thousands of students around the world rose up against apartheid. In late July, police shot and killed twelve nationalists in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. On October 17, 1961, students in France joined a demonstration against the country's continued occupation of Algiers, in which an estimated 200 people were killed.
By comparison, the uprising in America was unimpressive. On February 1, 1960, four African American students staged a sit-in at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Only a handful of white students joined sit-ins in the South, making modest appeals for human rights and desegregation. Few responded to the roll call on March 15, 1960, when the police arrested 350 African Americans for participating in peaceful demonstrations in Orangeburg, South Carolina. At no time did anything even vaguely resembling a nationwide student movement materialize in response to blacks rising up. On the contrary, like the American public and the national media, the white student population for the most part remained on the sidelines.
Frustrated and appalled by what they had begun to think of as pandemic apathy, a few white students joined black activists to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ), which attempted to remedy the situation by organizing random acts of resistance and creating new forms of civil disobedience. " SNCC later told me...they wanted me to get beat up, because that would get national attention in the media," recalls Tom Hayden, then an SDS field secretary, but Americans, including university students, would not be moved.
Yet it was not a Japanese, Indian, South African, or French student but twenty-four-year-old Robert Alan Haber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, who sought to own the spontaneous, restive, sometimes violent expressions of international student unrest. To him and his peers who made the pilgrimage to Port Huron, the opportunity to give the protests an inner coherence and a thematic consistency was too good to miss. At a meeting in Ann Arbor, Haber, who had been elected president of SDS , began downplaying old-world ideologies, treating Saint-Simon's sentimental socialism, French syndicalism, hardline Marxism, George Bernard Shaw's Fabianism, Eduard Bernstein's social democracy, the Jesuit belief that Christ resided in all of us as so much grist for the mill. To the exalted position of the mill itself, Haber raised the New Colossus: " Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! "
Courtesy of C. Clark Kissinger Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Rights from wrongs The Students for a Democratic Society meet in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1963; images from Saigon helped to foment anti-war protests; John F. Kennedy in 1961, two years before he sent the civil rights bill to Congress.
There was something true, if mean spirited, in the criticism of Haber that he saw every student complaint, even if it was only about dormitory food, as fodder for the movement. His hyper-inclusiveness--his indifference to the difference between fire-breathing Communists and soft socialists, between the steely righteousness of Christian soldiers and the pragmatism of mushy liberals, between thoughtful intellectuals and spoiled dorm dwellers--was mind boggling. Yet it was Haber who finally persuaded LID to sponsor the Port Huron gathering, which he immodestly pitched as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to set the "agenda for a generation."
Haber was hardly a nationalist. His most deeply held values hewed to the concept of humanity and hardly at all to the idea of the nation-state. His commitment to America stemmed mostly from his conviction that for the world to survive, one nation had to take up the torch, experiment, and create new social, political, and economic institutions. His idea that America should step up to the plate had less to do with the vainglory that is American exceptionalism than it did with America's wealth and power--and with the fact that America was at least half responsible for the Cold War.
Delegates from SNCC responded to Haber's high-mindedness, as did representatives from Young Christian Students, the National Student Christian Federation, and the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee. But they were a mulish bunch, and the three days and four largely sleepless nights they spent debating questions that singed the wings of Icarus left them hungry, intoxicated, and gasping for air. At the end of the third day, as a new sun dawned over Lake Huron, none of them were prepared to bury their differences. Indeed, they were so incapable of consensus that they decided not to vote on the sixty-three-page draft they had produced, choosing instead to endorse something they called a "living document"--meaning infinitely revisable, not at all conclusive, maybe even rescindable--which came to be known as the "Port Huron Statement." Mimeographed copies were run over to the Oval Office. Thousands more were sold at campuses across America for twenty-five cents apiece. Two years later, President Lyndon Johnson's speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, borrowed heavily from the statement's Values section when he crafted the Great Society speech many Americans still consider Johnson's finest hour. Twenty-five years later, James Miller, now chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, wrote that the "Port Huron Statement" remains "one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history."
W e are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. " So the statement began. It could just as well have begun more breathlessly, by citing a spectre, not of Communism but of nuclear Armageddon, which loomed over the earth like the shadow of a giant boot. Indeed, the statement did refer to the invidious cloud--" Our work ," it said, " is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living "--but it did so in astonishingly subdued tones, very different from the insane modalities expressed by the beat generation. What Port Huron took from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal Cassady was not the madness that overwhelmed the postwar beats. To those who gathered in Port Huron, "Rockland," Ginsberg's metaphor for the insane asylum, existed only as the option they abjured. To escape to the asylum seemed even more insane than a world that tolerated the bomb. Worse, it was to refuse responsibility for Little Boy and Fat Man (the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan), which were, after all, "made in America."
To the Port Huron gathering, it was America that had lifted the lid, loosed the demons, raised the roof beams, and it was therefore the duty of Americans to restore order. " Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal....Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted as part of the total disarming process....The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international co-operation....America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary....Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged....A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken...No Federal co-operation with racism is tolerable...Laws [hastening] school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats..."
Courtesy of the Peace and Justice Resource Center Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Bruce Davidson/Magnum Soldier on SDS member Tom Hayden, top right, would go on to craft the "Port Huron Statement"; activists burn their draft cards in New York in 1965; Martin Luther King Jr. marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 9, 1965.
T he statement's idealism found favour with the knights of Camelot, the name enchanted Americans gave to President John F. Kennedy's round table. Recognizing kindred spirits, Kennedy had already established the Peace Corps, in which hundreds of students happily enlisted. Four months after Port Huron, he dispatched hundreds of federal troops to ensure that James Meredith, an African American, gained admission to the University of Mississippi. In May of the following year, he issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 239, ordering a nuclear test ban treaty. In June, he made his famous speech at American University in which, chastened by the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis, he described his vision for world peace in an age of nuclear threats. In October, he issued Memorandum No. 263, withdrawing 1,000 military personnel from South Vietnam and promising that "the bulk" of US administrators would be out by the end of 1965. Then, on November 22, he was assassinated.
While Kennedy was gone, the train had already left the station. In July 1964, eleven days after three activists were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which included a ban on employment discrimination based on sex, race, and religion. (The Southern Dixiecrats, who had controlled the Democratic Party for over a century, abandoned ship--but not politics--regrouping to support Alabama governor George Wallace, who declared in his inaugural speech, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.") The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was redrawn to bring millions of new voters into the system. In 1966, the Freedom of Information Act received congressional approval. In 1967, Colorado legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest, and jeopardy to the mother's health. Similar laws were later passed in California, North Carolina, and Oregon. In March of 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortion at the patient's request. New York followed suit, and that paved the way for Roe v. Wade , which the Supreme Court passed in 1973. The first collective rights for farm workers and public sector employees were negotiated, as were fundamental reforms of university curricula. Anti-sodomy legislation was repealed. Legislation pertaining to homosexual rights was drafted.
But instead of honouring Kennedy's commitment to defuse the Cold War, Johnson escalated it, often on the sly. He tightened the draft and made it more difficult to dodge. Before long, thousands of young Americans were forced to participate in the unconscionable napalming of Vietnamese villages. The Port Huron reformist movement now morphed into a militant anti-war movement that required but failed to develop a stricter hierarchy and firmer lines of authority. Conservatives, especially in the South, began amassing a counterforce. America was fracturing along old fault lines. In 1963, black civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated. So, later, were Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. "We had no idea how much hate there was in America," says Tom Hayden, who wrote the first draft of the "Port Huron Statement" in a segregated jail cell in Albany, Georgia.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI , deployed strategies he had learned from Joseph McCarthy, casting student unrest as treason, and dispatching undercover agents to infiltrate and sow the seeds of suspicion, resentment, and hate. The CIA fell into lockstep, co-opting the AFL - CIO , the student movement's natural ally. The war in Indochina expanded to include Cambodia and Laos, and overnight the size of the protest movement doubled and then redoubled. However, Richard Nixon, now president, had signed tough new environmental and consumer protection laws to appease students and workers, and he would not be deterred. As the death toll mounted, rational conversation became impossible. "You had to be against the whole thing," says Hayden. Students began burning their draft cards, and some even self-immolated. The protest movement collapsed in the smoke and shattered windows of the counter-culture. None of the old SDS leaders could imagine other ways to organize the growing and entirely out-of-control army of hippies and yippies and stoners. Timothy Leary's beat-like motto, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," dissolved the last vestiges of idealism.
In 1968, when I was old enough to apply for membership in SDS , Hayden was talking about independent territories from which bands of militant students would lurch, recede, regroup, and strike out. Then, in June 1969, the Progressive Labor Party took over SDS , leaving its remnants to regroup as the paramilitary Weathermen. Operating under the banner "Bring the War Home" and launching a series of "days of rage," they terrorized America until April 30, 1975, when the war in Vietnam ended with the collapse of Saigon. By then, most everyone who had been involved in the student movement was either in jail, in therapy, hiding at some university, or swimming awkwardly back to the mainstream. The dramatic renewal of democratic spirit that began in Port Huron disappeared. As the "long '60s" came to an end, so did America's patience. The people wanted stability restored. A toothy Ronald Reagan agreed.
NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images Jay Cassidy/Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Pride and prejudice Police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, on June 28, 1969; Hayden addresses the Vietnam Moratorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 15, 1969; Black Panther Fred Hampton speaks at a meeting in Chicago in 1969.
A nd then they were back . In January 2010, when everything in the '60s began to turn fifty, the leaders of the student movement--Al Haber, Tom Hayden, and others--started turning up at conferences, seminars, and public lectures, and in television and radio interviews, raising questions and eyebrows much the way they had when they were young. What, I wondered, were they up to? What had they learned during their long years in exile? What lessons could they impart to writers like Matt Taibbi, who believes that "America never got over the '60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics."
In October 2012, my friend Kenny and I join a stream of young pilgrims making their way to Ann Arbor for a three-day event called A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement in Its Time and Ours. We check in to our hotel close by the University of Michigan and make our way to the Michigan Union, where JFK announced the birth of the Peace Corps. Tonight the speaker is former US senator Tom Hayden. A greybeard resembling Al Haber wearing a tubeteika sits on the auditorium floor, his back against the wall, facing the audience. As we make our way inside, Kenny trips on someone's leg, prompting two young women in the third row to stand up, smile, and offer us their seats. "You need them more than we do," the brunette says to Kenny, who argues with her sheepishly. The women tell us we shouldn't worry, because they have many friends in the overflow area. Kenny and I take their places, feeling our age, and pretty stupid.
A history professor from the university says a few welcoming words, then introduces Hayden, the principal author of the "Port Huron Statement." He is wearing a cashmere jacket over a blue V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt in a paler blue. He is svelte for seventy-two, his swagger intact, his hair still thick but now grey and slicked back, and he has acquired a beatnik goatee since the '60s. He leans on the podium and looks up at the projection booth. The lights dim, and Bob Dylan's voice rings out: "While riding on a train goin' west." On the big screen at the front of the hall runs a slide show of yellowed, campy photographs of the movement's patriarchs: John Dewey, Albert Camus, C. Wright Mills. The audience claps intermittently, respectfully. Kenny, who has no threshold for sentiment, says he feels nauseated, stands up and leaves. A photo of a leaner, bespectacled Al Haber draws fulsome applause. More shots follow of Hayden and others, and finally a recent photograph of the newest SDS chapter in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Hayden tells us this is the seventh or eighth event he has attended in the past year to celebrate the "Port Huron Statement." He says he is weary, hasn't slept well for days, and recently visited the site of the UAW hall, which was demolished. "There's a man standing there, who looks like a California surfer, with his feet in the water, his hair is wild, windblown....He says to me, 'I wondered when you were coming.'" Hayden says he thought the man had mistaken him for Jesus Christ. He says he told the man, "You must be John the Baptist." Then Hayden says to us, the faithful assembled in the Michigan Union auditorium, "And sure enough, he was like this prophetic figure who's helping us cross from the old world to the new." Some of the old-timers sitting on the floor near Haber roll their eyes, reminded perhaps of a time when many people were convinced, and none more than Hayden himself, that he was some sort of saviour, but most of the people in the audience are too young to have such recollections. They enjoy the story, laughing out loud.
Hayden does not explain why he seems so obsessed with the '60s, why he leaves his third wife and young son at home, what he is after--what makes Tom run. "I won't say [the '60s] traumatized us," he says, although in the opening line of his new book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama , he writes, "The sixties shaped my character permanently." And is this not what trauma is: an experience that changes a person forever? As he speaks, it becomes clear that, like Taibbi, he is having a hard time getting over the '60s. The events that transformed him from a brilliant and aimless candidate for the lost generation into a still-brilliant but hardened, suspicious, and sometimes cruel older man, continue to gnaw at his insides. Like so many of his fellow activists, he cannot find a way of stepping back, cannot stop blaming others for bringing the America of the '60s all too close to civil war. "The lesson I learned," he says, "was that it was not a crisis of the youth. It was a failure; it was a default of the elders. Had the elders done their job...much of this would have been averted."
Perhaps it is because he cannot get over the pain, forget the rage, and bury the grudges that he resorts to the pleasures of taxonomy. He is too intent on parsing the decade, trying to fit big, blubbery things like the student movement into little boxes. The spirit was born in a manger, he suggests, and then through no fault of its own became a dark horse and was put down. He mentions the fragmentation but blames it on the CIA . He leaves out his own indiscretions: the disruptive koan for which he became famous; the time he wrongfully accused Abe Peck, a friend of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, of working for the CIA ; the breaks with nearly every other student leader. He does not mention that he was forced out of his commune, moved to Venice, California, changed his name to Emmett Garity, and became an alcoholic. Evidently, he thinks these things are better left unsaid.
"Who wrote the 'Port Huron Statement? '" Hayden asks. "I wrote it. I drafted it. I fought the elders and some of my friends to get it even considered at the convention. The convention revised it. They told me to go away and rewrite it again. It was never voted on. That's why it's called a living document." But that leaves out what the other fifty-eight people did. Were they merely, as Hayden suggests, groupies? "They came to own it; they came to possess it." He pauses, shifts gears, goes into overdrive--as if to prove that he still has the magical touch that earned him a reputation as the supreme moralist of his generation. "This is where I may seem to be leaving my senses," he says. "I want to argue to you that the 'Port Huron Statement' wrote us." He tries to explain himself, drawing on James Joyce: "We were articulating the unconscious conscience of our generation....We were in a process of birthing ideas and language that didn't really exist until the experience itself."
Howard Ruffner/Life Images/Getty Images Burt Glinn/Magnum David Fenton/Getty Images The things they carried The Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State on May 4, 1970, killing four protesters; the family attends Robert F. Kennedy's funeral on June 8, 1968; Weathermen leader Bernardine Dohrn splits from SDS in 1969.
T o what spirit is Hayden pointing when he argues that "the 'Port Huron Statement' wrote us"? Was it the embryonic spirit of the '60s? No one who experienced it could deny its existence. It was ubiquitous, omnipresent, immediate, a cyclone lifting everything in its wake, transforming politics, science, journalism, the plastic arts, music. It dictated the way we spoke, how we dressed, the way we grew our hair, hallucinated, and made love--but, as Hayden knows, the ideas that animated the "Port Huron Statement" originated long before. He reminds the audience at the Michigan Union of the several hundred years of revolt against slavery that preceded the '60s. He reads an excerpt from Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, reflecting on a century of struggle for women's rights. Unfortunately, he stops short of calling the spirit what it really is: not the spirit of the '60s, but the spirit of reform.
Calling it the spirit of reform helps us to resist the temptation confronting every generation that experiences it--namely, to imagine that it is all about us and our times; that we are exceptional; that nothing like this has happened before or will ever happen again. To understand how wrong this is, one only need remember the hundreds of thousands who were seized by the spirit during the American, French, and Bolshevik Revolutions. Or one might consider the more recent events in Tahrir Square and, closer to home, in a hundred different encampments launched by the Occupy movement. Seeing it as the spirit of reform rather than of the '60s allows us to construct a history in which the decade figures as just one of many powerful surges. When was it born? Those comfortable with oral history may go back as far as the year zero, when a young Jewish reformer named Joshua of Nazareth challenged the authority of the rabbinical elders. For those who prefer written history, it probably makes more sense to imagine its conception sometime in the twelfth century, when British barons began whittling away at the legitimacy of Henry I. From either of those distant places, it would not be wrong to leapfrog to the Magna Carta, and from there to that incandescent morning when Martin Luther protested the sale of indulgences.
Any history worth its salt will need to pause in the study of Charles Louis de Secondat, commonly known as Montesquieu, who in the eighteenth century imagined the outlines of an emerging British parliamentary system in terms he called the " trias politica ." Secondat's work warrants the stop because it inspired the American federalists who fleshed it out, renaming it the system of "checks and balances." More significant, of course, was the American Revolution itself, because at that moment the spirit of reform, which in Europe was locked in an endless moral struggle aimed at loosening man-made authority, was given a new mandate: to bring the best of the old-world concepts in line with the revolutionary idea of a people's democracy. Everything needed to be realigned. American intellectuals, writers, and activists rolled up their sleeves and put themselves to work in what may someday be called the Great Realignment, in which the '60s will have played a large but not decisive role.
The '60s, after all, failed to mine the full potential of the spirit of democratic reform. The decade did not, for example, reimagine the party system. In his farewell address, George Washington, the first president of the United States, warned that political parties would entrench old hatreds and engender new ones. The party system emerged, not from the Constitution, but from the reformist spirit of the Jacksonian era. But with prescient vision, Washington saw the dangers of partisan politics: the hobbling of government, the shredding of civil society, and destabilization of the economy.
The '60s also ignored the corrosive influence of institutionalized religion. In the early draft of the "Port Huron Statement," Hayden tried to put forward an alternative: " We regard Man as infinitely precious and infinitely perfectible ," he declared, as though he were writing the introduction to a new American bible. Mary Varela, who represented the Catholic contingent at Port Huron, argued that Hayden's words contradicted the doctrine of original sin and would therefore alienate progressive Christians. The assembly agreed and struck the words out. But fifty years later, Hayden is unrepentant. "The 'Port Huron Statement' would have been more spiritual had we completed our meetings," he says. While he could not have written anything that would have persuaded any democratically elected government to restrict an individual's right to worship as he or she pleased, he could have proposed what the great American sociologist Robert Bellah called America's civil religion. What would it look like? Would it drop the old-world model of ineluctable authority in favour of something more compatible with the American dream of individual autonomy? Would its rituals perhaps resemble the discussions of everyday moral issues that took place in the ragtag encampments of the Occupy movement?
I n his book, Tom Hayden wrote that the spirit of the '60s is very much alive. This was six months before the birth of the Occupy movement, which, along with reviving the spirit of the '60s, may herald yet another surge of the spirit of reform. One must resist conceiving of Occupy as a movement concerned only with economic disparity. Think instead of its many splinter groups, including Occupy Faith, the radical assembly that attempted to take over Trinity Church in New York. What unites them, however disparate their origins, are moral concerns. And is their uprising, however uncoordinated, not the moral revolution the authors of the "Port Huron Statement" called for but never completed?
This appeared in the April 2014 issue. |
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Chick-fil-A is back in the news, and once again, it's not for a new menu offering.
The fast-food chain's president Dan Cathy sent a personal tweet Wednesday criticizing the Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage.
The tweet was deleted, but not before it was seen and captured in screen shots and on Topsy.
Via Topsy , Cathy's tweet read:
Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy Twittter
Cathy is no stranger to controversy over his vocal opposition to gay marriage.
In 2012, Cathy came out "'guilty as charged' for backing 'the biblical definition of a family,'" the Blaze reported.
The ensuing controversy was so heated and explosive, conservative supporters held a Chick-fil-A "Appreciation Day" that was a "record-setting day" for the chain, Fox News reported on Aug. 2, 2012.
As before, Cathy's comment has caused new backlash toward the company.
Chick-fil-A spokesman Jerry Johnston issued a statement Thursday on Cathy's tweet that read, "Dan Cathy, like everyone in this country, has his own views. However, Chick-fil-A is focused on providing great-tasting food and genuine hospitality to everyone," the Huffington Post reported.
Later on Thursday, Johnston explained to the Post why Cathy deleted his tweet.
"[Cathy] realized his views didn't necessarily represent the views of all customers, restaurant owners and employees and didn't want to distract them from providing a great restaurant experience," Johnston told the paper.
The Blaze published a sampling of angry tweets directed toward Cathy's Chick-fil-A:
We know first-hand that censorship against conservative news is real. Please share stories and encourage your friends to sign up for our daily email blast so they are not getting shut out of seeing conservative news.
"And though she be but little, she is fierce." And fun! This conservative-minded political junkie, mom of three, dancer and one-time NFL cheerleader holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science. [email protected] Twitter: @JaneenBPR
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Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF GIF via YouTube
Internet personalities Baked Alaska and Millennial Matt had a lot of fun at this past weekend's white supremacist rallies. Well, until Baked Alaska was maced , I guess. They used tools like Twitter and YouTube to bring their online followers into the heart of the racist action. But curiously, the two still insist that they're not neo-Nazis. So what the hell is a neo-Nazi?
The rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia were the largest collection of white supremacists in the United States in at least two decades. It left one woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, dead and dozens more injured. So it's curious to see both Baked Alaska (real name Tim Gionet) and Millennial Matt (real name Matthew Colligan) insist that they're not neo-Nazis and that they've never advocated violence. I'm starting to think that maybe they don't know what words mean.
If you're in the same boat, and don't know if you're a neo-Nazi, I've made a helpful guide to determine if you are. To be clear, the "neo" in neo-Nazi is simply meant to differentiate between Nazis who were around in the 1940s versus those who subscribe to Nazi beliefs today but weren't alive during Hitler's time. Sadly, there are still old school Nazis around, like 98-year-old Michael Karkoc who massacred women and children and currently lives in Minnesota .
If you answer "yes" to any of the questions below, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you regularly tweet the 14 Words?
The so-called 14 Words were coined by the late white supremacist David Lane and became a slogan for neo-Nazis around the world. The 14 Words read, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." It's not exactly subtle as far as Nazi slogans go.
In 1984, David Lane helped plot to kill Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host, and acted as the getaway driver when he and his fellow neo-Nazi scum shot and killed Berg in his driveway. Lane was sentenced to 190 years and died in prison in 2007.
Baked Alaska loves to tweet the 14 Words. He sends it to President Trump and he makes videos of it . Lots of videos of it .
Yesterday, Baked Alaska tweeted his defense of the 14 Words, saying that there's "nothing wrong" with the slogan and that "just because others have used them doesn't change the meaning." It's unclear if he understands the origin of the phrase, but he certainly understands that it means "white advocacy."
But even if he has no idea that it was coined by a murderous white supremacist thug, it's still a poisonous idea that has no place in society.
If you tweet the 14 Words you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you say "Hitler did nothing wrong"?
Some people insist that Baked Alaska and Millennial Matt can't be neo-Nazis because they're simply saying outrageous things to get a rise out of people. One of those things is that "Hitler did nothing wrong." But at some point you're no longer "trolling" and you're simply stating what you believe.
Millennial Matt has said "Hitler did nothing wrong" so many times that it's become his catchphrase. He says it on radio, in tweets, and in videos .
But what the hell does such a phrase mean? Adolf Hitler systematically killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Saying he did nothing wrong is an endorsement of those deaths.
Amazingly, Millennial Matt says that he's never advocated for violence against anyone. In a weepy YouTube post he whined that people were now threatening his life after he attended the rallies in Virginia. "There's nothing funny about threatening people's lives," he said.
But when you say that Hitler did nothing wrong you are explicitly advocating for violence against nonwhite people. That's explicitly what Hitler did. It's kind of what he's known for. When you say Hitler did nothing wrong, and you say it so many times that people start to riff on it with jokes about other people who " did nothing wrong " you're advocating for violence. That's kind of how this works.
If you say Hitler did nothing wrong, you're a neo-Nazi.
Have you attended a rally with people giving Hitler salutes?
The salute goes by a lot of names: The Roman salute, the Hitler salute, and the Bellamy salute. But it only has one meaning since it was adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s. It means you're a neo-Nazi.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF Footage of the infamous neo-Nazi tiki torchlight rally in Virginia on Friday taken by Baked Alaska (GIF made via Baked Alaska's YouTube)
Baked Alaska documented his trip from his home in Los Angeles to Virginia on Twitter and YouTube for all the world to see. And one of his most frightening videos came from Friday during the infamous tiki torchlight riot . Baked Alaska shot video as his fellow marchers viciously assaulted non-violent counter protesters. They can be seen in the video beating people with their torches. The counter protestors later described fearing for their lives .
And when Baked Alaska pans around in the crowd, you can clearly see people giving Nazi salutes as they chant "white lives matter."
If you attend a rally with people giving Hitler salutes, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you shout "hail victory" while carrying a torch in public?
Did you see footage of people shouting "hail victory" at the rallies this weekend? It's the English translation of "sieg heil," the notorious Nazi slogan. Baked Alaska shot video of himself saying just that.
"They thought we weren't going to stand up," Baked Alaska shouts into the camera . "Guess what, we're standing up for our rights! We're proud to be white!"
"We're proud to be white, brother," he continued while shaking hands with another white supremacist. "Hail victory! Hell yeah! Thank you, love you guys."
If you shout "hail victory" while carrying a torch in public, you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you deny that the Holocaust happened?
Holocaust denial is pretty much textbook neo-Nazism. And Millennial Matt peddles in it constantly. At the 52-minute mark during the livestream from Virginia, Millennial Matt encourages viewers to "look into revisionist history." Revisionist history often hinges on the belief that historians are lying about the fact that Nazi Germany executed millions of people.
"The history that they taught you in middle school is not factually accurate," Millennial Matt tells his viewers. "The reason that they teach you the civil rights movement and slavery in middle school is because you haven't fully developed your brain yet."
"If you wonder why people emotionally react when you talk about slavery, when you talk about the Holocaust, the reason people emotionally reaction is because they taught this to you before you were even old enough to realize what it is they were teaching you," he continued.
"The history that they teach you about the Holocaust is not factually accurate whatsoever," he says.
"The truth is, the Holocaust is one of the biggest hoaxes in world history," he said. "It's one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the human race."
If you deny the Holocaust you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you believe America's treatment of Nazis was worse than the Holocaust?
Aside from believing that the history of the Holocaust isn't accurate, Millennial Matt also believes that Nazi soldiers were treated more poorly than Jews during World War II . He goes so far as to compare Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people were systematically tortured and murdered, to a 5-star resort.
If you believe America's treatment of Nazis was worse than the Holocaust you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you publish photos of Jewish people you disagree with in gas chambers?
Baked Alaska also enjoys publishing photoshopped photos of Jewish people he doesn't like in gas chambers. President Trump is often depicted as the one administering the gas, dressed in Nazi regalia. Baked Alaska was even temporarily banned for doing it, but insists he'd do it all over again.
An image posted by Baked Alaska of a Jewish member of the alt-right in a gas chamber with President Trump administering the gas (Twitter)
If you publish photos of Jewish people you disagree with in gas chambers you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you have a photo of Joseph Goebbels in your Twitter header?
You're never going to guess what WWII-figure Millennial Matt has in his Twitter header. Yes, that's Joseph Goebbels, easily one of the most evil men in history and responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
The Twitter header of Millennial Matt which features a bloody Pepe, Joseph Goebbels and David Duke (Twitter)
Oh, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke is also in there. "Ironically," no doubt.
If you have a photo of Joseph Goebbels in your Twitter header you're a neo-Nazi.
Have you marched with people who physically assault others because of their race?
New footage has emerged overnight of the vicious assault endured by 20-year-old Deandre Harris at the hands of white supremacists in a parking garage . It's brutal to watch.
"Me and about five of my friends were out protesting. We thought [the racists] left, but at one point they came back. Everyone was exchanging words with the group, but then the KKK and white supremacists just rushed us," Harris told The Root .
Harris is lucky to be alive. Judging by the video, it doesn't appear like Baked Alaska or Millennial Matt were anywhere in sight and had nothing to do with the beating. But if you're marching with these people, this is what you're marching for.
If you march with people who physically assault others because of their race you're a neo-Nazi.
Do you want to hear the good news? You don't have to be a neo-Nazi forever. What you've done in the past doesn't have to define your future if you'd like to live a happier life. How do you stop being a neo-Nazi? Just stop doing all of the things above. You don't even have to join a new organization or donate to a nonprofit. Just stop being filled with irrational hate for people that are slightly different than you.
It's really as simple as that. Members of the alt-right have tried to rebrand their particular flavor of hate as new and stylish. But it's the same old Nazi shit. If you do the thing above you're a neo-Nazi. If you stop doing the things above you can stop being a neo-Nazi.
So give it a try! I promise it won't hurt. In fact, it might give you time to pursue things that are more fun. Do you enjoy making memes? Try making anti-Nazi memes. Or you can forget about Nazism altogether. Watch a movie, or build a tree fort, or go jerk off. I promise that they're all more fun than spreading the hatred of Nazism. |
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The rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia |
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 23, 2018
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Brienne Kordis, CODEPINK Media Liaison, brienne@codepink.org, 757-513-1934
Protesters Rally at BlackRock Shareholders Meeting
Coalition Calls on CEO Larry Fink & Shareholders to Stop Profiting on War & Violence
New York, NY - Today representatives and allies of the anti-war movement demonstrated in front of BlackRock's Manhattan office across from the Lotte Palace Hotel where BlackRock's shareholders will be attending their annual meeting.
Organizations including CODEPINK, Action Corps NYC, The Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance, Catholic Worker, the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, Enlace, Granny Peace Brigade, Gulf Coast Raging Grannies, Muslim Peace Fellowship, Muslims United for Justice, NYC Metro Raging Grannies, Peace Action New York State, Seeding Sovereignty, Show Up America, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace NYC Chapter 34, War Resisters League NYC, World Beyond War, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom protested the world's largest shadow bank for its practice of investing in weapons manufacturers and companies that profit from war and violence, in the U.S. and around the world.
"The U.S. is engaged in seven active conflicts and is the world's largest arms dealer, all while our domestic infrastructure crumbles and millions of Americans live in poverty," says Ariel Gold, CODEPINK National Co-Director. "BlackRock and its shareholders are profiting from war and violence by investing in companies who export weapons around the world and into our communities."
BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, controlling more than $5 trillion in assets. One of BlackRock's iShares funds is exclusively dedicated to "defense spending" - in other words, a fund that is exclusively profiting off of weapons of war. BlackRock has $7.25 billion invested in Boeing; $3.3 billion in General Dynamics; $5.6 billion in Lockheed Martin; $3.4 billion in Northrop Grumman; and $4 billion in Raytheon. Additionally, BlackRock holds investments in civilian gun manufacturers such as Sturm Ruger, Remington, and American Outdoor Brands (formerly Smith & Wesson).
They position themselves as a company that is socially responsible, while they profit from the world's worst humanitarian crisis - the devastation of Yemen, which has been fueled by American made arms and munitions. BlackRock is raking in billions from these very weapons manufacturers, while Yemenis starve and die from treatable diseases. BlackRock's investments are used to fuel war and violence around the world - in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and of course here in America. These weapons and the conflicts they fuel are responsible for the deaths of countless civilians. In Syria, thousands of civilians have been killed with U.S. weapons since 2014. In Yemen, one child dies every ten minutes from a preventable disease. In just the last seven weeks in Gaza, over a hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire while peacefully protesting. And in America, 2018 has already seen 22 school shootings - while BlackRock remains the leading investor in American Outdoor Brands, America's number one gun manufacturer.
The weapons funded by BlackRock's investments breed instability at home and abroad. In 2012, the FBI released a report indicating that U.S. military intervention abroad was responsible for the rise in terrorism around the world and at home. Far from making us safer, the products made and sold by these companies are creating an endless cycle of violence which disrupts peace and security at home and around the world.
"BlackRock claims to hold companies accountable for being socially responsible citizens, while their executives and shareholders continue to profit off of the most morally-corrupt companies in the world. They are making a killing on killing," says Sarah Eckel-Dalrymple, CODEPINK's Divest from the War Machine Campaign Manager. "Corporate accountability must extend to those who hold the shares of these companies. There should be no profit from war and violence." |
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Photo by Matthew Murphy
To make a great stage version of a towering film musical sounds like an impossible task. However, gay playwright Craig Lucas did just that with his 2014 stage adaptation of An American in Paris . The 1951 Oscar Best Picture-winner was inspired by George Gershwin's 1928 orchestral composition. Though Alan Jay Lerner's script for the film is charming as all get-out, Lucas transcends that by exuding that same charm while adding a deeper dimension of the characters' demoralization done by the Nazi occupation of France. The benefit a being a few generations further along has actually made the original story even better, thanks to Lucas. The Ordway is hosting the national tour of the Broadway hit and it is simply superb.
The musical takes place as World War II has just ended and reflects the paradoxical energies of grief sprung from 1. war's devastation and 2. the renewal of life after a dark, gruesome chapter. The musical focuses on a young woman and three men with strong feelings for that young woman. Her family was victimized by the Nazis.
Photo by Matthew Murphy
McGee Maddox and Sara Esty are picture-perfect as the romantic leads: American veteran, Jerry, and Jewish survivor, Lise. Etai Benson as Adam, a disabled U.S. veteran and a struggling composer, brings vibrant pluck to his role. Nick Spangler embodies the rigid decorum of Henri, the son of French industrialists. One wonders to what degree his family may have been collaborators with the Nazis.
Two supporting performances are notable. Gayton Scott as Henri's rigid, appearance-driven mother, and Emily Ferranti as Milo Davenport, an American socialite who champions young artists. Both performances reveal a lovely empathic humanity beneath what could be seen at first glance as arrogant self-preservation and opportunism.
An American In Paris has been directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon with a glorious mix of the balletic, the jazz scene, the modernist style, and that good old-fashioned boy-meets-girl prototype. Wheeldon is an absolute visionary. Scene after wonderful scene flows like a magical river.
Natasha Katz's lighting design and the projections by 59 Productions make for some of the most stirringly beautiful visuals you may ever see in a stage production. Faded images of Paris. Chalk-like drawing occurring right up on stage outlining such images, as if inscribed by God's hand. Bold evocations of modern art that fill up the stage space.
One of the show's most beguiling numbers is "Fidgety Feet" wherein a sensuous, sensual, slow-moving classical ballet is juxtaposed with an audience with the fidgets. Two dance styles appear simultaneously. Both are equally enthralling and underscore just how sophisticated and yet fully accessible An American in Paris truly is.
And the music! Well it's the incomparable George Gershwin. Need I say more? And lyrics by his brilliant brother Ira. Rob Fisher's adaptation and arrangements are marvelously handled.
An American in Paris Through June 18 Ordway Center, 345 Washington St., St. Paul (612) 224-4222 www.ordway.org |
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I'm not sure when it started, exactly. Maybe in elementary school, when the nuns used to pull me out of class to altar serve funerals because they knew I wouldn't cry? Maybe when Nova aired that documentary on the Ice Man mummy? Maybe when I started losing my baby teeth and my mom gave me a little box with a cat on it to put them all in? Who knows. Regardless, I've long been fascinated with human remains, and throughout my travels, I've seen quite a few.
Here are the top 9 I've witnessed. Happy Halloween.
9. Vial of one year's worth of eye boogers from a couple at the Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata.
8. Plastinated bodies at Our Body: The Universe Within.
7. Slides of Albert Einstein's brain at the Mutter Museum.
Via Mutter Museum .
6. Graves in the cemetery behind my apartment in Brooklyn that someone invited me on a date to one time.
Green-wood Cemetery via NYTimes .
5. The Mummy of Artemidora at the Metropolitan Museum.
Via Met Museum .
4. Oldcroghan Man, a preserved set of remains found in a bog in Ireland.
3. The Incorruptible Tongue of St. Anthony, which was still wet and undecayed 30 years after his death.
VIa iIvarfjeld.com .
2. The Catacombs in Paris, which holds the remains of over 6 million people relocated from overflowing cemeteries.
1. Specks of dust on the wind with every breath we take, because there are way more people who are dead than people who are alive. It's fine.
Via shutterstock . |
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Graves in the cemetery behind my apartment in Brooklyn that someone invited me on a date to one time.
Green-wood Cemetery via NYTimes . |
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Republican Sen. Bob Corker recently attended a classified, private briefing on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and he left the room feeling confident the United States would be doing everything it could do to "annihilate" ISIS, and that President Donald Trump is "not playing around."
Corker, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there was the impression that "more energy was going toward wiping out the extremist group," according to a recent report.
"There is just a lot more clarity, a lot more focus on annihilation," Corker said, according to the Washington Examiner. "Anybody that listened to that hearing understands they're all about killing every ISIS member they can get ahold of."
"The Trump administration is not playing around and is focused on completely annihilating ISIS," Corker tweeted. "I could not be more encouraged by the briefing."
(Twitter)
"There is a lot more clarity and a lot more focus on partnering with other countries to completely annihilate ISIS," he continued. "There is a renewed energy and a renewed focus, and I think every senator present today knows this administration is not playing around."
"Their approach is to kill members of ISIS and do everything they can to prevent them from escaping to other countries where they could inflict harm," he added.
Other senators declined to comment on the briefing, the Washington Examiner reported.
The closed-door briefing for the senators was given by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.
While the officials provided an update on the progress made toward eliminating ISIS, they did not deliver any new strategy handed down by the Trump Administration, which has been highly anticipated.
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Thanks. One way or another, I'll end up where I belong. It isn't in Washington State, that's sure!
Yeah, Patient Advocate is a joke. I had written a lot here on how to document the ineptitude and lack of concern you are encountering with yours, with the aim of her future unemployment, but when I got to going on things that might really help you, well, your Advocate suddenly seemed not so very important.
Right now we need to see you on the right path to fix your problem. So I slashed a small book... Fixing this, I pray, starts below.
First, in general: Document, make notes, names, dates, actions, communications, protect your documents, bring your own copies for others so tbey don't make "mistakes" with yours. Bring your originals, but don't relinquish them.
If a lot has transpired without actually being well documented, just do a little catch up memo to yourself. Details help and could be very useful to you.
With Government, as with so many things, it's all about the paper trail. Don't go sleuthing with videoing your interactions, I found out how dangerous that can be, legally, for us Citizens. Not a fun experience. All the above are just a modicum of the general guidelines on extricating oneself from SNAFUs.
So:
It IS weird that it's the US Treasury's fines you are facing. Evidently, the VA fines are collected in that fashion. If you get a traffic ticket on a Military base as a Civilian, your fine will be payable to the US Marshall's! It's the Government. It's weird, cruel, and nonsensical.
For you, it should be irrelevant which agency collects the VA's @#!& fines. The VA levied the fine. Treasury CANNOT change that. They are not in a position to arbitrate VA rules, they couldn't help you if they wanted to. It's the VA, and them alone, that can cancel that fine.
It only becomes a Treasury problem if they don't recognize tbe cancellation or they had already taken adverse action by the time the VA relents. We pray that will not be an issue, right?
Let the DAV help you get that canceled.
Let them tell the Treasury to hold their horses while they address the issue.
Let them demand that the VA provide their client documentation, proof positive, of having been notified of the necessity of providing such a signed document on a regular basis.
Even if they can provide a copy of the first letter you signed, and that letter has verbiage to the effect that it has to be repeated every three months, the DAV can question whether that document had a place to initial understanding of that requirement and if it was so initialled. Also, did the VA provide you a copy? You can't follow rules that you weren't provided.
The DAV can question the complete lack of notification to you of a pending requirement to re-sign. Question the lack of any grace period or notification that the "authorization" or whatever it was had expired and requested you return to sign another.
The DAV could, and should, question why the VA didn't automatically provide you, via USPS, two weeks in advance, an actual copy of that form with an explanatory letter and a return envelope?
Even if your agent hasn't seen this issue before, these common sense questions should be sufficient for them to hammer the appropriate VA official into submission. Take courage, Right is on your side.
DAV, asap, please. Don't sign up through the mail and wait for a membership card. Find your local DAV agent, walk in and join there at the same time you wish to press this issue. Bring your documentation, but do not relinquish it.
They do tend to have odd hours at the clinic or facility level offices, actually all of them I think, 0700 to a 1.5 hour lunch and an early closed time, and half a day Friday to permit training. I pray someone is close for you. If you must voyage to see him, or her, really make sure you have an appointment and they will be there for you.
Should the unthinkable happen, and they stink, there is the VFW, and even low income law clinics could take a stab at it I would hope.
Firstly, examine your documents to ensure that something was not over-looked. We all miss things from time to time. You are obviously very clear minded but I myself have made some really big embarrassing oversights as I am not always 100%, to say the least.
They still should have gone to much greater lengths to aid you. Their system stinks. The idea of sending a new form in advance of the due date sounds to me like a best practice. Bringing their shortcomings to light, even if you have "erred" on the fine print, could still gain you a break if a representative of DAV or VFW presses it.
Also, as if I haven't said enough already, make sure you are not entirely ignoring the Treasury people. Let them know you aren't yet in a position to pay the fine, and that you are contesting them as the VA did you wrong.
Don't let them increase that fine or go into collections, which could be from your current Government income. They are like any creditor, they need their fur stroked.
I could be wrong, but if I could avoid paying it I would. It is easier to have them dismiss a fine than to try to have them pay you back.
Maybe paying a little could keep them from going crazy on your SS payment, I don't like that idea, but I don't know.
I'm little more than a jailhouse lawyer at this point, well intentioned, but much is speculative. Which is why I want you to have representation. Call the DAV!
All this is worth exactly what you paid for it. But I pray it will be of benefit to you, I truly do.
I also pray you see this! My goodness, it's getting late. I need to put this thing down at 2100 and leave it alone! But you are worth it. I love my Treeper family.
God Bless you, and Goodnight, Maquis |
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Milo Yiannopoulos, the former bright star of the Alt Right, has fallen from grace after a video emerged of him appearing to defend pedophilia as a great way for young boys to "discover who they are." Apparently the GOP is perfectly fine with sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, but pedophilia is the breaking point. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
For about the last year, Milo Yiannopoulos from Breitbart has been the rising star among the alt right. Basically the rising star amongst all of the racist Republicans that helped to put Donald Trump in office. Well this past weekend, new audio/video from a podcast emerged that Yiannopoulos had done a while back, where Yiannopoulos told us that he believes people under the age of 16 in the United States, some teenagers should be legally allowed to consent to sex.
Essentially what Milo Yiannopoulos did here was say that he thinks that pedophilia in some cases is okay because anyone under the age of 16, by law if you engage in intercourse with them, consensual or not, it is considered pedophilia. You become a registered sex offender because that is against the 1956 sexual offenses act in the United Kingdom at least.
Here's the thing, after this audio of Yiannopoulos surfaced, he lost his speaking position at this week's CPAC convention. Shortly thereafter he lost his book deal with Simon and Schuster and as it stands right now is most likely, if he hasn't already, going to actually lose his job at Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos in the span of three days has lost his entire future and deservedly so. There is no sympathy. There are no tears for this madman. He is a man who was banned from Twitter last year for sexist and racist attacks on the cast of Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters reboot.
His whole career is built around essentially being the male version of Ann Coulter, just a little bit more extreme. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, you name it, this guy has done it all. To be honest for Republicans, up until the pedophilia comments, all of this was perfectly fine. In fact going back to those comments, Yiannopoulos actually said during that podcast that he thinks sex for 13, 12 year old boys is perfectly fine because it helps them discover who they are.
At that age of 12 or 13 a child, a teenager is not able to fully understand one the choice that they're making and two any potential consequence from those choices. Yiannopoulos is dangerously misguided on this issue and he is a dangerous person, not just because of the pedophilia comments but because of the way he seems to hate any non-white person. Yes, it is good that Yiannopoulos has lost his future. He's lost his book deal.
I am sure there's some other right wing publisher that's already talking to him right now. He's going to write a book. He's going to make millions off it because there's enough hateful disgusting people in this country that are going to go out and buy it. They're still going to listen to what this guy says, so he hasn't lost everything. He's still going to be around, this little cockroach is going to survive this nuclear storm that's currently happening in his life, but he doesn't deserve to.
Anyone like that, anyone who makes a career off of peddling hate in this country, or in any country, should not be given credence. They should not be given guest spots on Real Time with Bill Maher, where Bill Maher appeared to be best friends with Milo. This is the kind of guy that you ignore. This is the kind of guy that you don't talk about, and I can promise you, this is going to be the only time that we actually address what this whack job did, because to be honest, beyond this he's not worth our time. |
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WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of contracted airport service workers walked off the job Wednesday morning at Dulles International and Reagan National airports, speaking out against their employer and demanding to be paid a minimum of $15 an hour.
"They're on strike today to demand higher standards," said protest organizer Jaime Contreras, vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ.
"This is something that is very hard for them to do, but they've had enough."
The employees, including baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants, are with Huntleigh USA Corporation, a contractor that does business directly with airlines.
It has around 400 workers at the two airports.
Organizers of the demonstration said the employees often have to work two or three jobs to support their families and earn as little as $6.15 an hour plus tips.
"We're here today to make sure these workers get what they deserve which is a higher wage and respect and dignity on the job," Contreras said.
It was not the first time contracted airport service workers in the D.C. area walked off the job. Employees at Reagan National went on strike in late March as part of a nationwide protest involving people who do various jobs including cleaning airplanes, checking and hauling bags and assisting passengers who have disabilities.
Tuesday's protest was the first involving employees from Huntleigh, and it marked the first time that contracted airport workers from Dulles International agreed to strike.
"We work very hard to ensure that travelers have a safe and clean airport, but we are ready to go on strike to ensure we can provide for our families," said Aynalem Lale, a wheelchair dispatcher at Dulles.
"If I made $15 an hour, I wouldn't have to work two jobs and would not have to sleep at the airport between jobs."
Travelers should not notice any difference in operations.
"There has been no adverse impact on airport passengers or flights at Reagan National and Dulles International Airports. We expect normal airport operations during the peaceful protest," said Rob Yingling, a spokesman for the airports.
Protesters also planned to attend a Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board of directors meeting to ask for a new rule, requiring airline contractors such as Huntleigh to pay workers $15 an hour. |
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Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, has announced that he will, by executive order, restore the voting rights to felons on parole or probation in New York state -- a bloc that numbers about 35,000. He'll pull off this unusual move by pardoning the 35,000 currently on parole and then subsequently the newly released who [...]
The Muse has descended on the curriculum developers at Columbia University: they have designed a class entitled Pop and Social Justice Songwriting 101. Which implies that there will be a 102. But it seems unlikely that Columbia students will be able to major in it because the course is being offered to high school kids, [...]
Time was when the largest concentrations of Catholics in the country were in the big cities -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. It's said that in Boston, for example, if the cardinal spoke out against a particular issue that was coming before the legislature, the bill went down in flames. Because most of [...]
There was a period in my younger days when I became fascinated with epics disasters, and read about them almost to the exclusion of anything else. Pompeii. Chicago Fire. San Francisco Earthquake. Krakatoa. Most of the books were okay-ly written. The pick of the disaster crop of was (and remains) David McCullough's account of the [...]
On December 1, 2017, Los Angeles welcomed an exhibit taken from the collection of the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden. The exhibit showcases examples of innovations that didn't just flop, but have become classic examples of "what were they thinking?" This is especially true when the fiasco is dreamed up, manufactured, and taken to [...]
You probably recall hearing about the 24-year-old North Korean border guard who put down his weapon and sprinted across No Man's Land in a desperate attempt to reach freedom and security in South Korea. His former comrades opened fire on him and he went down. He was pulled to safety by South Korean border guards, [...]
Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest cities, are both located in Saudi Arabia. As guardians of these sacred sites, the Saudi royal family has decreed that no non-Muslim house of worship may be erected in the kingdom. Of course, not everyone who lives in Saudi Arabia is Muslim. There are many thousands of foreigners in [...]
Remember video stores? They tended to be hole-in-the-wall shops stacked floor to ceiling with VHS cassettes of every movie you didn't want to rent, but you couldn't rent the one you wanted because it had been rented already. In terms of customer satisfaction, this unhappy arrangement was problematic. But if video stores did one thing [...] |
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Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest cities, are both located in Saudi Arabia. As guardians of these sacred sites, the Saudi royal family has decreed that no non-Muslim house of worship may be erected in the kingdom. Of course, not everyone who lives in Saudi Arabia is Muslim. |
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Crowds gathered in New Orleans to protest Tuesday against a plan by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal to reinstate food stamp work-requirements.
The federal government has required work or job training to qualify for benefits since 1996. After the recession, many states were granted waivers that allowed them to ignore the requirements. With the improved economy, several states have decided to not request their waiver be renewed . Louisiana let its waiver expire Oct. 1. The move, however, has faced adamant opposition.
"The Department of Children and Family Services and Governor Jindal do not understand the impact of their policy change," the protesters said in a letter obtained by The Times-Picayune. "For many, food stamps stand between subsistence and starvation. Taking food out of people's mouths will neither promote self-sufficiency nor create jobs, but rather only leave entire communities hungry."
The protest was organized by Stand with Dignity. The group has filed an administrative complaint demanding that state reverse its decision. Protesters note 62,000 state recipients are at risk of losing their benefits. The work-requirements apply to able-bodied adults without children. The job must be at least 20 hours a week and the training must be federally approved. Without the waiver, state residents have three months to comply.
"We continue to seek opportunities for SNAP recipients to increase their self-sufficiency," Children and Family Services Secretary Suzy Sonnier said in September. "Engaging in work activities is a key step in that transition. We are striving to reduce reliance on public benefits, increase the number of clients participating in education or workforce activities and connect Louisiana employers with ready and willing to work job candidates."
Not everyone believes ending the waiver is a good idea. Louisiana Budget Project Director Jan Moller argues the decision ignores economic realities.
"Parts of the state that are very rural and very poor with unemployment rates far above the national average, that's what this waiver was designed to address," Moller told The Times-Picayune. "There are people who are desperately poor and need help."
As of June, 44 states have either a waiver or a partial waiver. The food stamp program is officially known as The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Run by The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), it is the nation's largest food -assistance program.
"We're not talking about a luxury villa and a Cadillac in the driveway," Moller continued. "Telling people you're taking food off table for ideological reasons is bad policy and bad economics."
According to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) , the program has increased from 17 million participants in 2000 to nearly 47 million in 2014. The improved economy has helped decrease the number of participants in recent years. Since participation hit its peak in December 2012, the number of people receiving benefits has declined by more than 1.5 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office .
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org. |
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Silvina met Nelson at a boliche (nightclub) in Miramar. It was 1986, and Silvina was nineteen years old. Nelson was two years younger but hot, a jitterbug from Mar del Plata, an hour away, who would cruise over every weekend with his buddies to dance and get laid. " Le gustaba la milonga a ese ," says Silvina . " Todavia le gusta la joda. [He liked to party. He still likes to party.]" But so did Silvina: " Era un tiro al aire yo. [I was a loose cannon. I liked Nelson, I liked his friend, I liked the neighbor, I liked them all.]" Three months after their eyes first locked, Silvina was pregnant. Yet they didn't marry until Mathew -- their oldest boy -- turned eleven months.
Having a child out of wedlock and being older than your groom-to-be are distinctions frowned upon in Argentine society. As in most Latin-American countries, "respectable" women in Argentina are still expected to remain virgins until marriage, and they usually marry much older men. "Usually there are two categories into which women fall," says Andrew, Silvina's gray-haired, 32-year-old confidante, who also is from Miramar. "There are women for the kitchen, the kind you want to have a relationship with, the type you want to have children with. And there are women who are only good for fucking." Silvina has blurred the lines. "She likes men," acknowledges Andrew. "But she's also a struggling mother trying to make it. La flaca es una buena mujer . Silvina [who's called la flaca -- the skinny one] is a good woman," he concludes.
"The first year of my marriage with Nelson was great," Silvina relates. "We got along very well. We had fun together and went out often. We led very social lives, and at first it was exciting." But by the second year, he began making his rounds with the ladies once again. "He had an affair with a girl from Buenos Aires. Even when my boys were sick in the hospital with respiratory problems, he had affairs. He had affairs through my pregnancies. It didn't matter. He fucked every woman he could.... My mother said to me: He's never going to change.' She was right. Here it only got worse. There's more variety. Already he's been through Colombia and Brazil," Silvina laughs.
In Miami Beach, Silvina says, Nelson's white painter's pickup truck became his roving bachelor pad: "He had it equipped with everything he needed. I just got sick of it. I couldn't stand him touching a single hair on my head. I was disgusted by him."
Last December, soon after the last time Silvina caught Nelson in bed with yet another woman, she met a young guy named Alex through Andrew and George. Alex is also from Miramar. The skinny, black-haired 26-year-old, who's into motorcycles and has tattoos of an eagle and a unicorn, is the father of a five-year-old boy in Argentina. Silvina began a relationship with him and kicked Nelson out.
"George told me one day: Guess who's got his eye on you?'
"Who?' I asked, surprised. He said, Alex.' I said, QUEEEE! -- what!' I never looked at him in that way." Then one day Alex expressed his feelings. "He said, ?No sabes las ganas que tengo de comerte a besos? [Don't you know I want to eat you with kisses?]'" Silvina recounts. "I melted. From then on we've been inseparable. He even keeps the cigarette butts of the first ones we smoked together."
But Alex put up with a lot, Silvina admits. During his weekend stays at her place, Nelson would burst into the house and hurl insults at the lovers. In their absence he'd break into Silvina's apartment and search through all of her and Alex's belongings. He'd follow the couple like a shadow, and on several occasions spied on them through the windows while they had sex. "Twice I caught him looking at us while we made love," Silvina says with her hands on her waist. Her eyes are smiling, and she's biting her bottom lip.
One day Nelson slipped into the back seat of Silvina's black Honda Civic just as she was parallel parking, with Alex in the passenger seat. "Keep driving," Nelson told her. When she refused, Silvina recounts, Nelson pulled her out of the car, threw her on the sidewalk, and began kicking her in the ribs. Alex leaped out of the passenger seat, and Nelson ran away. On the beach one day he grabbed Silvina by the stomach and twisted her skin. Alex was sunbathing nearby. "There were times I really struggled to contain myself," Alex says. Silvina's husband even threatened to run her over with his truck.
One night he came close to following through on his threats. According to Silvina and her neighbor George, Nelson once again broke into her apartment through the living-room window and then began screaming he would kill himself with a kitchen knife if Silvina didn't leave Alex. "But first he tried to stab me," she says. Somehow Silvina managed to wrestle the knife away from Nelson. She chased him out of the apartment and her lanky husband made it to his white truck. But Silvina followed and they wrestled like WWF stars inside the pickup. "He kept saying he was going to kill himself," Silvina now laughs hysterically. "So I called 911. I thought he was going to do it." But then he drove away. " Es un hincha pelotas mi marido . Un boludo -- He's a nuisance, an idiot. He got lucky that night," she boasts, still laughing. "I was holding back because I really thought he'd do it." George, from upstairs, witnessed the scene. So did Silvina's three-year-old daughter, Jessica. "The only thing I could do was hold on to the girl," George says. "She's a rare woman, Silvina."
Eventually Alex went back to Argentina, and Silvina sometimes thinks of joining him.
When they first arrived in North Beach, Silvina, Nelson and the two boys rented an efficiency with the help of a family friend they knew from Argentina who had been living there for several months.
North Beach, an area that stretches from 63rd to 87th street between Collins Avenue and Indian Creek Drive (which becomes Dickens Avenue north of 71st Street), is a magnet for Argentines. "It's easier to adapt to North Beach," says Graciela Mitchelli, who co-owns a newspaper in Miami called El Argentino Mercosur with her husband, Alberto. "There are other Argentines living there, the rent is lower, there is greater access to public transportation, and the language barrier is minimal." Of course the main attraction in this neighborhood of Miami Modern apartment buildings, single-family homes, Jewish learning centers, and Argentine delis and restaurants, is the beach. "Argentines love the beach and the heat," says Mercedes Garcia, a 28-year-old economic reporter from Buenos Aires, recently in Miami looking for freelance work. Alberto Mitchelli agrees: "It's a dream most Argentines have to live in a tropical place." (He has been in Miami since 1981.)
But there are other reasons why Miami in general, as opposed to other cities in the country, is on Argentine immigrants' radar. "Argentines, especially portenos [natives of Buenos Aires], are all about living the good life," explains Garcia. And Miami has that image. "In Argentina it's considered cool, or chic, to live in Miami. The city represents a mix of prosperity and the good life. New York is for people who want to break their backs working. Miami is for people looking for a more laid-back approach."
But soon Argentines face reality. They find that even for those just trying to survive, Miami is not much different from New York, Graciela Mitchelli says.
Shortly after they arrived from Argentina, Nelson painted buildings and Silvina cleaned hotel rooms in South Beach at night for minimum wage. During the day she also cleaned apartments in Miami Lakes for about $30 each. After two months she got a job at a pasta factory, for a meager salary as well, and the family was able to move to her present address. The one-bedroom apartment was at least bigger, if not less dingy. In January 1998 Silvina had a third child by Nelson, a daughter, Jessica. Suddenly the family had to make do with one paycheck and more demands on it. " Me sentia para la mierda -- I felt like shit," Silvina says about having another child. By then finances were intruding on her dreams of America, and of marriage.
Every day Silvina struggles to make ends meet. Often the most basic necessities, such as food, are not easy to get. There are days when she goes "hunting" to feed her children. Hunting, in Silvina's world, is asking for enough money for food for the day. She'll corner her husband until she's finally able to scrape $40 from him. "That's on a good day," she gripes.
If Nelson turns out dry, Silvina resorts to neighbors. She owes Andrew ten dollars. And recently she borrowed $60 from Elsa the Paraguayan, who also lends Silvina her old Mercedes-Benz to run errands with. "Silvina is alone," Elsa says. "From the time I've known her she's always depended on the kindness of others." Then there's the Cuban girl who lives on 77th Street. When Silvina needs to use the phone because hers has been disconnected, she calls on the Cuban girl from her kitchen doorstep and voila -- she's telephonic again. And when Silvina's electricity is cut off every now and then because she hasn't paid the bill, she'll cook over there, too. The Cuban girl saves for her everything from rice to toilet paper to leftover pizza, so Silvina's children won't have only a school lunch in their stomachs.
Silvina's last job was cleaning the Key Biscayne home of a rich Buenos Airean family who owns an air cargo company with offices in Miami, Chile, and Argentina. They paid her $250 per week to clean, do the laundry, iron clothes, and bathe the dogs. Silvina says that aside from exploiting her, the family was also verbally abusive, though not intentionally. "It's just the way they are," she asserts. "Although la mujer es un asco [the missus is disgusting], and she screams at me for nothing, she likes me. She's just very domineering." (Like Silvina's mother.) "The other day she called me every name in the book because I mixed colored towels with white ones in the dryer. You should see their house. They buy rare, exotic objects from places like Russia and Greece. I'm afraid to even go near them. Can you imagine if I broke some high-priced vase? I'd probably be working for a year to pay for it."
Silvina's way of overcoming humiliating experiences is by laughing. The smelly sneakers she wears to work became a big joke between her and Ronaldo, a Nicaraguan man who worked with her in Key Biscayne. "The other day I was cleaning the dining room when Ronaldo said, Silvina, the smell coming from your feet es impresionante -- impressive.' So I grabbed a can of country-scent Raid and sprayed out the room." Silvina laughs at the thought of using roach spray as an air freshener.
But she doesn't take everything lightly. "When it gets to be too much, I lose it," she says. "I have a very short temper. Me rayo. " Recently she told Estela, the rich Key Biscayne Argentine, to basically "fuck off." She got fired but the next day was hired back, with an apology. "She told me: Voz sos una barbara Silvina, eres unica. ' [You're a barbarian, Silvina, you're unique.]" But eventually Silvina quit that job. Currently she's out of work.
In the past, when there was no other way, Silvina lap-danced at Porky's II in Miami. For three months beginning in March, she worked steadily at the nude bar and made about $500 every weekend. One night at my house she proudly showed off her routine.
Silvina leaped up from a rocking chair, admitting she enjoys lap dancing, and sashayed across the living room and into the dining room, where she mounted a chair. "If you saw me you wouldn't recognize me," she said, while slowly grinding an invisible man. " Me transformo -- I transform myself." The vertical blinds of my dining-room window were open. Silvina's friends from above her apartment have an inside view of my home. That night los chicos del siete were also at Andrew and George's place playing video games. They became her audience. I warned Silvina about peeping Toms, but she didn't care. "Three or four girls do the lap dance together in a room," she explained. "There's one man for each girl. Then we rotate. You should see how those old men wet themselves. It really turns me on," she said, lifting up her shirt, her nipples erect. The following day, whispering excitedly, she confided like a teenager: "The guys from upstairs told me they were dying last night."
Though Silvina may escape most problems via comic relief, when it comes to her children, she's stern and often gets physical. Indeed dealing with her adolescent boys has become more of a challenge since her separation from Nelson, she admits. To each other the boys speak English, a language their mother doesn't understand. And of course Silvina receives no moral support from her husband. "The other day one of the boys asked his father for money. Nelson said, Go tell your mother to turn tricks so she can give you a few bucks.' Do you think after hearing that my boys will respect me? That's why they act they way they do."
Thirteen-year-old Mathew and twelve-year-old Anthony began getting into trouble in the neighborhood. One day in June the brothers were shooting rockets out on the street. Night had fallen when Anthony threw one and it landed inside a Brazilian woman's apartment, setting her curtains on fire. Amid the fire-rescue sirens the woman ran to Silvina's home. Clutching her cordless phone, she began lecturing Silvina on how to raise her children. But in the broken Spanish with a Portuguese twang, the lesson fell on deaf ears. After the incoherent sermon, Silvina called Anthony to her and smacked his face. The boy ran away crying.
Trying to make ends meet and raising three children on her own is just part of Silvina's struggle in a foreign land. Staying healthy is another. Because she has no medical insurance, Silvina hasn't been treating a kidney infection. On a recent night she drove herself to Jackson Memorial Hospital when the pains became unbearable. "It was like I was going through labor," she says, horrified. The doctor gave her a prescription, but Silvina hasn't filled it. Recently she suffered from a strong headache, and her physical therapist referred her to a neurologist who, according to Silvina, said she had suffered a brain convulsion. "He said I could have died," she shrugs.
Silvina was the twelfth child born to a poor family from Mar del Plata, 60 miles from Miramar. When she was two months old, her biological mother abandoned her in a stroller in the middle of a road. "I don't understand why she left me," Silvina recounts. "She already had so many children. What difference would one more make?" According to Silvina, a driver came upon the baby and took her to a hospital in Mar del Plata. There a well-off but childless Italian couple living in Miramar adopted her.
Though her family treated her as if she were their biological daughter, Silvina says she grew up feeling discriminated against by extended family members. When she was eight or nine, she began asking questions. "I first began noticing through photos. I always thought I looked so different. It was a strong feeling I had of not really belonging," says Silvina, a curvaceous woman whose full lips naturally pout when she complains, which is often.
On its official Website, Miramar is described as " la ciudad de los ninos -- los chicos nunca se olvidan [the city of children -- children never forget]." The coastal town, population 20,000, faces the Atlantic and is about 500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. It is heavily dependent on tourism in the summer; its beaches are good for surfing. In the winter "we die of hunger," say the Miramarans living in Little Buenos Aires. The winters are harsh, jobs are few, only the butcher and the baker have work, attests Allen, a witty, curly-haired 24-year-old who arrived from Miramar about five months ago and who lives in apartment seven, behind Silvina's place. But, he cautions, Argentines, as part of their national character, tend to exaggerate a lot.
Indeed says Mark Szuchman, professor of Latin-American history at Florida International University, anguish is an Argentine way of life. In fact, he says, there are more psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires per capita than in any other place in the world. "If Woody Allen knew this, he would move from New York," Szuchman assures.
Mercedes Garcia, the Argentine economic reporter, agrees. "We're a pessimistic people," Garcia concedes. "We're tragic, melancholic, and we like to complain a lot. Individually, we're overconfident and arrogant -- in Argentine slang we call it being chanta . But we lack those qualities as a nation. Argentines have no faith in Argentina."
According to last year's census, there were nearly 23,000 Argentines concentrated in South Florida. But according to the General Consul of Argentina in Miami, Deputy Maximo Gowland, there are more than twice that number -- about 60,000 -- residing in Miami-Dade alone, a growth of 61 percent since 1992. He warns the figure is only approximate. "More or less," Gowland says. "Though I would venture to say it's more." (By some accounts at least 100,000 Argentines have reached South Florida.)
Three years ago the number of Argentines coming to Miami-Dade increased sharply, as South America's second largest economy entered a demoralizing slump. To date Argentina remains mired in a muck of economic and political turmoil. "Things have gotten worse," says Szuchman. "There's been a considerable and growing amount of unemployment."
Mercedes Garcia, who works for El Cronista , says her country's economic woes are deeply entrenched in the nation's idiosyncrasies. "During the years of President Carlos Menem, between 1990 and 1999, there was a lack of economic reform," she explains. "The economy was growing, there was a lot of privatization going on, but instead of embracing needed changes, the government went all out. Argentina's foreign debt was enormous. Yet despite the country's growing deficit, the public sector continued to spend money left and right and nothing was really getting done. The mentality was mientras pueda safo ' --get away with it while you can. It's the Argentine way."
Currently, Garcia explains, international markets have no faith in Argentina. The South American country was pounded into a recession three years ago when Brazil, Argentina's biggest trading partner, devalued the real, Brazil's currency. As a result Argentina, which depended heavily on Brazil to purchase its exports, lost one of its biggest customers.
In Argentina salaries have been slashed, workers have been laid off, hundreds of small businesses have closed, and consumers have stopped spending. "It's a cycle that seems to never end," Garcia says. Argentine political scandals have aggravated the situation. (Last year former Vice President Carlos Alvarez resigned in the aftermath of a vote-buying debacle in the Senate. Menem is under house arrest for his alleged role in arms sales to Croatia, while an international arms-sales embargo was in place during the Balkan wars, and to Ecuador during its border war with Peru; ironically Argentina was a peace guarantor for a cease-fire.) "Just one of 20,000 cases of corruption," Garcia contends. Like most of her countrymen, she is cynical about her government. The disillusion is strongest among young people attempting to come into their places in Argentine society. They feel shut out by age and corruption.
Raul Costa, a political analyst from Cordoba, Argentina, paints a dismal picture affecting not just Argentine youth. "No matter what the government does in reaction to the economic crises, common Argentines, the ones sitting out in the bleachers, will have no victories to celebrate, no matter what the result of the game," writes Costa via e-mail. "For ordinary Argentines the suffering won't end when the referee blows his whistle.
"Here there is not a single day that goes by without protests or bad news," Costa writes. "The economic slump has translated into a national psychological depression. The situation is worse for young adults. You can't find work without a profession. But even for young pros, it's hard. In Argentina there are no social programs for people without jobs. Being without work can easily translate into homelessness. To have to live in a country where you can't plan beyond a few days is truly difficult."
Indeed the middle class has been pulling up roots and settling in places like Italy and Spain, where many Argentines not only have strong cultural ties, but citizenship as well, and for the more adventurous there's Miami. Professor Szuchman, an Argentine specialist, explains Miami is a natural attraction for business types and professionals. "I hear that every other Argentine waiter in South Beach is an architect."
But Deputy Maximo Gowland describes the exodus as being heterogeneous. "There are all kinds," he says. "From investors to blue-collar workers to the sons and daughters of the comfortable middle class." This group of young people, in their midtwenties to early thirties, comes as tourists and then sticks around to "see what happens." Some are students, others are typical middle-class slackers, often partly subsidized from home by Mom and Dad.
In the North Beach enclave known as Little Buenos Aires, working-class Argentine families with little or no educational background mix with the sons and daughters of the privileged middle class. "Their parents were European immigrants who saw Argentina rise. Ironically just as their parents emigrated to Argentina from Europe, this new generation have themselves become immigrants, however temporary it may be," professor Szuchman says.
Argentines can travel as tourists to the United States without American visas and stay in the country for up to 90 days, thanks to something called the Visa Waiver Permit Program. Owing to hard times back home, many Argentines are taking advantage of their traveling perks. But they're overstaying their visits in Miami-Dade. According to Gowland, there about six flights daily arriving at Miami International Airport from Argentina. More and more are beginning to drink their mate in public.
In Miami there are at least ten publications for Argentines, according to Gowland. Three civic organizations in the area -- the Association of Argentines in Miami, the Lions Club, and Association San Martiniana (named after Argentine independence hero San Martin) -- are among the dozen groups throughout Florida. On the beach soccer fans wear their favorite team jerseys everywhere -- red and white River Plate fans; yellow and blue for Boca Juniors . ( Futbol is Argentina's passion, and the game played in North Shore Park often sparks into flame.) One guy I met had Diego Maradona's face -- an Argentine soccer legend-turned-coke addict -- tattooed on his arm. Neighborhood cars are adorned with Argentine flags and nationalistic paraphernalia. Argentine delis, cafes, and restaurants are lined along Collins Avenue between 65th and 75th streets and along the 71st Street commercial corridor. "They stand out from other Latin Americans," says one non-Argentine neighbor. "They come, they stay, and they're loud about it."
"The question is how long are they here for," Szuchman says. "Argentines have had a history of migrating and then returning. They don't leave Argentina happily."
Silvina is an exception. She was thrilled to leave Miramar, the cold weather, and her domineering mom. "I was one of the first to arrive here," she claims. "In 1995, when I came, there were very few Argentines. Now they're everywhere."
"I tried to get away from [ los Argentinos ], and they followed me," Silvina contends sarcastically. "They should all go back to Argentina. Que se vayan ," she says loudly, one day walking back from the beach. A young Argentine couple is walking hand in hand just a few steps in front of her. Silvina breaks out into frenzied laughter. " Que se vayan todos los Argentinos. Son una porqueria -- they're trash."
Apartment seven, behind Silvina's place, is the nightly gathering spot for the clan of Miramarans inhabiting this slice of Miami Beach, Silvina's fan club, los chicos del siete, of which Allen is the newest member. Jokingly he calls his place el boliche -- the nightclub. "People are constantly coming and going," he says "We can even identify everyone's particular knock. So we don't bother opening the door anymore, we just shout, Come in,' or else we leave the door open. Though lately the mosquitoes and palmetto bugs have been forcing us to close up." Los chicos used to throw asados [barbecues] every Friday, just outside their apartment. The Argentine tradition is perhaps the closest thing to a meat-eater's nirvana on Earth: "If I go a day without meat, I feel something is not right," Allen affirms. "We're carnivores," he adds with a mischievous smile. "Vampires!" Birra -- beer -- is usually the chicos' drink of choice. And cigarettes ( puchos ) are chain-smoked. "Oh ... I can tell you some anecdotes about our gatherings," John says one night, while sitting near the sidewalk.
Now that Alex is gone, Silvina has started frequenting apartment seven again, once her children are tucked into bed. There she is the center of attention. The "boys" from Miramar see her as both a mother figure and sexually tempting. "When I hang out with them, se cagan de la risa -- they die of laughter. Que tengo, payasos en la cara. What is it with me? Do I have clowns coming out of my face? No la verdad es que son unos buitres . No, really, they're vultures. You see their faces, and you think they're angels. They're not," Silvina warns. " Mujer que ven, mujer que quieren montar . Any woman they see they want to ride. In fact," she adds, "there's so much jerking off going on in apartment seven they could open a ricotta factory.
"But I have no problems," Silvina continues. "I'm into menores [minors]." Silvana, however, is mostly all talk. Lately her mind has been on Alex, who's back in Miramar. "Alex used to say to me: Silvina, you're so liberal. I love that in a woman. You have no problems with sex.'"
"Do you consider yourself a feminist?" I ask.
" Yo lo que soy es una desgenerada -- I'm more of a degenerate," Silvina answers with a smirk, biting her bottom lip. A sexual predator in the most pure and innocent way, Silvina loves sex, men, and flirting. Riding in the car with her one night, on our way back from Normandy Supermarket, she flirts with every man walking on Dickens Avenue: "Here all you have to do is smile and wave and before you know it you'll have a handsome bachelor sitting in the passenger seat of your car."
Most of the things Silvina says are expressed with sexual undertones. She loves to pose in front of the camera. Before Alex left he shot photos of her dressed in black Victoria's Secret lingerie. He left her one photo and took the rest to Argentina. Silvina showed most of her young male neighbors and even displayed the pic on her refrigerator. Back in Argentina Alex showed the ones he took with him to his father and friends. "They told him he was crazy for leaving behind such a woman," Silvina says.
One night in apartment seven, John and his roommates were playing a soccer video game. (Losers wash the dishes.) AC/DC was playing on the stereo, and the slackers from Miramar were passing around a faso (a joint). The walls are adorned with a Bob Marley poster, a magazine cut-out of a marijuana plant, and a giant Indian dream catcher. A bookcase is filled with empty liquor, beer, and wine bottles. "The bottles are an offering to La Virgen de las montanas ," Allen says. But, I remark, there's no statue of a Virgin to place an offering to. "I don't think she'll be coming here," Allen laughs. "We just want to be ready."
Once the weed kicks in, John answers my questions about why he came to Miami. "Our parents are comfortable in Miramar," he says. "But they have only enough for themselves. There's nothing for us there. In South America Miami is the golden dream." A friend who is visiting argues that leaving Argentina for Miami, Spain, or Italy has become fashionable among young Argentines. "Okay, so it's appealing, but people are leaving because they are prompted by a reality," John counters. "The reality is that there's no room for us. But now that I've lived the dream, I think I'd rather go back."
Economics wasn't the motive for Silvina's move, she contends. She was upper middle class, her family traveled frequently to Europe. Her father, who passed away in Silvina's arms when she was sixteen, was in the military for ten years, then became a contractor on profitable construction projects. Silvina hardly ever worked. In fact, confirms her mother in Argentina, she owns two homes, five apartments, and two retail spaces in her native country. But none of the rental property is occupied. "I attended the best private schools," Silvina says. "The only thing missing was knowing where I came from."
When Silvina married Nelson, the couple depended partly on the family's riches and partly on Nelson's job working at a Pepsi factory. "My mother gave us anything we needed," Silvina revealed one night while hanging wet clothes on a line outside her place. "I wanted Nelson to start playing a more dominant role as the family's breadwinner. That's why I decided we should relocate. But look at me. Here in Norte America I'm poor, working as a housecleaner, de cabaretera [lap-dancing] on the side." Recently Nelson was fired from his job painting buildings. "He would show up to work whenever he felt like it," Silvina says. For her part she couldn't take any more of the cleaning life. So tonight, in a different part of town, Silvina is looking for work as an exotic dancer. By the end of the month she'll have to pay rent.
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"I'm probably going to end up moving in with my husband," Silvina pouts. "Where else am I going to go? Me, the kids, and the big-screen TV....
"I suppose I could sell the TV ... but no, what am I crazy? I can't sell that TV -- it's a great TV....
"I mostly just glance at it when I can. My kids have it mostly tuned to music videos. But I don't care what's on. Che, the few seconds I get sucked into it is like being at the movies. It's one of my few escapes, sabes? Alex is another escape for me ... even though he's gone."
Names in this article have been altered in some cases. All incidents are true. |
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You've probably heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment from a textbook, a documentary, or maybe you even saw the 2015 feature film of the same name. If not, this was an experiment carried out in 1971 by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. The idea was to hire students to act as either prisoners or guards for two weeks to see how they would react to the experience. But after just six days, the experiment was ended. The student guards had immediately become vicious authoritarians toward the "prisoners," some of whom had psychological breakdowns which were caught on camera. The conclusion drawn at the time by Zimbardo and many others was that human behavior is often contingent on the situation we find ourselves in, not the personality of individuals.
But in recent years the extent to which the entire experiment was a coached, misleading lie has come to light. Earlier this month author Ben Blum published a lengthy piece at Medium outlining some of what he uncovered :
It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.
"I mean, Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside!" he yelled, kicking furiously at the door. "Don't you know? I want to get out! This is all fucked up inside! I can't stand another night! I just can't take it anymore!"...
The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves. But its deeper, more disturbing implication is that we all have a wellspring of potential sadism lurking within us, waiting to be tapped by circumstance. It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ultimate symbol of the agony that man helplessly inflicts on his brother is Korpi's famous breakdown, set off after only 36 hours by the cruelty of his peers.
There's just one problem: Korpi's breakdown was a sham.
"Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking," he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he has granted in years. "If you listen to the tape, it's not subtle. I'm not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I'm more hysterical than psychotic."
Now a forensic psychologist himself, Korpi told me his dramatic performance in the SPE was indeed inspired by fear, but not of abusive guards. Instead, he was worried about failing to get into grad school.
Korpi had signed up for the experiment for the money, which was good, hoping he'd be left alone in a cell where he could study for his GRE's which were coming up in a little over a week. But once inside, the "guards" refused to give him his books. He wanted out of the experiment so he could study, but when he went to Zimbardo, he was told he couldn't leave. So Korpi and two other prisoners began acting up. As Clay Ramsay said, "I regarded it as a real prison because [in order to get out], you had to do something that made them worry about their liability."
So Korpi's mental breakdown was him acting crazy so he could get out and get back to studying. But doesn't the behavior of the "guards" prove at least some of the study was accurate? After all, they did refuse to give Korpi his books.
Only the behavior of the guards was coached by a grad student who designed most of the experiment. The guard who became most abusive, known as "John Wayne" said he based his performance, which included a fake accent, on characters he'd seen in the prison film Cool Hand Luke :
Though most guards gave lackluster performances, some even going out of their way to do small favors for the prisoners, one in particular rose to the challenge: Dave Eshelman, whom prisoners nicknamed "John Wayne" for his Southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi's breakdown. His overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the experiment succeed.
"I took it as a kind of an improv exercise," Eshelman said. "I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I'd do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona. I'd never been to the South, but I used a southern accent, which I got from Cool Hand Luke."
An attempt to replicate the results in 2001 failed and actually showed almost the opposite results:
In another blow to the experiment's scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher's attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo's findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.
"We discovered that he was privately writing to editors to try to stop us getting published by claiming that we were fraudulent," Reicher told me.
Given all of this, why is this still the most famous and frequently taught and cited psychological experiment in history? The answer has to do with the media and politics :
Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be "tough," nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did...
In the wake of the prison uprisings at San Quentin and Attica, Zimbardo's message was perfectly attuned to the national zeitgeist. A critique of the criminal justice system that shunted blame away from inmates and guards alike onto a "situation" defined so vaguely as to fit almost any agenda offered a seductive lens on the day's social ills for just about everyone. Reform-minded liberals were hungry for evidence that people who committed crimes were driven to do so by the environment they'd been born into, which played into their argument that reducing urban crime would require systemic reform -- a continuation of Johnson's "war on poverty" -- rather than the "war on crime" that President Richard M. Nixon had campaigned on. "When I heard of the study," recalls Frances Cullen, one of the preeminent criminologists of the last half century, "I just thought, 'Well of course that's true.' I was uncritical. Everybody was uncritical." In Cullen's field, the Stanford prison experiment provided handy evidence that the prison system was fundamentally broken. "It confirmed what people already believed, which was that prisons were inherently inhumane," he said.
Zimbardo himself even admitted he was a "social activist" looking to impact prison reform policy:
He at first denied that the experiment had had any political motive, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release disseminated on the experiment's second day explicitly stating that it aimed to bring awareness to the need for reform, he admitted that he had probably written it himself under pressure from Carlo Prescott, with whom he had co-taught a summer school class on the psychology of imprisonment .
"During that course, I began to see that prisons are a waste of time, and money, and lives," Zimbardo said. "So yes, I am a social activist, and prison reform was always important in my mind. It was not the reason to do the study."
There was always plenty of reason for skepticism of the methods and the results, but the findings fit with what social engineers on the left wanted to believe about crime and punishment and prisons. So the Stanford Prison Experiment was accepted uncritically and given a warm welcome from the media for nearly 50 years. It seems to me there are some lessons that can be drawn from this about people's willingness to take advantage of the unearned authority presented to them but those lessons have nothing to do with prisons. |
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The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...
"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world--and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." -- Brad DeLong
"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter--or an email..." -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." -- Mark Thoma
"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." -- Teresa Nielsen Hayden
"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." -- Brad DeLong
"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog--which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs--and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." -- Daniel Drezner |
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As of late, LGBTQ rights advocates have challenged religious organizations for endorsing oppressive and discriminatory doctrine under the guise of spiritual guidance . These disagreements with the Church as an institution , while generally valid, particularly target historically Black churches and often reduce these congregations to a monolith of homophobia. Without a doubt, many historically Black churches have stood in opposition to marriage equality; but, it's also important to recognize how historically Black churches fit into a larger context of LGBTQ rights and that the situation at hand may be more nuanced than it appears at first glance.
When President Obama announced in May of 2012 that he supports same-sex marriage , his statement divided many members and leaders of historically Black churches. Although historically Black churches, like many other religious groups, have grappled with the question of LGBTQ acceptance, the fact that the nation's first Black president -- who once opposed same-sex marriage -- aligned himself at least somewhat with LGBTQ individuals forced historically Black churches and congregations to break the silence surrounding the issue of queerness and faith.
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III , the pastor of Trinity United Church of Chicago, spoke up only a few weeks after the President issued his support of same-sex marriage. Rev. Dr. Moss entered the conversation not only because he was President Obama's former pastor, but also because he believed that even if the Black clergy who opposed same-sex marriage were unwilling to change their political position, they should at least be willing to further the dialogue between historically Black churches and LGBTQ communities. In his letter to the Black clergy and in a sermon, Rev. Dr. Moss encouraged religiously-inclined people to interrogate their beliefs and to make sure that their faith truly embraced a practice of love.
"Tell your brethren who are part of your ministerial coalition to 'live their faith and not legislate their faith' for the Constitution is designed to protect the rights of all. We must learn to be more than a one-issue community and seek the beloved community where we may not all agree, but we all recognize the fingerprint of the Divine upon all of humanity. There is no doubt people who are same-gender-loving who occupy prominent places in the body of Christ. For the clergy to hide from true dialogue with quick dismissive claims devised from poor biblical scholarship is as sinful as unthoughtful acceptance of a theological position. When we make biblical claims without sound interpretation we run the risk of adopting a doctrinal position of deep conviction but devoid of love. Deep faith may resonate in our position, but it is the ethic of love that forces us to prayerfully reexamine our position."
Unfortunately, Rev. Dr. Moss' support is hardly proof that once Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, Black religious folks decided that homosexuality is okay. In fact, many Black religious leaders voiced and continue to voice their deep disapproval for same-sex marriage and queerness. Former Illinois senator Rev. James Meeks targeted Black lawmakers' territories by sending emergency robocalls condemning same-sex marriage to approximately 200,000 households. These Black religious leaders who stand in opposition to same-sex marriage often put enough pressure on lawmakers to stall or halt the repeals of same-sex marriage bans.
While historically Black churches have opposed same-sex marriages, using support of same-sex marriage as a measure of homophobia distorts the relationship between historically Black churches and queerness. In a study about views about homosexuality in U.S. religious traditions , the analysis found that 39% of historically Black churches think that homosexuality should be accepted by society, versus 46% that do not. These findings do suggest that historically Black churches are not eager to support queerness but when compared to other religious traditions, historically Black churches are far from the most homophobic. 64% of Evangelical Churches, 68% of Mormons, 76% of Jehovah's Witnesses, and 61% of Muslims who participated in the survey think that homosexuality should be discouraged by society. If the reality of the situation is that historically Black churches are pretty split on the question of queerness, and it's not like Black religious leaders are the largest population of Christians popping into other countries and preaching LGBTQ-hate (I see you right-wing Evangelicals), why are historically Black churches often deemed monolithic spaces of homophobia and the biggest proponents of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric?
This trend of almost unquestionably associating Black churches (and people) with homophobia stems from a lack of understanding or analysis of real Black communities. In the United States, whiteness is the norm; for that reason, when we think about white churches and their views on homosexuality, we can imagine all of the nuances that "white" can entail. It's not hard to believe that not all white people or even all white churches are homophobic because our society teaches us that "whiteness" encompasses a lot of different categories. Furthermore, in LGBTQ spaces, we are overwhelmed with images of white people being queer, so it's hard to think that all white people could be homophobic if clearly some queer white people exist. I believe that this phenomenon reveals why there are few research studies specifically devoted to homophobia in white communities or religious spaces. There's an assumption in our society that we don't need to study white behavior or culture because whiteness is the measure of what is socially or culturally "normal". I mean, how many research studies have you seen that try to explain why white people are the way they are, period? It doesn't matter that Westboro Baptist church is composed mostly of a white family , or that white evangelicals have spread hate for LGBTQ people in other countries ; those people don't represent all white people.
On the other hand, when our society invokes images or ideas of Black people, it's as though there are only two ways to be Black: religious and intolerant of everything, or... not. Additionally, our society rarely speaks about Blackness in nuanced terms, and even throws around the phrase "the Black community" as if Black people form a homogenous collective. Therefore, when a group of Black people become associated with a quality -- especially a negative quality -- mainstream society imposes that quality on all Black people. Some church-going Black people are homophobic, so society portrays all Black people (especially if they are religious) as homophobic. And that, my friends, is how stereotypes are created.
It is important for those of us who care about the safety and well-being of LGBTQ communities to challenge groups and organizations that seek to oppress queer folks. However, if we treat historically Black churches as all anti-LGBTQ, we ignore our queer siblings who do find themselves in historically Black churches and also ignore the potential of alliances between LGBTQ communities and Black religious communities. For example, more than a few gay Black churches have sprouted up across the United States. Rev. Phyllis Pennese , an openly gay pastor, runs an African-American church with a predominantly LGBTQ congregation called Pillar of Love Fellowship. Pillar of Love, located in Chicago, was the 1,000th church to join the Open and Affirming (ONA) movement. The ONA movement consists of churches that belong to the United Church of Christ sect and are dedicated to providing a religious space for LGBTQ people. Rev. Pennese explains :
"Pillar of Love, like other ONA churches, is a community where LGBT individuals and families can be restored to wholeness. Our church motto is that 'we have the courage to be all that God created.' I do believe that because so many of us in the LGBT and black LGBT community have been abused and brutalized in the church, the only way we can heal and grow and walk confidently into what God has called us to be is to be showered with love."
These gay Black churches are not limited to cities like Chicago. In Harlem, NY, a gay and a lesbian pastor merged their churches to form the Rivers at Rehoboth Church , a Black church with a mission of "radical inclusivity." This inclusivity is not limited to only LGBTQ people but extends to any who have been marginalized.
The Rivers at Rehoboth choir and ministry via The Spook Who Sat by the Door
As LGBTQ communities hold religious groups accountable for the wounds that they have inflicted on queer folks, we must be careful not to burn bridges that may be useful. When we simplify historically Black churches as only a monolith of homophobia, we alienate LGBTQ folks who may need the community and spiritual support that historically Black churches have provided them, we disregard Black churches that are creating new frameworks for LGBTQ inclusion, and we ignore the political potential of an alliance between LGBTQ and Black religious communities.
Historically Black churches have been political birthplaces for civil rights movements. The 1960s in particular saw the organization of protests, and political campaigns in Black houses of worship and among Black congregational members as well as religious leaders. Furthermore, in the Jim Crow era of U.S. history, historically Black churches had a less hostile and antagonistic relationship with LGBTQ people. In her book Salvation: Black People and Love , writer and social activist bell hooks suggests:
"Without idealizing the past, it is important for black people to remember that love was the foundation of the acceptance many gay individuals felt in the segregated communities they were raised in. While not everyone loved them or even accepted their lifestyle, there was enough affirmation present to sustain them. Since legalized racial segregation meant that black communities could not expel gay folks, those communities had to come to terms with the reality of gay people in their midst. Straight folks who had been taught by religious teachings to love everybody as oneself were compelled to create a practice of acceptance that was redemptive for both the heterosexual and the homosexual because it offered them an opportunity to, as it was common to say then, "live the faith." ... In some small segregated black communities the church was a safe house, providing both shelter and sanctuary for anyone looked upon as different or deviant, and that included gay believers."
This church was built in 1823 as the Moravian church for African Americans via Learn NC
Integration meant that historically Black churches no longer needed to exist as a sanctuary for people rejected from the mainstream white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative society. There were more spaces for Black LGBTQ folks to feel welcomed or to enter into, and perhaps this shift compromised the tradition of inclusivity that played such a big role in the structure of historically Black churches. Without returning to segregation, I still believe that historically Black churches can return to a model of inclusivity.
Bishop Yvette Flunder , founder of the gay Black church City of Refuge, argues that the reason why this divide between historically Black churches and queerness presents such a problem is that people working in Black churches get studied instead of being brought into conversations about faith and sexuality. Bishop Flunder insists in an interview with Religion Dispatches that "It's just that folks are not talking to folks like me [who are people of faith and same-gender loving]. I have to make my way to folks to get them to hear." In the interview, she explains that conversations about homosexuality and faith could really change the game. Using her relationship with her mother as an example, Bishop Flunder says that the more the two women talked theology and sexual orientation, the more their understanding of one another expanded until her mother eventually accepted that perhaps queerness and faith were not irreconcilable. Ultimately, her mother even went as far as to join Bishop Flunder's gay Black church.
As a lesbian with ties to historically Black churches, I do not think it's impossible to open up a real dialogue about queerness and spirituality. Historically Black churches, as well as other religious traditions, must be held accountable for the crimes that they have committed against queer people; however, I will not reduce historically Black churches to some exemplar of homophobia and hatred when the situation at hand has a more complicated story. Imagine a world where historically Black churches championed the rights of LGBTQ individuals. Such an alliance truly would be a force to reckon with, and I think that with time, dialogue and acceptance (not reluctant tolerance) we can move in that direction.
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1. One dead after 20,000 Muslims burns down Hindu village in Bangladesh over rumoured Prophet Mohammed
A mob of angry Muslims burned down a Hindu village in Bangladesh after a rumor spread a local had insulted Prophet Mohammed on Facebook.
One person was killed and at least five more seriously injured after 20,000 Muslims attacked Hindu homes in the village of Thakurbari, in the Rangpur Sadar region of the country, on Friday.
Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the crowd after trouble flared when a villager allegedly posted a defamatory status about Prophet Mohammed.
By the time police arrived at the village at least 30 homes had already been burned down while others had been looted and vandalised, according to the Dhaka Tribune."
The article makes no mention of what the alleged slight to the founder of the Islamic doctrine was however.
More at the Dhaka Tribune .
2. Muslim crime gangs penetrate German police
Related:
3. Syrian refugee arrested for "raping" a pony in front of children at a German petting zoo
The German article is here .
An excerpt from the translation :
A young man allegedly sexually assaulted a pony of the "Children's Farm" in Gorlitzer Park. An employee of the institution confirms this to Berliner Morgenpost. The incident occurred on Friday of last week around 3 PM. Amanda F. (name changed by our editorial staff) described the incident to Berliner Morgenpost.
"My babysitter took a walk with our son through Gorlitzer Park. They had to witness the man sexually assaulting the pony." Her babysitter told her about the incident, and also spoke to the so-called "park runners". She did not want to comment on the incident. The scene was too traumatic."
4. ISIS in DIRECT threat to Trump as US President arrives in 'new home of jihad'
Jihadis have been circulating propaganda featuring the a picture of the US President covered in bullet holes as they urge fighters to kill him.
The threats come as Trump this evening flies into the Philippines in the final stop of his tour of Asia.
Security forces in the Philippines have been battling the threat of jihadis for years, with the city of Marawi being to reduced to rubble by ISIS.
Terrorists have been circulating the image on encrypted messaging app Telegram - urging fighters to "lie in wait" and "ambush" the US President.
Trump's Russian opposite number Vladimir Putin also features in the propaganda off to the side, his face also riddled with bullets."
Video of jihadis training in the Philippine jungle and presumably threatening the unbeliever in Tagalog, at link.
5. Saudi Arabia 'scrambles fighter jets' amid fears of WAR in Middle East
The kingdom has mobilised its F-15 fighter jet fleet to launch a military operation against the Iranian-backed terrorist militia of Hezbollah in Lebanon, regional news website The Baghdad Post reports.
Saudi Arabia previously accused both Lebanon and Iran of committing an act of war against it after rebels fired a missile at the King Khalid International Airport in the kingdom's capital of Riyadh.
Yesterday, Saudi Arabia ordered its citizens to leave Lebanon escalating fears of war to new heights - which the US have dubbed grounds for a "proxy war".
Hezbollah are the most powerful military and political force in Lebanon and receives major support from Iran.
Related : The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia vows to move "back to a moderate, open Islam."
6. Brussels riot after Morocco World Cup qualifier win
More than 20 police officers were injured in Brussels when celebrations over Morocco's qualification for football's World Cup turned violent.
The Moroccan national side qualified for the 2018 tournament in Russia with a 2-0 victory away to Ivory Coast on Saturday, topping their group.
Fans hit the streets after the game and burned at least one car, smashed glass and looted shops, police said.
Belgium has a large Moroccan community, making up 4% of the population.
One witness posted video to Twitter of water cannon being used on a crowd. Police said it was used on a group of about 300 people, some of whom were throwing stones.
There were also riots in Antwerp and Amsterdam and the Dutch police did nothing
7. Lee Rigby's killer is tormenting his victim's family by still waging jihad from behind bars
'He spends his time working out and is strong, physically imposing and a very intimidating presence,' says a source at the prison. 'But it's not just that -- his devotion to radical Islam is total, unbending and all-consuming.
'Because of that he is always giving the staff a hard time. He refers to them as kafirs and infidels and is constantly making threats against them.
'All the time he is on the offensive, upping the tension. There have been altercations -- spitting and throwing cups of urine at them. He regards himself as an active terrorist, as still being very much 'in the fight'.
To those who know anything of Adebolajo's history that will come as little surprise. In May 2013 he masterminded the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby near his barracks in Woolwich, South-East London.
8. Germans With Turkish-Sounding Names Denied Chinese Visas - Chamber of Commerce
The Chinese immigration authorities are reportedly denying Germans visas to visit China because they have Turkish-sounding names; the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce suspects that Turkey's support for Uyghurs in China is behind the move, Wirtschaftswoche reports.
The Chinese immigration authorities appear to be discriminating against Germans with Turkish-sounding names and those who have spent a long time in Turkey, according to the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK).
The DIHK has indications "that the Chinese consulate is not issuing visas to German businesspeople with Turkish-sounding names," the organization's foreign trade chief Volker Treier told the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche on Friday.
Treier warned that the issue could affect trade relations between China and Germany. In 2016, trade turnover between the two countries was EUR169.9 billion ($198.2 billion), making China Germany's biggest trade partner, ahead of France.
9. Generation Identity movement, mischaracterized in this video as "Far right", explain their position:
10. In a stunning show of loyalty to their nation, people, culture and religion, the Polish people took to the streets to mark Poland's national day: |
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Warning: some may find this footage disturbing. A cargo plane crashed Monday at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, killing all 7 passengers aboard (Americans). . This article says, "The Boeing 747-400 -- owned by National Airlines, a Florida-based subsidiary of National Air Cargo -- was en route to Dubai, carrying vehicles and other cargo." The [...]
David Graeber, author of The Democracy Project, writes in a guest column for "Informed Comment" The recent defeat of gun buyers' background check legislation in the Senate--legislation backed by an almost unimaginable 90% of the American public--has been taken as a somber day in the history of American democracy. We've been having a lot of [...]
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai on Monday confirmed an NYT report that he has been receiving cash payments in a paper bag every month from the US Central Intelligence Agency. Karzai maintained that the money actually goes to the director of national intelligence to be used for intelligence work, but the implication of the NYT article [...]
The Constitutional crisis in Egypt between the Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Morsi, and the thousands of judges in the Egyptian judiciary, according to Amr Moussa, derives from a misplaced desire for revenge on the part of the Brotherhood. Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood was only semi-legal, and members were often imprisoned (Morsi [...]
Alice K. Ross writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism 'Drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis,' Farea al-Muslimi told a rare US Senate hearing on targeted killing last week. The Yemeni journalist and activist gave emotive testimony at a Senate subcommittee about the impact of drone strikes and targeted killings on [...]
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz write at Tomdispatch.com A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can't escape it in our cars. It's in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, [...]
Julie Poucher Harbin presents an interview with Peter Feaver via Islamicommentary According to an assessment signed by White House director of the office of legislative affairs Miguel Rodriguez, which was sent to lawmakers on Thursday (April 25) "Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons [...] |
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Friday that if the United States backs out of the Iran nuclear agreement, the entire accord will "fall apart". 2018-01-20 20:16
TERHAN- On the threshold of the 14th meeting of Iran-Belarus Joint Economic Committee, Belarusian Industry Minister Vitali Vouk told IRNA on Friday that his country is determined to boost economic ties with Iran. 2018-01-20 20:14
TEHRAN- According to OPEC's latest monthly report published on January 18, Iran's oil production, based on secondary sources, stood at 4.405 million barrels per day (bpd) in December, up 8,000 bpd from that of November. 2018-01-20 20:13
TEHRAN - Hossein Jaberi Ansari, Iran's top negotiator at the Astana peace talks, held talks on Saturday with Sergei Lavrentyev, the Russian President's special envoy for Syria. 2018-01-20 20:09
Germany is lobbying among European allies to agree new sanctions against Iran in an attempt to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from terminating an international deal curbing Tehran's nuclear program, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday. 2018-01-20 20:07
TEHRAN - President Hassan Rouhani received credentials of new ambassadors of Cuba, Ghana, Chile and Cyprus in separate meetings on Saturday. 2018-01-20 19:00
Iran, Europe have held talks to remove banking obstacles
TEHRAN - Majid Takht-Ravanchi, deputy director of the presidential chief of staff for political affairs, has said that Iran and Europe have held talks to remove obstacles to banking relations. 2018-01-20 18:46
Zlatko Kranjcar has parted company with Iranian top-flight football club Sepahan. 2018-01-20 18:34
TEHRAN - The German music producer Marco Rhauderwiek will organize a sound performance in Tehran on February 1. 2018-01-20 18:33
TEHRAN - Actress Baran Kowsari has been appointed the ambassador of the Yari Foundation, an Uppsala-based charity organization founded by Iranian expatriates living in Sweden, the organization has announced. 2018-01-20 18:32
TEHRAN - An Iranian troupe directed by Arman Hossein-nejad is performing a stage adaptation of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in Tehran. 2018-01-20 18:30
TEHRAN - The veteran theater experts Ahmad Damud, Hushang Azadivar and Jamshid Khanian will be honored with lifetime achievement awards at the 36th Fajr International Theater Festival. 2018-01-20 18:29
TEHRAN - A retrospective of the veteran Iranian painter, illustrator, animator and sculptor Ali-Akbar Sadeqi will open at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) on January 28. 2018-01-20 18:26
TEHRAN - A play that spotlights transsexuals in Iran was staged during the 36th Fajr International Theater Festival in Tehran on Friday night. 2018-01-20 17:51
Koroush Gilani is an Iranian man who migrated to Japan in the 1990s. Over the years he has managed to fully integrate and adjust himself in to a completely different Asian culture, however, as is in such cases, assimilating to the culture of Japan has not been an easy task. 2018-01-20 15:51
Iranian football club Esteghlal are going to sign Yazalde Gomes Pinto, known simply as Yazalde, in the January transfer window. 2018-01-20 14:20
Iran defeated Japan in the 18th Asian Men's Handball Championship to occupy the top spot of Group A. 2018-01-20 12:20
The Tehran Symphony Orchestra gives a performance under the baton of Shahrdad Rohani (R) during the 33rd Fajr Music Festival at Tehran's Vahdat Hall on January 18, 2018. 2018-01-20 11:17
TEHRAN - The Islamic Azad University (IAU) is planning on expanding overseas branches through setting up units in Iraq and Syria, Khabaronline reported on Tuesday. 2018-01-20 11:17
TEHRAN -- The Ministry of Health is planning schemes to encourage consumption of traditional foods and is seriously reconsidering issuance of license for fast food restaurants, Mehr reported on Thursday. 2018/01/20
By Samira Mohebali*
In this series of articles you can trace cookery art in Iran during history up to present. The survey sheds light on different aspects of Iranian life, culture and civilization. 2018-01-20 11:16
TEHRAN - Commenting on recent turbulences in Iran Anthony Cartalucci says the U.S. still believes investing in the protests can create some sort of positive geopolitical return for their policy of undermining and coercing Iran domestically, regionally and internationally. 2018-01-20 11:13
Richard Nephew, program director at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told CNBC on Friday that "the simple reality is that Trump hates the JCPOA even as he doesn't understand it." 2018-01-20 10:08
TEHRAN -- Michael Klor-Berchtold, German ambassador to Tehran, posted a photo on his Twitter account on Thursday depicting him stirring Ab Gusht (Iranian stew made with lamb, chickpeas, white beans, onion, potatoes, and tomatoes, and dried lime) in a big pot. 2018-01-20 09:53
You wake up in the morning and set for another working day. You may take a quick shower, have a breakfast, get dressed and head out. 2018-01-20 09:48
Nearly 3 years have passed since the Saudi invasions of the defenseless people of Yemen. This is while the war crimes committed in this country are barely seen elsewhere throughout history. |
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By now, you've likely heard the story of Michael Rotondo, a 30-year-old college dropout from Camillus, New York, who refused to move out of his parents' house.
For months, they have encouraged him to find a job and have offered to help him find a place to live on his own. "There are jobs available even for those with a poor work history like you. Get one--you have to work!" one of their notes to him said. But he has refused to budge.
They served him an eviction notice in February and eventually took him to court. State Supreme Court Justice Donald Greenwood rightly ruled in the parents' favor on Tuesday, and while Rotondo called the decision "outrageous" and has vowed to appeal, it would be wise for him to begin searching for his next home.
The story of a work-capable young adult mooching off of his parents has become all too common, and unfortunately, many of these people are allowed to mooch off of taxpayers, as well.
Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka the food stamp program), which currently pays benefits of up to $192 per month to an estimated 5.4 million able-bodied adults without dependents ("ABAWDs" in Agriculture Department-speak).
While the program, on its face, requires that such an individual work at least 20 hours per week or engage in a job search or training--or at least volunteer in order to receive benefits--federal law provides that states may request that these work requirements be waived for all individuals who reside in any "area" that "does not have a sufficient number of jobs."
That has been interpreted through regulations to mean an unemployment rate as low as 20 percent above the national average. With the U.S. jobless rate at an 18-year low of 3.9 percent, an area with an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent could qualify.
One such area is the city of Syracuse, a 4.8-mile drive east of Mark and Christina Rotondo's home in Onondaga County. Its latest unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, in line with the national average for the past 50 years, but not a single one of its residents would be expected even to look for work, much less put in 40 hours per week, in order to qualify for SNAP benefits.
If Michael Rotondo finds a place to live there, he can rest assured that he will be able to continue his unspecified "successful" business, which he has called "the overwhelmingly superior choice for the economic well-being over the working of a full-time job," without actually having to work for his food--all thanks to U.S. taxpayers.
The recent debate on the farm bill in the House has focused primarily on whether those responsible for the care of dependents below a certain age should be made subject to SNAP work requirements, largely ignoring the extent to which geographic-area waivers undermine the existing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents who have the least excuse not to work.
For example, my colleague Robert Rector and I found that the farm bill now before Congress, H.R. 2, as drafted, would allow 4.3 million of these able-bodied adults without any dependents to remain exempt from the work requirement. And, along with Mimi Teixeira, we laid out five specific steps Congress could take to encourage work in the food stamp program.
If Congress wants to get serious about encouraging those who can work to do so, it should start by ensuring that those living in places such as Syracuse are not exempted from work requirements during an economic boom.
That would ensure that someone like Rotondo can't just move 5 miles to join them on the food stamp rolls. |
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Binney points to the critical evidence that shows that yes, Trump communications were surveilled.
President Donald Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.
"I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored," Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.
Binney resigned from NSA shortly after the U.S. approach to intelligence changed following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He "became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop -- nicknamed ThinThread -- were being used to spy on Americans," PBS reported.
On Monday he came to the defense of the president, whose allegations on social media over the weekend that outgoing President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign have rankled Washington.
Via FreeBeacon :
Leaders of the "Day Without a Woman" strike are working with a group that does not have a single female in a leadership position.
The Women's March protest group is asking female employees to skip work on March 8 to draw attention to the importance of females in the workplace and highlight "hiring discrimination" against women.
"We believe that creating workforce opportunities that reduce discrimination against women and mothers allow economies to thrive," the Women's March website states. "Nations and industries that support and invest in caregiving and basic workplace protections--including benefits like paid family leave, access to affordable childcare, sick days, healthcare, fair pay, vacation time, and healthy work environments--have shown growth and increased capacity."
Despite striking for equal opportunities for women in the workplace, the Women's March is working with the Action Network, a group that does not have a single female in its leadership.
The Action Network is a Washington, D.C.-based "progressive online organizing platform" that is managing the website and email lists of the Women's March. The group's work is "specifically designed to help organizers channel scattered grassroots energy into something more focused," Vox reported.
Via Politico :
Some House Freedom Caucus members dismissed the bill as creating a new "entitlement program" by offering health care tax credits to low-income Americans. A Republican Study Committee memo sent to chiefs of staff, obtained by POLITICO, echoed those comments and blasted the bill's continuation of the Medicaid expansion for three years.
"This is Obamacare by a different form," former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO. "They're still keeping the taxes in place and Medicaid expansion, and they're starting a new entitlement."
Because "no law in any country can tell me I am a criminal"... except every country.
Via Huffington Post :
I am not illegal.
Today I stumbled upon an article that talked about Golden Door, a program aimed to help undocumented students continue their education. The article talks about the expansion of the program and how it has helped 92 undocumented students attend college, and how the all the students who have graduated so far had job offers. Feeling proud of the accomplishments of those involved in the program, and being a part of it myself, I decided to read the comments to read the reaction of those around me.
The negativity that people poured into the comment section was beyond any of my expectations. A man talked about how we are just here to steal jobs. Someone said we need to be deported right now. Another person thought it necessary to talk about our inability to contribute to society. One guy thought it was funny to talk about how if we were somewhere else we would be incarcerated. All of these comments referred to us as illegals.
Illegal is defined as forbidden by law, especially criminal law. I am not defined as forbidden by law. No law in any country can tell me that I am a criminal simply for wanting a better life. I did not come to the U.S. by choice, as I was a child, but I will never resent my parents for making that decision for me. They chose to give up their lives and careers for my wellbeing, and that is more than I could ever ask for. To see the negativity hurts, and it stings to see people truly think of me as a criminal. [...]
To say I am illegal is to deny my humanity and reduce me to a criminal. To say we are illegal is to say our entire existence is defined by the laws of a country who thinks of us as numbers not people. I am not a criminal -- we are not criminals -- because we are not illegal. It has taken us years to be able to come out of the shadows, but today we are unafraid. We are unapologetic. We are undocumented.
ESPN programming and commentary has gone full social justice warrior and I no longer visit their web site or their TV channel.
As sports cable network ESPN continues to bleed cash, another round of layoffs is about to hit that will reportedly take out some well-known reporters and on-air faces.
Reports say that ESPN management is being tasked with cutting "tens of millions" of dollars of staff salary from its payroll, meaning that on-air personalities are on the chopping block, according to Sports Illustrated.
"Today's fans consume content in many different ways, and we are in a continuous process of adapting to change and improving what we do. Inevitably, that has consequences for how we utilize our talent," ESPN said in a statement. "We are confident that ESPN will continue to have a roster of talent that is unequaled in sports."
The news of the massive cuts comes on the heels of reports that ESPN is losing millions per year.
Once a sports powerhouse, ESPN has gone from must-see-TV for millions of sports fans to a financial boondoggle for owner Disney with the network losing up to 10,000 subscribers a day, reports said last month.
"A floundering ESPN, with rising costs and declining viewership, continued to sink Disney's DIS, +0.24% financial results during its fiscal first quarter," MarketWatch.com reported.
With ESPN dragging on the company, Disney's revenue fell 3 percent, and its profits sank 14 percent, the financial site reported.
As to ESPN itself, the network lost subscribers, found its average viewership crater, and experienced falling advertising rates even as its programming costs climbed. And this fall from grace continued even after Disney insisted that ESPN had reached its bottom after the previous quarter came to an end.
ESPN's crashing revenue coincides with its increasingly leftward political content, a drift so blatant that the network's ombudsman felt pressured to address the network's political content. |
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Paris (AFP) - The disproportionately high rate at which unarmed black people die at the hands of police in the United States has a corrosive impact on the mental health of black Americans, researchers reported Friday.
The frequency of these killings has been cited as symptomatic of deeply rooted racism, and is in any case perceived as such by most black Americans, they reported in The Lancet, a medical journal.
Audio or video evidence of such deaths over the last few years has given rise to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, whether in the form of street protests or National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem before games.
"We found that when police kill unarmed black Americans, there is mental health fallout that reverberates throughout the black American community," said senior author Alexander Tsai, an associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
"This finding is significant because it shows that the effects of these killings go beyond immediate friends and family," he told AFP.
Tallies kept by news organisations and researchers vary, but police have killed approximately 300 black Americans -- about a quarter of them unarmed -- each year since 2014.
Over this period, blacks were roughly three times more likely than whites to be killed by police, and nearly five times more likely to be killed by police while unarmed, the researchers said.
As of July 2017, 61 percent of the US population self-identified as "white," and 13 percent as "black", according to the US Census.
Statistics show that black Americans have proportionally more encounters with law enforcement, which in itself increases the opportunity for violent outcomes.
A state investigation, for example, into policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri after the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African American, Michael Brown, revealed that blacks were three-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be pulled over by police while driving.
- 'Structural racism' -
Black American stand-up comics have long highlighted the perils of "DWB", or "driving while black."
To probe the mental health effect of police killings of blacks on the larger black American population, Tsai and colleagues compared two sets of data.
One was a national, 2013-2015 telephone survey of more than 100,000 black American adults that asked how many out of the previous 30 days were marked by stress, depression and emotional problems.
The other was a state-by-state tally of police killings from the Mapping Police Violence database.
Using statistical analysis, the researchers found a strong link between more days of poor mental health and deaths at the hands of law enforcement occurring in the 90 days prior to the interview.
This "spillover" effect was strongest 30-60 days after police killings in or near the state in which respondents lived.
Extended to the US black adult population, the findings suggest that police killings of unarmed black Americans could account for up to 65 million excess days of stress or depression per year, on a par with the mental health burden associated with diabetes, the study found.
"Regardless of what is driving the disparate killings of black Americans, these killings have corrosive effects on population mental health among black Americans," said Tsai.
"Police killings of black Americans -- in contrast to police killings of white Americans -- have a long, painful history and sociological meaning attached to them."
"They undermine mental health among black Americans because they are a manifestation of structural racism," he added.
Featured Image: GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP / Justin Merriman. Police have killed approximately 300 black Americans -- about a quarter of them unarmed -- each year since 2014. |
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Jonathan Schell's Comments about the Watergate scandal, published in the magazine in 1973, shed light on the high stakes surrounding the firing of James Comey. May 11, 2017
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(c) 2018 Conde Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Conde Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices |
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Apparently, cartographers are really horny -- that or God is.
One Imgur user posted this photograph of a map hung in his or her firehouse. The person explained, This map has hung in my firehouse for years. I just looked at it for the first time.
If you don't see it right away, here is a hint: boobs. Look for the boobs.
This is why we have to do something about climate change! Think about what this hot land lady is going to look like covered in water. How sad would that be!?
A new study showed disastrous climate change problems could arise within decades, not centuries. Now, I know that's all really boring for most people, but think of the HOT LAND LADY! Also, think of the hundreds of thousands of people who will die from storms and floods, and the fact we all will likely have to abandon our coastal cities in the near future if things continue as they are.
BUT MOSTLY, HOT LAND LADY!!!
Donate here to help make a difference, assh*les.
Side note: Maybe God finally watched "Armageddon" and decided to make that creepy animal cracker scene into a reality with the hot land lady.
Geefux on YouTube
Oh, and by "creepy," I obviously mean romantic and super sad 'cause he's going to go save the Earth. I love this movie unabashedly.
Elite Daily on YouTube |
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Cheers to Andra Day and Common singing "Stand Up for Something" as a tribute to the Dreamers
From a reader:
On the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Andra Day and Common dedicated "Stand Up for Something" to the Dreamers. (Watch and listen here .)
Before singing, Andra Day said, "I just gotta take a minute to address all of the Dreamers. With the end of DACA and the possibility of deportation looming, we just want you guys to know that we stand with you, and we will not stop fighting for you. We dedicate this performance to you guys tonight."
At the end of the song, Common said, "For the Dreamers: Trump and Congress are failing you, but we the people will fight to the end till we win the Dream Act. We will fight to the end. We the people, we stand with you."
Here are the heartfelt lyrics of the song. Read more.
Cox Farms Calls for Resisting White Supremacy
From a reader:
Cox Farms, located in Centreville, Virginia, has been posting signs about social issues. Their most recent one reads "RESIST WHITE SUPREMACY."
Last year they posted other signs on the street outside their farm: "We Love Our Muslim Neighbors" and "Immigrants Make America Great!"
On their Facebook page, they explained the new sign:
Our little roadside signs have power. Most of the time, they let folks know that our hanging baskets are on sale, that today's sweet corn is the best ever, that Santa will be at the market this weekend, or that the Fall Festival will be closed due to rain. During the off-season, sometimes we utilize them differently. Sometimes, we try to offer a smile on a daily commute. Sometimes, a message of support and inclusion to a community that is struggling makes someone's day. Sometimes the messages on our signs make people think... and sometimes, they make some people angry.
Last week, some of our customers and neighbors asked us to clarify the sentiment behind our sign that said "Rise & Resist." So, we changed it to read "Rise Up Against Injustice" and "Resist White Supremacy." We sincerely believe that fighting injustice and white supremacy is a responsibility that can- and should- unite us all. We struggle to see how anyone other than self-identified white supremacists would take this as a personal attack.
Some have asked why we feel called to have such a message on our signs at all. Here is why:
Cox Farms is a small family-owned and family-operated business. The five of us are not just business-owners; we are human beings, members of the community, and concerned citizens of this country. We are also a family, and our shared values and principles are central to our business.
(see Cox Farm Facebook page. )
The local pig union showed its true white supremacist colors by calling for a boycott of Cox Farms' hay rides and pumpkin patches.
When someone responded to the sign by posting on social media "Resist white supremacy is not an inclusive message.... When you single out a group of people you exclude them. This is a sad message," Aaron Cox-Leow responded, "Yes, generally speaking, we are comfortable excluding white supremacists."
Gregg Popovich: "We Live in a Racist Country"
From a reader:
When Gregg Popovich, who is white and is the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, was asked about the importance of the NBA celebrating Black History Month, he said:
I think it's pretty obvious the league is made up of a lot of Black guys. To honor that and understand it is pretty simplistic. How would you ignore that? But more importantly, we live in a racist country that hasn't figured it out yet. And it's always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people. The point is, you have to keep it in front of everybody's nose so they understand it still hasn't been taken care of and we have a lot of work to do.
On Wednesday, Dan Le Batard, who has a radio and television sports talk show on ESPN, essentially said, "I think we should consider playing the audio clip of Popovich saying 'We live in a racist country' at the end of each show this week."
U.S. Winter Olympian rips Vice President Mike Pence as leader of the U.S. Olympic Delegation as other U.S. Olympians speak of possible protests
From a reader:
Adam Rippon, an openly gay U.S. Winter Olympian figure skater, was dismayed to find out that Vice President Mike Pence was leading the U.S. Olympic delegation. He told USA Today :
You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy? I'm not buying it. If it were before my event, I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren't a friend of a gay person but that they think that they're sick. I wouldn't go out of my way to meet somebody like that.
I don't think he (Pence) has a real concept of reality. To stand by some of the things that Donald Trump has said and for Mike Pence to say he's a devout Christian man is completely contradictory. If he's okay with what's being said about people and Americans and foreigners and about different countries that are being called "shitholes," I think he should really go to church.
Pence's office immediately issued a release that, in part, stated, Rippon's "accusation is totally false and has no basis in fact." Of course this is another lie by someone in the fascist Trump/Pence regime, as a statement Pence made in 2000 on his congressional campaign website stated, "Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior." It is widely believed that this meant "conversion therapy." Further, in 2006, when Pence voiced his support for a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman, he said gay relationships would bring about "societal collapse." (For more on Pence see the revcom.us articles " Vice President Mike Pence: The Christian Fascist 'Alternative' to the Fascist Donald Trump ," May 13, 2017, and " Mike Pence: A Christian Fascist Who's a Heartbeat Away from the U.S. Presidency ," November 21, 2016.)
Rippon is not the only U.S. Olympian who is speaking out. Others have said that they are considering protesting, despite Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which states: "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas."
Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn has already said that she will not go to the White House with the Olympic team. She said, "I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president. I want to represent our country well. I don't think that there are a lot of people currently in our government that do that."
Olympic bobsledders Elana Meyers Taylor and Kehri Jones may speak out. Meyers Taylor said, "I think the hardest thing is that all of us would love to just stick to sports--but if you want us to be role models to kids then you need to stand for more than just sports."
Olympic freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy said, "Whether it's Black Lives Matter or trans rights or climate change, there's so much to be stood up for right now ... And I think we will see athletes standing up for it, and I don't know how it will be yet, in what form, but I'm sure that we will."
Laurenne Ross, Olympic downhill skier, said she wouldn't be surprised if a U.S. athlete protests while receiving a medal. She said, "Part of me would be proud of that person for standing up or kneeling, or whatever, for their rights and using their voice. Part of me would be a little bit heartbroken that we are being torn as a nation and we are doing these actions that make us seem that we're not one anymore."
The 2018 Winter Olympics are taking place on the 50th anniversary year of the most famous Olympic protest of all time when U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a black-gloved clenched fist on the victory stand during the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City to protest the oppression of Black people.
Revcom will be reporting if something significant happens at the Winter Olympics being held in PyeonChang, South Korea, starting on February 9.
"Racism is insidious and it's still our national sin" Three white NBA coaches speak out on MLK Day
From a reader:
NBA teams played a full slate of games on Monday as they usually do to celebrate MLK Day. Three white coaches, Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, Stan Van Gundy of the Detroit Pistons, and Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors had something to say about what MLK Day means to them this year.
From Popovich:
"Dr. King, he was truly a person who was interested in making America great for everyone. He understood that racism was our national sin, and if everybody didn't come together it would bring everybody down, including white people. That promise that he basically demanded for America to fill from way back then is what put us on the road to make America great. At the same time, we all know the situation now. And I think he'd be a very, very sad man to see that a lot of his efforts have been held up and torn down. It doesn't matter if you're looking at the Voting Rights Act or the ridiculous number of people of color who are incarcerated."
"(Racism) is insidious and it's still our national sin that we have to work on. Every time I hear somebody (like Donald Trump) say they're not a racist, you know they are. So, those are some of the thoughts I have on this day. You want to be happy for some things, but current circumstances make it very difficult to clap too much."
From Van Gundy:
"Sadly, though, I think the 50th anniversary of his (MLK's) death finds us going backwards on the issue of racial equality. The Voting Rights Act has been largely dismantled. Men of color, and even boys of color, face systemic inequality in the justice system, and we used the war on drugs to lock up a generation of Black men. Affirmative action is being torn down. Police are killing men like a modern-day Bull Connor, and economic equality is headed in the wrong direction."
"Marches like Charlottesville are disturbing. It used to be that the KKK wore hoods, embarrassed to reveal their identity. Now people with racist beliefs proudly march in the open and are not even repudiated by our president. So yes, we honor Dr. King and all that he sacrificed and all that he accomplished. But if we truly want to honor him, we must get back out and fight like he did against the now-resurgent voices of racial injustice, discrimination and hate. I think 25 years ago Dr. King might have been happy to see some progress. My guess is today he would be in tears over where we are headed."
From Kerr:
"I love Martin Luther King Day in terms of what it means to the NBA, what it means to the country. It's become a great day for the NBA because we celebrate basketball, but what we're really celebrating is equality and inclusion, which is what the NBA represents. We've got players from all over the world, all different backgrounds. We've got players who are really socially active trying to promote peace and understanding, and these are all ideals Dr. King felt so strongly about."
"So, today is a great day for the league and for our country, and a good day to remember what's truly important and what we are aspiring for as a country, and that we can do a lot better. All of us."
"(King) would be less than inspired by the leadership in our country, no doubt about that."
"I do think social media has something to do with it. I really do. There's so much anger on social media, and there's such a forum now for everybody to display this anger without repercussion. Just sit behind your keyboard and tell everybody whatever vulgar, profane thing you want to say, and you're free from repercussion, and yet you're sending out this anger and vile into the atmosphere. So there's a lot of that included into what's happening right now."
Stan Van Gundy, Coach of the NBA Detroit Pistons, Supports NFL Players Refusing to Stand for the National Anthem and for Their Demands
From a reader:
In a November 14 essay in Time , Stan Van Gundy, the coach of the NBA Detroit Pistons, said he supports the NFL players who are refusing to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and social injustice and he calls on others "to join me in supporting them."
Van Gundy, who is white, talks about coaching in the NBA for 20 years in a league that is 75 percent Black and what he has learned about "the issues they and their families have had to encounter." He wrote, "I have an obligation as a citizen to speak out and to support, in any way possible, those brave and patriotic athletes who are working to bring change to our country. I believe all of us do."
Van Gundy points out that "These athletes could take the easy route and not placed their livelihoods at risk by standing up for what they believe in. They've put in their hard work. They could accept their paychecks and live lives of luxury. Instead, they are risking their jobs to speak up for those who have no voice."
He goes on to say that "Those who have been at the forefront of great advances in social justice have always been willing to make significant personal sacrifices, and that group has always included athletes," and he names Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Colin Kaepernick as those who have sacrificed for the cause of calling out social injustice, and that these current NFL players are following in their footsteps.
He points out that these NFL players are not just protesting on Sunday, but "On virtually every Tuesday during the NFL season (the NFL's traditional off-day), these committed athletes are using their platform as professional athletes in town halls, statehouses and even Washington, D.C., to listen, learn, meet with leaders, advocate for change and put the issues of criminal justice reform in the spotlight."
The changes they are advocating for are: Ameliorating harsh sentencing guidelines and ending mandatory minimum sentences. Enacting clean slate laws where convictions would be expunged after a certain period of time of good behavior. Eliminating cash bail. Reforming juvenile justice. Ending police brutality and racial bias in police departments. This was the issue that started the current player protests.
At the end of his essay, Van Gundy says, "We should all join them in ensuring their collective voice is heard."
Van Gundy's essay is online here .
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Calls Colin Kaepernick a Hero and Wants to Take a Knee with Him
From a reader
Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, called Colin Kaepernick a hero for taking a knee in protesting police murders of Black people. Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work seeking the ban of anti-personnel mines, gave her support to Kaepernick during her October 15 acceptance speech when she was receiving the Human Rights Awards from the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, New York.
In an interview after her speech, she talked about why the athletes are taking a knee:
(It's because) the seeming inability of this country to deal with racism in general, but in particular, the police brutality against primarily Black men. There certainly has been violence against Black women but the killings of Black men have been very, very disturbing to many people. I think [they] helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.
So when Kaepernick decided to use his fame to take a knee, and by doing so, make a public statement about the need to deal with this, I thought it was outstanding, personally.
And when others joined him, it I think was a pivotal moment in race issues in the country. We may not see a dramatic change immediately, but that Kaepernick took a knee, and then other Black athletes and white athletes joined in in their own way and found the support of the team owners, etc.--it reminds me of the chain of people protesting apartheid outside of the South African Embassy. You know, the impact of doing it again and again and again, famous people and not-so-famous people--it does make a difference.
Then she talked about the importance of those who have a disproportionate influence speaking out:
They mean that important figures have decided that they will use their fame to make a difference. And that also empowers the not-so-famous to stand up and make a difference. I think it's terrific. I think it's long overdue.
Despite the fact that, you know, Muhammad Ali--going to jail instead of going to war, and the two athletes in the Olympics raising their fists--famous people have done it before, but not to this extreme.
I wish I could take a knee with Kaepernick.
When I first saw that he took a knee, I [thought], "Oh, yes! If I could only go to a football game and take a knee with him, I would be so proud." Whether he ever plays football again, the man has made a statement that affects our culture. And for that alone, he is a hero.
Hertha Berlin Soccer Team Takes a Knee in Solidarity with Kaepernick
Hertha BSC (Berliner Sports Club), a German association soccer club based in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin, took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and the NFL players' protest during their home game on Saturday, October 14. Hertha's starting lineup, coaching staff, general manager, club officials, and substitutes joined in the protest before the start of the game.
Sebastian Langkamp, Hertha's defender, told Sky TV, "We're no longer living in the 18th century but in the 21st century. There are some people, however, who are not that far ideologically yet. If we can give some lessons there with that, then that's good." The Club released a statement on Twitter that said, "Hertha BSC stands for tolerance and responsibility! For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!"
Salomon Kalou, a forward for the team, who is from Ivory Coast, said their action was inspired by the NFL players' protest against police brutality and murder of Black and other people of color, in the face of the attacks against them by Trump. He said, "We stand against racists and that's our way of sharing that. We are always going to fight against this kind of behavior, as a team and as a city... [Racism] shouldn't exist in any kind of event, in the NFL or in the football world, soccer as they call it there. It shouldn't exist in any sport, period."
Hertha BSC (Berliner Sports Club), a German association soccer club based in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin, protests Saturday, October 14, in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and the NFL players
Credit: AP
Richard E. Frankel, Professor of Modern German History, on Trump's Pardon of Anti-Immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio: "To this German historian, the implications are ominous"
Richard E. Frankel is associate professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is the author of Bismarck's Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945 . The following originally appeared at historynewsnetwork.org , website of the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences at George Washington University.
In August of 1932, in the town of Potempa, nine Nazi Stormtroopers murdered a supporter of the German Communist Party, kicking him to death in his own apartment as his family watched in horror. Six were convicted with five receiving the death penalty. After the verdict, Hitler sent them a telegram in which he declared to them his "boundless loyalty." Shortly after he came to power in 1933, he pardoned the killers. While former Sheriff Joe Arpaio never kicked anyone to death, his pardon by President Trump raises disturbing parallels.
Upon gaining power, Hitler immediately pardoned allies who'd perpetrated ghastly crimes against those deemed enemies of the nation. What do we make of Trump's pardon of a political ally, a man duly convicted of systemic deprivations of people's constitutional rights--people Trump never considered part of his America? As a professor of modern German history, this administration seemingly provides such unpleasant reminders of Germany's dark past on a regular basis. What can German history teach us about this latest episode? How, for example, did the pardon of the Potempa killers help us better understand Hitler? What implications did it have for development of the Third Reich? And how does that knowledge help us better understand Trump and the danger that his pardon of Arpaio poses for the future of the United States? Read complete article.
Roger Waters: "I support my hero Colin Kaepernick, and all the fellow heroes in the NFL who stood up for rights and justice and equality"
At his September 28 concert in Boston, Roger Waters took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and other sports stars resisting police murder and the recent attacks from Trump.
As he took the knee on stage in front of a massive screen with the word RESIST projected on it, Rogers said:
I support my hero Colin Kaepernick, and all the fellow heroes in the NFL who stood up for rights and justice and equality. They're part of a far larger movement all over the globe standing up for equal civil rights and equal rights for all the peoples of the world no matter what their race, ethnicity or religion.
Rogers' entire current Us + Them tour has been laced with statements of resistance against the Trump/Pence fascist regime.
NBA Basketball Players and Coaches Speak Out in Support of the NFL Players' Protests Against Trump
From a reader :
On Sunday, September 24, the world saw NFL players, joined in some cases by coaches and owners, deliver a powerful statement by sitting, taking a knee, locking arms together, or remaining in the locker room during the singing of the national anthem at nearly every game played that day and at the Monday night game. They were responding to the vicious, racist attacks unleashed by Trump at his Nazi rally in Alabama Friday when he declared that when a player refuses to stand for the national anthem, the owners should "get that son of a bitch off the field now." The taking the knee protest was started last year by then S.F. 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick against the police brutality and murder of people of color. As Carl Dix said , with Trump's fascist, racist rant against the NFL player protesters, this Klucker-in-chief was making clear what his "Make America Great Again" is all about.
The day following the NFL players' Sunday protests was the first day of NBA basketball practice, when all of the teams speak to the press. Many players and some coaches made thoughtful comments to the media, giving a glimpse of the impact the actions of the football players is having. It should be mentioned that last week, after Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors NBA team publicly said he wasn't going to be part of any team celebration at the White House, Trump tweeted that he was disinviting the Warriors.
Here are highlights from some of the comments from NBA players and coaches:
Jabari Parker, player for the Milwaukee Bucks:
I'm not really surprised at what he said, because basically that's the narrative of Mr. Trump and that's the type of person he is. ... I think that anybody with any responsibility has the opportunity to create change and to take a side. You have good and you have bad. There's no in-between, because when you're in the middle, you're in favor of the oppressor. That's a quote by Desmond Tutu.
As far as the flag goes, it's not like people are [protesting] for any ordinary reason. There's a huge meaning, a broad horizon to it. A lot of people are frustrated that nothing's changed from the time that we've learned it from kids until now. There's been a lot of bad going on with the oppression of colored folks and minorities...
Stan Van Gundy, head coach, Detroit Pistons:
There are serious issues of inequality and injustice in this country. People of conscience are compelled to oppose racism, sexism and intolerance of people of different sexual identities and orientation wherever and whenever they see it. I stand with those opposing such bigotry. I as an individual and the Detroit Pistons as an organization support diversity, inclusion and equality.
J.J. Redick, player for the Philadelphia 76ers:
There's very few days that go by where I don't get pissed off at something Trump does, so this weekend was kind of like a normal thing... There's nothing that I would ever want to say to Trump or interact with Trump. I agree with LeBron [James, of the Cleveland Cavaliers] in the sense that what the White House and what the presidency used to represent does not represent that during these four years. It just does not. It's now a mockery of what the presidency and the White House stood for. So, I would have zero interest in ever going there. [Reddick is a white player.]
Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs:
Obviously, race is the elephant in the room and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better. "Oh, they're talking about that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?" Well, because it's uncomfortable. There has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change, whether it's the LGBT movement, or women's suffrage, race, it doesn't matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we're comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means....
You have advantage that are systemically, culturally, psychologically rare. And they've been built up and cemented for hundreds of years.... People want to hold their position, people want their status quo, people don't want to give that up. Until it's given up, it's not going to be fixed....
[Referring to NASCAR team owners who said NFL protesters should be fired and even leave the country...] I had no idea that I lived in a country where people would actually say that sort of thing. I'm not totally naive but I think these people have been enabled by an example that we've all been given. You've seen it in Charlottesville, and on and on and on.
Erik Spoelstra, coach of the Miami Heat:
I commend the Golden State Warriors for the decision they made [not to accept Trump's invitation to go to the White House]. I commend NFL players and organizations for taking a stand for equality, for inclusion, for taking a stand against racism, bigotry, prejudice...
Professor's first act as American citizen--get arrested for protesting in support of DACA students
Harvard Professor Ahmed Ragab's first act as an American citizen was to get arrested for protesting in support of DACA students. Ragab drove directly from his citizenship ceremony to a protest in Cambridge, Massachusetts to stand in solidarity with other Boston area professors and protest the DACA repeal.
He wrote in part in a Washington Post opinion letter :
With the Trump administration abolishing DACA, my students now live in fear that the lives they have built will be wrestled away, that they could be thrown out of this country, which is theirs as much as it will ever be mine. Adding insult to injury, President Trump is using them as pawns in his political games. First, shirking his responsibility, he put their fate in the hands of Congress. Then he suggested that he would take action if Congress doesn't, and that they will not be a deportation priority. Finally, he tweeted that they have nothing to fear "for six months." Throughout, the abuse continues. These young people are to continue working, studying and serving this country while simply hoping that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don't show up, and they are expected to believe in a system that consistently rejects their rights and threatens their lives and families.
The discourse defending DACA focuses on these young people being in the United States "through no fault of their own." This narrative vilifies their parents to avoid difficult, broader questions about immigration, racism and xenophobia. My "DACAmented" students are here thanks to their parents, who made many sacrifices to offer their children better lives. Two generations ago, James Baldwin wrote of "the American Negro": "It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until ... we are able to accept that we need each other, that I am one of the people who build the country, there is little hope for the American Dream." Baldwin's prescient diagnosis is still germane; our society still denies the contribution of millions of undocumented Americans to the making of this country, and dismisses their rights to the fruits of what they helped build. The American Dream lives in tortured dissociation: claimed to be for all, but denied to many.
So last week, my fellow Boston professors and I protested beside a statue of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist who nearly lost his life for rejecting the Fugitive Slave Act. We crossed Massachusetts Avenue to stand in the middle of the street. As a friend put it, we wanted to bridge the distance between law and justice with our bodies. Before we were arrested, the officers informed us that we were disturbing the peace. But the peace that we disturbed is but a veneer obscuring the injustices embedded in arbitrary immigration systems and institutional racism.
Banner unfurled at Boston's Fenway Park: "Racism is as American as Baseball"
Letter from a reader:
On Wednesday, September 13, a group of white people dropped an enormous banner, "RACISM IS AS AMERICAN AS BASEBALL," over the famous "Green Monster" wall in Boston's Fenway Park during a nationally televised game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics.
The group stated "We are a group of white anti-racist protesters. We want to remind everyone that just as baseball is fundamental to American culture and history, so too is racism. White people need to wake up to this reality before white supremacy can truly be dismantled. We urge anyone who is interested in learning more or taking action to contact their local racial justice organization." "We are responding to a long history of racism and white supremacy in the United States that continues to pervade every aspect of American culture today. We deliberately chose a platform in an attempt to reach as many people as possible." After Adam Jones of the Baltimore Orioles was taunted with bags of peanuts thrown at him and being called the "N-word" by Boston fans earlier in the season, the group decided that something had to be done. Other Black players spoke up after Jones did, saying similar things happened to them when they played in Boston against the Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox was the last Major League Baseball team to have a Black player on its roster. Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox from 1933 to 1976, continuously rejected any attempts to integrate the team. He refused to sign Jackie Robinson, who called Yawkey "one of the most bigoted guys in baseball." The current owner of the Red Sox, John Henry, is attempting to remove the name of the street, Yawkey Way, where Fenway Park is located and rename it with the name of a famous Red Sox player, like David Ortiz, who is known as "Big Papi." In speaking to the issue of racism in Boston, the group that dropped the banner said, "...we saw, we see Boston continually priding itself as a kind of liberal, not racist city, and are reminded also constantly that it's actually an extremely segregated city. It has been for a long time, and that no white people can avoid the history of racism, essentially. So we did this banner as a gesture towards that, to have a conversation about that."
A Voice of Conscience in Sports World-- ESPN Reporter Calls Trump a "White Supremacist"
From a reader:
The shit hit the fan on Tuesday, September 12, after Jemele Hill, an anchor on ESPN's SC6 (SportsCenter at 6) news show, tweeted out on Monday that Donald Trump is a "white supremacist."
Hill has been known for not shying away from politics in her commentaries.
She began her tweets about Trump by first going after singer Kid Rock, a supporter of the fascist Trump/Pence regime, by responding to his tweet that he was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate and claiming he "loves black people," and then accused the "extreme left" of "trying to use the old confederate flag BS" to label him a racist. Hill responded by tweeting out, "He loves black people so much that he pandered to racists by using a flag that unquestionably stands for dehumanizing black people."
The Twitter thread by Hill continued after she was attacked for her tweet about Kid Rock. She posted her Trump tweets in reply to them: "Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists." "Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period." "He is unqualified and unfit to be president. He is not a leader. And if he were not white, he never would have been elected." "Donald Trump is a bigot. Glad you could live with voting for him. I couldn't, because I cared about more than just myself." "The height of white privilege is being able to ignore this white supremacy, because it's of no threat to you. Well, it's a threat to me."
Hill then was barraged with racist and anti-woman tweets calling her a "nigger" and a "bitch." The white supremacist supporters of Trump, including Breitbart and Fox News, called for ESPN to fire her. ESPN tried to throw her under the bus when they "disavowed" what she said, and put out a statement, "We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate."
Then on Wednesday September 13 the White House called for ESPN to fire Hill--Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders responded to a question about the tweets by saying "That's one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN."
But broadly from athletes, Hill immediately got support from Colin Kaepernick, who tweeted out, "We are with you @jemelehill." Deadspin.com reported, "ESPN Issues Craven Apology For Jemele Hill's Accurate Descriptions Of Donald Trump." Reggie Miller, former NBA basketball all-star, tweeted out, "I'm on team @jemelehill..." Current NBA all-star Dwayne Wade responded to Miller's tweet with, "Sign me up!"
Hill, who grew up in poverty-ridden Detroit, has continuously brought politics into sports. In 2008, she compared rooting for the Detroit Pistons with rooting for the Boston Celtics, a team that traditionally became known as the team for white people to root for in a predominantly Black league, when she wrote, "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim. It's like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan. Deserving or not, I still hate the Celtics." (Listen to Bob Avakian's talk about the NBA, "Marketing the Minstrel Show and Serving the Big Gangsters," at revcom.us)
Earlier this year, Hill was reporting on Colin Kaepernick not currently being signed by an NFL team because of his political views by refusing to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and murders against Black people. In reporting that Kaepernick had compared the cops of today with "slave patrols," she said the comparison of police to "slave patrols" was "inflammatory, but historically accurate."
After she was attacked for bringing politics into sports and ESPN was attacked as being liberal, she gave an interview to Yahoo.com (See https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sportscenter-anchor-jemele-hill-espns-politics-athletes-dragging-us-193537563.html )
I just hadn't noticed the correlation between us being called more liberal as you see more women in a position on our network... as you see more ethnic diversity, then all of a sudden ESPN is too liberal. So I wonder, when people say that, what they're really saying. The other part of it is that we're journalists, and people have to understand, these uncomfortable political conversations... the athletes are dragging us here. I didn't ask Colin Kaepernick to kneel. He did it on his own. So, was I supposed to act like he didn't? Gregg Popovich, every week at his press conferences, is having a 10-minute soliloquy on Donald Trump. Am I supposed to act like he's not doing that? You have athletes saying they're going to the White House, not going to the White House, that's all sports news. It didn't just start with this generation of athletes, it's always been that way. Sometimes when I hear a viewer say they don't want their politics mixed with sports, I say, "What did you think about Muhammad Ali?" And then all of a sudden it's glowing praise.
In another interview she said:
Whether we want to discuss it or not, athletes are dragging us into these conversations. It's not that Mike [her co-host, Michael Smith] and I wake up one day and say, "Hey, today we're going to be MSNBC." It's usually based off a news story that is relevant to sports.
If ESPN attempts to suspend or fire Jemele Hill for telling the truth, people need to come to her defense in a big way.
Munroe Bergdorf, L'Oreal's First Trans Model Fired for Calling Out White Supremacy
Munroe Bergdorf, a transgender model was recently hired by L'Oreal to be featured in a YouTube ad for its True Match Foundation. However, Bergdorf's deal with the company did not last very long.
Bergdorf posted comments on Facebook calling out white supremacy, white privilege and systemic racism in the United States. She wrote:
Honestly I don't have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people" .... "Because most of ya'll don't even realize or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this shit." .... "Come see me when you realise that racism isn't learned, it's inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege," she added. "Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth... then we can talk."
Immediately the media attacked Bergdorf filled with vitriol, how can she say, "All white people are racist?" The media continued by spreading falsehoods and distorting her statements. In fact, Bergdorf's statements represent undeniable truths about the nature of this system and its foundation in white supremacy that continues up until today. Bergdorf did not remain silent after being fired. She took to Facebook again to clarify her statements, making a powerful point:
"When I stated that 'all white people are racist,' I was addressing that fact that western society as a whole, is a SYSTEM rooted in white supremacy--designed to benefit, prioritise and protect white people before anyone of any other race," she wrote. "Unknowingly, white people are SOCIALISED to be racist from birth onwards. It is not something genetic. No one is born racist."
To read more of Munroe Bergdorf's posts and her response to L'Oreal click here
Messages of Resistance at the MTV Video Music Awards
This week MTV held its annual Video Music Awards. This year's VMAs were far from apolitical--a number of artists made righteous political statements, many against white supremacy.
During her presentation for best pop video, Paris Jackson, daughter of Michael Jackson, condemned the white supremacists and Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. Jackson said, "I hope we leave here tonight remembering that we must show these Nazi, white supremacist jerks in Charlottesville and all over the country that as a nation with liberty as our slogan, we have zero tolerance for their violence, hatred and their discrimination."
Katy Perry jokingly compared the votes for best video award for the show to the votes cast in the election, saying this is "one election where the popular vote actually matters." Somali nominee K'naan wore a mock "Make America Great Again" hat with a message scrawled in Arabic.
The night's big performance was by Kendrick Lamar, who started his song with a brief message about police brutality. Later in the night, singer Cardi B showed support by giving a shout out to Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who is being blackballed from the the NFL because of his refusal to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and murder of people of color. Cardi said, "Colin Kaepernick, as long as you kneel with us, we gonna be standing for you baby."
Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville when a white supremacist slammed his car into a group of anti-racist protestors, took the stage at one point. She was joined by Robert Wright Lee IV, pastor and descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. "We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism and hate," said Lee. "Today, I call on all of us with privilege and power to answer God's call to confront racism and white supremacy head-on."
Strong and steadfast, Susan Bro spoke about Heather and the foundation she has started in honor of her. She then presented the Best Fight Against the System Awards as a tribute to Heather's passion for social justice. Susan Bro said, "I want people to know that Heather never marched alone. She was always joined by people from every race and every background in this country."
The winners of the Best Fight Against the System Awards were: Logic ft. Damian Lemar Hudson, for "Black Spider Man"; The Hamilton Mixtape, for "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done); Big Sean for "Light"; Alessia Cara, for "Scars To Your Beautiful" (Body image); Taboo ft. Shailene Woodley, for "Stand Up/Stand N Rock #NoDAPL"; and John Legend for "Surefire."
Punk Rock Band Anti-Flag: Time to remove "all monuments to the Confederacy and the racism for which they stand"
Punk rock band Anti-Flag has released a new track, "Racists," in the wake of the recent fascist/white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. In the lyric video, photos of the KKK, Confederate flag, pro-Trump signs, and other images appear on the screen along with the song's words, including the chorus:
Just 'cause you don't know you're racist A bigot with a check list Just 'cause you don't know you're racist You don't get a pass when you're talkin' your shit
Along with releasing the song, the band released a statement saying:
We stand in solidarity with those fighting racism and fascism in the streets of Charlottesville and beyond. We believe it is time for the removal of all monuments to the confederacy and the racism for which they stand. We must put these symbols of white supremacy into places where the proper context can be provided for what they actually are; outdated, backwards, and antithetical to what we believe the values of humanity should be. It is past time to have real conversations on systemic racism and America's history of it. There are museums memorializing the Holocaust all across Europe, while America continues to try to hide from its racist and murderous past and present
NFL Player Anquan Boldin Quits Because of Charlottesville: "There's something bigger than football"
All-Pro National Football League wide receiver and Super Bowl champion Anquan Boldin has quit football, just two weeks after signing a contract with the Buffalo Bills, saying, "Just seeing things that transpired over the last week or so [in Charlottesville], I think for me there's something bigger than football at this point." In an interview with ESPN, Boldin said he was "drawn to make the larger fight for human rights a priority" and that "my life's purpose is bigger than football."
Boldin, a 14-year NFL veteran, said that he has been considering retirement for a while, but the events that unfolded in Charlottesville helped prompt his decision. He said, "I can remember as a kid wanting to get to the NFL and wanting to be a professional football player. I dedicated my life to that, and I never thought anything would take the place of that passion. But for me, it has."
He went on, "I'm uncomfortable with how divided we are as a country. Is it something new to us? No. Is it something that we're just starting to experience? No. But to see just how divided we are, I'm uncomfortable with that."
Last year, Boldin was awarded the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award for his volunteer and charity work. In talking about that, he said, "Humanitarian work is something that I've been working on for years. Advocating for equality, criminal justice reform, all of those things are something that I've been working on for years. So this is not just a fly-by-night decision for me. It's something that I've been dealing with for years, and it's something that I'm willing to dedicate my life towards. Do I think I can solve all the problems that we have in this country? Of course not. But I think I do have a duty to stand up and make my voice heard and be a voice for those that don't have a voice.
"My passion for the advocacy work that I do outweighs my passion for football at this point," he said. "So I'm not coming back to play for a contender or to do anything else. I'm done with the game of football."
Artist Joseph Guay on his "Border Wall" Installation in Atlanta
Several weeks ago, a large art installation popped up along a busy Atlanta street. The project is "Border Wall," by Joseph Guay, who explains, "It is modeled after the proposed $20 Billion dollar wall for the US/Mexico 1,989 mile border. The purpose of this installation is to create social awareness on the issues surrounding immigration in the United States." Guay's wall is 40 feet long, 16 feet tall and made of steel, rebar, and concrete.
As part of his conception for the work, the "Border Wall" was constructed by undocumented Mexican workers. One side of the wall shows a giant image of Donald Trump, the other side is adorned with a massive Mexican flag. The "Border Wall" sits strikingly behind a barbwire fence in an abandoned parking lot. Guay has invited anyone who wants to express their thoughts on the Trump wall and on the issue of immigrants and immigration by posting and writing graffiti on the wall. In just a few weeks, the wall has been covered mostly with anti-Trump statements, messages of love for immigrants, and a number of Refuse Fascism NO! signs.
On his website , Joseph Guay says:
"The incredible souls that we label as illegals, poor immigrants, the people who want to steal our jobs...( undocumented Mexican labor workers ) have actually come together to help construct this wall. They believe in showing the world what a dividing wall looks and feels like. They believe in letting the American public know, in a peaceful way, that they are not here to take anything. They are actually here to give and help build our 'United' States. One worker has shared several stories of his difficult journey here. He also explained how other individuals raised $15,000 US in order to pay an illegal transporter to get them into this country... only to be treated like slaves on their arrival. Every story he tells makes me upset at the incorrect way we are dealing with this issue. I hope this project will give a better voice to the difficult topics individuals face that are only looking for a better life, and the difficult topics we face as a country. I can't help but ask myself... Does this wall stand for more than just a border crossing point? Maybe it's a symbol of division.... division of land, of cultures, of race, and equality. If we start going in this direction as a nation then where do we stop? I do not know, but I hope we can collectively explore the path together and find a more humane solution."
Artist Joseph Guay's "Border Wall" Installation in Atlanta Photo: special to revcom.us
Mitch O'Connell, Artist, on his Anti-Trump Billboard in Mexico City: "Mexico came to mind because Trump started out his campaign by being cruel and mean to everyone in Mexico"
Chicago-based artist Mitch O'Connell's artwork featuring an "alien invader" image of Donald Trump now towers above one of Mexico City's busiest roads. The billboard features a monstrous image of Trump with a blue and red fleshless face and the slogan "Make America Great Again," and an American flag waves in the background.
O'Connell said the idea came as he was designing a poster for a science-fiction and horror film festival. The artist said that he intended the project to be posted in a U.S. city but was denied a permit 30 times. "No one wanted to touch it because it's political," he said. O'Connell's mind then turned to Mexico. He said, "Mexico came to mind because Trump started out his campaign by being cruel and mean to everyone in Mexico." With the help of an Argentinian artist living in Mexico City, O'Connell brought his controversial billboard to fruition.
O'Connell says, "With every month that passed since I did the drawing two years ago, he has become more like that crazy alien. It seems over time he became more and more like the movie, so it became more and more appropriate over time."
David Strathairn: "July 15, We Have to Stand Up and Say NO!"
From David Strathairn:
Our form of a humane, compassionate, all-inclusive governance, guaranteed us by the founding principles of our constitution, a government, remember?, "of the people, by the people, and for the people", is in a battle for its life against the vile, malignant, fascist agenda of the Trump/Pence regime.
This regime and it's co-conspirators, is being allowed to infiltrate more widely, more deeply, and more insidiously, into the precious fabric of our daily lives, everyday, assaulting our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by spreading bias, hatred, greed, and distrust; threatening to tear apart our own nation's vital need for communality and inclusiveness; displaying a disgusting example of basic human decency; attempting to establish economic policies that will only fill their already bulging pockets while fleecing tens of millions of people of essential human services; trying to pass laws of ethnic, religious, and gender oppression; seeking to control the way we chose our public servants; arrogantly and ignorantly destabilizing crucial global alliances to a frightening degree; and willfully denying, while adding to, the undisputed scientific facts that the health of our planet is under serious duress. And this is all happening right under our noses.
We have to stand up and say NO. However we can, Wherever we can. Before it's too late. Add your voice on July 15th . The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, National Education Association: "We will not find common ground with an administration that is cruel and callous to our children and their families."
Over the weekend, the National Education Association (NEA) met for their annual conference in Boston. The NEA has three million members at all levels of education and describes itself as the "largest professional employee organization" in the U.S. The tone of the conference was certainly different from years past--fear and defiance of the Trump Regime permeated the air.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the NEA, delivered a speech indicting Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, for their "profoundly disturbing" agenda aimed at destroying public education. She said, "I do not trust their motives. I do not believe their alternative facts. I see no reason to assume they will do what is best for our students and their families."
While not naming them by name, Garcia made clear that the NEA was taking a sharply different stand from heads of other unions who have had friendly meetings with Trump: "There will be no photo-op.... We will not find common ground with an administration that is cruel and callous to our children and their families."
In her speech Garcia warned that educators' resistance will have a backlash from the Trump regime: "They're going to hit us with everything they've got because we are a threat to them. They will try to take away your freedom to organize. They will try to take away your freedom to negotiate with a collective voice. They will try to silence us because when we win, the entire community wins." Garcia went on to say that teachers must be prepared to fight back against the Trump/Devos's fascist agenda while defending the students, families, and communities under attack.
Read text of her talk here
Neil Young: "Children of Destiny"
Neil Young surprise-released a new song titled "Children of Destiny" in time for the Fourth of July weekend. The song features a new young rock group, Promise of the Real, fronted by Willie Nelson's son, Lukas Nelson, as well as a 65-piece orchestra. The video for the song shows flag-waving crowds, protests/marches, beautiful nature scenes, and the destruction of war. The song shifts between upbeat to melancholy and so does the imagery.
The song's chorus is powerful and a call to resistance. Young sings:
Stand up for what you believe Resist the powers that be Preserve the land and save the seas For the children of destiny. The children of you and me
Then, suddenly, the imagery shifts and so does the emotion of the song as Young sings:
Should goodness ever lose, and evil steal the day Should happy sing the blues, and peaceful fade away. What would you do? What would you say? How would you act on that new day?
The upbeat chorus kicks back in as Young answers his own questions with images of resistance and protests: "Resist the powers that be..."
Watch the video:
Corey Stoll, actor in New York Public Theater's production of Julius Caesar , calls the performance an act of resistance
Corey Stoll played Julius Caesar's assassin, Marcus Brutus, in the New York Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar. The Public Theatre's staging of the play depicted the murdered title character as Donald Trump--and this outraged the fascists. Trump's fascist base was up in arms, and they disrupted the performances multiple times.
In an essay written after the final show, Stoll says that he realized that the play itself was an act of resistance. "The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling," recalls Stoll. He continues, "At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance."
Stoll and the rest of the cast performed amidst the media's distortion of the meaning and intention of the play, along with fascist trolls yelling things like, "Liberal hate kills" and "Goebbels would be proud." (Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.) In addition, Donald Trump Jr. went on TV to lambaste the play, claiming that it was responsible for the shooting at the congressional baseball game. The director of the play also said that the performance received multiple death threats.
Stoll writes, "In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act. I'm thankful for all the beautiful defenses of our production written in the last few weeks. But the cliche is true: In politics, when you're explaining, you're losing. So if you're making art, by all means question yourself and allow yourself to be influenced by critics of good faith. But don't allow yourself to be gaslighted or sucked into a bad-faith argument. A play is not a tweet. It can't be compressed and embedded and it definitely can't be delivered apologetically. The very act of saying anything more nuanced than 'us good, them bad' is under attack, and I'm proud to stand with artists who do. May we continue to stand behind our work, and, when interrupted, pick it right back up from 'liberty and freedom.'"
Read Stoll's entire essay at Vulture.com .
Diala Shamas, supervising attorney at the International Human Rights Clinic, on Supreme Court reinstating parts of Trump's Muslim ban: "Lawyers alone can't save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it."
Diala Shamas, a lecturer in law and supervising attorney at Stanford Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, has worked extensively with Muslim communities in the U.S. as well as refugees abroad. Her June 27 piece for the Washington Post, which appeared right after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated large parts of the Trump/Pence regime's Muslim ban, was titled "Lawyers alone can't save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it."
Shamas begins by recalling that when Trump first issued the Muslim ban in January, she and other lawyers who went to the airports to help immigrants and refugees detained or stranded because of the ban were treated like "superheroes" by the crowds that had gathered. While she appreciated the good will, she also writes that "it also seemed to foreshadow a dangerous tendency to rely on the courts and lawyers to act as a balance to our new administration's executive power."
Her fear came to life when the Supreme Court reinstated significant parts of the Muslim ban, which had been blocked by several appeals courts. Shamas explains that "The logic of this decision turns fundamental premises of refugee law, immigration law and the international system on their heads..." As she notes, "Significantly, it was also a per curiam decision, issued on behalf of the full court--meaning that the justices usually considered bastions of the left partook in its holding and its underlying logic."
Shamas warns, "While lawyers are important allies, the dangers of entrusting us with the pushback against executive overreach--as the liberal camp began to do almost instantly after Trump issued the original executive order--are now evident." She points to U.S. history and present-day struggles as evidence that rights cannot be won solely by relying on the courts: "Even landmark civil rights cases--whether Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education-- were preceded by significant organizing and mobilization. Victories in the Supreme Court (and in lower courts) reflected their times, cementing hard-earned popular progress only after the political ground had already begun to shift."
Shamas cautions people against "finding comfort" in the possibility of the Supreme Court further reviewing the case or the case becoming moot by that time. Instead, she remarks, "We must renew popular and political interest in pushing back against the executive order--and the many iterations that could follow, including other forms of discriminatory immigration profiling--in more sustained, nonlegal ways."
Read Diala Shamas's article here .
Moby: "In This Cold Place" music video portrays horrors of the Trump regime--and is attacked by fascist ghouls
Musician Moby and the Void Pacific Choir recently released the new music video "In This Cold Place" featuring animation by Steve Cutts. Among the many animated characters in the video is Trump as a Transformers-like robot that wreaks destruction and then turns into a swastika/dollar sign and self-destructs. Trump supporters are lashing out at Moby for this work of art. One fascist blog, for example, accused him of "corrupting children into hatred and accepting violence against President Trump." As RefuseFascism.org points out, "Meanwhile, around the country, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and others face threats to their well-being and their very lives on a daily basis at the hands of these same fascists. This is art that plays an important part in exposing the illegitimacy of this regime. It deserves to be shared, debated, and defended."
Watch the video:
Reza Aslan, former host of CNN series Believer : "When the house is on fire you can't just calmly describe the flames. You need to get onto the roof and scream at the top of your lungs, 'Fire!'"
Reza Aslan is the former host of the CNN show Believer , which followed Aslan as he traveled the world and explored different religions. Aslan, who is Muslim, and his staff were deep into the production of the second season of the show, and he was literally packing his bags to fly to the first location to shoot some footage when he received the news that his show had been canceled. Why? Following the recent terror attacks in London, Trump seized the opportunity to reiterate the fascist call for a ban on Muslims traveling to the U.S. Outraged, Aslan took to Twitter and called President Trump "a piece of shit"--and for that, CNN fired him. This was soon after this same network cravenly fired comedian Kathy Griffin for a joke she made that Trump did not like.
In a recent interview on Deadline.com, Aslan said he was "bummed" about the canceling of his show and having to let his staff go in the middle of production--but, he said, "I think that there is something much more important right now, which is the assault on our democracy and I need to make sure that that fight is the fight that I am fighting first and foremost."
Asked whether he regrets his tweet, Aslan responded, "I don't regret the sentiment. I'm not trying to exaggerate here but look, when the house is on fire you can't just calmly describe the flames. You need to get onto the roof and scream at the top of your lungs, 'Fire!' And I think that nothing less is tolerable at this time that we are living in."
Aslan's sense of urgency is something that people broadly should learn from and act on.
Read the rest of Reza Aslan's interview here .
Jacob Ayol, Security Supervisor at Denver International Airport and Sudanese Refugee, Speaks Out Against Trump's Muslim Ban
Jacob Ayol came to the United States in 2003 from Sudan. He spent several years in the U.S. military before finding his current job as security supervisor for the Denver International Airport.
He was at the airport when Trump's first Muslim travel ban went into effect, and says there was lots of fear and confusion among many people at the airport. As the head of security, he faced questions from employees and passengers who were coming to him for answers that he could not provide. He states that there was an overall "fear of the unknown." The travel ban reminded him of the fear felt in his former country and the religious divide between Sudan and South Sudan. "Each wanted to be superior, and each was afraid of the other," Ayol says. "It has brought our country to its knees and divided our country. It's not just history; it's real life. We just all want to live. We want to appreciate life and not tell the other what to believe."
Ayol has joined with the Service Employees International Union in opposing the travel ban and believes that sharing his story and the stories of other refugees will help in that fight. "It's important if you've ever lived where you don't see buildings, where you don't know where you will eat tomorrow, you don't see clean water. If you ever live like that, you will understand that it is very important that someone have a shot at life."
Read the rest of Jacob Ayol's story here .
Steven Thrasher, Writer for the Guardian : "Yes there is a free speech crisis. But its victims are not white men."
A writer at large for the Guardian US, Steven Thrasher was, among other honors, named Journalist of the Year in 2012 by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. In a June 5 piece at theguardian.com, Thrasher makes incisive points about what is widely being discussed by media "talking heads on both the left and the right" as a "freedom of speech crisis." Thrasher notes that those talking heads are "not lacking in a freedom to speak, nor are the white conservatives on college campuses they seem so worried about. It's women and people of color who struggle the most finding a platform--but there is a conspicuous lack of concern about that by free speech crusaders."
Thrasher raises the recent example of what happened to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . After she gave a commencement address at Hampshire College in which she said that Donald Trump had "fulfilled the campaign promises of a campaign organized and built upon racism, corporatism and militarism," she was threatened with lynching and being shot in the head; and she said, "I have been repeatedly called 'nigger,' 'bitch,' 'cunt,' 'dyke,' 'she-male,' and 'coon'--a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence."
Thrasher writes that he and his journalist colleagues have also been recipients of such outrageous and violent threats. And as Thrasher notes, all this is not happening in a vacuum: "They are happening in a country where the majority of white voters elected a man who bragged about grabbing women 'by the pussy' without consent. They are happening in a country where, as Business Insider put it , 'Trump has unleashed a white crime wave' against people of color from Maryland to Kansas to Oregon .
"They are happening in a country where Confederate monuments are removed at night (for the safety of those removing them) but where pro-Confederate forces feel safe to carrying torches . They are happening in a country where an academic philosophy journal will publish a Black Lives Matter symposium without any black philosophers.
"And they are happening in a country where black children are shot by the police, where the greatest basketball player of all time has a racial slur painted on his home, and where a noose was found at the nation's newest black history museum."
Read Steven Thrasher's article online here .
C. Christine Fair, Georgetown University Professor, on Confronting neo-Nazi Leader Richard Spencer: "This is our December 1932"
Christine Fair is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. A May 25 op-ed in the Washington Post by Fair was titled, "I confronted Richard Spencer at my gym. Racists don't get to lift in peace." Recently, while working out at the gym, Fair came face to face with Richard Spencer. Spencer heralds himself as the new face of white supremacy, the "alt-right," which is in fact a euphemism for fascist neo-Nazi thugs. Spencer is a strong supporter of Trump, whom he believes is mainstreaming his racist vision of an "ethno-state." Some will recall, after the election, Spencer and his "alt-right" storm troopers celebrating and referring to Donald Trump as their "Fuhrer," giving Nazi salutes, and shouting "Hail Trump," summoning to mind the Nazi "Heil Hitler."
Fair courageously called Spencer out as a "vocal propagandist for racism" right in the middle of his workout. Immediately, Spencer took to YouTube to decry his "unfair" treatment and lambaste Fair in the most misogynist of terms.
As Fair points out, Spencer "sought to garner sympathy by arguing that he is a model gym user--he should be allowed to spread hate and stoke racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and other bigoted forms of violence, and organize torchlit nighttime rallies that conjure up images of similar rallies staged by the Klan--all without facing consequences for his actions when off the job, so to speak." Fair simply responds, "But Spencer is wrong."
Fair goes on to compare the current historical moment with that of Germany in December 1932. She says, "I imagine Germans sitting around their tables in December 1932 lamenting the eroding civil society and expansion of hateful, nationalist rhetoric between bites of Wiener schnitzel and sips of beer. They see what's coming but they are too uncomfortable to do anything."
Fair ends her article with a challenge to today's "Good Germans" (she refers to Richard Collins, a Black U.S. Army lieutenant who was recently murdered by a white man who was involved in a Facebook group that posts racist material):
This is our December 1932. We have a choice. Good people can acquiesce to the purported demands of polite society and concede that Spencer's right to lift weights in peace is more important that the rights of men like Collins to live full and productive lives, that being a white supremacist is not a 9-to-5 job, and that as long as he doesn't bring his torch into an establishment, Spencer and his associates should be treated as any other civilized person. Or we can refuse to treat this hateful, dangerous ideology as just another way of being, and fight it in every space we occupy.
I've made my choice. You need to make yours.
Read C. Christine Fair's op-ed here .
Lincoln Blades, Contributor to Teen Vogue : "White male terrorists are an issue we should discuss"
In a May 9 piece for Teen Vogue , Lincoln Blades explores why the United States needs to take seriously the presence of white male extremists. He contrasts the swirling media coverage and intense government response of mass attacks carried out by Islamic jihadists and the lack of coverage by the media and the government's reluctance to identify attacks carried out by white (often right wing) men as acts of terrorism. He also notes Trump and other politicians' fierce response to attacks by Muslims, while refusing to address the far more likely scenario of white supremacists attacking Black people.
After the San Bernardino shooting, Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio all jumped at the opportunity to declare that America was at "war." Then candidate, and current president, Donald Trump took the rhetoric a step further by calling for a broad-sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States. But, five days earlier, a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs was targeted by a white male devout Christian, and there was no degree of rage expressed by those same Republican presidential candidates or the accompanying hyperbolic war proclamations. In fact, the shooter, Robert Dear, was referred to as a "gentle loner" by The New York Times ....
Who radicalized Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in 2015 executed nine unarmed black churchgoers inside of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina? After he was arrested, it was discovered that he had published a website where he espoused racist ideology, regurgitating bigoted talking points on the false "epidemic" of "black-on-white" crimes, espousing that black people are inherently "violent" and that white women need to be protected from black men. It's easy to say that his views were influenced by a small, fringe group of insane right-wing extremists, but it's seemingly far more difficult for us to collectively accept that these prejudiced talking points have been given life through mainstream media bias, and even by the president of the United States, who once tweeted a racist meme that incorrectly cited myths about "black-on-white" crime in America as fact.
Read Lincoln Blade's entire article here .
Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie--on connection between the murders by a white-supremacist Nazi in Portland and Trump's anti-Muslim bigotry
On May 26, Jeremy Joseph Christian, a known white supremacist and neo-Nazi, began harassing two teenage Muslim women on MAX, Portland's subway train. Christian was verbally assaulting the two young women, yelling racist and anti-Muslim slurs. When several men on the train attempted to intervene, Christian pulled out a knife and stabbed three men. Two of the men died from their wounds, and a third is in a hospital.
Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie, a contributor at HuffingtonPost.com wrote a powerful piece a day after the attacks. Currie is a minister in the United Church of Christ, Director of the Center for Peace and Spirituality, and University Chaplain at Pacific University. He lives just a few blocks from where the attack took place. In his piece, Currie discusses correlation between hate crimes and the election of Donald Trump, pointing to the reported increase in hate crimes by 197% since the day after the election to February. He notes that Trump and others are being helped in spreading anti-Muslim bigotry by "Christian leaders such as Franklin Graham, a close ally of the president."
Dr. Currie calls on Christians and others to oppose the hate incited by Trump and his cronies:
Islam is not evil or a dangerous religion. Fundamentalism, however, can turn any faith tradition into a violent movement. Consider the number of terrorist bombings at women's health clinics in the United States by so-called Christians over the last several decades, and the link between white nationalist domestic terrorist groups that identify as part of a fringe movement within Christianity.
Trump, Graham, and others have helped to incite violence at their rallies and in the streets. This new normal can only be called sinful. The attack in Portland can only be called domestic terrorism.
My prayer is that every Christian body speaks out against hate crimes such as the one that occurred in Portland last night. It is vital that the interfaith movement in the United States continues to stand-up as a counterweight to those who would use religion as a tool of division. All our faith traditions, at their core, are about building just societies and freeing people from oppression. We must be about the work of bringing people together; not building walls to keep one another apart.
Read the whole article by Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie article here .
Max Perry Mueller, Religious Studies Professor: How Trump and Pence Together Embody a "White Christian America" in Decline
Religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller, writing before the election of the Trump/Pence regime, dug into the seeming contradiction between the worldview of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Mueller, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, described Mike Pence's long history of perverse Christian fascist legislation, which is substantial to say the least. He reminded readers that Pence as vice president would be "just a heartbeat--or impeachment--away from the Oval Office," describing him as "a politician who, as Pence himself implied at the vice presidential debate, believes it his 'calling' to legislate his religious views into public policy."
In his piece, Mueller hit on some important reasons why Trump and Pence, despite some of their obvious differences in worldview and public persona, dangerously complement each other:
Pence's first--and primary--identity as a conservative Christian and the governing worldview that it forms in many ways aligns with Trump's own view of seeing the world divided starkly into allies and enemies, good deals and bad deals, security and menace.
In this sense, both Trump and Pence are restorationists. And their restorationist visions for America are complementary. Trump's is racial; Pence's is religious. Together, their ticket embodies a "white Christian America" in decline, as Robert P. Jones has powerfully described it . In a Trump-Pence ticket, white Christian America not only hopes to resist the forces demographic and cultural change, but to restore white Protestant Americans (especially men) to their place of unchallenged preeminence.
See Mueller's article, "The Christian Worldview of Mike Pence," here .
Michelangelo Signorile, Editor of HuffPost "Queer Voices" on Firing of Comey: "Stop Being Polite and Immediately Start Raising Hell"
In a May 10 article, Michelangelo Signorile, editor-at-large of the "Queer Voices" column on HuffPost, says that with the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump "made his most frightening authoritarian power grab yet." He writes, "This could be viewed as a direct step toward consolidating power and, yes, toward fascism, as we've seen play out in other countries--in Turkey recently, and in many other countries in history from which you could choose as an example."
Signorile puts forward sharply that, given this very dangerous situation, "It's time to move beyond polite protests within specified boundaries. It's time to escalate the expression of our outrage and our anger in a massive way."
He goes on:
Starting today and from here on , no elected official--certainly those in the GOP defending and supporting Trump on a variety of issues, for example--should be able to sit down for a nice, quiet lunch or dinner in a Washington, DC eatery or even in their own homes. They should be hounded by protestors everywhere, especially in public--in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts, and yes, on the public property outside their homes and apartments, in Washington and back in their home states.
White House officials too--those enabling the authoritarian--need to be challenged everywhere, as do all those at the conservative think tanks who support Trump and those who publicly defend him in their columns and on television.
Go here to read the entire piece, "To Save America We Must Stop Being Polite And Immediately Start Raising Hell."
Joan Baez: "In the new political and cultural reality in which we find ourselves, there is much work to be done"
On April 7, in recognition of her nearly 60-year folk singing career, Joan Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following is from her acceptance speech:
What has given my life deep meaning, and unending pleasure, has been to use my voice in the battle against injustice. It has brought me in touch with my own purpose. It has also brought me in touch with people of every background... And I've met and tried to walk in the shoes of those who are hungry, thirsty, cold and cast out, people imprisoned for their beliefs, and others who have broken the law, paid the price, and now live in hopelessness and despair. Of exonerated prisoners who have spent decades in solitary confinement, awaiting execution. Of exhausted refugees, immigrants, the excluded and the bullied. Those who have fought for this country, sacrificed, and now live in the shadows of rejection. People of color, the old, the ill, the physically challenged, the LGBTQ community.
And now, in the new political and cultural reality in which we find ourselves, there is much work to be done.
Where empathy is failing and sharing has been usurped by greed and the lust for power, let us double, triple, and quadruple our own efforts to empathize and to give of our resources and our selves. Let us together repeal and replace brutality, and make compassion a priority. Together let us build a great bridge, a beautiful bridge to once again welcome the tired and the poor, and we will pay for that bridge with our commitment. We the people must speak truth to power, and be ready to make sacrifices. We the people are the only one who can create change. I am ready. I hope you are, too. I want my granddaughter to know that I fought against an evil tide, and had the masses by my side.
Read the whole speech here .
Henry Scott Wallace: "American Fascism, in 1944 and Today"
In a May 12 op-ed in the New York Times, Henry Scott Wallace--lawyer and co-chairman of the foundation Wallace Global Fund, which promotes "sustainable development"--compares Trump to the fascist Benito Mussolini, whose regime ruled Italy leading up to and through World War 2. Wallace's grandfather was Henry A. Wallace, who was vice-president under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s.
In 1944, Henry A. Wallace wrote an article in the New York Times titled "The Danger of American Fascism." According to Henry Scott Wallace, his grandfather's article "described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears..." He writes, "'[I]n my view, he predicted President Trump."
In the op-ed, Henry Scott Wallace cites different quotes from his grandfather's article and points to their relevance today. One point the op-ed addresses is how fascists use lies:
In fact, they use lies strategically, to promote civic division, which then justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Through "deliberate perversion of truth and fact," [Henry A. Wallace] said, "their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity."
Thus might lying about unprecedented high crime rates legitimize a police state. Lying about immigrants being rapists and terrorists might justify a huge border wall, mass expulsions and religion-based immigration bans. Lying about millions of illegal votes might excuse suppression of voting by disfavored groups.
The op-ed appears in the May 12 print issue of the NY Times and online here .
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah) in The New Yorker , December 2, 2016
"Now is not the time to tiptoe around historical references. Recalling Nazism is not extreme; it is the astute response of those who know that history gives both context and warning."
Statement from Faculty at the University of Southern California, published in the Los Angeles Times , March 23, 2017
We are USC Faculty.
We are scientists, artists, and thinkers from over 115 countries, working together every day, side by side, to understand the world around us and to share what we've learned with future generations.
We proudly affirm the core mission of the university as a place for the generation of knowledge, the preservation of scholarship, and informed discussion and debate, all of which are vital to a healthy democracy.
We will vigorously defend our core values of academic freedom, high standards of evidence, free inquiry, openness, and inclusion against policies and actions driven by fear, bigotry, and propaganda.
We are committed to:
-- protecting the human rights of our students, our fellow faculty, staff, and all members of the USC community, irrespective of their race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, nationality, or citizenship status.
-- supporting and encouraging all university efforts to provide critical resources for staff, students and faculty who are most vulnerable and at greatest risk.
-- supporting faculty, students, and staff who engage in civil disobedience and protest if members of the academic community are harmed or deported due to targeted state actions.
We will Fight On!
Shaun King: "No President who ever owned human beings should be honored"
In his article "No President who ever owned human beings should be honored" on March 15, Shaun King wrote in the New York Daily News that Adolf Hitler "is a monster who should never be honored," and continued:
Just as this is true for Hitler, it is true for any American President who ever owned human beings and forced them into a life of slavery. The Holocaust and slavery are each an unjust disgrace.
King details the monstrous horrors of slavery and then calls out Trump:
Today, Donald Trump is going out of his way to honor President Andrew Jackson. He should never be honored. Over his lifetime his family owned at least 300 human beings. This is terrible and no contribution he made in his life will ever outweigh this fact. To this very day, Andrew Jackson's own estate openly admits that the key source of his wealth came from owning human beings and forcing them to work on his plantation. At the time Jackson died, he owned about 150 people. He was a full-fledged unrepentant bigot. The enslaved Africans on his plantation were often whipped and beaten. If they escaped, fugitive squads searched for them and returned them back to the plantation. One advertisement put out by Jackson for a runaway slave offered $10 for every 100 lashes given to the slave who was caught. Is that not sick to you?
This makes Andrew Jackson a monster. Nothing he did as President of the United States is good enough to look past this.
The same holds true for every single American President who owned human beings.
Read the whole article here
Michael Bennett, NFL football player, supports the women's strike on International Women's Day
Michael Bennett, who plays for the Seattle Seahawks, who participated in the pro football players' national anthem protest, and who refused to be a shill for Israel against the Palestinian people (see " Pro Football Player Michael Bennett Refuses to Be a Shill for Israel " Revolution, February 14, 2017, revcom.us), had his statement in support of the women's strike on International Women's Day read by Dave Zirin on his podcast.
Here are some excerpts from Bennett's statement:
"As a Black man in America sometimes I get overwhelmed and discouraged by what I see, from the police killings of unarmed Black men to the unequal educational system to mass incarceration, but when I look into my daughter's eyes, I see the courage of Harriet Tubman, the patience of Rosa Parks, the soul of Ida B. Wells, the passion of Fanny Lou Hamer, and the heart of Angela Davis. I see the future. I see hope. And, I'm inspired because it will be women who lead the future. So, I'm writing this to express my unconditional solidarity for the women's strike on International Women's Day, March 8th."
"It's about the women across the Earth who are suffering. Women not so worried about the glass ceiling because they are trying to survive a collapsing floor. It's about women of color across the Earth who live on less than one dollar a day. It's about all women who are subject to sexual assault and violence.
"I stand with the women's strike because I agree with their unity statement that reads that this day is 'organized by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed towards working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, and lesbian women.'"
"I encourage my fellow football players to take off their helmets and stand with these brave women across the world."
"We need change, and to quote Frederick Douglass, 'Without struggle, there is no progress.'"
(The statement is 35 minutes into the podcast at https://www.thenation.com/article/the-edge-of-sports-podcast-the-enduring-legacy-of-hoop-dreams/ )
Former ABC News Reporters, Executives, Producers Urge Strong Stand Against Trump
As of March 1, more than 230 former ABC News correspondents, executives and producers have signed a letter urging the network's top executive to take a firm stand against any Trump administration effort to curtail press access. The letter was written after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a briefing on February 24 and, in an unprecedented move, excluded several news organizations that have done stories Trump didn't like.
The letter called the February 24 incident "an alarming new development enacted by an administration that has declared war on respected news outlets" and asked James Goldston, president of ABC News, to "take a public stand" and "Refuse to take part in any future White House briefings based on an invitation list of who's in/who's out." The letter noted that there has been strong public protest by Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times , and statements by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg that they would not participate in future briefing where reporters are barred.
Signees include former White House correspondent Sam Donaldson; former ABC reporters Ken Kashiwahara, Jeanne Meserve and Lynn Sherr; four former executives and four former executive producers of "World News Tonight" and top leaders at "Nightline," "20/20'' and "Good Morning America." Kayce Freed Jennings, the widow of the late anchor Peter Jennings, was also one of the signers.
ABC News is one of the media organizations Trump has labeled as the "enemy of the American people" and "fake news." ABC was allowed into the Spicer briefing, while CNN, New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Politico and BuzzFeed were denied access. Reporters from other organizations, including the Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine, refused to attend the briefing in protest.
Tim Rogers at Fusion: Calling Trump "Presidential" Is the First Step to Normalizing Fascism
Tim Rogers is senior editor for Latin America at the cable and satellite TV channel Fusion. After Trump's February 28 speech to Congress, Rogers wrote a piece titled "Calling Trump's speech 'presidential' is the first step to normalizing fascism" (March 1, 2017) noting that "talking heads were quick to applaud Trump for acting 'presidential.'" Rogers goes on to say:
But Trump's speech to Congress was only presidential by fascist standards. What Trump laid out, in the methodical words penned by an ideologue behind the throne, was a frightening vision of a country under siege by foreign hordes that are trying to establish a "beachhead of terrorism" to convert the United States into a "sanctuary for extremists."
Trump depicted a dark world in which the U.S. is fighting "a network of lawless savages" that it must "extinguish ...from our planet."
Trump was talking about ISIS in that instance, but his fear-mongering over foreigners wasn't limited to Islamic State fighters any more than the travel ban was limited to Muslims from seven countries. The narrative of barbarians at the gate was woven throughout Trump's speech, which seemed to build on George W. Bush's worldview of "You're either with us, or against us." But Trump's view is even racist and alienating by W's standards.
From his call to build a border wall as "a very effective weapon against drugs and crime," to reiterating his appallingly cynical pledge to create a new Homeland Security Office to "serve American victims" of crimes committed by immigrants, Trump's whole speech was to lay out a dichotomy of us versus them, or "America first" in Trumpspeak. ...
When the speech was over, Trump lackeys congratulated themselves on a "home run"--actually, make that a "grand slam."
But even normally critical pundits said they thought Trump looked "presidential."
That's dangerous thinking. Calling Trump's fear-mongering "presidential" is a first step to normalizing fascism. It's granting acceptance to the dangerous fascists skulking behind the golden curtains of the Oval Office.
Anderson Cooper 360deg @AC360: Van Jones: Trump "became President of the United States" when he honored the widow of the Navy SEAL killed in Yemen. ...
In an America where Trump's speech can be called "presidential," it'll be a slippery slope to despotism.
Read Tim Roger's article in its entirety here .
"I am vowing, here and now, not to show papers in this situation"
" American citizens had their introduction to the Trump-era immigration machine Wednesday ..." So begins "Papers, Please," an article that appeared in The Atlantic online on February 27, about the February 22 domestic flight from SFO to JFK airport where every passenger was told by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents to show their ID before they could get off the plane. The agents claimed they were looking for a passenger who was undocumented and had a criminal record; it turned out that the person they sought was not on the plane.
In the article, written by Garrett Epps, legal scholar, novelist, and contributing editor to The Atlantic , he examines all possible legal authorities and concludes that there is no justification in U.S. law for what was done to the passengers on that plane. And then Epps, demonstrating the courage of his convictions, writes:
" I am vowing, here and now, not to show papers in this situation. I know that it will take gumption to follow through if the situation arises. What will be the reaction of ordinary travelers, some with outstanding warrants or other legal worries? Should we expect heroism of people who just want to get off an airplane? "
"I wasn't pulled out because I'm some kind of revolutionary activist, but my God, I am now." Mem Fox's Terrifying Detention at the Los Angeles Airport
Mem Fox, an award winning author from Australia, was pulled off an airplane when she arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and held in detention for almost two hours and interrogated for 15 minutes. In an op-ed article in The Guardian , she tells of her terrifying, belligerent, and violent experience.
She describes the room "like a waiting room in a hospital but a bit more grim than that.... There was no water, no toilet... Everything was yelled..." She said that she "heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human."
She describes an elderly Iranian woman in a wheelchair where they were yelling at her at the top of their voices--"Arabic? Arabic?" They screamed at her "ARABIC?" She told them "Farsi." A woman from Taiwan was being yelled at about how she made her money: Does it grow on trees? Does it fall from the sky?" Mem said, "...the agony I was surrounded by in that room was like a razor blade across my heart."
When she was called to be interviewed, she was degraded, and called it "monstrous." She told them that she writes books about exclusivity. She had one of her books in her bag and said, "I am all about inclusivity, humanity and the oneness of the humans of the world; it's the theme of my life." He yelled at her, "I can read!" She was standing the whole time and said, "The belligerence and violence of it was really terrifying. I had to hold the heel of my right hand to my heart to stop it beating so hard."
Interview with Claudia Koonz, Historian and Author of The Nazi Conscience
Claudia Koonz is a historian of Nazi Germany and the author of Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, The Nazi Conscience , and other works. She was interviewed on The Michael Slate Show on KPFK Pacifica Radio on February 10. This is a transcript of the interview, slightly edited for length and clarity.
Michael Slate: In broad strokes, let's talk about how fascism developed in Germany.
Claudia Koonz: OK. First of all, let's remember that nobody ever heard of Hitler until the early 1930s. He was unemployed. The only steady job he ever had in his life was when he fought in World War I for four years. He was quite brave.
This was a splinter party. As late as 1928, ten years after the defeat in World War I, the Nazis got 2.6% of the vote. 1930, they got 18% of the vote. 1932 they were up to the high point ever, 37.4% of the vote. So, the Nazis were never voted into power. Hitler was appointed into power.
So the question is, how did this disreputable, fringe party of loudmouth, brawling Stormtroopers get from a tiny splinter party to the center in 1932, which put Hitler in position to get appointed as chancellor?
John Legend: "Are we going to just accept inhumanity, or are we going to resist?"
The singer John Legend has won ten Grammy Awards, one Golden Globe Award, and one Academy Award. He will be playing Frederick Douglass in the second season of the WGN series Underground . In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine he was asked, "Has there been a piece of art that has affected you politically?" He replied:
Books have certainly affected me. In college, I took a class that centered on a book called "Obedience to Authority," which was trying to explain why an ordinary German would be a worker at a concentration camp, or why anyone would be part of a system that is so evil and corrosive, and how they deal with authority and whatever cognitive dissonance they need to have to do something so inhumane. Then we read some James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; all those books in that class opened my eyes to the way human beings deal with authority and deal with how we become inhumane. I took those classes 20 years ago, but I've been thinking about that a lot when I think about how we're reacting to Donald Trump right now.
The interviewer then asked, "How are you applying that thought process to contemporary times?" Legend said:
Yeah, are we just going to go about our lives and try to be normal? I've seen a tweet going around about how a lot of people say that they would have been part of the civil rights movement, so this is basically that chance, this moment of truth for our society. Are we going to just accept inhumanity, or are we going to resist?
Read the New York Times Magazine interview with John Legend here .
Ann Frank Center for Mutual Respect Condemns Trump's So-Called "Condemnation" of Anti-Semitic Attacks
On February 21, Donald Trump issued a statement supposedly condemning anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish institutions. At his February 16 press conference, Trump had insulted and bullied a correspondent from an Orthodox Jewish news agency who asked if Trump could condemn the wave of threats against Jewish institutions. Trump cut him off, yelled "quiet!" and "sit down" and ranted that this was "a very insulting question." Trump then declared himself "the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life" while refusing the reporter's request to condemn attacks on Jewish institutions. Days after this, on February 20, Jewish community centers in ten states were targeted with bomb threats and forced to evacuate. There were also 170 graves at an historic Jewish cemetery in Missouri desecrated in the last few days.
Immediately after Trump's February 21st statement, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect posted a response on Facebook. The Center takes inspiration from Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager hunted down and killed by the Nazis. Her Diary is a famous chronicle of hiding out from the Nazis. The center "calls out prejudice, counters discrimination and advocates for the kinder and fairer world of which Anne Frank dreamed."
The statement said in part:
The President's sudden acknowledgement is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Antisemitism that has infected his own Administration. His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President's Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing.
Berkeley Law School Faculty and Staff: #NoBanNoWall
Members of Berkeley Law (University of California, Berkeley School of Law) are taking a public stand against Trump's executive orders intensifying repression against immigrants and on the U.S.-Mexico border through a #NoBanNoWall photo project . Close-up photos of faculty and staff members show them with handwritten or printed signs.
Their statement reads:
President Trump's immigration executive orders, enforcement actions, and xenophobic threats directly impact members of our law school community.
They undermine the public mission of our university to ensure access to the talented pool of students and researchers that reflects the diversity in the State of California and the world.
They attack the ability of the university to fulfill its unique role as a site for the generation of knowledge and the free exchange of ideas among students, faculty, and staff of all nationalities, backgrounds, and creeds.
They threaten our values of diversity and inclusion, which ensure a vibrant democracy.
We oppose the executive orders and President Trump's attacks on certain communities.
We are committed to maintaining the law school as a just and inclusive community.
The PDF of the poster is available here .
"Hands Off Our Revolution"--More than 200 Artists Around the World Say "We will not go quietly"
When you go to the website, Hands Off Our Revolution, the first thing you see is the flashing words: HANDS OFF OUR BORDERS... WATER... AIR... LAND... CITIES... HOMES... PLANET... BODIES... HEALTH... JUSTICE... FRIENDS... FAMILIES... LOVES.... LIVES...
More than 200 artists, writers, photographers, musicians and curators from around the world--including well-known figures such as Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson, Ed Ruscha, Matthew Barney, Rosalind Krauss, Maya Lin, Hank Willis Thomas, Catherine Opie, Yinka Shonibare, David Byrne, and Michael Stipe--have joined this spirit of resistance, signing the following Mission Statement:
We are a global coalition affirming the radical nature of art. We believe that art can help counter the rising rhetoric of right-wing populism, fascism and the increasingly stark expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and unapologetic intolerance.
We know that freedom is never granted--it is won. Justice is never given--it is exacted. Both must be fought for and protected, yet their promise has seldom been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp, as at this moment.
As artists, it is our job and our duty to reimagine and reinvent social relations threatened by right-wing populist rule. It is our responsibility to stand together in solidarity. We will not go quietly. It is our role and our opportunity, using our own particular forms, private and public spaces, to engage people in thinking together and debating ideas, with clarity, openness and resilience.
The website also announces a project to do a "series of contemporary art exhibitions and actions that confront, head on, the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere... to help envision and shape the world in which we want to live."
The Mission Statement in 10 different languages and the full description of the project are online at handsoffourrevolution.com .
"I want to be a voice for the voiceless": Pro Football Player Michael Bennett Refuses to Be a Shill for Israel
Bennett, who plays in the NFL (National Football League) for the Seattle Seahawks, announced he will not be joining an NFL delegation to Israel.
Bennett has been involved in the struggle by professional athletes to protest police brutality. He took up the protest in the NFL started by San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand for the national anthem. Bennett called for white athletes to take a stand against police murders, saying "You need a white guy to join the fight. The white guy is super important to the fight. For people to really see social injustices, there must be someone from the other side of the race who recognizes the problem, because a lot of times if just one race says there's a problem, nobody is realistic about it." Bennett has also posted photos and quotes from Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on his Instagram page.
Bennett had originally planned to be on the delegation because he wanted to have interaction with both Palestinian and Israeli people. But he learned from an article in the Times of Israel that the trip would isolate him from the Palestinian people and turn him into a "goodwill ambassador." Then he read an open letter in The Nation magazine, signed by John Carlos, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Alice Walker, and others calling on the athletes to "reconsider taking this trip to ensure you are standing on the right side of history."
Bennett then wrote an open letter that he posted on Instagram and Twitter.
Meryl Streep on standing up against "armies of brownshirts and bots": "You have to! You don't have an option"
Actor Meryl Streep received the National Ally for Equality Award at a fundraising gala held by the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ civil rights organization, on Saturday night, February 11. In her acceptance speech, Streep said:
[F]undamentalists, of every stripe everywhere, are exercised and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. We should not be surprised that not everyone is totally down with it.
If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn't lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for. He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is....
I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, over-berated actress, who likes football, of my generation. But that is why you invited me here! Right?
The weight of all these honors is part of what brings me to this podium. It compels me, against every one of my natural instincts (which is to stay home), it compels me to stand up in front of people and say words that haven't been written for me, but that come from my life and my conviction and that I have to stand by....
It's terrifying to put the target on your forehead. ... And it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is if you feel you have to. You have to. You don't have an option, but you have to stand up and speak up and act up.
Hear Meryl Streep's whole speech here .
A Tribe Called Quest at Grammys: "Resist, Resist, Resist"
The Grammy Awards on Sunday night, February 12, closed with an electrifying set by the legendary hip-hop crew A Tribe Called Quest joined by Busta Rhymes, Anderson .Paak, and Consequence. At mid-point in the Tribe's medley of several songs, Busta Rhymes came--on and focused right on the outrages being carried out by Trump and his regime: "I'm not feeling the political climate right now. I just want to thank President Agent Orange for perpetuating all of the evil that you've been perpetuating throughout the United States. I want to thank President Agent Orange for your unsuccessful attempt at the Muslim ban. When we come together--we the people, we the people, people!" As he said those words, Tribe member Q-Tip, along with a woman wearing a hijab and others, bust through a wall on the stage.
Q-Tip then launched into the Tribe song "We the People." And as he went into the hook, which sarcastically hits at those who spew hate and intolerance--"All you Black folks you must go/All you Mexicans you must go/And all you poor folks, you must go/Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways/So all you bad folks, you must go"--a diverse grouping of people of different nationalities, genders, and style of clothing walked up on to the stage. The performers all lined up at one point with fists in the air, and protest signs reading "No Wall No Ban" and photos of different faces were projected in the background.
The powerful performance, inspiring performance closed with the chants from the stage: "Resist! Resist! Resist!"
"The Rock," Misty Copeland, Steph Curry Hit Under Armour for Calling Trump an "Asset"
On Tuesday, February 7, on CNBC's Halftime Report , Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank called Trump "a real asset for the country" and lauded his plans to "make bold decisions and be really decisive." The next day, ballerina Misty Copeland, actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and NBA star Steph Curry, who all have endorsement deals with the athletic clothing company, spoke out against Plank.
Copeland wrote in an Instagram post, "I strongly disagree with Kevin Plank's recent comments in support of Trump." In a Facebook post, Johnson said Plank's comments were "neither my words, nor my beliefs" and said that he would ultimately "stand with this diverse team, the American and global workers, who are the beating heart and soul of Under Armour." Curry told the San Jose Mercury News that he agreed with Plank's comment on Trump... "if you remove the 'et'" from the word "asset." When asked if he would abandon Under Armour, Curry said that if "the leadership is not in line with my core values, then there is no amount of money, there is no platform I wouldn't jump off if it wasn't in line with who I am." Curry went on to say, "So that's a decision I will make every single day when I wake up. If something is not in line with what I'm about, then, yeah, I definitely need to take a stance in that respect."
George Prochnik on Stefan Zweig, Trump, and "When It's Too Late to Stop Fascism"
George Prochnik wrote the book The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (2015). Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer who at the height of his literary career in the 1920s and '30s, was one of the world's most popular writers and most widely translated living author. Zweig was a Jewish intellectual and his books were burned in Berlin in 1933. Like millions of others, with the rise of Hitler, he was driven into exile. Zweig went to London, New York, and then to Brazil where he committed suicide in 1942. Prochnik wrote a piece in the February 6 issue of The New Yorker , "When It's Too Late To Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig." Prochnik says when Zweig sat down to write his biography, "He was determined to trace how the Nazis' reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings." Zweig wrote: "the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the [fascist] movement ... would inevitably collapse in no time" and that Hitler had "elevated lying to a matter of course."
Prochnik writes:
Reading in Zweig's memoir how, during the years of Hitler's rise to power, many well-meaning people "could not or did not wish to perceive that a new technique of conscious cynical amorality was at work," it's difficult not to think of our own present predicament. Last week, as Trump signed a drastic immigration ban that led to an outcry across the country and the world, then sought to mitigate those protests by small palliative measures and denials, I thought of one other crucial technique that Zweig identified in Hitler and his ministers: they introduced their most extreme measures gradually--strategically--in order to gauge how each new outrage was received. "Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest the dose," Zweig wrote. "The doses became progressively stronger until all Europe finally perished from them."...
In Zweig's view, the final toxin needed to precipitate German catastrophe came in February of 1933, with the burning of the national parliament building in Berlin--an arson attack Hitler blamed on the communists but which some historians still believe was carried out by the Nazis themselves. "At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed," Zweig recalled. The destruction of a symbolic edifice--a blaze that caused no loss of life--became the pretext for the government to begin terrorizing its own civilian population. That fateful conflagration took place less than 30 days after Hitler became chancellor. The excruciating power of Zweig's memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.
To read the whole article, go here .
Wagner College (Staten Island, NYC) Profs Denounce Trump Executive Orders
In a February 8 paid ad in the Staten Island Advance newspaper, 33 professors at Wagner College, a liberal arts college in New York City, denounced Trump's executive orders and other actions. The statement is in the form of an open letter to Representative Dan Donovan, a Republican congressman from a district on Staten Island, who supported Trump's executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries saying it was "in America's best interest." The Wagner professors' statement said they "first and foremost" condemn that ban, saying that "this order creates religious discrimination and does so intentionally."
The professors also condemned Trump's removal of any mention of climate change and LGBTQ rights from the White House website, Trump's attacks on the press and fact-based journalism, and his continued profit-making from his global holdings. They ended their statement with: "We believe the above actions, among others, taken by the Trump Administration are a threat to our democracy, our economy, our American values, our international alliances, and the ideals of citizenship and respect for knowledge and diversity that we strive to foster in our students."
Read the statement and list of signatories (PDF) here .
Two NBA Coaches Take On Trump this Week Popovich and Kerr Speak on Racial Inequality and the Muslim Ban
From a reader:
This week GQ published an article by Jay Willis, " Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr Would Make a Great Presidential Ticket " where "these two have no time for the 'stick to sports' bullshit." Kerr and Popovich, both who are white, have been close friends since Kerr played for the San Antonio Spurs, coached by Popovich. Kerr coaches the Golden State Warriors in the San Francisco Bay Area.
When Popovich was asked about Black History Month he said,
"But more than anything, I think if people take the time to think about it, I think it is our national sin. It always intrigues me when people come out with, 'I'm tired of talking about that or do we have to talk about race again?' And the answer is you're damned right we do. Because it's always there, and it's systemic in the sense that when you talk about opportunity it's not about 'Well, if you lace up your shoes and you work hard, then you can have the American dream.' That's a bunch of hogwash. If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally in this society and all the systemic roadblocks that exist, whether it's in a judicial sense, a neighborhood sense with laws, zoning, education, we have huge problems in that regard that are very complicated, but take leadership, time, and real concern to try to solve. It's a tough one because people don't really want to face it."
Kerr was born in Lebanon, where his father was president of the American University of Beirut. His father was murdered at the university by two men in 1984, and soon after an unknown Islamic group called the press to claim responsibility. Kerr weighed in on Trump's Muslim Ban this past week when he said,
"As someone whose family member is a victim of terrorism, having lost my father--if we're trying to combat terrorism by banishing people from coming to this country, we're really going against the principles of what our country is about, and creating fear. It's the wrong way to go about it. If anything, we could be breeding anger and terror, so I'm completely against what's happening. I think it's shocking. I think it's a horrible idea and I feel for all the people who are affected, families are being torn apart."
Kerr also had something to say about the liars in the Trump administration when he told reporters after a game with the Orlando Magic that "Sean Spicer will be talking about my Magic career any second now. 14,000 points. Greatest player in Magic history." Kerr actually scored 5,437 points while playing in the NBA from 1988-2003.
Shawn Gaylord, Advocacy Counsel for Human Rights First: "I would call on the entire LGBT community to stand up and say 'not in our name'"
In a February 3 article for the Advocate titled "Trump's Executive Orders: Divide and Conquer," Shawn Gaylord, advocacy counsel for Human Rights First focusing on LGBT issues, makes an important point about how Trump must not be allowed to pit different sections of the people against each other.
Gaylord writes, "I am sure I am not alone in reading through each statement and each executive order [from Trump] with a sense of foreboding as we watch community after community being targeted by a government that seems determined to roll back the progress of the last few decades." He notes that so far Trump's executive orders have not "specifically targeted people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity," though, as he points out, among the sections of the people targeted so far--women, refugees, immigrants, religious minorities, people of color--LGBT people are part of each.
Noting that there is one direct mention of "sexual orientation" is Trump's executive order banning immigrants and refugees from seven mainly Muslim countries, Gaylord writes:
A quick read might cause you to think it was actually a move to protect LGBT people. But on closer examination, you quickly realize that what is at play is something we dreaded all along. The protection of LGBT people is cited as a justification for a set of cruel and unnecessary new immigration policies that, no matter how carefully worded they might be, amount to a Muslim ban.
The "Purpose" section, which purports to explain what the executive order is designed to accomplish, notes, "The United States should not admit ... those who would oppress members of one race, one gender, or sexual orientation." It is not clear exactly how immigration authorities would know which individuals "would" take such actions, although I suspect they will turn to broad generalizations about religious groups. This language, like other sections of the order, seems clearly designed to target Muslims. We saw this coming and we cannot let it stand....
The Trump administration seems to be employing every tactic at its disposal, but one of the most egregious is this strategy of "divide and conquer." By appealing to the shared desire that LGBT people might live their lives free from violence, the Trump administration is hoping we will turn that desire into fear and hatred of another marginalized community. He did it after Orlando, he did it with this executive order, and I would call on the entire LGBT community to stand up and say "not in our name."
Read Shawn Gaylord's article at the Advocate web site.
Cleveland Clinic Doctors, Medical Students, and Other Medical Staff: Trump's actions "directly harm human health and well-being in the United States and abroad"
When Trump signed the executive order banning Muslims from seven countries from entering the U.S., one of the people affected was a first-year internal medicine student at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic hospital, Dr. Suha Abushamma. Even though she has a legal visa and documents allowing her to legally study and work in the United States, she was not allowed to re-enter the country because she has a passport from Sudan--one of the seven banned countries--and was forcibly diverted to Saudi Arabia.
Her colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic, along with more than 1,400 other medical students, doctors, and other medical staff have issued an open letter criticizing the heads of the hospital for not taking a stand against Trump's Muslim ban. The letter points out that far from condemning Trump's actions, "the Cleveland Clinic silently continues to promote ties with the Trump administration." In fact, an upcoming Cleveland Clinic fundraiser--with tickets costing upwards of $100,000--is scheduled to be held at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The open letter says:
Through this action you are supporting a president who has, in his first ten days in office, reinstated the global gag rule, weakened the Affordable Care Act, fast-tracked construction of both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines through legally protected native lands, and banned legal U.S. residents from majority-Muslim countries. All of these actions directly harm human health and well-being in the United States and abroad. Your willingness to hold your fundraiser at a Trump resort is an unconscionable prioritization of profit over people. It is impossible for the Cleveland Clinic to reconcile supporting its employees and patients while simultaneously financially and publicly aiding an individual who directly harms them.
The open letter and list of signatories is available here
NARAL Pro-Choice America: "Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States..."
After Trump announced the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court seat that has been empty since Antonio Scalia died last year (see " Trump Picks 'Scalia Clone' to Replace Scalia on the Supreme Court "), the pro-choice group NARAL issued a statement saying in part:
...President Trump's decision to speed up the announcement of his Supreme Court nominee will not distract from the hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrating in the streets and at airports. After Trump's disastrous first week on the job--from his global gag rule to his travel ban on Muslims--we cannot afford to elevate his destructive agenda with a lifetime appointment to our nation's highest court.
With Judge Neil Gorsuch, the stakes couldn't be higher when it comes to women and our lives. Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States and must never wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice.
With a clear track record of supporting an agenda that undermines abortion access and endangers women, there is no doubt that Gorsuch is a direct threat to Roe v. Wade and the promise it holds for women's equality. The fact that the court has repeatedly reaffirmed Roe over the past four decades would no longer matter, just as facts often don't seem to matter to President Trump. Confirming Gorsuch to a lifetime on the Supreme Court would make good on Trump's repeated promises to use his appointments to overturn Roe v. Wade and punish women.
NARAL and our 1.2 million member-activists call on the Senate to reject Trump's nominee using any and all available means, including the filibuster.
The complete statement from NARAL on Trump's nomination of Gorsuch is online here .
Emma Stone, Actor: "We have to speak up against injustice, and we have to kick some ass"
At the Screen Actors Guild award on January 29, Emma Stone won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role for her work in the film La La Land . In her acceptance speech she said:
We're in a really tricky time in the world and our country and things are very inexcusable and scary and need action and I'm so grateful to be part of a group of people that cares and that wants to reflect things back to society.
Later in an interview backstage, she said:
We have to speak up against injustice, and we have to kick some ass.... I was thinking about art this year, and that in a time like this, for so many, horrific things are happening. It's so special to be a part of people who want to reflect what's happening back to the world and to make people happy. I would hope that people would fight for what's right and what's just fucking human....
I think if we're human beings, and we see injustice, we have to speak up, because staying silent, as they say, only really helps the oppressor. It never helps the victim. So I think that, yes, right now, I would hope that everyone, when seeing things being done that are absolutely unconstitutional and inhumane, would say something, anything. Whether it's at school or at an awards show or work, offices, or online.
Saira Rafiee, CUNY Grad Student: "We, the 99% of the world, need to stand united in resisting the authoritarian forces all over the world"
Saira Rafiee, an Iranian Ph.D. student in political science at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center, was traveling back to the U.S. from Iran when Trump issued the executive order banning people from seven majority Muslim countries, including Iran, from entering the U.S. Rafiee, an Iranian citizen, was visiting family and was on her way back to New York, with legal documents, to resume her work and studies at CUNY.
Saira Rafiee wrote on Facebook about what happened:
I got on the flight to Abu Dhabi, but there at the airport was told that I would not be able to enter the U.S. I had to stay there for nearly 18 hours, along with 11 other Iranians, before getting on the flight back to Tehran. I have no clue whether I would ever be able to go back to the school I like so much, or to see my dear friends there. But my story isn't as painful and terrifying as many other stories I have heard these days
The sufferings of all of us are just one side of this horrendous order. The other side is the struggle against racism and fascism, against assaults on freedom and human dignity, against all the values that even though are far from being realized, are the only things that would make life worth living. As a student of sociology and political science, I have devoted a major part of my scholarly life to the study of authoritarianism. The media has published enough statistics during the past few days to show how irrelevant this order is to the fight against terrorism. It is time to call things by their true names; this is Islamophobia, racism, fascism. We, the 99% of the world, need to stand united in resisting the authoritarian forces all over the world.
Ben Cohen, Founder/Editor of The Daily Banter : "This Is Straight Up Fascism"
Ben Cohen is the founder and editor of The Daily Banter (thedailybanter.com). Originally from London and now living in Washington, DC, he has written for the Huffington Post and ESPN.com. His January 27 article, "Trump's Weekly List of Crimes Committed by Immigrants is Straight Up Fascism," says in part:
Adding to his list of executive orders and policy proposals designed to roll back civil liberties, wreck the environment and insult foreign nations, the Trump administration is also mandating that Homeland Security "make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens." This was included in Trump's new executive order on immigration, and according to the Independent , "Will also include details of so-called 'sanctuary cities' that refuse to hand over immigrant residents for deportation"...
Make no mistake about it, this is straight up fascism... nothing more than a nasty scare tactic designed to instill fear in white Americans and create a new way of dividing the country along ethnic identity lines. We have seen this over and over again throughout history. Fascist dictators rise to power through the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities, then hold onto office by continuing the tactic. The Trump administration clearly believes it is a winning formula and Trump has made so called "illegals" the focal point of his first few days in office. From insisting that he only lost the popular vote due to (completely non-existent) widespread voter fraud to his executive order to build a wall stopping Mexicans from entering the country, Trump is betting big on white fear keeping him in office. The weekly list of immigrant crime is appalling and will simply fan the flames of xenophobia and hate....
Read Cohen's article here .
Rihanna: "What an immoral pig"
On January 28, singer Rihanna tweeted:
Disgusted! The news is devastating! America is being ruined right before our eyes! What an immoral pig you have to be to implement such BS!!
As of January 30, there have been 175,000 re-tweets of this Rihanna tweet.
Cast of Stranger Things : "We will get past the lies. We will hunt monsters!"
On Sunday night, January 29, the Netflix series Stranger Things won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble. A capsule description of the series says: "In a small Indiana town in the early 1980s, a boy goes missing after finding something sinister lurking in the woods. Nearby, a girl with extraordinary powers escapes from a sinister government facility and joins together with the boy's friends to get him back." At the televised SAG award show, David Harbour, who plays Chief Hopper in the series, stepped up to the mic to accept the award on behalf of the cast. After making a number of acknowledgements he turned to current events. He called on his fellow actors to:
Go deeper and through our art battle against fear, self-centeredness, and exclusivity of our predominantly narcissistic culture.... As we act in the continuing narrative of Stranger Things , we 1983 Midwesterners will repel bullies. We will shelter freaks and outcasts, those who have no hope. We will get past the lies. We will hunt monsters! And when we are at a loss amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will, as per Chief Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the weak and the disenfranchised and the marginalized! And we will do it all with soul, with heart, and with joy. We thank you for this responsibility.
University Science Professors Call for Defense of Science and Government Scientists
Three university science professors--Graham Coop, Professor of Evolution and Ecology, UC Davis; Michael B. Eisen, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley; Molly Przeworski, Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University--have issued a statement in support of scientists within the government who are under attack.
Their message is as follows:
Governmental scientists employed at a subset of agencies have been forbidden from presenting their findings to the public. We have drafted the following response for distribution, and encourage other scientists to post it to their websites, when feasible.
In Defense of Science
We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration's move to gag scientists working at various governmental agencies. The US government employs scientists working on medicine, public health, agriculture, energy, space, clean water and air, weather, the climate and many other important areas. Their job is to produce data to inform decisions by policymakers, businesses and individuals. We are all best served by allowing these scientists to discuss their findings openly and without the intrusion of politics. Any attack on their ability to do so is an attack on our ability to make informed decisions as individuals, as communities and as a nation.
If you are a government scientist who is blocked from discussing their work, we will share it on your behalf, publicly or with the appropriate recipients. You can email us at USScienceFacts@gmail.com .
Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law Professor: "Trump must be impeached for abusing his power"
Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, sent out a series of tweets on January 28--as thousands of people protested at airports across the U.S. against the anti-Muslim order Trump signed the day before:
Vital to impeach and remove Trump before his cruel brand of bigotry and scapegoating seeps even more deeply into our national bloodstream.
Trump just said what he's doing at the airports "is working out very nicely." The man has no eyes, no brain, and no heart.
Trump must be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other President in American history.
The tragic scenes unfolding at JFK and other US airports expose Trump as a heartless merciless monster. He must be stopped.
Trump's promise to prioritize Christian over Muslim refugees when the 90-day ban lifts violates the Religion Clauses of our First Amendment.
Jewish Voices for Peace on Trump's Anti-Muslim, Anti-Refugee Order: "We pledge to resist in every way that we can"
On January 25, Jewish Voices for Peace released the following statement in anticipation of Trump's issuing of an executive order the next day targeting refugees and immigrants from mainly Muslim countries:
As the Trump administration follows through on the some of most harmful and alarming promises of his campaign, we will follow through on ours: to love, defend and fight alongside our friends, neighbors, and communities directly under attack.
Decades of racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic policies and discourses around national security, the "War on Terror," and immigration have laid the groundwork for this nightmare set of policies designed to target, profile, surveil and ban people due to their religion, race, national origin or legal status. These new policies will build on existing infrastructure, primarily impacting people who have fled from countries that the United States has bombed or invaded, as well as those whose local economies have been destroyed by our military operations and trade policies.
While the details of these new policies are still unfolding, we pledge to resist in every way that we can. We'll put our hearts, souls, and bodies on the line to stop hateful and racist attacks. We will organize our communities to stand alongside our Muslim, immigrant & refugee neighbors, in the halls of Congress & government institutions, and in the streets.
We cannot let this stand.
Nikki Giovanni, the well-known African- American poet, essayist, and a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, recently spoke with the Huffington Post. During the interview, she said the following:
"My heart breaks for the next generation with these fools in the white house. Asking us to give Trump a chance is like asking Jews to give Hitler a chance. I read that eight percent of blacks voted for him. That's like a vote for slavery. I'm so proud of women for standing up at the Women's Marches all over the country. In Washington it was so crowded that you couldn't move. These women were telling Donald Trump 'not on our watch'. Saying they won't bow down or bend over and take the worse from him. Why take abortion and make us have children and then deny those kids healthcare?...
"Trump will not listen and only a fool would try to reason with him. He is beyond redemption."
For the entire interview go here :
Philip Roth on Trump: "What is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe"
Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America imagines a scenario where there is a fascist takeover in America--through the ballot box. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh--who in his day was one of the three or four biggest celebrities in the world and a Nazi sympathizer--sweeps the 1940 election in a landslide. Then, in steps both incremental and rapid, fascism comes in. At the time, Roth wrote in the New York Times Book Review that he did not intend to write this as a political roman a clef (a novel in which real people or events appear with invented names). He said he wanted to dramatize some "what-ifs" that never happened in America.
Now Roth is commenting about the current relevance of The Plot Against America. A piece titled "Philip Roth E-Mails On Trump" by Judith Thurman appears in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker . Thurman says Roth was asked via e-mail if the scenario in his book has now happened. Roth's response, in part:
It isn't Trump as a character, a human type--the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist--that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.
I was born in 1933, the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English...
Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven't had their driver's licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don't live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless--or until--there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump's river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit...
My novel wasn't written as a warning. I was just trying to imagine what it would have been like for a Jewish family like mine, in a Jewish community like Newark, had something even faintly like Nazi anti-Semitism befallen us in 1940, at the end of the most pointedly anti-Semitic decade in world history. I wanted to imagine how we would have fared, which meant I had first to invent an ominous American government that threatened us. As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.
The New Yorker piece with quotes from Philip Roth is available online here .
Roger Cohen, NY Times Columnist: "Trump's outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought"
Roger Cohen is an author and columnist for the New York Times . Before becoming a columnist for the Times , he worked as a foreign correspondent in 15 countries. In the January 24 edition of the Times , his column titled "The Banal Belligerence of Donald Trump" said in part:
I have tried to tread carefully with analogies between the Fascist ideologies of 1930s Europe and Trump. American democracy is resilient. But the first days of the Trump presidency--whose roots of course lie in far more than the American military debacles since 9/11--pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire.
To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses. To speak of "carnage" is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of "a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before" is to demonstrate consuming megalomania. To declaim "America first" and again, "America first," is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman , is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.
Trump's outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought. When Primo Levi arrived at Auschwitz he reached, in his thirst, for an icicle outside his window but a guard snatched it away. "Warum?" Levi asked (why?). To which the guard responded, "Hier ist kein warum" (here there is no why).
As the great historian Fritz Stern observed, "This denial of 'why' was the authentic expression of all totalitarianism, revealing its deepest meaning, a negation of Western civilization."
Americans are going to have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why against the banal belligerence of Trump.
Read the whole Cohen column here .
Poem by Nina Donovan, "I am a nasty woman" performed by Ashley Judd at Women's March: "I feel Hitler in these streets"
The poem, "I am a nasty woman" by 19-year-old Nina Donovan was performed by actress Ashley Judd at the Women's March in Washington, DC on January 21. It starts:
I'm not nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheetos dust.
A man whose words are a distract to America. Electoral college-sanctioned, hate-speech contaminating this national anthem. I'm not as nasty as Confederate flags being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is going to rise again. Maybe for some it never really fell. Blacks are still in shackles and graves, just for being black. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin.
I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a pride flag, and I didn't know devils could be resurrected but I feel Hitler in these streets. A mustache traded for a toupee. Nazis renamed the Cabinet Electoral Conversion Therapy, the new gas chambers shaming the gay out of America, turning rainbows into suicide. I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege ... your daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes. Yeah, I'm a nasty woman -- a loud, vulgar, proud woman.
To listen to the whole poem performed by Ashley Judd go here :
Sierra Club on Trump's Energy Plan: "A shameful and dark start"
The Sierra Club is the largest grassroots environmental organization in the U.S., with more than 2.7 million members and supporters. On the day of his inauguration, Trump released his energy plan (available on the White House website). In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune released the following statement:
Minutes after he was sworn in, any illusion that Trump would act in the best interests of families in this country as President were wiped away by a statement of priorities that constitute an historic mistake on one of the key crises facing our planet and an assault on public health. What Trump has released is hardly a plan--it's a polluter wishlist that will make our air and water dirtier, our climate and international relations more unstable, and our kids sicker. This is a shameful and dark start to Trump's Presidency, and a slap in the face to any American who thought Trump might pursue the national interest.
Matthew Rothschild: "Trumpolini.... Beware"
Matthew Rothschild is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonprofit, nonpartisan political watchdog group. His January 21 article titled, "The fascist overtones in Trump's inaugural address" starts underneath a photo of Benito Mussolini, leader of Italy's National Fascist Party from 1922 until 1943, and says in part:
It was hard to listen to Trump's inaugural address without hearing some not-so-faint echoes of fascism.
The most obvious was his invocation of "America First" as the "new vision" that "will govern our land." But it's not a new vision or a new name. In fact, "America First" was the name of the isolationist and anti-Semitic organization in the 1930s that wanted to accommodate Nazi Germany.
But there were other echoes as well....
Like 20th century fascists, he extolled the nation's "glorious destiny." He saluted "the great men and women of our military and law enforcement."
And then he invoked the divine will. "Most importantly," he said, "we are protected by God."
And let's not forget that his campaign slogan and the coda to his inaugural address, "Make America great again," itself strikes a fascist chord: nostalgia for national greatness, mixed with grievances (that can lead to scapegoating) about who is to blame for the loss of such greatness.
If you were looking for Trump to take the high ground in his inaugural address and call on "the better angels of ourselves," you were kidding yourself.
That is not who he is. He is Trumpolini.
To read the whole article go here
Big Bang Theory on Eve of Trump Inauguration: "Beware of Darkness"
Vanity cards have become a trademark for Chuck Lorre Productions. At the end of every episode of shows Lorre produces there are different messages that read somewhat like a comment or observation on life or what's going on in society. This was done with shows Lorre produced like Dharma & Greg and Two and a Half Men . And these vanity cards appear at the end of The Big Bang Theory-- the #1 comedy on TV for many seasons . On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, the message that flashed across at the end of The Big Bang was the lyrics to George Harrison's song, "Beware of Darkness":
Watch out now, take care, Beware of greedy leaders They'll take you where you should not go While Weeping Atlas Cedars They just want to grow, grow and grow Beware of darkness
Then another quote, this one from Monty Python:
Run away! Run Away!
Roger Waters from Pink Floyd on Inauguration: "The resistance begins today"
Roger Waters, English singer, songwriter, bassist, and composer, is the co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd--internationally known for albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. On January 20, the day of Trump's inauguration, Waters posted a video for his Trump-slamming performance of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" in Mexico City last October. A message also went up on his Facebook: "The resistance begins today."
The performance took place in Zocalo Square before 300,000 fans. During the song, the huge screens flash graphics of ugly Trump faces with text like "Charade" and "Gotta stem the evil tide." There is an image of Trump doing a Hitler Nazi salute and the KKK. At the end, disgusting quotes from Trump are seen on the screen. The final text: "Trump eres un pendejo" (Trump, you're an asshole)."
Some of the lyrics to "Pigs (Three Different Ones)":
Big man, pig man, ha ha charade you are You well heeled big wheel, ha ha charade you are And when your hand is on your heart You're nearly a good laugh Almost a joker With your head down in the pig bin Saying "Keep on digging." Pig stain on your fat chin What do you hope to find When you're down in the pig mine You're nearly a laugh You're nearly a laugh But you're really a cry
Petition to White House Correspondents' Association: "Stand up to Trump's blacklist"
At his January 11 press conference, Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, saying, "You are fake news." Angelo Carusone from Media Matters posted a petition, "Tell the White House Press Corps: Stand up to Trump's blacklist," to be delivered to the White House Correspondents' Association, which says:
If Trump blacklists or bans one of you, the rest of you need to stand up. Instead of ignoring Trump's bad behavior and going about your business, close ranks and stand up for journalism. Don't keep talking about what Trump wants to talk about. Stand up and fight back. Amplify your colleague's inquiry or refuse to engage until he removes that person/outlet from the blacklist.
The goal is to get 300,000 signatures. As of January 22, nearly 290,200 people had signed. The petition includes a background that says in part:
Trump has a history of doing this--and worse.
He has literally banned the Des Moines Register from covering his events. He banned Univsion from attending his events. He revoked The Washington Post's credentials for a period in retaliation for a headline that he didn't like. He revoked Politico's credentials for a while to punish them for an article he didn't like. BuzzFeed--which Trump called "a pathetic pile of garbage" during the press conference--has been on a blacklist since June of 2015. The Daily Beast is on the blacklist and is almost always denied credentials as a result. This list isn't exhaustive, either.
But journalists covering Trump don't learn. Time and time again, as one outlet after another is frozen out, reporters continue to go about their interactions with Trump and his people as if nothing is wrong.
Enough is enough. Some principles are more important than competition among news outlets....
To read the petition and full background go here .
Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism: "We cannot remain silent as we witness the rise of an American form of fascism"
Citizen Therapists for Democracy, an association of psychotherapists, states that their mission is to: "Learn and spread transformative ways to practice therapy with a public dimension; Rebuild democratic capacity in communities; and Resist anti-democratic ideologies and practices." The website of Citizen Therapists for Democracy contains "A Public Manifesto" from Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism. It has been signed by 3,500 people and says in part:
As psychotherapists practicing in the United States, we are alarmed by the rise of the ideology of Trumpism, which we see as a threat to the well-being of the people we care for and to American democracy itself. We cannot remain silent as we witness the rise of an American form of fascism. We can leverage this time of crisis to deepen our commitment to American democracy....
Why speak collectively? Our responses thus far have been primarily personal--and too often confined to arm-chair diagnoses of Donald Trump. But a collective crisis faces our nation, a harkening back to the economic depression and demoralization of the 1930s (which fed European fascism) and the upheaval over Jim Crow and Black civil rights in the 1950s.... As therapists, we have been entrusted by society with collective responsibility in the arena of mental, behavioral, and relational health. When there is a public threat to our domain of responsibility we must speak out together, not just to protest but to deepen our commitment to a just society and a democratic way of life. This means being citizen therapists who are concerned with community well-being as much as personal well-being, since the two are inextricably joined.
To read the whole statement go here .
Punk Band United Nations on Inauguration Day: "Never Again Is Fucking Happening Again"
United Nations, hardcore supergroup led by frontman for the band Thursday, Geoff Rickly, released a new song on January 20, the day of Trump's inauguration. The song is called "Stairway to Mar-a-Lago"--Mar-a-Lago is Trump's estate in Florida which he says will be his "winter White House."
Some of the lyrics go:
Dimwitted bigot Misplacing sympathies From on your cross Tell them who matters Policing cities in ruin
It blows my mind How these Nazis Took the stage And pandered to Your deepest fears Dead and cold The Gipper must be Rolling in his grave
Never again, Again and again Never again is Fucking happening Again
New from Outernational: "Decision"--"How will you live? What will you decide?"
The band Outernational released a new song and video on the morning of the Trump inauguration, titled "Decision." Miles Solay of Outernational wrote, "I am writing to you from the USA on the morning that a fascist regime is being coronated. I will be in the streets of Washington, DC today and tomorrow. The regime of Donald Trump and Mike Pence is illegitimate because fascism is illegitimate. If ever there was a time in our lives to act as if the future depended on us, now would be that time. GET INVOLVED AND TAKE TO THE STREETS WHEREVER YOU ARE."
The lyrics of "Decision" include:
Decision! Enforced! You can't say you hate this While you're waiting for the cure...
Deception! All the lies! America was never great Eat your apple pie and genocide
Decision! Of your life! How will you live? What will you decide?...
Listen and download audio here .
New Anti-Trump Song by Entrance: "Not Gonna Say Your Name"
"There are people who say we ought to give you a chance. But there's not a chance in hell that we'll sit back and watch you try to turn back the clock and sigh and say, oh well."
This is how "Not Gonna Say Your Name" starts--a new song released on January 16 by Los Angeles-based musician Guy Blakeslee (aka ENTRANCE). The song's video features clips of anti-Trump protests that broke out in the days after the election.
Blakeslee says, "I really wanted to write a song expressing my own feelings about the election and the state of things in our country--like many I was in a state of mourning. I wondered, how can I sing about this without saying his name?" All proceeds from song purchases are going to Planned Parenthood. Blakeslee said: "I decided to use the song to benefit PP because one of the things that is so shocking about the election result is that it sends such a negative message to women and girls.... It's the least I could do - for all of the women in the world, in my life, and especially for my mother - to fight back and make a clear statement that we will not accept this backwards agenda." In a piece in TheTalkhouse, Blakeslee wrote:
When the result was called at the crack of dawn that November morning, I knew I had to come back home as soon as possible and join with my fellow Americans in resisting this imminent slide toward fascism, tyranny, intolerance, bigotry, sexism, xenophobia and unchecked capitalist pillaging.
In a psychological state quite similar to mourning, I was inspired and comforted watching from afar on social media as friends and family joined hundreds of thousands of others in the streets and wished I could be there with them to say NO to hatred and regression and YES to love and continued communal progress.
While in Amsterdam a few days later, the idea for this song ("Not Gonna Say Your Name" ) came to me; I was writing a lot of angry words and I was desperately trying to figure out how to say something positive, to make some kind of contribution and offer a different way of thinking about the situation instead of just complaining and fixating on this person that so many of us can't help but despise.
To read the whole piece by Blakeslee go here
To watch the video of "Not Gonna Say Your Name" go here .
News of Girl Scouts Marching for Trump Inauguration "filled me with rage"
The Girl Scouts of America have come under severe criticism for its decision to have 75 Girl Scouts march in Trump's inauguration parade. People are saying they should not participate--given Trump's ugly comments about women and Pence's extreme anti-abortion views. Jean Hannah Edelstein, a New York-born, London-based journalist and the author of Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them , wrote in a January 18 opinion piece in the Guardian :
The news that the Girl Scouts are sending a contingent to participate in Donald Trump's inauguration filled me with real rage. How can an organization that promises to build "girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place" send them to celebrate the ascent of a leader who would likely consider them fair game for sexual assault if they grow up to be "beautiful"?
...what would be emotionally and physically safe for a girl about watching the swearing-in of Mike Pence as Vice President, a man who's sworn to overturn the laws that allow them to use the bathrooms where they feel safe? What of Muslim Girl Scouts, who've been told that their names will be put on a list, or undocumented girls, who are also welcome to join Girl Scouts? Should they march, or should only the girls who Donald Trump might one day rate "a 10" be encouraged to participate?
...Yes, it's a tradition: they've marched at inauguration for decades. But does tradition justify collaboration with an administration that promises to oppress the young women it's supposed to serve? As shown by John Lewis and the other members of Congress who are choosing to skip the inauguration, sometimes human rights are more important than protocol. The Girl Scouts is an organization that has stood up for the human rights of girls and women for many years. Why quit now?
Read this whole piece here .
Charles M. Blow on the Day Before Inauguration Day: "Are You Not Alarmed?"
New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow's piece on January 19, 2017 is titled, "Are You Not Alarmed?" and says:
I continue to be astonished that not enough Americans are sufficiently alarmed and abashed by the dangerous idiocies that continue to usher forth from the mouth of the man who will on Friday be inaugurated as president of the United States.
Toss ideology out of the window. This is about democracy and fascism, war and peace, life and death. I wish that I could write those words with the callous commercialism with which some will no doubt read them, as overheated rhetoric simply designed to stir agitation, provoke controversy and garner clicks. But alas, they are not. These words are the sincere dispatches of an observer, writer and citizen who continues to see worrisome signs of a slide toward the exceedingly unimaginable by a man who is utterly unprepared.
In a series of interviews and testimonies Donald Trump and his cronies have granted in the last several days, they have demonstrated repeatedly how destabilizing, unpredictable and indeed unhinged the incoming administration may be. Their comments underscore the degree to which this administration may not simply alter our democracy beyond recognition, but also potentially push us into armed conflict...
This is insanity. But too many Americans don't want to see this threat for what it is. International affairs and the very real threat of escalating militarization and possibly even military conflict seems much harder to grasp than the latest inflammatory tweet.
Maybe people think this possibility is unthinkable. Maybe people are just hoping and praying that cooler heads will prevail. Maybe they think that Trump's advisers will smarten him up and talk him down.
But where is your precedent for that? When has this man been cautious or considerate? This man with loose lips and tweeting thumbs may very well push us into another war, and not with a country like Afghanistan, but with a nuclear-armed country with something to prove.
Are you not alarmed?
Green Day: Trump and "Troubled Times"
Green Day continues to call out Trump as a fascist. A video of the song "Troubled Times" from their latest album, Revolution Radio , was released on Monday, MLK Day. A statement from Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said, "Today we celebrate love and compassion more than ever." The song/video doesn't name Trump but the message is clear through the imagery. There's a Trump-like figure with KKK teeth wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap--spewing hateful, racist garbage before crowds as Kluckers come out of the White House. Cops beating up Black people. But there are also images of resistance: People with signs saying "Stop racism, islamophobia, and war," "No border wall," and "Against racist hate." Clips from the Civil Rights Movement and the the women's suffrage battle. At the end, the stakes of the situation are underscored with a nuclear mushroom cloud.
This isn't the first time Green Day has called out Trump. Shortly after the election, during their MTV and American Music Awards performances of the song "Bang Bang," they added the chant: "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA." Armstrong said, "It was a good start to challenge [Trump] on all of his ignorant policies and his racism."
The lyrics to "Troubled Times" are searing:
What good is love and peace on earth? When it's exclusive? Where's the truth in the written word? If no one reads it A new day dawning Comes without warning So don't blink twice
What part of history we learned When it's repeated Some things will never overcome If we don't seek it
The world stops turning Paradise burning So don't think twice
We live in troubled times We live in troubled times
Rapper T.I.: "Be Aware or Be Bamboozled"
On MLK Day, Rapper T.I. (Tip Harris) sent out a series of tweets and videos addressed to Black celebrities and athletes who are meeting with Trump.
"Attn.!!!! Be clear.... There IS an agenda behind all these meetings. "There's a strategic plan that people are trying to make you a part of.... Do not accept any invitation to have any meeting, no matter how positive you think the outcome may be." "Given what's going on between him & Congressman Lewis... All y'all looking CRAZY right now!!!! Be Aware, BE Alert, Or Be Bamboozled."
One tweet has a photo of Malcolm X with a quote from him: "The first thing the (white racist) does when he comes in power, he takes all the Negro leaders and invites them for coffee. To show that he's all right. And those Uncle Toms can't pass up the coffee. They come away from the coffee table telling you and me that this man is all right." T.I. writes: "Sound familiar? Malcolm knew it then.... Be Aware, Be Alert, or Be Bamboozled."
One tweet addresses Trump: "Should it ever seem at times like we are against you, I assure it is a result of you defining yourself as the representative of those who are and who always have been against us... The deck has always been stacked against us in this country. With every generation there has been strategic steps to oppress, imprison, and control us."
See T.I.'s tweets and videos here .
Statement from Michael Dietler, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, at Chicago Protest Against Trump-Pence Regime and Police Terror on MLK Day
A small but determined group of protesters rallied in the cold Chicago rain on MLK Day, where Christian clergy, representatives from the Muslim community, and youth spoke along with other fighters in the movement to Stop Trump and Pence. After the rally the protest took off in two parallel marches down both sides of State Street, stopping on the corners to speak to people who were out on the cold, wet street. Protestors criss-crossed back and forth across State Street, blocking traffic briefly a number of times. Some people along the route joined in the march briefly, and others took up posters and/or bundles of the Call and were organized to organize others in the fight to stop the fascist Trump-Pence regime.
Speakers at the rally addressed the need and possibility of stopping the Trump-Pence regime from taking power and the recently released Justice Department report detailing years of abuse of Black and brown people by the Chicago police. They included Rev. Gregg Greer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Rev.Pughsley; Salman Aftab from the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections; Raja Yaqub from the American Muslim Aliance; and a middle school student who spoke about the terror Pence will bring to the LGBTQ community with his promotion of electro-shock torture "conversion therapy." The following statement from Michael Dietler, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago was read.
This day, of all days, should raise awareness of the danger that Donald Trump poses to this country, and to the world. The contrast with Martin Luther King could not be stronger.
Today the nation honors a fearless champion of human rights and human dignity, a man of principle who dedicated his life to the service of others and was willing to be sacrificed in the struggle against injustice. We also honor all those heroes of the Civil Rights movement, those thousands of ordinary people who courageously put their bodies and their lives on the line to oppose the racist, oppressive, violent regimes that tried to deny people their rights.
In ironic contrast, this Friday, a new president will be sworn in who waged a disgraceful campaign of lies and deceit, of racist bigotry and hatred, of misogyny, fear, and ignorance. Donald Trump has no principles, no concern for anyone but himself. He has spent his life in the relentless pursuit of personal wealth and power, using any means available without regard to the consequences for others.
He is a liar, fraud, and a dangerous egomaniac who has already normalized racism, xenophobia, and misogyny and prepared a cabinet of robber barons ready to pillage the country. Now is the time for all good people of conscience to come together to oppose this destructive force, before it is too late. Let the voice of the people rise again in solidarity with the spirit of the Civil Rights movement: justice and equality for all! Stand up against racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and greed!
Clip from Ava DuVernay Documentary 13th-- Searing Exposure of Trump on the "Good Old Days"
Ava DuVernay is an American director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor. Her film Selma , which told the story of the campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King for equal voting right and the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965,was nominated for Best Picture at the 2014 Oscars. And DuVernay became first Black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
DuVernay's recent Netflix documentary 13th just picked up three Critics' Choice Awards and is on the Oscar shortlist for best documentary. 13th , named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery with the exception of punishment for crime, digs deeply into and exposes the rise of mass incarceration in the USA. 13th includes a series of powerful clips that shows Donald Trump and footage from the Civil Right era--where Trump is talking about "the good old days."
During the film's press screening at the New York Film Festival in October, DuVernay talked about how she debated whether to include Trump, who at the time was the Republican presidential candidate, in the documentary. She said, "Take him out? Leave him in? No, he doesn't deserve a place in this thing, and such. But you gotta show that stuff because it's too important and it can't be forgotten,"
13th is available to stream on Netflix.
Pete Vernon in Columbia Journalism Review: "Trump and his team have shown a willingness to retaliate, bully, and ban journalists"
At his January 11 press conference, Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, saying, "You are fake news." In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review titled "Trump berated a CNN reporter, and fellow journalists missed an opportunity" Pete Vernon says:
CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stood pleading with Trump to acknowledge his question, referencing earlier attacks made by Trump and his press secretary about the accuracy of a CNN report detailing Trump's ties to Russia. "Mr. President-elect, since you have been attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance?" Acosta yelled above the scrum of reporters.
"No! Not you. No! Your organization is terrible," the President-elect shot back. When Acosta persisted in shouting for recognition, Trump pointed a finger at him and said, "Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question."
Trump then turned to the next question, and the press conference proceeded from there. It was a striking moment not only for the direct confrontation between the two men, but also for the fact that it seemed to have no effect on other journalists in the room. No one immediately leapt to Acosta's defense....
I wished those journalists in attendance had picked up Acosta's line of questioning, or even refused to continue asking questions, until the President-elect acknowledged the organization he had earlier attacked....
Next Friday, the new administration begins. As a candidate, and now as the President-elect, Trump and his team have shown a willingness to retaliate, bully, and ban journalists whose questions he doesn't want to answer. As an industry, we must be prepared for more moments like today's, and we must be ready to respond accordingly.
Peter Vernon's article is available online here .
Theologians Raise Opposition to Jeff Sessions for "positions that compromise the rights of these vulnerable populations"
A group of Christian theologians of various denominations delivered an open letter to the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. The signatories include Peter Goodwin Heltzel, New York Theological Seminary; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Fordham University; Gary Agee, Anderson University (Indiana); Cornel West, Harvard University; James Cone, Union Theological Seminary; Jim Wallis, Sojourner ; and others.
The theologians' letter says in part:
Vulnerable populations in our country--victims of police brutality, undocumented workers, LGBTQ persons, women, people of color, and people of non-Christian faiths--are placed at increased risk of further harm when our laws are not upheld. Yet, throughout his career, Senator Sessions has taken positions that compromise the rights of these vulnerable populations. His racist comments reflect prejudice against people of color. His opposition to immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, women's rights and equal access for persons with disabilities make it unlikely that he shares the Christian vision of justice and protection of the vulnerable that we embrace.
The letter and signatories are available online here .
Powerful Video Produced by Katy Perry: #DontNormalizeHate
A moving and deeply thought-provoking PSA video produced by Katy Perry asks the question: is history repeating itself? The short video features actor Hina Khan, a Muslim of Pakistani heritage, and begins with the voice of 89-year-old Haru Kuromiya--recalling how, when she was a girl during World War 2, her family, along with about 120,000 other Japanese Americans, were first put on a registry and then forced by the U.S. government into concentration (internment) camps.
According to the LA Times , "Codirected by filmmakers Aya Tanimura and Tim Nackashi, the #DontNormalizeHate PSA landed the early support of director Spike Jonze and actor-activist George Takei. But it was Perry whom Tanimura credits for making the short possible." The video has close to 300,000 views since it was posted on YouTube--it should be seen by millions. Watch it below:
Bruce Springsteen: "The country feels very estranged..."
Bruce Springsteen on Marc Maron's WRTF podcast on January 2 (at the end) is asked what his biggest fear is about Trump and says:
That a lot of the worst things and the worst aspects of what he appealed to come to fruition. When you let that genie out of the bottle - bigotry, racism, when you let those things out of the bottle, intolerance, they don't go back in the bottle that easily if they go back in at all. Whether it's a rise in hate crimes, people feeling they have license to speak and behave in ways that previously were considered un-American and are un-American. That's what he's appealing to. And so my fears are that those things find a place in ordinary, civil society; demeans the discussions and events of the day and the country changes in a way that is unrecognizable and we become estranged, as you say, you say hey well, wait a minute you voted for Trump, I thought I knew who you were, I'm not sure. The country feels very estranged, you feel very estranged from your countrymen. So those are all dangerous things and he hasn't even taken office yet.
The podcast is available here
Children's and YA authors refuse "to quietly accept or assent to this 'Gleichschaltung,' this getting in line with fascism and making it mainstream"
Recently, Threshold, an imprint of the book publisher Simon & Schuster, gave a $250,000 book deal to Milo Yiannopoulos, writer for the neo-Nazi, white-supremacist Breitbart News Network and supporter of Trump. There was immediate outrage against the deal from writers, bookstores, book reviewers, and others. (See " Outrage at Simon & Schuster's Book Deal for Pro-Trump Racist .") Now more than 160 children's and young adult (YA) book authors and illustrators with Simon & Schuster have sent a letter protesting the deal to the Simon & Schuster CEO and "all the readers and supporters of books for children."
As technology editor at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos promoted "GamerGate," a vicious flood of degrading attacks and terroristic threats against prominent women in the video game development community. This summer he was banned from Twitter after his followers carried out a racist harassment campaign against Black comedian/actor Leslie Jones.
The letter from the authors and illustrators reads in part:
Threshold has placed Simon & Schuster's considerable reputation and weight behind one of the most prominent faces of the newly repackaged white supremacist/white nationalist movement and financially supported a man who routinely denigrates, verbally attacks, and directs dangerous internet doxxing and hate campaigns against women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims, and anyone he chooses to target who supports equality and human decency. Irrespective of the content of this book, by extending a mainstream publication contract, Threshold has chosen to legitimize this reprehensible belief system, these behaviors, and white supremacy itself....
As Simon & Schuster authors and illustrators who are already published, with books in the release pipeline, with contracts in place, we do not have to quietly accept or assent to this "Gleichschaltung," this getting in line with fascism and making it mainstream. We reject the wisdom of this decision. This man, and this book, are not America. This man, and this book, are not the bulk of Simon & Schuster. This man, and this book, are not us, the authors and illustrators of Simon & Schuster. We believe that the children we write for deserve a better America.
Among the signers of the letter are winners of Newbery, Caldecott, and National Book Award honors, including Cassandra Clare, Laurie Halse Anderson, Christian Robinson, Dan Santat, Marla Frazee, Ellen Hopkins, and Rachel Renee Russell. The Publisher's Weekly article on this, including the text of the full letter and the list of signatories, is available online here .
Charlotte Church, Singer, Refuses Invitation from Tyrant Trump
Charlotte Church is a Welch singer who performs in many genres and has a big following. She has sold over ten million records worldwide.
The Trump team, which has already been turned down by most of the entertainers they have asked to perform at the inauguration, sent an invitation to Church. Church tweeted her reply directly to Trump @realDonaldTrump:
"Your staff have asked me to sing at your inauguration, a simple Internet search would show I think you're a tyrant. Bye."
Her message was followed by four poop emoji.
This is the link to her tweet.
Australian Tennis Star: T-Shirt Statement on Trump
At the Australian Open tennis tournament, Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios made a statement about Donald Trump with his T-shirt. During his match with Rafael Nadal he wore a shirt that had Trump's face covered with devil-like illustrations and the words "Fuck Donald Trump" at the bottom.
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: "Sessions has 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights"
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter to the U.S. Senate opposing the confirmation of Sessions as Attorney General, saying:
On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations committed to promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, and the 144 undersigned organizations, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the confirmation of Senator Jefferson B. Sessions (R-AL) to be the 84th Attorney General of the United States. Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the Attorney General of the United States. In our democracy, the Attorney General is charged with enforcing our nation's laws without prejudice and with an eye toward justice. And, just as important, the Attorney General has to be seen by the public--every member of the public, from every community--as a fair arbiter of justice. Unfortunately, there is little in Senator Sessions' record that demonstrates that he would meet such a standard.
To read the whole letter go here
Shaun King: "One of the most dishonest men on Earth is about to become our leader"
Shaun King's column in the Monday, January 9 New York Daily News was titled "Americans must call Trump out on lies, not get so used to them that we become desensitized to his dishonesty." King writes, in part:
Last night, Meryl Streep, in an acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award that she won at the Golden Globes, reminded the audience that our incoming President once openly mocked a reporter with a physical disability from the stage of a rally....Trump has now outrageously said he has no recollection of ever meeting Kovaleski and was not aware of his disability, but that is another outrageous lie. He did not meet Kovaleski once or twice. He did not meet him three or four times, or even half a dozen times, but met with Kovaleski at least a dozen times across the years. They met in Trump's office, at events, and at press conferences. They were so close that Kovaleski described them as being "on a first name basis for years."
To fight back against Streep reminding us of what he did, Trump is lying about lies about lies. His lies have so many layers that it often seems like he gets lost and simply cannot keep up....
Our incoming President of the United States is a liar. He tells them often. He lies far more often than he tells the truth. We must call him out on it. We must not become desensitized to his lies. We must not get so used to them that they become normal to us.
One of the most dishonest men on Earth is about to become our leader. I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't deeply concerned about what comes next.
To read the whole piece by Shaun King, go here .
Meryl Streep at Golden Globe Awards Speaks Out on Trump: "When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose"
On Sunday night, January 8, Meryl Streep received The Cecil B. DeMille Award, an honorary Golden Globe Award given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment." In accepting the award, she said, in part:
An actor's only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that--breathtaking compassionate work. But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
Watch Meryl Streep's acceptance speech here
Jello Biafra on Trump: "What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0"
Jello Biafra is the former lead singer for the band Dead Kennedys, known for songs like "California Uber Alles" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." In a recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine he said:
As laughable as Rick Perry has been as governor of Texas and other [presidential] campaigns, he's also very dangerous. At first they were saying Secretary of Agriculture for him, but then suddenly Secretary of Energy. That dude is in charge of our nukes now and he's also part of a fundamentalist Christian doomsday cult. ... It was basically yet another cult like the one Sarah and Todd Palin prescribed, whose whole mindset was "Jesus is coming soon, and in order to expedite we should be wasting every last natural resource and clear-cutting every tree we can right now because Jesus is coming back again. It's OK to run up further budget deficits, because Jesus loves America, he's going to put the money back."...
People are freaked out that Trump has made the head of Exxon the Secretary of State, and the guy is so tight and in bed with Putin--well, there's another part of Rex Tillerson I hope people are going to highlight, too. He's the one who finally admitted climate change existed as head of Exxon, but then he said mankind will adapt and so it's no big deal....
What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0, and they're going to be even more hardcore about that in the 2018 election, to keep anybody with a conscience from being able to vote. Look at who the new Attorney General is going to be, the same guy who in the Eighties said he thought the people in the Ku Klux Klan were all right "until I saw some of them smoked pot."
Cornell William Brooks: NAACP opposes nomination of Jeff Sessions "bodily, spiritually, morally, by encouraging civil disobedience"
Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and five other civil rights leaders were arrested January 3 after sitting in at Jeff Sessions' office in Washington, DC, demanding the withdrawal of his nomination by Trump for Attorney General. In a January 5 interview on Democracy Now , Brooks said:
Our objections are, fundamentally, Senator Sessions represents a kind of dim and dystopian view of American civil liberties and civil rights. And so our objections are at least threefold, first of which is that he has demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of voter suppression that we have seen from one end of the country to the other, as attested to in the Fourth Circuit decision that found voter suppression in North Carolina, the Fifth Circuit decision which found voter suppression in Texas. He has not acknowledged the reality of that, and certainly not the reality of voter suppression in his own state...
In terms of immigration rights, he is one--among one of the most conservative, ultraconservative, extremist senators in terms of his opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. In addition to that, he has voiced an openness to a immigration ban on a global religion, namely Islam, which cannot be squared in any way, shape, fashion or form with the U.S. Constitution.
Number three, his views on criminal justice reform stand in stark contrast to both red state and blue state governors. In other words, he stands for law and order in Nixonian and draconian terms, at a moment in which we have over 2 million Americans behind bars, 65 million Americans with criminal records, 1 million fathers behind bars....
Brooks said the NAACP is "unapologetically opposed" to Sessions and is calling for civil disobedience protests:
The board of directors of the NAACP voted to oppose this nomination. And we're doing so not only as a matter of policy, but we're doing so bodily, spiritually, morally, by encouraging civil disobedience--that is to say, standing in the tradition of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, standing in that tradition by sitting down. And so, we understand that the odds may be difficult, but we, as the NAACP, don't gauge our principled opposition to a nominee based upon odds and probabilities, but rather the rightness of the cause....
Read the whole interview here .
Joshua Pechthalt, Calif. Federation of Teachers President: "The similarities with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s...are chilling"
In the November-December issue of California Teacher, Joshua Pechthalt, the president of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), which is part of the American Federation of Teachers, has a piece titled "Responding to election of Donald Trump: Reassess, Mobilize, Defend." Pechthalt writes:
In the last few weeks, I have had many discussions trying to sort out the implications of a Trump presidency. His nomination for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, who has been a pro-voucher, pro-charter school advocate, demonstrates he wants to privatize and charterize public schools. President-elect Trump is making clear where he wants to take the country.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has said positive things about the KKK and will likely head the Justice Department, indicates this administration will not be an advocate for criminal justice reform, voting rights, and countless other social justice efforts. More disturbing will be Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court. A generation of justices will be in the majority and committed to an agenda that is opposed to union rights, women's rights, voting rights, environmental protection, and other matters that will affect our children and grandchildren.
Trump has also strengthened his relationship with Steve Bannon, the former leader of Breitbart News and one of the leaders of a movement known as the alt-right. The alt-right sees this appointment as an opportunity to fan the flames of white nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. One needs only to watch the Nazi salute at a recent gathering of alt-right supporters in the nation's capital to be alarmed. The similarities with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and the growing neo-fascist movement now gaining traction in Western European countries, are chilling and require a response...
The issue of California Teacher containing the article by Pechthalt is available online here .
Thousands Sign Petition Against University of Tennessee Marching Band Participation in Trump Inauguration
The University of Tennessee marching band is scheduled to march in Trump's Inauguration parade, but a lot of alumni of the school and residents of Tennessee are protesting this. More than 3,340 people have already signed an online petition calling on the president and director of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to stop the university marching band from playing in the inaugural parade. The change.org petition , signed "Concerned Citizens and Alumni," says in part:
As either proud residents of Tennessee or proud University of Tennessee alumni, we are greatly disturbed by the behavior exhibited by Donald Trump both during and after the recent presidential campaign. He has made racist and sexist remarks that should never come out of the mouth of someone in public office.
As residents of Tennessee, we believe that the attendance at the upcoming inauguration of a band representing the state of Tennessee would condone this behavior. As alumni, we believe that no university should risk its reputation and credibility by welcoming such ignorance and celebrating a man like Trump. It is for this reason that we urge that the band not march at the upcoming inauguration.
San Francisco teacher calling on educators across the country to take up the "NO!"
Rosie O'Donnell on Trump: "Less than 3 weeks to stop him"
On January 1, comedian and TV entertainer Rosie O'Donnell tweeted:
DONALD TRUMP IS MENTALLY UNSTABLE - LESS THAN 3 WEEKS TO STOP HIM AMERICA
The day before, in response to a Donald Trump New Year's Eve tweet, O'Donnell tweeted:
@realDonaldTrump - we know what to do RESIST YOU - and everything you represent #notANYONESpresident #resist #liar #cheater #fraud #crook
She also tweeted:
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. ~ Maria Robinson
Then on January 3, @ROSIE retweeted:
#NoFascistUSA @RefuseFascism
The amount of flak @Rosie O'Donnell is taking right now for stating fact, as if SHE's out of line, is criminal. #NoFascistUSA #DontNormalize
Petition at Olivet Nazarene, Christian University, Speaks Out Against Trump's "well-documented sexism, his political alliances with white supremacists, and his hostility toward immigrants and refugees"
Olivet Nazarene is a Christian university located south of Chicago in Illinois. When school officials announced that the Olivet Nazarene band would be taking part in Trump's inauguration, there was immediate opposition. An online petition, "Withdraw Olivet Nazarene University from Inaugural Parade," has gathered over 2,000 signers. The petition , addressed to the college president and administrators, says in part:
Sadly, President-elect Trump has consistently articulated and advocated policies that undermine the Christian commitments of communities like Olivet. His well-documented sexism, his political alliances with white supremacists, and his hostility towards immigrants and refugees are just a few positions incompatible with Christian teachings in general and the Nazarene message of holiness in particular.
Any university presence at the inauguration would suggest toleration or, even worse, endorsement of the President-elect's objectionable attitudes on these and other issues. Such a presence is simply unacceptable.
We call on you to decline this and any other invitations to participate in President-elect Trump's inaugural festivities. We make this request not out of partisan opposition. Both educational and religious organizations should be capable of holding differing political opinions within the bonds of community. Yet, conservatives and liberals alike acknowledge that President-elect Trump has demeaned and alienated many, with little or no effort made towards reconciliation. For Olivet to embody the faith it proclaims, we have a responsibility to stand with those marginalized by the President-elect's divisive rhetoric rather than march in celebration of it.
Rebecca Ferguson Says She'll Sing at Trump Inauguration Invite IF She Can Sing "Strange Fruit"
Rebecca Ferguson is a British singer and songwriter. Her 2015 album "Lady Sings the Blues," covering classic songs by Billie Holiday, made the charts in the UK. Ferguson says she was asked to sing at Trump's inauguration and says she will do it.... IF she can sing "Strange Fruit"--a song first recorded by Billy Holliday in 1939 that scathingly indicts the lynchings of Black people in the American South. Ferguson wrote on TwitLonger:
I've been asked and this is my answer. If you allow me to sing "strange fruit" a song that has huge historical importance, a song that was blacklisted in the United States for being too controversial. A song that speaks to all the disregarded and down trodden black people in the United States. A song that is a reminder of how love is the only thing that will conquer all the hatred in this world, then I will graciously accept your invitation and see you in Washington. Best Rebecca X
Gregg Popovich, Coach of NBA San Antonio Spurs: "[Trump] is in charge of our country. That's disgusting"
Soon after the election, Gregg Popovich, one of the top coaches in the National Basketball Association (NBA), was asked to comment on Trump's victory. The following are excerpts from his comments:
It's our country, we don't want it to go down the drain. Any reasonable person would come to that conclusion. But it does not take away the fact that he is fear-mongering--all the comments, from day one--the race baiting, trying to make Barack Obama, the first Black president, illegitimate. It leaves me wondering where I've been living and with whom I'm living.
And the fact that people can just gloss that over and start talking about the transition team, and we're all gonna be kumbaya now and try to make the country good without talking about any of those things. And now we see that he's already backing off of immigration and Obamacare and other things, so was it a big fake? Which makes you feel it's even more disgusting and cynical that somebody would use that to get the base that fired up. To get elected. And what gets lost in the process are African-Americans, and Hispanics, and women, and the gay population, not to mention the eighth-grade developmental stage exhibited by him when he made fun of the handicapped person. I mean, come on. That's what a seventh-grade, eighth-grade bully does. And he was elected president of the United States. We would have scolded our kids. We would have had discussions and talked until we were blue in the face trying to get them to understand these things. And he is in charge of our country. That's disgusting.
See a YouTube of Popovich (along with another NBA coach, Stan Van Gundy) commenting on Trump here .
Mormon Tabernacle Singer Quits Over Trump Inauguration: "I could never throw roses to Hitler."
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is scheduled to sing at Trump's inauguration and 19,000 members of the Mormon Church have already signed a petition against them performing. Now, a member of the choir, Jan Chamberlin, has resigned over this, saying, "I could never throw roses to Hitler. And I certainly could never sing for him." Her letter, which was posted on Facebook, says:
Since "the announcement" [of the Choir performing at the inauguration], I have spent several sleepless nights and days in turmoil and agony. I have reflected carefully on both sides of the issue, prayed a lot, talked with family and friends, and searched my soul.
I've tried to tell myself that by not going to the inauguration, that I would be able to stay in Choir for all the other good reasons.
I have highly valued the mission of the Choir to be good-will ambassadors for Christ, to share beautiful music and to give hope, inspiration, and comfort to others.
I've tried to tell myself that it will be alright and that I can continue in good conscience before God and man.
But it's no use. I simply cannot continue with the recent turn of events. I could never look myself in the mirror again with self respect...
I also know, looking from the outside in, it will appear that Choir is endorsing tyranny and fascism by singing for this man...
Tyranny is now on our doorstep; it has been sneaking its way into our lives through stealth. Now it will burst into our homes through storm. I hope that we and many others will work together with greater diligence and awareness to calmly and bravely work together to defend our freedoms and our rights for our families, our friends, and our fellow citizens. I hope we can throw off the labels and really listen to each other with respect, love, compassion, and a true desire to bring our energies and souls together in solving the difficult problems that lie in our wake...
History is repeating itself; the same tactics are being used by Hitler (identify a problem, finding a scapegoat target to blame, and stirring up people with a combination of fanaticism, false promises, and fear, and gathering the funding). I plead with everyone to go back and read the books we all know on these topics and review the films produced to help us learn from these gargantuan crimes so that we will not allow them to be repeated. Evil people prosper when good people stand by and do nothing.
We must continue our love and support for the refugees and the oppressed by fighting against these great evils.
For me, this is a HUGELY moral issue....
I only know I could never "throw roses to Hitler." And I certainly could never sing for him.
To read the whole letter go here .
Rockette Speaks Out Against Trump: "A moral issue, a women's issue"
The Radio City Rockettes, whose trademark routine is a line of dancers doing eye-high leg kicks in perfect unison, are scheduled to perform at Trump's inauguration. Right away there were signs that some of the dancers are very disturbed about this. In a shameful move, the union representing the Rockettes, the American Guild of Variety Artists, sent an email to the dancers saying they were "obliged" to perform at the inauguration. Later the company that owns the Radio City Rockettes, the Madison Square Garden Company, told Rolling Stone magazine that individual dancers "are never told they have to perform at a particular event, including the inaugural. It is always their choice." But one can imagine the pressure being put on these women to perform and what it could mean for their careers if they refuse.
Recently, MarieClaire.com wrote a piece about this controversy, including quotes from an exclusive interview they did with "Mary," one of the Rockettes. The following are some excerpts from this article:
The dancer next to Mary was crying. Tears streamed down her face through all 90 minutes of their world-famous Christmas Spectacular as they kicked and pirouetted and hit mark after mark on the glittering Radio City Music Hall stage. This was Thursday, three days before Christmas, the day the Rockettes discovered they'd been booked to perform at the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.
"She felt she was being forced to perform for this monster," Mary told MarieClaire.com in an exclusive interview. "I wouldn't feel comfortable standing near a man like that in our costumes," said another dancer in an email to her colleagues.
For Mary? "If I had to lose my job over this, I would. It's too important. And I think the rest of the performing arts community would happily stand behind me." ...
"There is a divide in the company now, which saddens me most," Mary says. "The majority of us said no immediately. Then there's the percentage that said yes, for whatever reason--whether it's because they're young and uninformed, or because they want the money, or because they think it's an opportunity to move up in the company when other people turn it down." ...
Mary says that to her knowledge, no women of color have signed up to perform that day. "It's almost worse to have 18 pretty white girls behind this man who supports so many hate groups." ...
"This is not a Republican or Democrat issue--this is a women's rights issue," she continues. "This is an issue of racism and sexism, something that's much bigger than politics. We walk into work and everyone has different political views. The majority of the stage crew are Trump supporters; there's a 'Make America Great Again' bumper sticker on the crew doors at the side of the stage."
But the majority of the staff skews liberal, she says, especially considering the many LGBT employees at Radio City. "It's the ensemble. It's the people in our wardrobe and hair department, some of whom are transgender," she says. "These are our friends and our family, who we've worked with for years. It's a basic human-rights issue. We have immigrants in the show. I feel like dancing for Trump would be disrespecting the men and women who work with us, the people we care about."
On December 29, former Rockette Autumn Withers said in an interview on cable news channel MSNBC that the group has performed at previous inaugurations but Trump is different:
[W]e've never had an incoming president who has publically and repeatedly demeaned women and said derogatory things about women. And I think that's what makes this is a really unique situation and elevates it above a situation of just doing your job as a Rockette as you would for any other event and elevates it to a moral issue, a woman's rights issue. What does this say, the optics of having the Rockettes perform at Trump's inauguration? How does that normalize these comments and remarks that Trump has made to women at large and is that OK?
He has talked about grabbing women's genitals, he has called them names from dogs, pigs, slobs, crooked, nasty. And to have a beautiful line of women dancing behind him I think on a larger level kind of normalizes his derogatory comments. I have Republican female family members and even when you bring up his comments they're very uncomfortable and they still agree that this is a women's rights issue....
The whole MarieClair.com article is available here .
To listen to the MSNBC interview with Autumn Withers, go here .
1,500 Past and Current Fulbright Scholarship Recipients: "The consequence [of Trump becoming president] could be dire for both international cooperation and peace"
The Fulbright Program, funded by the U.S. government and private sources, gives prestigious scholarships to about 8,000 recipients yearly--for students, academics, artists and others in the U.S. to study and do research abroad and for recipients in other countries to do the same in the U.S. After the presidential election, three past and current Fulbright grant recipients wrote an open letter expressing alarm at Trump's victory. The letter has gathered signatures from over 1,500 other past and current Fulbright scholarship recipients from 95 countries.
Their letter says in part: "We have, for the last eighteen months, watched the electoral process unfold in the United States as the president-elect openly engaged in demagoguery against a number of vulnerable populations, courted hate groups, threatened the press, and promised vindictive actions against his opponents. This is not populism; it is recklessness. The consequence could be dire for both international cooperation and peace. We are now worried by the prospect of his inauguration into one of the world's most powerful offices with the power to carry out his stated intentions. While we respect the American electoral system, we write to express our deepest concerns."
The letter and list of signatories are available online here .
Franz Wasserman, Survivor of Nazi Germany: "We have to counter this trend toward fascism in every way we can."
Franz Wasserman, 96 years old, was a youth in Germany during the 1930s and saw the rise of the Nazis first-hand. He's never considered himself an activist. But with the election of Trump, he felt he had to act. He wrote a letter to U.S. senators warning of the parallels between Trump and Hitler--and shared it with others. Jerry Lange, a columnist for the Seattle Times, received a copy, and he wrote a piece on Wasserman that appeared on December 26.
Wasserman begins the letter: "I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1920. I lived there during the rise of the Nazi Party and left for the U.S.A. in 1938. The elements of the Nazi regime were the suppression of dissent, the purging of the dissenters and undesirables, the persecution of communists, Jews and homosexuals and the ideal of the Arians as the master race. These policies started immediately after Hitler came to power, at first out of sight but escalated gradually leading to the Second World War and the holocaust. Meanwhile most Germans were lulled into complacency by all sorts of wonderful projects and benefits."
Today, Wasserman writes, "The neo-Nazis and the KKK have become more prominent and get recognition in the press. We are all familiar with Trump's remarks against all Muslims and all Mexicans. But there has not been anything as alarming as the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump's Chief Strategist. Bannon has, apparently, made anti-Semitic remarks for years, has recently condemned Muslims and Jews and he and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the pick as National Security Adviser, advocate the political and cultural superiority of the white race. At the same time Trump is trying to control the press... We can hope that our government of checks and balances will be more resistant than the Weimar Republic was. Don't count on it."
The Seattle Times article with quotes from Franz Wasserman and his story is available here .
Feminist Scholars: "We cannot and will not comply. Our number one priority is to resist."
The following "Statement by Feminist Scholars on the Election of Donald Trump as President" is posted at a number of sites on the Internet and so far has more than 900 signatories:
"On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, a sizeable minority of the U.S. electorate chose to send billionaire Donald Trump, an avowed sexist and an unrepentant racist, who has spent nearly forty years antagonizing vulnerable people, to the White House. Spewing hatred at women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and those with disabilities is Trump's most consistent, and well-documented form of public engagement. Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women because, as he quipped, his celebrity made it easy for him to do so. We can only assume that the hostile climate and anxiety about what is to come were contributing factors. The political shift we are witnessing, including the appointment of open bigots to the president-elect's cabinet, reaffirms the structural disposability and systemic disregard for every person who is not white, male, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and middle or upper class.
"As a community of feminist scholars, activists and artists, we affirm that the time to act is now. We cannot endure four years of a Trump presidency without a plan. We must protect reproductive justice, fight for Black lives, defend the rights of LGBTQIA people, disrupt the displacement of indigenous people and the stealing of their resources, advocate and provide safe havens for the undocumented, stridently reject Islamophobia, and oppose the acceleration of neoliberal policies that divert resources to the top 1% and abandon those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. We must also denounce militarization at home and abroad, and climate change denial that threatens to destroy the entire planet.
"We must also reject calls to compromise, to understand, or to collaborate. We cannot and will not comply. Our number one priority is to resist. We must resist the instantiation of autocracy. We must resist this perversion of democracy. We must refuse spin and challenge any narratives that seek to call this moment "democracy at work." This is not democracy; this is the rise of a 21st century U.S. version of fascism. We must name it, so we can both confront and defeat it. The most vulnerable, both here and abroad, cannot afford for us to equivocate or remain silent. The threats posed by settler colonialism and empire around the globe have never been more real, nor has our resolve to oppose these injustices ever been stronger. Concretely, within the U.S., we oppose the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the establishment of a registry for Muslim residents.
"We owe this moment and the communities we fight for our very best thinking, teaching, and organizing. We must find creative solutions to address the immediate needs of those who will be acutely affected within the first 100 days of Trump's presidency. We must push ourselves into new, and more precise and radical analytical frameworks that can help us to articulate the stakes of this moment.
"The most important thing we can do in this moment is to make an unqualified commitment to those on the margins through our actions, insist that the media be allowed to do its job; and protect the right to protest and dissent. We recognize clearly that our silence will not protect us. Silence, in the aftermath of 11/8 is not merely a lack of words; it is a profound inertia of liberatory thought and praxis. So - what are we waiting for? We are who we are waiting for. We pledge to stand and fight, with fierce resolve, for the values and principles we believe in and the people we love."
The statement and list of signatories is available here .
Center for Constitutional Rights: "We must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism"
Shortly after Trump's election, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City issued this statement:
"We send love and solidarity to all those who are hurting and afraid that Donald Trump's America excludes them. We share the despair of the millions who are in shock that a candidate supported by the KKK has won the presidency of the United States.
"If there is a silver lining in this election result it is that it is impossible now to deny the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that have been part of America for centuries. Our duty is to stand together with all those who dissent from this bigotry and to defend and protect vulnerable communities. That has been CCR's mission for 50 years, and we will work harder than ever to defend civil and human rights and the U.S. Constitution.
"The dangers of a Trump presidency go beyond the attacks on people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. His campaign was marked by the strategies and tactics of authoritarian regimes: endorsing and encouraging violence against political protesters, threatening to jail his opponent, refusing to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost, punishing critical press. Together with all those who value freedom, justice, and self-determination, we must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism.
"Resistance is our civic duty."
Lauren Duca, Teen Vogue Editor: Trump's "Gaslighting" and the Fight for the Truth
Lauren Duca is an editor for Teen Vogue magazine and has been a contributing reporter/writer for several other magazines including Huffington Post , Vice , New York , and The New Yorker . In a December 10, article published in Teen Vogue titled "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," she writes:
"Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a bucket of ice over your head while listening to 'Duel of the Fates.' Donald Trump is our President now; it's time to wake up.
"'Gas lighting' is a buzzy name for a terrifying strategy currently being used to weaken and blind the American electorate. We are collectively being treated like Bella Manningham in the 1938 Victorian thriller from which the term 'gas light' takes its name. In the play, Jack terrorizes his wife Bella into questioning her reality by blaming her for mischievously misplacing household items which he systematically hides. Doubting whether her perspective can be trusted, Bella clings to a single shred of evidence: the dimming of the gas lights that accompanies the late night execution of Jack's trickery. The wavering flame is the one thing that holds her conviction in place as she wriggles free of her captor's control.
"To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that's precisely what Trump is doing to this country.... At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.... The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we're not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It's on every single one of us to stop pretending it's always been so hot in here...
"The road ahead is a treacherous one. There are unprecedented amounts of ugliness to untangle, from deciding whether our President can be an admitted sexual predator to figuring out how to stop him from threatening the sovereignty of an entire religion. It's incredible that any of those things could seem like a distraction from a greater peril, or be only the cherry-picked issues in a seemingly unending list of gaffes, but the gaslights are flickering. When defending each of the identities in danger of being further marginalized, we must remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together. As we spin our newfound rage into action, it is imperative to remember, across identities and across the aisle, as a country and as individuals, we have nothing without the truth."
To read the whole article go here .
Journalist Summer Brennan: "I promise to be a siren going off..."
On December 19, Summer Brennan, an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, tweeted:
"Trump is a fascist. I promise to be a siren going off about this national disaster until it is averted or stopped. #resist"
Constitutional Law Scholars to Trump: "We feel a responsibility to challenge you in the court of public opinion"
In an open letter to Trump dated December 13, constitutional legal scholars associated with law schools across the U.S. wrote, "Some of your statements and actions during the campaign and since the election cause us great concern about your commitment to our constitutional system."
The open letter gets into some of these issues: First Amendment protection of the rights of free speech and free press; "poisonous anti-Muslim rhetoric"; violation of government checks and balances; threats to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion; appointment of Alabama Senator Sessions, with a "troubling history on voting rights and civil rights," as Attorney General; "baseless charges concerning voter fraud"; and "inflammatory rhetoric" that has been "taken as invitation to discriminate and to act out in all kinds of hate-filled ways."
In the point on anti-Muslim attacks, the open letter notes: "To make matters worse, your proposed national security advisor, Michael Flynn, has described what he calls 'Islamism' as a 'vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people' that 'has to be excised.' Such rhetoric is shocking in its ignorance and bigotry; it must not become normalized. We continue to hear talk of a 'Muslim registry' being created by your administration--or a nationality-based registry that would be a proxy for religious discrimination. To our national shame, the federal government during World War II carried out--and the Supreme Court's discredited Korematsu decision upheld--the mass internment of Japanese Americans based upon no individualized suspicion of wrongdoing; the federal government under President Ronald Reagan subsequently apologized and paid reparations. We urge you to reconsider your naming of Flynn and to renounce a Muslim registry or anything like it."
The open letter concludes: "Although we sincerely hope that you will take your constitutional oath seriously, so far you have offered little indication that you will. We feel a responsibility to challenge you in the court of public opinion, and we hope that those directly aggrieved by your administration will challenge you in the courts of law. We call upon legal conservatives who cherish constitutional values to join us in speaking law to power. And we call upon citizens, lawyers, educators, public officials, and religious leaders to use every legal means available to protect the most vulnerable members of our society and our constitutional guarantees. At no point that any of us can remember has this need been more imperative than it is now."
See a pdf of the open letter and list of signatories here .
America Ferrera: Future under Trump is "terrifying" but "we can't give up the fight"
America Ferrera is an actress who has won many awards, including an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In a December 14 interview, she was asked, "How are you feeling about the future of our environment during the Trump administration?" She said:
"When you have a president-elect who says he doesn't even know if climate change is real, for the next four to eight years, the future looks pretty horrible. We know that climate change is real, and yet he's still questioning it. So, that's pretty terrifying. We haven't had any time to waste for a long time now, and it's a pretty devastating thing to start moving backward. So yes, I think that it's really daunting. But we have to be committed to staying alert and staying awake and staying educated and using our voices to push back. It doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, or there's ever going to be a defining last fight where we win and we never have to go back and defend the idea that climate change is the real thing we need to pay attention to. But we can't give up the fight."
Celebrities Refuse to Perform at Trump Inauguration
During his presidential campaign, many musicians, actors, and other celebrities spoke out against Donald Trump. And now he and his team are having a hard time getting musicians to perform at his inauguration. A number of celebrities have been asked and refused, and some have made it clear that if they are asked, they will refuse.
Read more here
Open Letter Protesting American Library Association Press Release: "I am absolutely not ready to work with President-elect Trump"
On November 20, Sarah Houghton wrote an Open Letter to Julie Todaro, President of the American Library Association, protesting a press release from the ALA in which Todaro stated, "We are ready to work with President-elect Trump, his transition team, incoming administration and members of Congress to bring more economic opportunity to all Americans and advance other goals we have in common."
Houghton has been an active member of the ALA for 16 years and says, "I have never before this week considered canceling my membership." Houghton says in her letter: "I am absolutely not ready to work with President-elect Trump. He has stood for racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination for his entire life--including during his campaign. Those are all things ALA stands firmly against. Explain to me why we're ready to work with a bigot? Because I'm not ready for that at all. The rest of this release went on to detail some of the things libraries do for communities--coming off as a weak and pandering missive begging for scraps and, in truth, coming from a place of fear."
Houghton points to another ALA press release that highlights "how libraries can advance specific policy priorities of the incoming Trump administration in the areas of entrepreneurship, services to veterans and broadband adoption and use" and says:
"This trajectory away from justice and toward collaboration with a fascist regime disturbs me greatly. These comments are tone deaf and, not only do not represent my values as a librarian, but do not represent the shared values of the American Library Association and its membership. There is a time to walk a middle road, to give voice to a moderate viewpoint of an organization's membership. This is not that time. This is the time to stand tall and proud, and give voice to the fiery ethics and values that our profession has held dear for so long in the face of fascism and bigotry.
"I have no intention of supporting this incoming administration in any way whatsoever. With the transition team and other appointments being floated in the press, President-elect Trump has made it clear that racism, sexism, bigotry, assault, discrimination of all kinds, and the destruction of basic civil liberties are foundational to his administration's philosophy. I refuse to be complicit in the work of the Trump administration and cannot in good faith remain part of a professional organization that chooses to be complicit."
Read the whole letter here .
Celebrity Chefs vs. Trump
Anthony Bourdain , currently host of CNN's travel and food show Parts Unknown, was asked in a recent interview about sushi chef Alessandro Borgognone's decision to move his restaurant to Trump's Washington, DC, hotel. Bourdain said he would "never eat in his restaurant" and felt "utter and complete contempt" for the chef. He explained, "I'm not asking you to start putting up barricades now, but when they come and ask you, 'Are you with us?' you do have an option. You can say, 'No thanks, guys. I don't look good in a brown shirt. Makes me look a little, I don't know, not great. It's not slimming.'" In a tweet on December 22, Bourdain said, "I am not 'boycotting' anything. I choose to not patronize chefs who tacitly support deporting half the people they've ever worked with"--clear reference to Trump's threat to deport millions of Mexican immigrants.
Jose Andres operates more than a dozen restaurants in cities including Washington, DC; Miami; Las Vegas; and Los Angeles. In 2015, after Trump made disgusting racist comments about Mexican immigrants, Andres withdrew the commitment he'd made to open a restaurant in Trump's new DC hotel. Trump sued him for breach of contract, seeking $10 million in damages. Andres countersued, and said, "More than half of my team is Hispanic, as are many of our guests. And, as a proud Spanish immigrant and recently naturalized American citizen myself, I believe that every human being deserves respect, regardless of immigration status." Andres tweeted on December 19: "I am a proud immigrant!! To my fellow immigrants thank you for the amazing work you do every day. #ToImmigrantsWithLove" Trump is required to appear to be deposed in Andres's suit, just weeks before his scheduled inauguration.
Fiona Apple's Christmas Song: "Trump's nuts roasting on an open fire..."
At the December 18 "We Rock with Standing Rock" benefit concert in Los Angeles, singer Fiona Apple did a fiery performance of her version of the Christmas standard "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" that begins: "Trump's nuts roasting on an open fire..." She ends with "Donald Trump... Fuck You!" to the loud cheers of the audience. Watch it here:
George Polisner, Executive of Tech Company Oracle: "I am here to oppose [Trump] in every possible and legal way"
George Polisner, a top executive at the tech corporation Oracle, publicly resigned from the company on December 19 after Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz announced she was going to join Trump's presidential transition team. Catz was among the executives from major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Apple, who met with Trump last week--a shameful meeting that helped to lend legitimacy to the Trump-Pence fascist cabal. When Polisner learned of this, he sent his letter to Catz and at the same time posted it on the LinkedIn website.
His resignation letter says in part, "Trump stokes fear, hatred and violence toward people of color, Muslims and immigrants. It is well-known that hate crimes are surging as he has provided license for this ignorance-based expression of malice.... He seeks to eviscerate environmental protections, the public education system, LGBTQ rights and women's rights."
And Polisner says in the letter: " I am not with President-elect Trump and I am not here to help him in any way. In fact--when his policies border on the unconstitutional, the criminal and the morally unjust--I am here to oppose him in every possible and legal way." (emphasis in the original)
Polisner told the UK Guardian that he decided to make his resignation letter public because he "decided it was too important to die as a private letter" and that "I thought I could either be a role model in terms of a path forward or a cautionary tale."
Read George Polisner's resignation letter here .
Actor Michael Sheen: "In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped"
Michael Sheen is a Welsh stage and screen actor whose work includes starring roles in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon and the current Showtime series Masters of Sex. On December 17, the Sunday Times of London ran a profile on him, titled "Michael Sheen gets political. This time it's for real." The writer of the profile had expected Sheen to discuss his role in the upcoming sci-fi film Passengers. "Instead, Sheen, 47, wants to talk about politics. Lately, it's been bothering him a lot. No, that's not nearly strong enough. What he calls the 'demagogic, fascistic' drift of politics in the western world in the past few years, culminating in Donald Trump's election victory, has left Sheen horrified, furious and determined to do everything he can to counter it. It's why, after several years of increasing commitments to a broad spread of causes, including the NHS, Unicef, the Freedom of Information Act, fighting homelessness and campaigning against fracking, the actor is preparing to go all in. He plans to start fighting the rise of the 'hard populist right'--evident in France, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States--via grassroots organizing in his beloved Port Talbot (he pronounces it "P'Talbot") and see where it takes him." (Port Talbot is Sheen's hometown in Wales.)
Later, the profile quotes Sheen saying, "In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped. But it has to be understood before it can be stopped."
The whole profile is available at the Times website here (the site requires registration for free access).
100+ Professors at Notre Dame Say: We are coming forward to stand with the professors you have called "dangerous"
A website called "Professor Watchlist," run by a group called Turning Point USA, has posted the names of more than 200 professors they accuse of putting forward "leftist propaganda" and "discriminating" against right-wing students. This campus witch-hunt is a sign of the time of Trump.
Among the names appearing on the Watchlist are two Notre Dame academics: philosophy professor Gary Gutting and Iris Outlaw, director of Multicultural Student Programs and Services. The Watchlist said Gutting was added because he wrote that the country's "permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism," and Outlaw because she "taught a 'white privilege' seminar that pledged to help students acknowledge and understand their white privilege."
In response, more than 100 Notre Dame faculty members published an open letter in the Observer , the student newspaper at Notre Dame, defying the Professor Watchlist. Their statement said in part: "We surmise that the purpose of your list is to shame and silence faculty who espouse ideas you reject. But your list has had a different effect upon us. We are coming forward to stand with the professors you have called 'dangerous,' reaffirming our values and recommitting ourselves to the work of teaching students to think clearly, independently, and fearlessly.
"So please add our names, the undersigned faculty at the University of Notre Dame, to the Professor Watchlist. We wish to be counted among those you are watching."
The full letter and list of the names are available at the Observer site.
In his December 5 piece titled "Trump's Agents of Idiocracy," in the New York Times , columnist Charles Blow wrote:
"What if Trump has shown himself beyond doubt and with absolute certainty to be a demagogue and bigot and xenophobe and has given space and voice to concordant voices in the country and in his emerging Legion of Doom cabinet? In that reality, resistance isn't about mindless obstruction by people blinded by the pain of ideological defeat or people gorging on sour grapes. To the contrary, resistance then is an act of radical, even revolutionary, patriotism. Resistance isn't about damaging the country, but protecting it..."
Read the whole column here
MIT Faculty: "The President-elect has appointed individuals to positions of power who have endorsed racism, misogyny and religious bigotry, and denied the widespread scientific consensus on climate change."
More than 500 members of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have issued a statement opposing Trump's official appointments and "upholding the value of science and diversity." The signers include people from every academic department at MIT, nine department and program heads, and four Nobel Prize recipients. Notable signatories to date include Susan Solomon, Co-Chair of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor; Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus; Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab; and Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author.
This is an important development, and this kind of stand needs to spread to other campuses and through the academic community, even as people get more clarity on the actual fascist nature of Trump and the incoming regime. Read the MIT faculty statement here .
Shaun King: "No, we should not wait and see what a Trump administration does. We should organize our resistance right now."
New York Daily News columnist Shaun King's writes: "Now, in the name of a peaceful transition, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton are striking a conciliatory tone. I understand that such a tone is a tradition in American politics, but everything about Donald Trump and this election breaks with tradition. President Obama may feel obligated to strike such a tone, but I don't have such an obligation. Perhaps President Obama feels that by striking such a tone, it makes it more likely that Donald Trump will be moderate after his inauguration. I don't believe that for one second."
His column concludes: "We can't wait until he does those things before we act against him. We must outsmart and out-organize his team. I implore you to ignore anybody saying anything other than that. They've been wrong all year. We must act and we must act now."
Read Shaun King's piece here .
"Trump is saying Hitler-level things in public... And I feel like it's dangerous for us to be complacent"
Read John Legend's comments here .
Green Day at American Music Awards, November 20: NO TRUMP! NO KKK! NO FASCIST USA!
During the live TV broadcast of the American Music Awards on Sunday night, November 20, the punk rock band Green Day let loose with a defiant condemnation of Donald Trump. In the middle of performing "Bang Bang," from their latest album Revolution Radio, the band, led by singer Billie Joe Armstrong, broke into the chant:
"No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!"
ABC TV executives were reportedly thrown "completely off guard." The audience gave Green Day a standing ovation.
This is the kind of bold, truth-telling denunciation of Trump--calling out what he actually represents--that we need much more of, right now!
Watch a video clip here.
"Farewell, America" by author Neal Gabler, November 10
Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently ...
With Trump's election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public's contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information - a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.
With the mainstream media so delegitimized -- a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies -- they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism -- if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.
Read more here .
Architect Resigns from Association for Pledging to "Play Nice" with Trump
Two days after Trump's election, Robert Ivy, the CEO and executive vice president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), sent a memorandum to the organization's members saying, "The AIA and its 89,000 members are committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues our country faces, particularly strengthening the nation's aging infrastructure. ... It is now time for all of us to work together to advance policies that help our country move forward."
When Frederick "Fritz" Read, the founder and head of Read & Company Architects in Baltimore, saw this, he acted immediately. He sent a letter condemning Ivy's statement and declaring his resignation from the AIA. He wrote: "The alacrity with which Robert Ivy hopped out there to promise the President-Elect that the AIA will play nice with his administration, without even a pro forma caution that what Mr. Trump has promised and threatened are deeply antithetical to the values that many of us cherish, is the final straw for me, the last bit of evidence I needed, that our only serious interest as an organization has become a craven interest in securing our piece of the action. The AIA does not represent my personal or professional interests. Please consider this my resignation from the AIA, effective immediately, and remove both my name and that of my firm from your membership records. I am appalled."
In a subsequent email to an official of the Baltimore AIA chapter who talked about how AIA relations with the U.S. government have always been and should continue to be "neutral," Read wrote: "Am so curious how a pledge made explicitly on behalf of all 89,000 members of open-ended and unqualified support for a climate-change-denying, xenophobic, racist, sexist, repeated bankrupt can possibly be understood as a statement of organizational neutrality. ... Ours is not an honorable history of willingness to forgo enrichment simply on principle, and this statement slips all too closely to the worst of that: are we all too young or forgetful to recall that Albert Speer was one of ours?" Speer was Hitler's chief architect who headed major projects under the Nazi regime and became Minister of Armaments and War Production during World War 2.
Under mounting criticism from architects, architecture faculty, and other architecture professionals, Ivy and other leading AIA officials were forced to apologize to the membership for their craven remarks about working with the Trump administration.
Read more about this here at Architect News online
Center for Biological Diversity: "Lash Out at the Darkness and Fight Like Hell"
In the November 10 issue of their online newsletter "Endangered Earth," the Center for Biological Diversity included a statement saying, "We're only thinking about one thing right now: stopping Donald Trump from destroying the planet." The statement goes on to say, "If President Trump carries out the disastrous promises he made while campaigning, the Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted, the Endangered Species Act will be repealed, old-growth forests will be clearcut, hard-fought global climate change agreements will be undermined, and polluters will be given free rein over our water and air."
And the center vowed, "There's no way in hell we're letting that happen." Read the entire statement here.
Read the Center's piece here .
Jewish historians speak out on the election of Donald Trump
Hostility to immigrants and refugees strikes particularly close to home for us as historians of the Jews. As an immigrant people, Jews have experienced the pain of discrimination and exclusion, including by this country in the dire years of the 1930s. Our reading of the past impels us to resist any attempts to place a vulnerable group in the crosshairs of nativist racism. It is our duty to come to their aid and to resist the degradation of rights that Mr. Trump's rhetoric has provoked.
However, it is not only in defense of others that we feel called to speak out. We witnessed repeated anti-Semitic expressions and insinuations during the Trump campaign. Much of this anti-Semitism was directed against journalists, either Jewish or with Jewish-sounding names. The candidate himself refused to denounce--and even retweeted--language and images that struck us as manifestly anti-Semitic. By not doing so, his campaign gave license to haters of Jews, who truck in conspiracy theories about world Jewish domination.
Read entire statement here
Issa Rae, Actor: "The scariest part is how normal it's becoming to some people"
Issa Rae is star of the HBO series Insecure . Sunday night, January 9, on the red carpet at the Golden Globes awards in Los Angeles., she was asked what she thought of Trump. Rae said:
Every single time I see a tweet from that man, every single time I see the administration that he's bringing in, it just gets worse and worse. And the scariest part to me is how normal it's becoming to some people. And I think we just have to keep calling things out, it's like nope, you're lying, nope, that's not true, nope, that doesn't work that way. As long as we don't continue to let him slide, then there might be some hope, but it's scary.
Actor Debra Messing: "This is a regime that will strip away the rights of millions..."
Debra Messing, best known for her starring role in the TV comedy series Will & Grace, tweeted on December 18:
This is a regime that will strip away the rights of millions. Threaten the lives of millions. And threatens the planet. #NOFASCISTUSA
Messing is one of the signatories of the Call to Action of RefuseFascism.org. On Wednesday, January 4, when the Call appeared as a full page in the New York Times, she tweeted a photo of that Times page with the #NoFascistUSA hashtag and link to refusefascism.org.
Literary Magazine Editor Philip Elliot: "Fascism is rising. Not just in the U.S. but across Europe too"
Philip Elliot is the editor-in-chief of Into The Void , a print and digital literary magazine based in Dublin, Ireland, "dedicated to providing fantastic fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art from all over the world." In a recent roundtable with several editors, the online journal The Review Review asked the question "How Will a Trump Presidency Impact Literary Magazines?" Elliot answered:
Fascism is rising. Not just in the U.S. but across Europe too. In the West we're experiencing similar circumstances that led to its rise a century ago and now the wheel has turned again. People say to me, especially because I live in Ireland, that I'm overreacting to this; that's it's just more politics, everything will blow over, etc. They fail to see the bigger picture. What's been put into motion here, catalyzed by the election but arisen from a far more complex sense of discontent and fear, is the greatest threat to our newly-progressive societies that we've ever seen. More than anything else, my fear is that we as artists and curators of art will allow our way of thinking to become the "It's just politics, it will all blow over soon" attitude. I fear that because nothing terrible is going to happen right away, we will normalize this whole affair and accept it. What people forget is that Hitler began his slow climb to absolute power in 1918. Bad things are coming, that's for certain, but they will come slowly, and they will come under the guise of good. As writers, we peer under the masks of things for a living and that skill is more important now than ever. Art's duty to criticize the bad and protect the good is infinitely more important in times of darkness. It reminds us what we can be. And it must also remind us of the terrible evil we once did. Because if we truly remembered, how could we have let this happen again? At Into the Void, we'll be paying close attention to work that criticizes the actions of our supposed leaders in the months and years to come.
Elliot's comments and others can be found here .
Petition Against Museum Loan of Art for Inauguration: "We object...to an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency"
When the St. Louis Art Museum announced that they were making an artwork from their collection available on loan to serve as a centerpiece of the Trump inauguration luncheon, art historian Ivy Cooper and artist Ilene Berman began an online petition calling for the cancellation of the loan. According to the petition, the 1855 painting, "Verdict of the People" by George Caleb Bingham, "depicts a small-town Missouri election, and symbolizes the democratic process in mid-19th century America." The petition goes on to say:
We object to the painting's use as an inaugural backdrop and an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency and his expressed values of hatred, misogyny, racism and xenophobia. We reject the use of the painting to suggest that Trump's election was truly the "verdict of the people," when in fact the majority of votes--by a margin of over three million--were cast for Trump's opponent. Finally, we consider the painting a representation of our community, and oppose its use as such at the inauguration.
Art can be used to make powerful statements. Its withdrawal can do the same. Join us in our campaign.
As of January 6, close to 2,700 people have signed the petition, which is available here .
Gothamist.com on Refuse Fascism NY Times Ad: "It's a Noble Cause..."
In a January article at Gothamist.com, an article by Rebecca Fishbein titled " Celebrities, Activists Publish Anti-Fascist, Anti-Trump Ad In NY Times " said, in part:
Rosie O'Donnell, Debra Messing, and a handful of celebrities and activists have joined forces with RefuseFascism.org, a Cornel West and Carl Dix-helmed group dedicated to opposing the incoming Trump Administration and calling Trump's presidency "illegitimate."
The group took out a full page ad in the Times yesterday calling for a month long resistance effort against Trump: [facsimile of the ad is included]
Refuse Fascism is also asking for donations to help reprint the Times ad in papers across the country, as well as "to support volunteers going to D.C., to produce millions of copies of Refuse Fascism material and get them out everywhere, and to support organizers and speakers."
It's a noble cause, and there's nothing wrong with celebrities speaking out. Influential people should be speaking out against Trump, and advocating activism, and fighting him at every turn....
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Poet and Literature Professor: "Full-fledged U.S. fascism has come"
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept. In a New Year's Eve blog post, Gonzalez wrote of Donald Trump:
Shall I repeat the litany of his faults--his misogyny, his racism, his homophobia, his bigotry, his profound ignorance? His analysis, his description, his judgment of anything does not go beyond stock superlatives; he knows nothing of ideas, much less policy, not an iota of science. "I am a business man," he says proudly as if that justified all his conniving, his dishonesty, his thievery. Should we doubt it, he has his billions to prove it. So the empire now gets its own, homegrown Caligula. Sociopathic megalomaniac, he too may come to declare himself divine. True, we have been governed by criminals before (can one govern an empire and not be criminal?), but this is a case apart.
It is the cruelty I fear, the utter heartlessness in the face of suffering, the willingness, nay, the intent to cause suffering and pain. Nor compassion nor justice is a hallmark of the 1%, the Republican Party he represents and that brought him to power. (Being a Democrat is no guarantee of decency, but it seems that a decent Republican is an oxymoron.) With Republican control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive (the proposed Cabinet reads like a Hitlerian wish-list), full-fledged U. S. fascism has come, a fascism prepared to destroy the Earth itself for the sake of wealth and power. Can it be called anything but madness?
He went on to write:
Democracy once lost is very hard to restore. Our resistance must be immediate and overwhelming, our love fierce, our joy protected. Our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities must be made bulwarks of justice, of refuge. Our schools sanctuary of freedom of thought and inquiry, our churches voices for justice rooted in compassion. Much is demanded of us and great may be the sacrifice, but if we all share it, it will be much, much less. Let us then take to the streets and public places dressed in our most joyful colors, making music with our drums and flutes, dragging our pianos out our doors if we must, dancing, singing, chanting, turning all our art into protest and celebration--and make our spaces truly our own.
Read the whole piece by Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, titled "Thoughts for the Last Day of the Year 2016," available in English and Spanish here .
More Than 1,100 Law Professors Tell Senate to Reject Sessions Nomination
More than 1,100 law school professors from across the country are behind a letter sent to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, January 2, calling for the rejection of Trump's nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general. The letter says (in full):
We are 1140 faculty members from 170 different law schools in 48 states across the country. We urge you to reject the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions for the position of Attorney General of the United States.
In 1986, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, in a bipartisan vote, rejected President Ronald Reagan's nomination of then-U.S. Attorney Sessions for a federal judgeship, due to statements Sessions had made that reflected prejudice against African Americans. Nothing in Senator Sessions' public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.
Some of us have concerns about his misguided prosecution of three civil rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in 1985, and his consistent promotion of the myth of voter-impersonation fraud. Some of us have concerns about his support for building a wall along our country's southern border. Some of us have concerns about his robust support for regressive drug policies that have fueled mass incarceration. Some of us have concerns about his questioning of the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change. Some of us have concerns about his repeated opposition to legislative efforts to promote the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of us share all of these concerns.
All of us believe it is unacceptable for someone with Senator Sessions' record to lead the Department of Justice .
The Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer in the United States, with broad jurisdiction and prosecutorial discretion, which means that, if confirmed, Jeff Sessions would be responsible for the enforcement of the nation's civil rights, voting, immigration, environmental, employment, national security, surveillance, antitrust, and housing laws. As law faculty who work every day to better understand the law and teach it to our students, we are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation's laws and promote justice and equality in the United States. We urge you to reject his nomination.
To read the statement with list of signatories go here .
Outrage at Simon & Schuster's Book Deal for Pro-Trump Racist
When the book publisher Simon & Schuster recently signed Milo Yiannopoulos, writer for Breitbart News Network, to a $250,000 book deal for the Threshold imprint, there was immediate outrage. Breitbart is a neo-Nazi, misogynistic, white-supremacist website whose former owner, Steve Bannon, is now Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor. As technology editor at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos promoted the vicious campaign known as "GamerGate," a flood of viciously degrading attacks and terroristic threats against the very small number of prominent women in the video-game development community. Among the despicable things he's written is: "...Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the internet without feminist whining. It will be fun! Like a big fraternity..." And Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter this summer after his followers mounted a racist harassment campaign against Black comedian/actor Leslie Jones.
After the Simon & Schuster signing of Yiannopoulos, the Chicago Review of Books tweeted:
In response to this disgusting validation of hate, we will not cover a single @simonschuster book in 2017.
A bookstore in Dublin, Ireland, tweeted that it would not be carrying any Simon & Schuster titles:
Sometimes it's a tough call for bookshops between respecting free speech and not promoting hate speech. Sometimes not. Byebye
Writer Danielle Henderson's memoir is scheduled for publication by Simon & Schuster next year. Henderson wrote in a series of tweets:
I'm looking at my @simonschuster contract, and unfortunately there's no clause for "what if we decide to publish a white nationalist"
But know this: i'm well aware of what hill I am willing to die on, and my morals and values are at the top of that list.
I will happily go back to slinging coffee--I'm not afraid to stand for what I believe in, and I make a MEAN cappuccino foam
Comedian Sara Silverman tweeted:
The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him & give him a platform tells me a LOT about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS
Shannon Coulter, a marketing specialist who started a campaign to boycott Ivanka Trump products, tweeted ("@Lesdoggg" is Leslie Jones' Twitter handle):
@simonschuster are you concerned $250k book deal you gave Milo Yiannopoulos will read as condoning the racist harassment @Lesdoggg endured?
Poet Nikky Finney: Talladega College should stand with others "protesting the inauguration of one of the most antagonistic, hatred spewing, unrepentant racists"
The January 2 announcement that Talladega College, a historically Black college in Alabama, would send its marching band to be part of Trump's inauguration march was met with immediate outrage from many students and alumni. Nikky Finney, a poet whose 2011 work Head Off & Split won the National Book Award, is an alumna of Talladega and currently a chair in creative writing and Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. Finney said of Talladega's decision:
The news that Talladega College has forgotten its steady and proud 150 years of history, by making the decision to not stand in solidarity with other clear-eyed and courageous people, academic institutions, and organizations, protesting the inauguration of one of the most antagonistic, hatred-spewing, unrepentant racists, has simply and unequivocally broken my heart today. Historical Black colleges are duty bound to have and keep a moral center and be of great moral consciousness while also teaching its students lessons about life that they will need going forward, mainly, that just because a billionaire--who cares nothing about their 150 years of American existence--invites them to a fancy, gold-plated, dress-up party, they have the moral right and responsibility to say "no thank you," especially when the blood, sweat, and tears and bodies, of black, brown, and native people are stuffed in the envelope alongside the RSVP.
This should have been a teachable moment for the President of Talladega College instead it has become a moment of divisiveness and shame. Bags of money and the promise of opportunity have always been waved in front of the faces and lives of struggling human beings, who have historically been relegated to the first-fired and the last-hired slots of life. It has been used to separate us before. It has now been used to separate us again.
Stan Van Gundy, Detroit Pistons Coach: "We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus"
Speaking about Trump after his election victory, Stan Van Gundy, coach of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Detroit Pistons, said in part:
We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus, and I have problems with thinking that this is where we are as a country. It's tough on [the team], we noticed it coming in. Everybody was a little quiet, and I thought, "Well, maybe the game the other night." [The Pistons were badly beaten in the game that night.] And so we talked about that, but then Aron Baynes said, "I don't think that's why everybody's quiet. It's last night."
It's just, we have said--and my daughters, the three of them--our society has said, "No, we think you should be second-class citizens. We want you to be second-class citizens. And we embrace a guy who is openly misogynistic as our leader." I don't know how we get past that.
Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice." I would have believed in that for a long time, but not today.... What we have done to minorities... in this election is despicable. I'm having a hard time dealing with it. This isn't your normal candidate. I don't know even know if I have political differences with him. I don't even know what are his politics. I don't know, other than to build a wall and "I hate people of color, and women are to be treated as sex objects and as servants to men." I don't know how you get past that. I don't know how you walk into the booth and vote for that. I understand problems with the economy. I understand all the problems with Hillary Clinton, I do. But certain things in our country should disqualify you. And the fact that millions and millions of Americans don't think that racism and sexism disqualifies you to be our leader, in our country....
We presume to tell other countries about human-rights abuses and everything else. We better never do that again, when our leaders talk to China or anybody else about human-rights abuses. We just elected an openly, brazen misogynist leader and we should keep our mouths shut and realize that we need to be learning maybe from the rest of the world, because we don't got anything to teach anybody...
To see a YouTube of Van Gundy's remarks (along with another NBA coach, Gregg Popovich) go here.
Scientist Lawrence M. Krauss on "Donald Trump's War on Science"
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and director of its Origins Project. He was one of the producers of the documentary film The Unbelievers, which promotes a scientific view of the world. An article by Krauss appeared in the December 13 issue of The New Yorker titled, "Donald Trump's War on Science." In this article Krauss says:
The first sign of Trump's intention to spread lies about empirical reality, "1984"-style, was, of course, the appointment of Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, as Trump's "senior counselor and strategist." This year, Breitbart hosted stories with titles such as "1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016," despite the fact that 2016 is now overwhelmingly on track to be the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2013. Such stories do more than spread disinformation. Their purpose is the creation of an alternative reality--one in which scientific evidence is a sham--so that hyperbole and fearmongering can divide and conquer the public.
Bannon isn't the only propagandist in the new Administration: Myron Ebell, who heads the transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency, is another. In the aughts, as a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he worked to kill a cap-and-trade bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; in 2012, when the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a meeting about the economics of a possible carbon tax, he asked donors to defund it. It's possible, of course, to oppose cap-and-trade or carbon taxes in good faith--and yet, in recent years, Ebell's work has come to center on lies about science and scientists. Today, as the leader of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-climate-science group, Ebell denies the veracity and methodology of science itself. He dismisses complex computer models that have been developed by hundreds of researchers by saying that they "don't even pass the laugh test." If Ebell's methods seem similar to those used by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health effects of smoking in the nineteen-nineties, that's because he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.
When Ebell's appointment was announced, Jeremy Symons, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said, "I got a sick feeling in my gut.... I can't believe we got to the point when someone who is as unqualified and intellectually dishonest as Myron Ebell has been put in a position of trust for the future of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we are going to leave our kids." Symons was right to be apprehensive: on Wednesday, word came that Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma's attorney general, will be named the head of the E.P.A. As Jane Mayer has written, it would be hard to find a public official in the United States who is more closely tied to the oil-and-gas industry and who has been more actively opposed to the efforts of the E.P.A. to regulate the environment. In a recent piece for National Review, Pruitt denied the veracity of climate science; he has led the effort among Republican attorneys general to work directly with the fossil-fuel industry in resisting the Clean Air Act. In 2014, a Times investigation found that letters from Pruitt's office to the E.P.A. and other government agencies had been drafted by energy lobbyists; right now, he is involved in a twenty-eight-state lawsuit against the very agency that he has been chosen to head...
And the Trump Administration is on course to undermine science in another way: through education. Educators have various concerns about Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education--they object to her efforts to shield charter schools from government regulation, for example--but one issue stands above the rest: DeVos is a fundamentalist Christian with a long history of opposition to science. If her faith shapes her policies--and there is evidence that it will--she could shape science education decisively for the worse, by systematically depriving young people, in an era where biotechnology will play a key economic and health role worldwide, of a proper understanding of the very basis of modern biology: evolution....
Taken singly, Trump's appointments are alarming. But taken as a whole they can be seen as part of a larger effort to undermine the institution of science, and to deprive it of its role in the public-policy debate. Just as Steve Bannon undermines the institution of a fact-based news media, so appointments like Ebell, Pruitt, McMorris Rodgers, Walker, and DeVos advance the false perception that science is just a politicized tool of "the elites."
...It is not only scientists who should actively fight against this dangerous trend. It is everyone who is concerned about our freedom, health, welfare, and security as a nation--and everyone who is concerned about the planetary legacy we leave for our children.
To read the whole article go here .
Mormon Church Members Protest Mormon Tabernacle Choir Singing at Trump's Inauguration
Some members of the Mormon church are protesting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing at Trump's inauguration. A petition saying "Mormon Tabernacle Choir Should NOT Perform at Trump Inauguration" has now been signed by close to 19,000 people. It says in part: "As members and friends of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we strongly urge the Church to stop this practice and especially for an incoming president who has demonstrated sexist, racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic behavior that does not align with the principles and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." The online petition can be found here .
Law Students Speak Out Against Trump's Attorney General Nominee: "Sessions stated that he believed the Ku Klux Klan was okay"
After Trump nominated Alabama white supremacist and Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the American Constitution Society (ACS) at Harvard Law School--one of the most prestigious law schools in the world--wrote a letter to Trump opposing the nomination and began distributing it for signatures through ACS chapters across the country. As of December 22, it was signed by 1,060 law students from many different schools.
The letter points at some of Sessions's outrageous record:
*"As a four-term member of the U.S. Senate, former Alabama Attorney General and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, Senator Sessions consistently opposed laws advancing civil rights, environmental protections, reproductive rights, criminal justice, voting rights, immigration and marriage equality."
*"During the unsuccessful confirmation hearing [for federal judgeship in 1986], witnesses testified under oath that Sessions described a white civil rights attorney as a 'race traitor'; referred to a black attorney as 'boy'; and called the ACLU, NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Council of Churches and other groups 'un-American organizations.'"
*"During the 1986 hearing, a former colleague also testified that Sessions stated that he believed the Ku Klux Klan was okay, until he learned its members smoked marijuana."
The letter and signatories are online here .
National Nurses United: Trump pick for Health and Human Services would throw "our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans at the mercy of the healthcare industry"
National Nurses United (NNU) is the largest union of registered nurses in the United States. It recently organized a national network of volunteer RNs to go to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to meet the first aid needs of thousands who were there to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline. On December 22, the NNU sent a letter calling on the Senate to reject Trump's nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tom Price.
According to a NNU press release, the letter says in part: "If confirmed, it is clear that Rep. Price will pursue policies that substantially erode our nation's health and security--eliminating health coverage, reducing access, shifting more costs to working people and their families, and throwing our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans at the mercy of the healthcare industry."
Price has played a major role in attempts by Republicans to undercut or repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obama's healthcare law (see " Tom Price, Trump's Pick for Health and Human Services: A Slasher of Healthcare for the Poor and Women "). The NNU letter says: "Even today, four years after enactment of the Affordable Care Act, we have seen a drop in U.S. life expectancy rates for the first time in decades, millions of people who self-ration prescription medications or other critical medical treatment due to the high out-of-pocket costs, and continuing disparities in our health care system based on race, gender, age, socio-economic status, or where you live.
"While our organization repeatedly voiced concerns that the ACA did not go far enough, repealing the law, especially the expansion of Medicaid which extended health care coverage to millions of low and moderate income adults, and limits on some of the most chronicled abuses in our present insurance based system, would only exacerbate a healthcare crisis many Americans continue to experience..."
Read the NNU press release here .
Thousands of Doctors Speak Out Against Trump's Pick to Head Health and Human Services
On November 29, the American Medical Association (AMA), which represents about a quarter of doctors in the U.S., issued a statement saying that it "strongly supports" Trump's nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tom Price, and calling on the Senate to "promptly consider and confirm" him for the position.
In response, three physicians from the University of Pennsylvania--Drs. Manik Chhabra, Navin Vij and Jane Zhu--posted a statement online opposing the Trump nominee. The statement has been signed by over 5,500 doctors as of December 16.
Their statement, "The AMA Does Not Speak for Us," says in part:
We are practicing physicians who deliver healthcare in hospitals and clinics, in cities and rural towns; we are specialists and generalists, and we care for the poor and the rich, the young and the elderly. We see firsthand the difficulties that Americans face daily in accessing affordable, quality healthcare. We believe that in issuing this statement of support for Dr. Price, the AMA has reneged on a fundamental pledge that we as physicians have taken -- to protect and advance care for our patients.
We support patient choice. But Dr. Price's proposed policies threaten to harm our most vulnerable patients and limit their access to healthcare. We cannot support the dismantling of Medicaid, which has helped 15 million Americans gain health coverage since 2014. We oppose Dr. Price's proposals to reduce funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a critical mechanism by which poor children access preventative care. We wish to protect essential health benefits like treatment for opioid use disorder, prenatal care, and access to contraception.
We see benefits in market-based solutions to some of our healthcare system's challenges. Like many others, we advocate for improvements in the way healthcare is delivered. But Dr. Price purports to care about efficiency, while opposing innovations by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to improve value and eliminate waste in healthcare. He supports plans to privatize Medicare, a critical program which covers 44 million of our elderly patients.
The AMA's vision statement includes "improving health outcomes" and "better health for all," and yet by supporting Dr. Price's candidacy -- and therefore, his views -- the AMA has not aligned itself with the well-being of patients.
For the complete statement and list of signatories, go here .
Merrill Miller, Associate Editor of TheHumanist.com: "Now is the time for us to stand in solidarity with those who face oppression"
Merrill Miller is associate editor of TheHumanist.com and Communications Associate at the American Humanist Association. The January/February 2017 issue of the Humanist includes an article by Miller titled, "Who Will We Speak For? Humanism's Role in Defending Human Rights and Civil Liberties." The piece starts with the famous quote from Protestant pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent seven years in one of Hitler's concentration camps, about how he had not spoken out when the Nazis attacked different sections of the people until there was no one left to speak for him.
Miller writes: "For many humanists and those in the progressive community at large, these past weeks have, in some ways, felt like decades. We've seen Hillary Clinton win the popular vote for president by an enormous margin and still lose the Electoral College to Donald Trump, who is now president-elect. We've seen Stephen Bannon, who fueled the fires of racism, sexism, and bigotry in his time at Breitbart News, named as a chief strategist for the Trump administration, as climate change deniers and individuals with no respect for church-state separation (Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, for one) are being nominated or considered for other top positions. We've heard talk of legislation that would chip away at our constitutional right to free, peaceable assembly, such as Washington State Senator Doug Ericksen's bill to classify street protests as a form of 'economic terrorism'...
"Humanists are in a unique position to demonstrate outrage...We must harness that capacity for outrage now--not just to defend church-state separation but to protect all of our basic human rights and civil liberties.
"We can start by directing that outrage at the notion that the government would profile and register people based on their race and religion, as the Muslim registry would do. While current discussions of this registry would focus on immigrants, Trump said during his campaign that he would require all Muslims to register, presumably including US citizens. Humanist groups should reach out to their local mosques and Islamic community centers and ask them what their community needs are and how to help...
"Now is the time for us to stand in solidarity with those who face oppression, whether they are undocumented immigrants in danger of losing their basic human dignity or women in danger of losing their hard-won reproductive rights. We must stand up for all people of color and LGBTQ individuals, who are terrified by the bigotry unleashed by Trump's campaign and his coming presidency. We must stand up for healthcare for the elderly and for everyone in our nation or else more than 22 million people (as estimated by Vox) will be without it, even though a national, single-payer healthcare system should be considered a human right. We must stand with the labor movement to fight for economic justice for all low-wage workers, whose rights will be threatened by Republican-controlled executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government. We must do all that we can to protect these and other vulnerable communities and individuals, because the very foundations of our democracy, our civil liberties, and our human rights are at stake. If humanists and nontheists don't speak up for these marginalized groups while we can, there is a distinct possibility that when we're specifically threatened, there will be no one left to speak for us."
To read the full article go here .
Andrea Bocelli Fans Raise Uproar to Stop Him from Singing at Trump Inauguration
Apparently Donald Trump is a fan of the famous Italian opera tenor Andrea Bocelli. When word went out that Trump had approached Bocelli to perform at his inauguration, and there were reports that Bocelli had tentatively agreed (which, if true, is utterly shameful), there was a huge uproar of protest from Bocelli's fans. Some threatened to #BoycottBocelli if he decided to sing on January 20. Here are a few tweets, among many: "Dumped @AndreaBocelli CD's in trash, won't be buying tickets to Feb. Orlando concert after all. DONE with him. Will #boycottBocelli forever." "Please accept the inauguration offer because the Klu Klux Klan makes great fans!" "Contact @AndreaBocelli's booking agent & manager to warn of #BoycottBocelli if he sings for fascist Trump." One fan wrote on Facebook: "Mr Bocelli, please do not sing for Donald Trump. He stands for racism, misogyny, and hatred of others. Music is beautiful, sacred. Don't let this man buy you and desecrate art, hope, and beauty."
In the face of the outrage from so many of his fans, Bocelli announced he would not be performing at the inauguration. Trump's people claimed that they had rescinded the invitation.
Earlier, in the summer, the widow and daughters of another famous Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, asked Trump to stop using his recording of Puccini's aria "Nessun Dorma" at his campaign events. They said that "the values of brotherhood and solidarity which Luciano Pavarotti expressed throughout the course of his artistic career are entirely incompatible with the worldview offered by the candidate Donald Trump."
Hollywood PR Agency Cancels Parties to "defend the values we hold dear"
Sunshine Sachs is a PR agency that represents stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Natalie Portman. Every year they usually hold a big holiday party, on both the East and West coasts. But this year they didn't feel the usual "holiday cheer." CEO Shawn Sachs said, "However I felt the morning after [Trump was elected] was nothing compared to how I felt talking to people in this office, those who felt their citizenship--in a matter of moments--was gone or had been lessened... Being the diverse workplace we are, many of us felt under assault." So Sunshine Sachs cancelled its annual bicoastal holiday celebrations, and will donate the money that would have been spent for the lavish galas to 16 different organizations, including the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, the Environmental Defense Fund and Planned Parenthood. The agency sent out an email saying their decision was a gesture to "defend the values we hold dear."
George Takei Speaks Out Against Trump on Nuclear Weapons and Registry for Muslims
Responding to Trump saying he wants to "strengthen and expand" the nuclear capabilities of the U.S., actor George Takei tweeted on Thursday, December 22: "Trump wants to expand our nuclear arsenal. I think of my aunt and baby cousin, found burnt in a ditch in Hiroshima. These weapons must go."
Takei and his family spent years in one of the U.S. concentration ("internment") camps for people of Japanese descent during World War 2. In his November 18 op-ed for the Washington Post titled, " They interned my family. Don't let them do it to Muslims ," Takei wrote:
"During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community necessitate draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security....
"Let us all be clear: 'National security' must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.
"Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security...."
In a December 8 interview on CNN, Takei said that during World War 2, before they were sent to an internment camp, his family was placed on a registry of Japanese Americans and subjected to a curfew: "We were confined to our homes from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the morning, imprisoned in our homes at night. Then they froze our bank accounts. We were economically paralyzed. Then the soldiers came... I remember the two soldiers walking up our driveway, marching up our driveway, shiny bayonets on the rifle, stopping at the front porch and with their fists started banging on the front door and that sound resonated throughout the house...."
Takei connected that history to what is happening today: "It is an echo of what we heard from World War II coming from Trump himself. That sweeping statement characterizing all Muslims. There are more than a billion Muslims in this world. To infer they are all terrorists with that kind of sweeping statement is outrageous, in the same way that they characterized all Japanese Americans as enemy aliens."
Patti Smith's rendition of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" at Nobel Prize ceremony resonates powerfully today
At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, singer Patti Smith performed a moving tribute to Bob Dylan, the winner of this year's laureate for literature. She chose to sing one of Dylan's songs--"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," released in 1963, a time when the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests were a sign of the times.
Check out the performance here:
The final stanza, especially, resonates very powerfully today:
"And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son? And what'll you do now, my darling young one? I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin' I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest Where the people are many and their hands are all empty Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison And the executioner's face is always well hidden Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten Where black is the color, where none is the number And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin' But I'll know my song well before I start singin' And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."
Danny Glover: "We have to fight him every inch"
At a December 7 rally in Washington, DC, to support striking federal workers, actor Danny Glover criticized people who say Trump should be given "a chance." Glover said, "Give him a chance what? We know who he is. We know exactly who he is. We have to accept that. But we have to fight him every inch. We have to fight him every moment."
Time magazine had just come with their annual "Person of the Year" issue with Trump on the cover. Glover said, "It's irresponsible to make him Person of the Year. Based on what? Based on the fact that he won the Electoral College? Based on the fact that he lied to people? Based on the fact that all the stories of all he's done to women and what he thinks about women? Based on his racism? A racist as Person of the Year? I'm appalled, I'm appalled. I'm angry now that Time magazine would name this person Person of the Year. It's incredible." He said this was a "slap in our face" and "the most disrespectful thing."
Rosie O'Donnell: "Not My President"
Actor and TV personality Rosie O'Donnell has been calling on people to stand up against Trump in a number of recent tweets. In response to someone who tweeted, "we need to organize an anti-Trump inauguration," O'Donnell tweeted: "no one go - film urself - periscope STANDING keep saying 'NOT MY PRESIDENT - LIFE - WITH MILLIONS OF OTHERS." She also wrote "its called STAY HOME - DO NOT WATCH IT." And she quoted from writer and journalist Norman Cousins: "There is nothing more powerful than an individual acting out of conscience."
IBM Employees Denounce CEO's Collaboration with Trump
On November 15, IBM Corporation CEO, Ginni Rometty, published an open letter to Donald Trump, offering the tech giant's cooperation to "advance a national agenda" and offering "ideas that I believe will help achieve the aspiration you articulated" in his Election-night acceptance speech.
The following week, Elizabeth Wood, a senior content specialist in IBM Marketing, wrote her own open letter, denouncing Rometty's shameless offer to collaborate with the new fascist regime, and resigning from her position.
Wood's letter said (all emphasis in original):
" Your letter offered the backing of IBM's global workforce in support of his agenda that preys on marginalized people and threatens my well-being as a woman, a Latina and a concerned citizen. The company's hurry to do this was a tacit endorsement of his position. ...
"The president-elect has demonstrated contempt for immigrants, veterans, people with disabilities, Black, Latinx, Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ communities. These groups comprise a growing portion of the company you lead, Ms. Rometty. ...
" When the president-elect follows through on his repeated threats to create a public database of Muslims, what will IBM do? Your letter neglects to mention. 1
Read Wood's entire letter here .
Wood's action inspired others at IBM to stand up. In early December, 10 current IBM employees started a petition to Rometty insisting that IBM has "a moral and business imperative to uphold the pillars of a free society by declining any projects which undermine liberty, such as surveillance tools threatening freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure," and that "history teach[es] us that accommodating those who unleash forces of aggressive nationalism, bigotry, racism, fear, and exclusion inevitably yields devastating outcomes for millions of innocents." 2 And they specifically demand that IBM execs respect the right of individual employees to "refuse participation in any U.S. contracts that violate constitutional and civil liberties."
The petition circulated privately at first, and went public on December 19. It now has at least 500 signatories--employees, former employees, IBM stockholders and others in the tech community. The petition is available online here .
1. On December 16, after Wood's letter was published, as well as a statement from at least 800 tech workers saying they would refuse to work on such a Muslim registry, IBM, as well as Google, Apple and Uber, all told BuzzFeed that they also would refuse. [ back ]
2. This history includes the fact that IBM put its precursor to the computer--the IBM punch card sorter system--at the service of Hitler's genocide of Jewish people. In IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black writes: "IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before--the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting machines were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation." [ back ]
Writers Resist NYC: Louder Together for Free Expression
On January 15, writers across the U.S. and other countries are holding Writers Resist events to "focus public attention on the ideals of a free, just, and compassionate society." The "flagship" event on that day is slated for New York City and is co-sponsored by the writers' group PEN America. It is described on the PEN America website as a "literary protest" that will be held on the steps of the New York City Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan "to defend free expression, reject hate crimes and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation."
The protest "will bring together hundreds of writers and artists and thousands of New Yorkers on the birthday of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. American poet laureates Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove will each offer hope and inspiration with original 'inaugural' poems written for the occasion."
And, "After the readings and performances, a group of PEN America leaders and any who wish to join will walk the blocks to Trump Tower together to present PEN America's free expression pledge on the First Amendment signed by over 110,000 individuals to a member of the President-elect's team. We are confident the reading at the library and the subsequent march, as two distinct but powerful events to uphold free expression and human rights for all, will be powerful."
According to Writers Resist organizers, in addition to NYC, January15 events are planned for "Houston, Austin, New Orleans, Seattle, Spokane, Los Angeles, London, Zurich, Boston, Omaha, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Madison, Milwaukee, Bloomington, Baltimore, Oakland, Tallahassee, Newport, Santa Fe, Salt Lake, and Portland (Oregon AND Maine) and many other cities."
For more on the protest and participants, go here .
500 Women Scientists: "We reject the hateful rhetoric that was given a voice during the U.S. presidential election..."
An online letter by a group of women scientists against Trump's attacks on science and on his hateful poison directed at different sections of the people has gathered over 11,000 signatures from around the world as of December 23. In an article published by Scientific American, ecologist Kelly Ramirez said that, after the Trump-Pence victory, she and a small group of scientist friends began discussing "how can we take action?" On November 17, they posted their letter with signatures of 500 women scientists.
The letter begins: "Science is foundational in a progressive society, fuels innovation, and touches the lives of every person on this planet. The anti-knowledge and anti-science sentiments expressed repeatedly during the U.S. presidential election threaten the very foundations of our society. Our work as scientists and our values as human beings are under attack. We fear that the scientific progress and momentum in tackling our biggest challenges, including staving off the worst impacts of climate change, will be severely hindered under this next U.S. administration. Our planet cannot afford to lose any time.
"In this new era of anti-science and misinformation, we as women scientists re-affirm our commitment to build a more inclusive society and scientific enterprise. We reject the hateful rhetoric that was given a voice during the U.S. presidential election and which targeted minority groups, women, LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual], immigrants, and people with disabilities, and attempted to discredit the role of science in our society. Many of us feel personally threatened by this divisive and destructive rhetoric and have turned to each other for understanding, strength, and a path forward. We are members of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. We are immigrants. We are people with disabilities. We are LGBTQIA. We are scientists. We are women."
The letter outlines a number of actions that the signers pledge to take "to increase diversity in science and other disciplines." The complete letter (available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch, and Farsi), signatories, and other related information is available online here .
Mystery Writer Elizabeth George: "I will not ever accept what's going on right now in the US as the new normal"
Elizabeth George is a U.S.-based writer of mystery novels set in Great Britain. She is widely known for her series of books featuring Inspector Thomas Lynley. In a recent post titled "Mea Culpa" on her website, part of a series of essays on the 2016 elections, George wrote in part: "...what I cannot forgive is the effort being made on all sides to normalize what is going on, to say 'let's give him a chance.' To this I say that, for me, what's going on is not the new normal. So far and at the time of my writing this, Donald Trump has given cabinet positions to two of his billionaire friends, has chosen a Wall Street bigwig from Goldman Sachs to head the Treasury Department, has selected a foe not only of women's rights to choose but also of insurance supplied contraception as his head of Health and Human Services, has chosen a racist as his attorney general, has chosen a climate-change denying non-scientist to head the EPA, has chosen a woman who sank the educational system in Detroit to be the head of the Department of Education.... If at some horrible point in the future, Muslims are told that they must register, I intend to register as a Muslim and I encourage everyone else to do the same. I will not ever accept what's going on right now in the US as the new normal."
She closes the essay with: "Normal is actually standing for something and drawing a line in the sand across which racial hatred, religious intolerance, sexual aggression, misogyny, fascism, Nazism, white supremacy, Hitler salutes, the Ku Klux Klan, and LGBTQ persecution dare not cross.
"That's the new normal, that's the old normal, and that's the only normal that I will ever accept or support."
Read the whole piece by Elizabeth George here .
Playwright and Literature Professor Ariel Dorfman: "Now America Knows How Chile Felt"
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American playwright, novelist, human rights activist and an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University. In an op-ed titled "Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt" that appeared in the New York Times on December 17, Dorfman describes how after Salvador Allende had won the presidential election in 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon and the CIA worked to undermine the results, including the assassination of a general who stood in the way of the U.S. plans. When the U.S. was not able to block Allende's inauguration, "American intelligence services, at Henry A. Kissinger's behest, continued to assail our sovereignty, sabotaging our prosperity ('make the economy scream,' Nixon ordered) and fostering military unrest. Finally, on Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was ousted, replaced by a vicious dictatorship that lasted nearly 17 years. Years of torture, executions, disappearances and exile."
Dorfman notes the irony of the CIA "now crying foul because its tactics have been imitated by a powerful international rival," referring to allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections. He writes that when Donald Trump dismisses those allegations, "he is bizarrely echoing the very responses that so many Chileans got in the early '70s when we accused the C.I.A. of illegal intervention in our internal affairs." And Dorman writes, "The United States cannot in good faith decry what has been done to its citizens until it is ready to face what it did so often to the equally decent citizens of other nations. And it must resolve never to engage in such imperious activities again."
Ariel Dorfman's piece is online here .
Neveragain.tech: "We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable"
On December 13, a group of people who work in tech organizations and companies based in the U.S. issued a strong statement pledging "solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration's proposed data collection policies." They said they refuse to build databases of people based on their religious beliefs and to facilitate mass deportations. Their statement was also in defiance of top execs from major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, and Alphabet (Google), who a day earlier met with Trump, adding to the efforts to normalize fascism.
The statement says: "We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust , contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past--among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.
"Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again."
As of the evening of December 14 the statement has close to 800 signers. The statement and other resources are available here .
In a piece titled "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" in Monthly Review , Susie Day writes:
"People often compare the ascendance of Trump and his cabinet of deplorables to the rise of the Nazis --taking momentary refuge in the fact that 1933 Germany didn't have the nuclear option. Apropos of Trump's take on flag burning, one of the first things Hitler did as chancellor was to rescind freedom of speech, assembly, the press. . . Then the arrest of political opponents, the forcing of Jews to register their property , wear Stars of David . Remember those "good" Germans, who may have lamented, but went along because they could--because they still fit in to what remained normal?'
Read the entire article here
Cornel West: "Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here"
...In this bleak moment, we must inspire each other driven by a democratic soulcraft of integrity, courage, empathy and a mature sense of history - even as it seems our democracy is slipping away.
We must not turn away from the forgotten people of US foreign policy - such as Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Yemen's civilians killed by US-sponsored Saudi troops or Africans subject to expanding US military presence.
As one whose great family and people survived and thrived through slavery, Jim Crow and lynching, Trump's neofascist rhetoric and predictable authoritarian reign is just another ugly moment that calls forth the best of who we are and what we can do.
For us in these times, to even have hope is too abstract, too detached, too spectatorial. Instead we must be a hope, a participant and a force for good as we face this catastrophe.
Read entire statement here
Guns N' Roses Invites Mexico Fans Onstage to Destroy Trump Pinata
On November 30, in the middle of a song they were performing at Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City, the band Guns N' Roses cut the music and brought a giant pinata of Donald Trump onstage. According to an online TIME magazine report, Axl Rose, the band's front man, said, "Let's bring up some people and give them a fucking stick... Express yourselves however you feel." Fans got up on the stage and began swinging at the pinata.
Undocumented in Trump's America By Jose Antonio Vargas, November 20
On election night, while making my way through a crowd gathered outside the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, a white man wearing a Mets cap patted my back and said through the noise: "Get ready to be deported." Rattled, I made it inside the green room and waited to go on the air.
I am an undocumented immigrant. I outed myself in a very public way in The New York Times in 2011, and since then have appeared regularly on cable news programs, especially on Fox, to humanize the very political and polarizing issue of immigration ...
What will you do when they start rounding us up?
Read entire article here
An abortion doctor on Trump's win: "I fear for my life. I fear for my patients." By Warren M. Hern, November 11
As I've headed to work in recent days to see abortion patients in my office, I have felt bereft: All the premises of my life, work, education, and future were gone. Something very profound in the meaning of the America I know has been destroyed with the election of Donald J. Trump as president ...
Under an unrestrained Donald Trump and this Republican Congress, I fear for my life, I fear for my family, and I fear for my future. I fear for my staff and my patients.
Even more, I fear for my country, and I fear for the world.
Read entire article here
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: "We cannot let justice be denied by waiting. History has shown us over and over what horrors that leads to."
In a December 1 article for the Washington Post online edition, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calls for resistance against Trump. Writing from his viewpoint of protecting this country's "most sacred values," Abdul-Jabbar criticizes others and their "hide-beneath-the-bed tactic"--like Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, who says "we should take a look-and-see approach" and Black Entertainment Television founder and Hillary Clinton supporter Bob Johnson who said African Americans should give Trump "the benefit of the doubt." He writes that the appointments Trump has been making already show that "these people and their contra-constitutional view are a clear and present danger" and calls for civil disobedience in different forms.
See Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's article here .
In a November 10 speech in the Irish Parliament, Senator Aodhan O Riordain made a strong speech denouncing Donald Trump as a fascist--and condemning the Irish government's conciliatory response.
After the election of Trump, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny called to congratulate him and ask whether the annual White House celebration of St. Patrick's Day was still on. Irish Senator Aodhan O'Riordain, fired off this response in the Irish Seanad (Senate):
Edmund Burke once said the only way evil can prosper is for good men to do nothing. American has just elected a fascist and the best thing that good people in Ireland can do is to ring him up and ask him if they can still bring the Shamrock on St. Patrick's Day. I'm embarrassed about what the Irish government has done I can't believe the reaction from the government. And I don't use the word fascist lightly. What else would you call somebody threatens to imprison his political opponents? What else would you call somebody who threatens to not allow people of a certain religious faith into their country? What would you say, or how would you describe somebody who is threatening to deport 10 million people. What would you say about somebody who says that the media is rigged, the judiciary is rigged, the political system is rigged. And then he wins the election and the best we can come out with is a call to say is it still ok to bring the shamrock...I am frightened. I am frightened for what is happening in this world and in our inability to stand up to it. I want to ask you, leader, to ask the Minister of Foreign of Affairs into this house and ask him how we are supposed to deal with this monster who has just been elected president of America because I don't think any of us in years to come should look back on this period and say we didn't do everything in our power to call it out for what it is.
See the whole speech below.
This Irish politician just said what many American leaders are too scared to say about Trump pic.twitter.com/Q2MeB815jz -- NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 17, 2016
Andrew Sullivan: "The Republic Repeals Itself"
Andrew Sullivan is a well-known conservative writer and online commentator, currently a contributing editor to the New York magazine. We want to bring to our readers' attention a November 9 online article by Sullivan titled " The Republic Repeals Itself ." While we have differences with Sullivan overall and with this particular article in certain dimensions, we think he makes important points that are worthy of reflection.
Read Andrew Sullivan's piece here . |
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In the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy, Black Lives Matter Louisville co-founder Chanelle Helm has helpfully listed a few ways white people can do better when it comes to race relations.
. @ChanelleHelm , cofounder and core organizer of @BLMLouisville , has a few requests for white people. https://t.co/0XZNh71MD1
-- Leo Weekly (@leoweekly) August 18, 2017
Call them "requests," because that's what she calls them as she proceeds to brazenly ask for the moon and more in her "Southern, black grandmamma voice."
The first few involve direct transfers of property, reparations, if you will. Things like willing "your property to a black or brown family" that "preferably ... lives in generational poverty."
"Preferably," we suppose, because if it's a RICH "black or brown family" apparently that would work too. Hey, we're talking about putting wealth in the hands of the good guys, right?
Helm's "requests" also include donations to "black funds for land purchasing," developers and realty owners building "in a black or brown blighted neighborhood and let black and brown people live in it for free," downsizing and giving up your old home "to a black or brown family - again "preferably" one from "generational poverty" - and changing your will to leave your property to people of color if your current inheritors are "racist assholes."
Three of Helm's requests involve getting various "they asses fired," or something. We'll quote the whole thing because you can't leave before getting a taste of Helm's "Southern, black grandmamma voice," especially when she's trying to ruin people's lives and even commit violence against them for disagreeing with her on the issue of race.
7. White people, especially white women (because this is yaw specialty -- Nosey Jenny and Meddling Kathy), get a racist fired. Yaw know what the fuck they be saying. You are complicit when you ignore them. Get your boss fired cause they racist too.
8. Backing up No. 7, this should be easy but all those sheetless Klan, Nazi's and Other lil' dick-white men will all be returning to work. Get they ass fired. Call the police even: they look suspicious.
9. OK, backing up No. 8, if any white person at your work, or as you enter in spaces and you overhear a white person praising the actions from yesterday, first, get a pic. Get their name and more info. Hell, find out where they work -- Get Them Fired. But certainly address them, and, if you need to, you got hands: use them.
Twitter reaction to Helm's "requests" were particularly strong:
If this doesn't show that #BLM is all about the almighty dollar & reparations, then nothing will. All they want is white people bankrupted
This is a troll account right? these arent legitimate? Demanding things be given to you based on race is the definition of racial privilege
-- Brazen (@Brazen2014) August 20, 2017
There is literally 0% chance of me doing this. When I die, I will leave everything to my children. If not them, then to my church.
-- Tiffany Marin Jones (@Tiffers919) August 21, 2017
Bahahahahahaha, good one. Yaw funny.
I prefer donating $ to @UNCF @NAACP and other worthy causes. Please excuse me if I find your suggestions ridiculous.
-- Matthew Matheny (@MatthewMatheny4) August 22, 2017
-- Tiffany Smith (@booperdakitty) August 22, 2017
More free handouts for doing nothing. Work hard and you will get what you want, plenty blacks do.
-- Tammy Pelc (@Germanengel81) August 22, 2017
wow so this is definitely stupid.
-- Chloe Simone Valdary (@cvaldary) August 20, 2017
10 requests from a black nazi
-- WonderUK (@8thWonderUK) August 19, 2017
Op-ed v iews and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.
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Scott Morefield is a news and opinion columnist for BizPac Review. In addition to his work on BPR, Scott's commentary can also be found on Townhall, TheBlaze, The Hill, WND, Breitbart, National Review, The Federalist, and many other sites, including A Morefield Life , where he and his wife, Kim, share their marriage and parenting journey.
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The headlines are worth scratching your head over: "Five white men are suing Diddy, for discriminating against white men."
Um, ok.
Dig a little deeper, get to the specifics and the story still seems a little odd.
It seems five white men are suing Sean "Diddy" Combs' media company, Revolt, alleging they were discriminated against for not being young, black men.
That news was reported on Tuesday by the New York Post, which says it obtained a copy of the lawsuit, which apparently was filed at the Manhattan Supreme Court.
The men say they were fired while working for the TV version of Power 105.1's morning show, "The Breakfast Club."
Obviously, discrimination at the workplace is wrong; there's no debating that. Plus, it remains to be scene how the actual lawsuit plays out.
That being said, it's fair to say this looks as ridiculous as any instance of "reverse racism" sounds.
Mind you, the lawsuit doesn't actually use those words, at least not according to the New York Post's report. But because the topic of this lawsuit is being discussed as an accusation of reverse racism, we should point out a few things.
Reverse racisms is a myth.
As PBS' Mychal Denzel Smith noted , 'Reverse racism' only makes sense through the erasure of the power dynamics of racism, which has been accomplished through the teaching of racism as a strictly interpersonal issue of hatred and intolerance.
In other words, reverse racism only makes sense if you're delusional about how actual, pervasive, systemic racism works. "Reverse racism" is essentially used the way the president talks about "fake news."
It's seldom actually what it purports itself to be.
Now that we're past that, we can just treat this as an accusation of bias or discrimination. But even then, the lawsuit just seems so strange.
First off, the suit alleges that Revolt TV treated them "worse than other employees who were younger and African-American," an idea which will sound foreign to any employee who's actually younger and African-American.
Secondly, the suit supports its claims that black employees were favored over the white, more experienced, producers by accusing executive producer Anthony Boreland of saying "Caucasians harbored racism against African-Americans," which is unimpressive, at best.
Speaking of unimpressive, here's another doozy: One manager was accused of responding to a producer's complaint of show guests being late by saying, "he [the producer] just did not understand the 'culture' of the show's guests and on-air personalities."
There are more quotes of course, but none come anywhere close to being damning. Now add in the fact that Revolt released this statement, saying, These claims are without merit and have previously been dismissed by the EEOC. Revolt Media and TV, LLC has always been committed to diversity in the workplace and is an equal opportunity employer.
By EEOC, the company means the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the body which aims to protect employees from the type of discrimination the suit alleges.
Now, to be fair, there haven't been any reports that confirmed whether the EEOC formally took a stance on the plaintiff's complaints.
On the other hand, Revolt has been able to give its side of the story on the reasons why the five producers were let go. Both of those fact could change how we look at Diddy and his company in this matter.
As of right now, though, the lawsuit seems frivolous and flimsy. In other words, it seems just as a ridiculous as any accusation that pretends "reverse racism" is a thing.
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Protesters at Claremont McKenna College partially shut down a talk by Heather Mac Donald, author of the book The War on Cops Thursday evening. Mac Donald was forced to speak to a nearly empty auditorium and then had her talk, which was being live-streamed, cut short by police who were concerned the crowd outside was getting rowdy. The College Fix reports :
"The protesters surrounded all the doors to the Atheneum where I was supposed to speak, so none of the students who had signed up to attend my lecture could get in," Mac Donald (pictured) told The Fix . "I was hustled from my guest suite by several police officers from Claremont PD into the lecture hall. It was decided that I would give the speech for live streaming to a largely empty hall. The organizers moved the podium so that it would not be visible through the windows to the students surrounding the building once night fell. We jumpstarted the timing of my talk as the crowd seemed to be getting more unruly."...
"During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking," Mac Donald said. "An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them."
The two hundred or so protesters spent their time chanting various slogans including "Black Lives Matter," "Shut it down!" and "From Oakland to Greece, f**k the police." Incidentally, for anyone wondering why the Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner went over like a lead balloon this week, it's partly because the ad ended with Jenner giving a Pepsi to a police officer . You can imagine how well that minimal sign of mutual respect would go over with the people who, in real life, are chanting "F**k the police!" Here's video of the protest. (The College Fix has more video of the protest here .)
This semi-successful attempt to silence Mac Donald was organized on a Facebook page titled, "Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald." The Claremont Independent has more :
"Heather Mac Donald has been vocally against the Black Lives Matter movement and pro-police, both of which show her fascist ideologies and blatant anti-Blackness and white supremacy," the Facebook page adds. "Let's show CMC that having this speaker is an attack on marginalized communities both on campus and off. Together, we can hold CMC accountable and prevent Mac Donald from spewing her racist, anti-Black, capitalist, imperialist, fascist agenda."
The page also included a photo of Mac Donald with devil horns. So in addition to all the usual leftist tropes--those who disagree are racist, speech is "an attack"--the page used literal demonization to rally people.
There was a similar protest a day earlier when Mac Donald spoke at UCLA. However, protesters at UCLA actually were quiet for most of Mac Donald's actual talk, though they shouted frequently throughout the Q&A that followed. From UCLA, here's the speech protesters at Claremont McKenna didn't want people to hear:
Heather Mac Donald, "Blue Lives Matter - Cops: The Real Victims" LIVE
Posted by Bruin Republicans at UCLA on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 |
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the daily shoah the right stuff
Keith Preston recently issued a response to a short letter we wrote a while back asking him to stop calling himself an anarchist because of his racism, misogyny, and support for libertarian variants. In what is probably the most anarchist thing he could do, he responded with a letter defending his pan-anarchism and associating us with totalitarian elements of the left. This accusation is a go-to for fascist organizers shut down by anti-fascist movements, as if the freedom for loud and angry loud men to rant and rave is what liberation is really all about. The issue with Preston as an associate and supporter of the far-right is an important reason to isolate his website, Attack the System, from having any association with anarchism, as is his idea that he can reconcile completely disparate philosophical tendencies that have literally no association with one another other than the "anarcho" prefix. Preston himself mentions this after citing John Zube's bizarre dialogue on anarchism.
There are indeed many readily identifiable traditions within anarchism, some of which maintain a paradoxical relationship to each other.
He goes on to mention that anarchists are like divisions in the Christian church that refuse to recognize each other as being appropriately Christian.
What Preston hopes is that his critique will allow him to ride the wave of critiques that his title suggests, that we are being "More Anarchistic Than Thou." This is a very real response that began in the 1990s where deconstruction and a "culture of critique" formed around post-left anarchism where by people began a "one-upmanship" of who could be more "radical" or attack oppression at more "systemic" levels. This can lead to some destructive behavior as small disagreements become overpowering and destroy even fleeting unity, but this is not what is happening with Preston. While disagreements over lifestyle choices or the specifics of anti-capitalist economics are applied are completely within the realm of disagreement between associated ideologues, arguing over racial nationalism, gender essentialism, and whether or not capitalism is acceptable is simply not. No person inside of anarchist anti-oppression politics, where the "More Anarchistic Than Thou" situation often arises, would extend this anarchist umbrella to Keith Preston as the different cultural elements he celebrates (racism and capitalism) are opposed at the foundation of the anarchist project. As was said in the original article, anarchists oppose the State not out of some revulsion to organization, but because it serves a class and hierarchy. A pan-secessionist movement that Preston advocates means empowering movements that seek to crystalize the elements of the State and general social system that motivate anarchism's revolutionary potential.
Plainly put: Anarchism is founded on the desire to smash capitalism, racism, sexism, and the like, so you cannot make friends out of movements that seek to celebrate those tyrannies.
While Attack the System is more known for its National Anarchism than its Anarcho-Capitalism, the libertarian traditions are well represented on the site. Capitalism is not "a central project" of anarchism, but, in a lot of ways, the central project that began the movement. Anarchism comes out of the socialist tradition, yet a libertarian version of this as opposed to Marx's conception of revolutionary socialism developing out of Proletarian Dictatorship through a Worker's State. Anarcho-capitalism is an idea that really did not become apparent until the 1970s-80s, and comes not from the liberatory movements associated with the anarchist tradition, but for the deregulation of capitalism for completely different motivations. There were socially "left" people associated with disparate strains of Anarcho-capitalism, but that does not make them any more associated with the tradition than liberals who share the anarchist disdain for sexism. The question of Anarcho-capitalism, which is a strong part of the synthesis that Preston attempts, is brought up into the massive FAQ project that Ian McKay as put together.
While "anarcho"-capitalists obviously try to associate themselves with the anarchist tradition by using the word "anarcho" or by calling themselves "anarchists" their ideas are distinctly at odds with those associated with anarchism. As a result, any claims that their ideas are anarchist or that they are part of the anarchist tradition or movement are false.
"Anarcho"-capitalists claim to be anarchists because they say that they oppose government. As noted in the last section , they use a dictionary definition of anarchism. However, this fails to appreciate that anarchism is a political theory . As dictionaries are rarely politically sophisticated things, this means that they fail to recognise that anarchism is more than just opposition to government, it is also marked a opposition to capitalism (i.e. exploitation and private property). Thus, opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist -- you also need to be opposed to exploitation and capitalist private property. As "anarcho"-capitalists do not consider interest, rent and profits (i.e. capitalism) to be exploitative nor oppose capitalist property rights, they are not anarchists.
Part of the problem is that Marxists, like many academics, also tend to assert that anarchists are simply against the state. It is significant that both Marxists and "anarcho"-capitalists tend to define anarchism as purely opposition to government. This is no co-incidence, as both seek to exclude anarchism from its place in the wider socialist movement. This makes perfect sense from the Marxist perspective as it allows them to present their ideology as the only serious anti-capitalist one around (not to mention associating anarchism with "anarcho"-capitalism is an excellent way of discrediting our ideas in the wider radical movement). It should go without saying that this is an obvious and serious misrepresentation of the anarchist position as even a superficial glance at anarchist theory and history shows that no anarchist limited their critique of society simply at the state.
McKay goes on to deconstruct allegations that Individualist anarchists that some anarchists claim affinity with are capitalist, who have a much different conception of property than people like Hayek or Rothbard.
The question comes up of exactly what totalitarianism is as it is the "totalitarian humanism" that Preston talks about is a problem of the left and distracts the left's claims of liberation. Preston's critique is especially precious given his belief that completely deregulated capitalism is acceptable in his "liberated" society. As Daibhidh points out in Anarcho-Hucksters , to allow a "Boss" to take place in an "anarchist" society, which is unequivocally necessary in any form of capitalism, undermines the basic assumptions of the anarchist project.
"Anarcho" capitalists talk of freedom as a negative, in a (Ayn) Randian definition of: "the absence of physical violence" . They see capitalism as the epitome of this ethic, and the State as the antithesis of it (defining the State as "the institution with a monopoly of force") .
This is the cornerstone of their professed anarchism. They say, "we oppose the State; anarchists oppose government; ergo, we are anarchists."
But anarchists look at that statement and ask: What of the boss in the workplace? What of the wealthy owner of property? What of the capitalist industrialist? What of the church elder? What of the judge? What of the patriarch of a family?
Don't these people have very real authority over others' lives? Haven't each of these, in their way, brought shame, misery, and degradation to those under their control?
The "anarcho" capitalist has no problem with rulers below State level, so long as they don't impinge on profit and property! So, if your boss eavesdropped on your calls, the "anarcho" capitalist would say, "hey, you can always get a new job" rather than taking the anarchist stance of "how dare X boss eavesdrop on their employees?! We must work to end workplace tyranny!"
In fact, to the "anarcho" capitalist, being able to work for whomever you want (including working for clients [e.g., "self"-employment) is what they consider "freedom". This amounts to choosing who gets to be your boss! Some choice, huh?
Anarchists, in contrast, don't think there should BE any bosses. Everyone pulls their fair share of the collective social burden of day-to-day living. And, while everyone works, the distinction between this and typical capitalist drudgery is that, in anarchy, you'd be working for your own needs, rather than for the profit of another! As such, you wouldn't have to put in 40+ hour weeks lining the pockets of whoever owns the company you work for (or servicing your clients' needs).
The tyranny that people experience is rooted in fundamental inequalities, both social and systemic. Without the ability to challenge those dynamics then there is no liberation, and to allow wage-slave systems in other "city-states" (or whatever Preston thinks his ideological enclaves would be called) would be the opposite of the ongoing revolutionary transformation of anarchism.
Attack the System itself has a banner at the top of the website that shows images of some of the famous anarchists of the past that Preston respects and says is a part of his own tradition. If we look at their own work, it is pretty clear that their opinions about capitalism do not for allow for Preston's idea that anarchism can collaborate with capitalism. According to Mikhail Bakunin, capitalism undermined any sense of freedom for the vast majority of humanity.
Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person ant his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer.... The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.
The worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom. lacking any means for its possible realization. ant consequently it is only a fictitious liberty. an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom-"voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense-broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.
Alexander Berkman, the author of the ABC's of Anarchism, is known for outlining many of the ideas that brought anarchism into the 20 th Century. He noted that capitalism represented the foundations of a society that had to be torn apart.
If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters. If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.
Even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a person who shared some of Preston's bigotries and was more of a proto-anarchist than the anarchism we would call today said that "property is theft." We could really go down the line on this, but what we would find is not just that these anarchists have a different opinion about capitalism, they find anti-capitalism foundational. What Preston attempts to do though is to say that anarchism naturally has the ability to take on fully contradictory ideas, as he mentions also with religious anarchism. There certainly is a broad anarchist movement with many colliding ideas, but the fundamental values do remain the same. No one in the broad anarchist movement, even on the primitivism or post-leftist fringes would accept capitalism or racial nationalism. Even the more nuanced anarchists from fringe traditions, like Max Stirner and Hakim Bey, seem to be little understood by Preston and his writers, though they pull at anyone vaguely associated with the anarchist tradition to give relevance to their absurdity. It is like someone who thinks a political movement can be summed up by describing its members clothing and hair styles: he seems to know nothing about the fundamental values and motivating factors of the revolutionary anarchist movement.
For Attack the System, and Preston personally, the real issue is of this new concept of National Anarchism. When stripped of its pseudo-mystical tracts and overly jargon filled double speak, the notion here is almost identical to Preston's idea of pan-secessionism. Groups, known as tribes, would create separate enclave based either on identity, such as race, or on social choice, such as economic system. The NA's themselves focus on racial identity as they are essentially anti-State nationalists, who maintain the same violent racism and misogyny that most neo-Nazis do. Troy Southgate, former organizer with the National Front and some even more unsavory and violent white nationalist groups, is the ideological frontrunner of the NA theory, and has written most of their few works of theory. Spencer Sunshine outlines this beautifully as you can see where their true allegiances are.
The National Anarchists claim they are not "fascist." Still, Troy Southgate looks to lesser known fascists such as Romanian Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu, and lesser light Nazis like Otto Strasser and Walter Darre. Part of Southgate's sleight of hand is to claim to be 'against fascism' by claiming he is socialist (as did Nazis such as Strasser) and by supporting political decentralization (as do contemporary European fascists such as Alain de Benoist). Sometimes he proclaims fascism to be equivalent to the capitalism he opposes, or promoting a centralized state, which he also opposes.
Southgate is undoubtedly sincere in his aversion to the classical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, and has cited this as a reason for his break from one of the National Front splinter groups. He sees the old fascism as discredited, and an abandonment of the true values of revolutionary nationalism. But his ultimate goal, shared with the European New Right, is to create a new form of fascism, with the same core values of a revitalized community that withstands the decadence of cosmopolitan liberal capitalism. This cannot be done as long as his views are linked in the popular mind to the older tradition.
Spencer Sunshine attempts to look a little closer at the ideas of NA to see if they are aligned with anarchism on any fundamental level, yet sees instead the same kinds of deeply run bigotries you find on Stormfront.org.
The National-Anarchists are quite open about their antifeminism and desire to exile queer people into separate spaces, but tend to hide their deeply antisemitic worldview. Troy Southgate says of feminism, "Feminism is dangerous and unnatural... because it ignores the complimentary relationship between the sexes and encourages women to rebel against their inherent feminine instincts."
The stance on homophobia is more interesting. Southgate said:
Homosexuality is contrary to the Natural Order because sodomy is quite undeniably an unnatural act. Groups such as Outrage are not campaigning for love between males -- which has always existed in a brotherly or fatherly form -- but have created a vast cult which has led to a rise in cottaging, male-rape and child sex attacks... But we are not trying to stop homosexuals engaging in this kind of activity like the Christian moralists or bigoted denizens of censorship are doing, on the contrary, as long as this behaviour does not affect the forthcoming National-Anarchist communities then we have no interest in what people get up to elsewhere.
What this means in his schema is that queer people will be given their own separate "villages." The recent National-Anarchist demonstrations in San Francisco were against two majority-queer events, the Folsom Street Fair and the related fair Up Your Alley. Their orchestrator, "Andy," declares that he is a "racist" who hates queer people.
Andy also denies the charge of antisemitism against National-Anarchists, claiming that they merely engage in a "continuous criticism of Israel and its supporters," 53 as do the majority of Leftists and anarchists. Once again, this is a typical disingenuous attempt by National-Anarchists to duck criticism. Antisemitism is an important element of the political world views of Southgate and Herferth.
Southgate actively promotes the work of Holocaust deniers, including the Institute for Historical Review, and holds party line antisemitic beliefs about the role of the international Jewish conspiracy. As a dodge, he sometimes uses the euphemism "Zionist"; for instance, he says "Zionists are well known for their cosmopolitan perspective upon life, not least because those who rally to this nefarious cause have no organic roots of their own."54 In another interview he says that, "there is no question that the world is being ruthlessly directed (but perhaps not completely controlled) by International Zionism. This has been achieved through the rise of the usurious banking system." And he describes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forgery which is the world's most popular antisemitic text) as a book which "although still unproven, accordswith the main events in modern world history."
Meanwhile, his Australian counterpart Welf Herferth is even more explicit in his neo-Nazi antisemitic views. In one speech, he describes the Holocaust as an "extrapolation" that "has been an enormously profitable one for the Jews, and one which has brought post-war Germany and Europe to its knees," before referring to Israel as "the most powerful state in the Western world." Herferth concludes that "by liberating Germany from the bondage to Israel and restructuring a new Germany on the basis of a new 'volksgemeinschaft,' the German nationalists will liberate Europe, and the West as well."
Preston would have us believe that since anarchists of the left and post-left variety share anti-capitalism and opposition to the State with them that we should ally with them even though they represent a complete break from all of our motivating ideas.
Preston goes on to make some claims that are bizarre on their surface since their refutation is really implicit. First he says:
Attack the System does not oppose the maintenance of identity politics by African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, the LGBTQ umbrella, feminists, atheists, vegetarians, vegans, immigrants, environmentalists, the elderly, young people, disabled people, fat people, ugly people, students, gamers, drug users, sex workers, slut walkers, street gangs, prison inmates, or Star Wars fans. Likewise, Attack the System does not oppose the maintenance of identity politics by Protestant evangelicals, Catholic traditionalists, adherents of Eastern Orthodoxy, Mormons, Europeans, Caucasian-Americans, Southerners, Midwesterners, Catalans, Scots, Basques, Russians, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scientologists, Moonies, the white working class, WASPs, yuppies, men, social conservatives, cultural traditionalists, ethnic preservationists, Euro-pagan tribalists, gun owners, meat eaters, tobacco smokers, rednecks, military veterans, motorcycle gangs, survivalists, metal heads, or aficionados of classical music.
Let's think about this for just a second. The first on the list are racial groups who have been historically oppressed by white majorities that use both unregulated social systems and the State to oppress them. Later there are groups that also could fit under the oppressed banner: fat people, disabled people, Jews, Muslims, sex workers, etc. The point here is that this identity means something in that the identity is a point of resistance to oppression, not identity for identity's sake. This "identity politics" (though it is clear he does not understand what identity politics are and why most anarchists oppose them) is something that the radical right often highlights since they want to compare their "white nationalism" with "black nationalism" as if they are both equally movements towards racial identity and the advocacy of an ethnic identity. The difference is that black nationalism is a response to white oppression and an identity use only as a tool to resist that historic oppression. For white nationalists to say that they are the same project is to deny the fact that the purpose is fundamentally different. White nationalists seek to double down on their perceived identity, essentializing their racial characteristics. This is fundamentally a different project, for a different purpose, and a radically different politic. Preston goes on to identity feminists in his list, which he has to understand is not an "identity" as much as a movement to overhaul society and dethrone patriarchy. To list this as an "identity" is again a sign that he doesn't clearly understand why identities are used in anti-oppression politics.
It is not that "identity" is something that the left wants to create dividing lines around, but instead, for some people, a piece of their lives through which they have been oppressed, and therefore need to create solidarity with others who share the same background of oppression. To say that white people are in the same boat as people of color in terms of racially defined oppression is offensive right from the start.
Preston often likes to cite obscure pseudo-anarchists from history, while ignoring ninety-five percent of anarchist history and theory. The best example of anarchist social organization existed in response to the rise of the Fallange fascist party in Catalonia, and were eventually crushed fighting for survival against the Catholic nationalists. Anarchists rose up as primary actors in fighting the fascist party machine in Italy, Romania, Austria, and Germany, all of which show the history of the radical right as being the direct inverse of anarchism and dedicated to its destruction. As you prance around the National Policy Institute and promote your Americanized pan-libertarianism, you are celebrating the forces that have been the historic enemy of the anarchist movement and who have murdered anarchists by the thousands.
Preston also lists a number of often considered right-wing political issues that he says anarchists are not vocal on. These include gun control, home schooling, and alternative medicine. This is a red herring as he is again looking for surface politics while failing to go deeper. Most anarchists do oppose bourgeois gun control, yet the politics motivating that movement are xenophobic and reactionary. To join that movement in equal parts is to undermine our founding purpose, even if there is tacit support. The rest of the list has disparate political ideas that would be boring to go through point by point, but needless to say there are left-anarchists associated with most of those projects. They certainly are not primary political issues because they are incredibly marginal and many of the motivating factors would not be shared by anarchists, but that is certainly an individual's choice as to whether or not to support home schooling or zoning regulations.
Preston himself now has zero connection to larger anarchist movements and seems to have been deemed persona non grata from all political arenas except the far-right. At the National Policy Institute "Become Who We Are" conference , the last that Preston spoke at as of this writing, there were speakers advocating for whites to have their own state, claiming that Jews control world affairs, and that there are racial differences in intelligence. NPI, Radix, the Daily Shoah, American Renaissance, and the Occidental Observer were all represented organizations there right along Attack the System, which puts Keith and his website firmly in the camp associated with neo-Nazis and Klan supporters. Preston will likely put out a response to the response (we are sincere when we say this behavior is the closest you have come to contemporary anarchist conduct), in which he will quote his own cadre of unknown authors to try and justify his racist connections, but luckily his backward jargon works on no actual anarchist communities. We could go on a detailed analysis of what "is" and what "is not" anarchism, but the reality is that there are dozens of books available that do this wonderfully and do not include you are any of your ideas. This notion that anarchism is just anything anyone says it is, that its opposition to authority means that no one can define it, is a-historical and non-useful to those who actually try to utilize anarchism as a revolutionary idea.
Keith himself has not actually organized in a couple decades, and has resigned himself to racist conferences and internet blogs. You may want to criticize Antifa organizers for what you see as censorship (Angry white men always scream censorship when their bullshit is disallowed by the community, usually because they have never been told "no" before in their lives.), but we are out in the streets and fighting in solidarity with movements across the world to bring together a liberated society. We are not sure what part of standing with Richard Spencer as he argues for a White European Empire, but since "anarchism" is just a t-shirt you like to wear on top of your opportunistic Third Positionism, you try to make yourself immune to common sense and reason. |
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A note of caution regarding our comment sections:
For months a stream of media reports have warned of coordinated propaganda efforts targeting political websites based in the U.S., particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
We too were alarmed at the patterns we were, and still are, seeing. It is clear that the provocateurs are far more savvy, disciplined, and purposeful than anything we have ever experienced before.
It is also clear that we still have elements of the same activity in our article discussion forums at this time.
We have hosted and encouraged reader expression since the turn of the century. The comments of our readers are the most vibrant, best-used interactive feature at Reader Supported News. Accordingly, we are strongly resistant to interrupting those services.
It is, however, important to note that in all likelihood hardened operatives are attempting to shape the dialog our community seeks to engage in.
Adapt and overcome.
Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News |
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How are you?
Did you see that tweet? Write about it!
It's important!
Want me help?
{... type, type, type, tip, tap, type ...}
See you tomorrow ...
Posted by b on May 31, 2013 at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (67)
May 30, 2013
Syria: Assad's Al-Manar Interview Just listened to Bashar Assads's interview with Hizbullah's TV station Al-Manar in the English language live translation by Press TV. Some points from my notes:
The interviewer asked why the recent more offensive reaction against the foreign supported insurgents only came so late.
Assad responded that there first had to be a change in public opinion. Many people first believed that this was a "revolution". They took time to understand that this was a foreign assault. Now many of the Syrian fighters have stopped to fight and the balance of power has changed. There are now mostly tens of thousands of foreign fighters against our troops.
Q: Is the action in Qusayr to connect to a Damascus connection to the Alawi land on the coast.
A: That is nonsense. There are no road connections there [we pointed this out in an earlier post - b]. The purpose is to cut the insurgents off from the borders to diminish their supplies.
Q: S-300?
A: Russia is committed to our contracts and those will will be fulfilled. Parts of the contracts have been fulfilled [no direct confirmation that S-300 are already in Syria -b].
Q: Geneva conference?
A: We will ask who the SNC represents. Who are the people on the other side? What is their legitimation? Who do they represent? They are just slaves of foreign powers.
Q: Conditions for Geneva?
A: No preconditions. Results will have to go to a referendum for the Syrian people to decide. Constitution says the president stays on. The government (prime minister etc.) may change while president stays on.
Q: Change of position in Arab League or Turkey?
A: No detectable change. Just rhetoric. They still support insurgents with money and weapons. They receive orders from outside.
Q: What if Geneva fails?
A: That is possible. Some try to make it fail. Russia plays down expectations. Would not change things on the ground.
Q: What do you say to our friends.
A: We confront a campaign against the resistance. This is a World War against us and the resistance.
The above is just from my shortened notes. I will link to transcript as soon as one is available.
UPDATE: The official English transcript posted by the Syrian news agency SANA: Interview Given by President al-Assad to Lebanese Al-Manar TV . I have not read it yet (and have no time to do so now) and therefor have not yet corrected any of my impressions posted above.
Posted by b on May 30, 2013 at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (99)
May 29, 2013
Syria: The Deadbeat Opposition And A Russian Checkmate The Syrian exile opposition is becoming irrelevant. It has been destroyed due to the rivalities between Saudi Arabia and Qatar and is now denounced by all other parts of the Syrian opposition. The U.S. has thereby lost one of its key political instruments to drive the Syrian government out. It now has no one to present as negotiating partner opposed to the Syrian government side in the planned Geneva II conference.
Hassan Hassan writes from Istanbul about the failed "western" attempt, with Saudi support, to make the exile opposition more relevant and to dislodge the Muslim Brotherhood from the leading role in the Syrian National Coalition: The Syrian political opposition, in its current form, is a hopeless case. ... One member of the coalition told me Mr Al Sabbagh has been pushed by Doha to block any changes to "give the impression that the new sponsors of the Syrian dossier have failed". By new sponsors, he meant Saudi Arabia, which has assumed responsibilities of sponsoring the Syrian opposition, pushing Qatar aside. ... It is time for Syrians to realise that the political opposition is an important factor behind the stalemate. The Syrians have realized that. Michael Kilo (a secular Marxist(!)) the U.S./Saudis alliance wanted to push into a leadership role is rather scathing : "The real, real, real problem is in the Coalition," Kilo told Saudi-owned broadcaster Al-Arabiya, after some dissidents accused Riyadh of imposing his entry into the warring country's main opposition group. ... Though still in Istanbul, it was unclear early Wednesday whether Kilo would stay on in the Coalition. ... The opposition has long been marred by internal divisions and bickering, giving rise to doubts over its ability to present a united front with the proposed peace talks ahead. The Local Coordination Committee as well as some other opposition groups inside Syria join the criticism and demand a place at the table for themselves: The revolutionary forces that have signed this statement will no longer bestow legitimacy upon any political body that subverts the revolution or fails to take into account the sacrifices of the Syrian people or adequately represent them.
We consider this statement to be a final warning to the SC, for the Syrian people have spoken. Edward Dark (a nom de guerre) was one of the original organizers of opposition demonstrations in Aleppo. He witnessed the destruction the armed insurgents waged in his city and has given up on his hopes: To us, a rebel fighting against tyranny doesn't commit the same sort of crimes as the regime he's supposed to be fighting against. He doesn't loot the homes, businesses and communities of the people he's supposed to be fighting for. Yet, as the weeks went by in Aleppo, it became increasingly clear that this was exactly what was happening.
Rebels would systematically loot the neighborhoods they entered. They had very little regard for the lives and property of the people, and would even kidnap for ransom and execute anyone they pleased with little recourse to any form of judicial process. They would deliberately vandalize and destroy ancient and historical landmarks and icons of the city. They would strip factories and industrial zones bare, even down to the electrical wiring, hauling their loot of expensive industrial machinery and infrastructure off across the border to Turkey to be sold at a fraction of its price. Shopping malls were emptied, warehouses, too. They stole the grain in storage silos, creating a crisis and a sharp rise in staple food costs. They would incessantly shell residential civilian neighborhoods under regime control with mortars, rocket fire and car bombs, causing death and injury to countless innocent people, their snipers routinely killing in cold blood unsuspecting passersby. As a consequence, tens of thousands became destitute and homeless in this once bustling, thriving and rich commercial metropolis.
But why was this so? Why were they doing it? It became apparent soon enough, that it was simply a case of us versus them. They were the underprivileged rural class who took up arms and stormed the city, and they were out for revenge against the perceived injustices of years past. Their motivation wasn't like ours, it was not to seek freedom, democracy or justice for the entire nation, it was simply unbridled hatred and vengeance for themselves. ... Whatever is left of Syria at the end will be carved out between the wolves and vultures that fought over its bleeding and dying corpse, leaving us, the Syrian people to pick up the shattered pieces of our nation and our futures. The original "democratic protesters" like Edward Dark have had enough. They never understood that the role their original sponsor had planned for them was only to be a diversion for the all out armed assault on the Syrian state. They have been abused. They wanted freedom but received anarchy. They will now rather support the Syrian government than support any further strife.
The military leader whom the U.S. supports but who has little control over any units on the ground demands that the war be widened: "What we want from the U.S. government is to take the decision to support the Syrian revolution with weapons and ammunition, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons," Idris said. "Of course we want a no-fly zone and we ask for strategic strikes against Hezbollah both inside Lebanon and inside Syria. I doubt that any of Idris' sponsors will support an escalation into Lebanon. But some in the "west" are still dreaming of implementing an illegal "no-fly zone" over Syria. They do not believe the Russian commitment to prevent such by sending S-300 air defense systems to Syria: "Does Russia have S-300 batteries ready to go?" said Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain. "I'm not sure that it does. Is it going to send engineers to integrate it with existing [air defence] architecture? Will they send trainers for the one to two years it takes to train people to use it? This seems more like an exercise in political signalling to me, saying: 'Hands off Syria.'" This is misreading the Russian plans. I suggested that Russia could move its own fighter planes to Syria to protect the Syrian air-space. This though suggests that Russia will instead move its own S-300 air-defense mssiles: Four regiments of S-300 air defense systems have been deployed at the Ashuluk firing range in southern Russia as part of another snap combat readiness check of the Russian armed forces, the Defense Ministry said.
The regiments were airlifted on Thursday by military transport planes to designated drop zones where they will carry out a variety of missions simulating the defense of the Russian airspace from massive attacks by "enemy" missiles and aircraft.
"The missions will be carried out in conditions of heavy electronic warfare to test the capabilities of the air defense units to the highest limit," the ministry said. The "western" air-forces do know the older export versions of the S-300 that Russia sold to Greece and the ones the U.S. bought from Croatia. They know how to defeat those. But the systems the Russians use themselves have had several upgrades in their radars, electronic systems and have new missiles. If Russia moves those, as it is now training to do, any "no-fly zone" attempt is likely to start with lots of downed "western" jets and a high casualty count. It would be a checkmate move.
The U.S. has no "Syrian opposition" to support in Geneva. The exiles are totally discredited. The unarmed opposition in Syria has given up. The armed opposition in Syria is collection of disunited thieves and takfiris. Russia has the checkmate chance of deploying its S-300PM2 and may well use it.
What is the U.S. to do now? Escalate further and risk an ever widening war throughout the Middle East with heavy Russian involvement? Or will it get off its high horse and agree to Russia's demand to actively stop any additional Libyan weapon supply through Turkey and any other support for the violence in Syria? Are there other alternatives?
Posted by b on May 29, 2013 at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (137)
WaPo Claims "Liberal Hawks" Are Quiet While Describing The Opposite The Washington Post claims: Liberal hawks were vocal on involvement in Iraq but have been quiet on Syria [A]mid the burst in outside engagement, one influential group seems noticeably silent. The liberal hawks, a cast of prominent left-leaning intellectuals, played high-profile roles in advocating for American military intervention on foreign soil ... [E]ven as the body count edges toward 100,000 in Syria and reports of apparent chemical-weapons use by Assad, liberal advocates for interceding have been rare, spooked perhaps by the traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clear reluctance of a Democratic president to get mired in the Middle East. Call them Syria's mourning doves. The piece than names eight "liberal hawks" who argue for intervention in Syria (Vali Nasr, Bill Keller, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Paul Berman, Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer) and two "liberal hawks" who argue against it (Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria).
How can the central thesis of the piece be true when the author finds four times as many pro-war as anti-war "liberal hawks"?
Fact is that the "liberal hawks", like their fellow neoconservatives, have been quite noisy arguing for intervention in Syria. Fact is also that the U.S. has intervened from the very beginning of the "revolution" and continued to do so by providing thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition, foodstuff as well as other secret support to the insurgents. It is also managing, not successful though, the exile opposition.
What then is the purpose of a page 1 piece in the Washington Post pushing the obviously false claim that "liberal hawks" are quiet?
Posted by b on May 29, 2013 at 02:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)
May 27, 2013
Unsophisticated Reporting so*phis*ti*cat*ed
Adjective (of a person or their thoughts, reactions, and understanding)
"Aware of and able to interpret complex issues; subtle." -----
According to a writer at the Washington Post the level of sophistication of an election campaign in Iran is measured by its numbers of English language spokespersons: With fluent English speakers on staff available to address media requests, Rouhani's campaign team is also more sophisticated than those of his competitors. That sentence (and the whole report) is stupid on various levels.
1. English is taught as mandatory second language in all pubic and many private schools in Iran. About everyone who finishes at highschool level in Iran will have had at least 5 years of English language education. All candidates for the presidential election will have capable English speakers on their staff.
2. Any election campaign's aim is to maximize the number of voters that will choose it. One probably could measure a campaigns sophistication by its ability to get the votes. To use the existence of English capable spokesperson in a Farsi speaking country as a measurement of sophistication is just nuts. While Americans might like to believe otherwise fact is that English language capabilities in non-English speaking countries have zero effect on a local candidates capability to attract the local vote.
3. By writing that sentence the author shows his own lack of sophistication. Reporting from Tehran on elections while emphasizing English campaign spokesperson seems to be a confession that the reporters capabilities in understanding Farsi are less than those spokespersons' English capabilities. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in anything else that author may write.
Posted by b on May 27, 2013 at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (61)
May 26, 2013
Syria: Hizbullah Joins The Fight Hassan Nasrallah announcement to use Hizbullah's full power on the side of the Syrian government brings a new quality to the fight. Hizbullah has a record of successful military operations against the most powerful and brutal enemies. When Nasrallah promises victory, as he yesterday did, the odds are that he will deliver. In his speech he justified Hizbullah's intervention by the danger the "western" supported takfiris pose to the resistance against Israel.
That Nasrallah defined the insurgents as takfiris is important. A takfiri is one who declares everyone who does not strictly follow his version of believe an unbeliever that should be punished and killed. As one of the Jabhat al-Nusra guys asserted in an interview: There is a difference between the basic kuffar [infidels] and those who converted from Islam. If the latter, we must punish them. Alawites are included. Even Sunnis who want democracy are kuffar as are all Shia. It's not about who is loyal and who isn't to the regime; it's about their religion. Sharia says there can be no punishment of the innocent and there must be punishment of the bad; that's what we follow. By defining the enemy solely as takfiris Nasrallah can justify his call to arms as a non-sectarian fight. Not every Sunni will buy it but many likely will. Following that announcement attacks were and will be mounted against Hizbullah in Lebanon but those will be more of a nuisance than a real danger.
The fight in Qasayr is ongoing. The Syrian military had some successes but the urban combat proves again to be a hard slog. Several of the opposition leaders have urged insurgents from other areas to join the fight in Qasayr. That was a mistake. Few of the reinforcements seem to have reached their target but were caught in the Syrian army cordon around Qasayr. Many of them (video) were killed. For some weeks now the Syrian Observatory's casualty count shows that about double as many insurgents are getting killed than troops on the government side. Some of the insurgents are killed in unnecessary conflicts with Kurds or other groups, some of them by missile fire and many in street combat. I doubt that the killing of 11 Chechen in Syria will lead to more Chechen joining the fight. The takfiris are training kids (video) but those will have little chance against Hizbullah's or the Syrian army's seasoned troops. At a certain point the general insurgency will die down for lack of manpower. When the Syrian government regains full control of the country a terrorist element will likely continue to exist. But it will no longer be an existential danger to the Syrian state.
Senator McCain claimed that the U.S. will create a no fly zone should, as is likely, the Geneva talks fail. I doubt this very much. It is just one of the scare points brought up by the U.S. to increase pressure on the Syrian government. Other such points are Jordan's request for Patriot missiles deployment and the announcement of a large scale multinational maneuver in Jordan.
Under international pressure to join the Geneva talks the exile opposition is in Istanbul again trying to unite but, like in every one of these events before, this attempt is likely to fail. The Muslim Brotherhood, supported by Turkey and Qatar, is unwilling to give up its (somewhat hidden) majority, does not stick to its earlier commitments and inserts new demands: When [Al Sabbagh] was asked in front of the foreign ambassadors: "What is your priority? Especially that we are facing the challenges of Geneva 2. These demands will lead to the failure of the plan or even the fracture of the coalition which might consequently lead to Bashar Al Assad staying in power". He answered with this (literally): "My conditions are more important and urgent". These are the people the U.S. wants to install in Syria? Do these exiles look like they would gain control of the takfiris? No and no.
The U.S may soon recognize that its Syria project has come to a dead end. There is no viable replacement for the Syrian government and the takfiris are a serious danger . If the U.S. were sure about a positive outcome should the insurgency win it would certainly do more to help them. Instead it presses European countries to deliver weapons to them. If one, like Nasrallah, is convinced of ones case, one will use all ones own might to win and not ask proxies for help. That the U.S. is doing such is telling
Posted by b on May 26, 2013 at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (91)
Open Thread 2013-10 News & views ...
Posted by b on May 25, 2013 at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (62)
May 24, 2013
Obama: Expect More Drone Strikes Only one of the following headlines is mostly correct. Guess which one.
As usual McClatchy comes nearest to the truth. Here is the White House "Factsheet" on the "new" policies: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities (pdf).
One can easily fly dozens of drones through the obvious holes in those "new" rules. I for one can think of no past drone strike Obama ordered that would not be allowed under these "new" policies.
By now everyone should know that when Obama says "A" the people will hear their preferred "B" while what Obama will be doing is "C". "A" is great rhetoric, "B" is vague content and the wish to believe while "C" will be a bad policy. Why do most media still fall for this?
Posted by b on May 24, 2013 at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)
May 23, 2013
The Difference? A 75-year-old man stabbed to death yards from his home may have been targeted in a racially motivated attack, according to police.
Mohammed Saleem, who used a walking stick, was stabbed three times in the back as he returned home from prayers at his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, on Monday night.
The blows were struck with such violence they penetrated to the front of his body.
The father of seven also had no defensive wounds in what has been described as a swift, vicious and cowardly attack by the man leading the murder investigation, Detective Superintendent Mark Payne of West Midlands police. Birmingham murder may have been racially motivated , say police - 2 May 2013
--- Dramatic footage has emerged of the suspected terrorist attack near the London barracks that left one man dead, showing a suspect with blood-covered hands using jihadist rhetoric to justify the violence.
On Wednesday night the prime minister, David Cameron, vowed that Britain will "never buckle" in the face of terrorist incidents, and condemned the "absolutely sickening" killing in Woolwich. Man killed in deadly terror attack in London street - 22 May 2013
Posted by b on May 23, 2013 at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)
May 22, 2013
Syria: The Messed Up Neighborhood The recent bombing that killed 51 in the Turkish town Reyhanli received only scant coverage in the local media. While the Turkish president Erdogan accused the Syrian government of committing the crime he did not want the facts to be out in the public. But he is not the only one to have power in Turkey.
The Turkish hacker collective RedHack liberated several documents from the Turkish gendarmerie intelligence. The documents mention that Turkish intelligence had since April 25 information that the Jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria was preparing three car bombs for attacks in Turkey. If these documents are as genuine as they look the Turkish press will hardly ignore them and Erdogan will have to do some explaining.
The Reyhanli cover up and this leak point to a growing spat between the Erdogan followers and the followers of his former allies in the Gulen movement: Beyond such arguments that there might be a cover-up in the establishment, there are even bigger mysteries. For instance, nobody explained yet why a corpse was tied to one of the car bombs with copper wires, even though this photo was in almost all newspapers in Turkey including Hurriyet, Milliyet, Sabah and Aksam just after the bombing.
In the end, fifty people died, Turkish society is even more divided and many people don't have any trust for the official investigation. The only indisputable outcome of this process is how the crime scene became another arena in the silent fight between the Gulenist-dominated police force and the Erdoganist-dominated national intelligence service (MIT). The other countries in Syria's a neighborhood also experience related interior trouble. In Lebanon the issue has turned bloody and the northern city of Tripoli has seen several days of now heavy fighting including mortar barrages: Around 4:30 a.m., a 300-strong force of Salafist fighters from the mainly Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh neighborhood, which backs the uprising in Syria, tried to launch an offensive against gunmen loyal to President Bashar Assad in the opposite area of Jabal Mohsen.
They were repelled by Lebanese soldiers, who opened fire with heavy machine guns.
The complicate relationships between various religious trends in Lebanon is well describe with this report of clashes over where a Sunni turned Shia and Hizbullah fighter who died in fighting in Qusayr should be buried.
Iraq has seen many serious bombings in recent weeks against various sides and against different population groups. These seem to be calculated to induce a new sectarian war. Reidar Visser finds that Iraq can pull back from the brink and avoid another civil war. The leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Massoud Barzani closed the border with Syria after the PYD which rules in the Kurdish parts of Syria detained some people belonging to his Kurdistan Democratic Party. In Israel a commentator warns prime minister Netanyahoo of reckless behavior especially toward the Russians. He mentions that in one of Israel's wars some planes on the other side where actually flown by Russian pilots. The writer, as I did earlier , seems to think that a further Russian intervention on the Syrian government side is possible. Should the Syrian government fall the military situation for Israel would be even more complicate .
For the Jordan king Abdullah the political problems over nearly half a million Syrian refugees are getting bigger. Jordan now closed its border for any new refugees coming from Syria. But traffic in the other direction still seem to flow : A good summary of the rebels' conditions for Geneva came in a telephone interview Monday with Gen. Salim Idriss, the commander of the rebels' Supreme Military Council. He spoke from Jordan, where his forces had just received a new shipment of 35 tons of weapons from Saudi Arabia ; Idriss said these weapons will help, but they aren't advanced enough to combat Assad's tanks and planes in Qusair.
Idriss said he would not attend the Geneva talks unless the United States and its allies establish "military balance" by giving him modern anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. "It's not valuable to go to negotiations when we are weak on the ground," he said. ... Rebel forces are chronically short of ammunition, Idriss said. According to one rebel source, he has privately asked the United States for 700 tons of ammunition each week over the next month to help strengthen the rebels' hand and provide leverage before Geneva. King Abdullah is openly arguing for negotiations over Syria. He fears that a victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria would cost him his throne. But one wonders how that fits with weapon deliveries through Jordan's borders. When he recently was in Washington his escorts leaked what might be future U.S. plans. [S]ources from the king's escorts in Washington confirmed to Al-Monitor that the Americans informed him that attempts at a peaceful political solution will not last beyond the end of this year. If these efforts were to fail, Jordanian diplomatic sources told Al-Monitor that they expect the Americans will resort to powerful military intervention in Syria, either with extensive logistical support for the armed opposition or what has been dubbed the "Serbia scenario," in which air strikes would weaken Assad and lead to a final shift in the balance of the forces. Having again messed up the whole neighborhood the colonial "friends of Syria", now shrunk down to a mere 11 countries, are today meeting in Jordan. This is the first time that no one from their sponsored exile Syrian opposition is attending such a meeting. Those SNC folks will meet tomorrow in Istanbul to quibble again and to receive the new orders of their colonial masters. The SNC still demands that Assad must go before they can agree to any serious negotiations. As this does not fit the current "western" plan for negotiations the group, already in terminal crisis , will fall even further apart.
I do expect that today's meeting in Jordan will here some arguing for more weapons to flow to the foreign supported insurgency in Syria during the time the sham Geneva negotiations take place. Even the German intelligence service, after predicting Assad would soon fall, now believes that the Syrian government is likely to win. Without more supplies the insurgents will continue to lose their hold on the Syrian countrysides and with each town that falls back to the government the "western" parts of the Geneva negotiations will lose leverage. But the problem of who should receive those weapons is still not solved. Even " suck on this " Thomas Friedman is now warning against arming the insurgency without further deeper thought.
Meanwhile the fighting in Syria continues. The insurgents have send some convoys from Aleppo and Homs to reinforce their colleagues in Qusayr. They threaten to wipe out Shia and Alawite towns should Qusayr fall to the government. The town is now the propaganda Schwerpunkt for both sides.
Posted by b on May 22, 2013 at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (84)
May 21, 2013
Syria: Obama Expresses Concern About Some Foreign Fighters Lebanese youth from the city of Saida, south of Beirut, began Wednesday signing up for armed Jihad in Syria, responding to a call yesterday by firebrand Sunni cleric Ahmad Assir.
Individuals in charge of enlisting Jihadists at Bilal Bin Rabah mosque told Al Arabiya that "hundreds" have signed up so far and that the number is expected to reach thousands . Lebanese Sunni youth sign up for holy war
... Following a circuitous route from Saudi Arabia up through Turkey or Jordan and then crossing a lawless border, hundreds of young Saudis are secretly making their way into Syria to join groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, GlobalPost has learned. With Official Wink And Nod, Young Saudis Join Syria's Rebels
... Veteran fighters of last year's civil war in Libya have come to the front-line in Syria, helping to train and organise rebels under conditions far more dire than those in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan-Irish fighter has told Reuters. EXCLUSIVE-Libyan fighters join Syrian revolt against Assad
... Tunisia 's government says that some 800 of its citizens are fighting alongside Islamist rebels in Syria, although some estimates put the figure much higher . Syria conflict: Why did my Tunisian son join the rebels?
... Fighters from across the globe have joined the war against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including hundreds of Egyptians who have completed their engagement in their own revolution and turned toward the "holy war" in Syria. Egyptian Fighters Join 'Lesser Jihad' in Syria
... Dozens of Kuwaitis are fighting with the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) after crossing from Turkey, Al-Qabas newspaper reported yesterday, citing the fighters' relatives. Fighters from Kuwait joining Syrian rebels
... A U.S. Army veteran says he has joined an offshoot of al Qaeda after spending several months fighting alongside Syrian rebel forces. U.S. Army veteran joins al Qaeda-linked group after months of fighting with rebel forces in Syria
... The EU's anti-terrorist chief Gilles de Kerchove estimates that around 500 Europeans are now fighting with rebel forces in Syria against Bashar al-Assad's regime. Syria crisis: EU says 500 Europeans have joined fight
... More than 20 Lebanese extremists were killed Saturday in an ambush by the Syrian army in the Syrian town of Tal Kalakh. ... It further mentioned that "the number of Lebanese who were killed in Syria during the fighting along with the armed opposition exceeded two hundred . However, no media fuss was raised around them, because they were killed individually or in small numbers." Joining Syria Rebels, 20 Lebanese Killed in Tal Kalakh So many foreign fighters have joined the Syrian insurgency that one wonders if their is role left for any indigenous Syrian insurgent. We have yet to see any comment from the White House or the State Department that warns against these foreign fighters joining the conflict in Syria.
But now, as a handful of additional foreign fighters join the Syrian government side, the Obama administration is deeply concerned : "President Obama stressed his concern about Hezbollah's active and growing role in Syria, fighting on behalf of the Assad regime, which is counter to the Lebanese government's policies," said a White House statement. ... Earlier, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell condemned "Hezbollah's direct intervention and assault on Qusayr where its fighters are playing a significant role in the regime's offensive."
"Hezbollah's occupation of villages along the Lebanese-Syrian border and its support for the regime and pro-Assad militias exacerbate and inflame regional sectarian tensions and perpetuate the regime's campaign of terror." And those thousands of foreign Jihadis do what?
Posted by b on May 21, 2013 at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (56)
Syria: Journalists Are Misreading The Map
The New York Times : Mr. Assad could probably take Qusayr, a crucial area because it lies near the border and links Damascus with the rebel-held north and the government-held coast .
The Wall Street Journal : The bloody battle over the city of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, has the potential to transform Syria's conflict, say fighters, diplomats and analysts. A government victory there could give the regime of President Bashar al-Assad a corridor of territory connecting Damascus to Syria's pro-Assad coastline and to Lebanese territory controlled by Iran-backed Hezbollah. The Globe & Mail : The small city, about 100 miles northwest of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is crucial to supply routes for both sides. Qusair is a conduit for rebel supplies and fighters from Lebanon, and it links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland for Mr. al-Assad's minority Alawite sect . A map of south-west Syria shows Damascus at the bottom, Homs in the upper right and Tartus at the cost in the upper-left. The marker "A" points to the city of Qusayr. It lies across road number 4 which runs from the north-east to the south-west connecting Homs with Baalbek in Lebanon.
Notice that there is no road through Qusayr running from the south-east to north-west. There is not even a minor connection from Damascus to Tartus that runs through the town. If you were planning a trip from Damascus to Tartus would you consider passing through Qusayr? Unless you would want to walk you likely would not do so. Why then are journalists asserting that the Syrian government would do so? Qusayr does not "links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast" unless you want to walk the direct line through the fields. Its sole military value is its position across the insurgency's supply line from Lebanon to Homs. The insurgents know that very well: "To lose Qusair would be a disaster; we will lose the whole city of Homs," said Fadi al-Issa, a fighter with the opposition Farouq Brigade But why are the above quoted news sources falsely insisting that Qusayr is a link between Damascus and Tartus?
These journalist try to insert an official "western" narrative of an Alawite regime ruling over a majority Sunni land. The sole purpose to connect the fighting in Qasayr to some route between Damascus and the Syrian coast is to introduce and narrate the supposedly sectarian fighting. This despite the facts that the Syrian government includes many Sunnis, that the Syrian army troops are mainly Sunnis and the inhabitants of the big harbor cities in the alleged "Alawite heartland" at the coast are also mainly Sunni. The whole idea of some "Alawite state" at the Syrian coast is therefor pretty stupid but the media keep inserting that over and over.
The fighting in Syria is not about Sunnis versus Alawite. The fighting is rather between those who favor to live in a secular republic versus those who want a Sunni Islamic regime in one form or another.
Misreading the map and thereby inserting a sectarian view of the conflict is contrary to the facts and serious journalistic malpractice.
Posted by b on May 21, 2013 at 04:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)
May 20, 2013
Syria: Disunited Insurgents Lose Qusayr The Syrian army seems to be successful in capturing Qusayr. It has thereby opened the transport routebetween Damascus and Lebanon while denying it as a resupply line for the insurgents in Homs governate. Within Qusayr an old armored Israeli Jeep (video) that had been used by the insurgents was found. There must be an interesting story behind this find.
There was a lot of twittering today between pro-insurgency folks about this or that insurgent group that had allegedly sold out or skipped away from the battle in Qusayr. The hundreds of insurgency "brigades" are disunited. The do not have the same motives and aims and therefor lack cooperation. That is one of the reasons why they get beaten back : Abu Akram, a rebel commander in the city of Maaret al-Numan from the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham brigades who was part of an operations team planning the battle, was a little clearer about the disputes: "The main reason was the lack of supplies, and we started blaming each other and saying 'so-and-so has more than me, you pledged to work, why aren't you?' until it reached the point that Ahrar al-Sham wouldn't work with the Martyrs of Syria [brigade], and the Martyrs of Syria wouldn't work except with so-and-so. So we had to end the battle, and plan for a new one." While the insurgency continues to retreat, Russia's maneuvering is successful in deterring any chance of outright "western" intervention. Israel remains the wild card. Should Netanyahoo miscalculate and order another Israeli air raid on Syria the local conflict in Syria will escalated into a much greater confrontation .
Posted by b on May 20, 2013 at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (45)
May 19, 2013
Doug Saunders Is Wrong On Iran
Doug Saunders writes for the Globe & Mail. His book Arrival City takes a somewhat contrarian view of the migration into city and is pretty good. I found it therefore pretty disgusting to read his recent totally conventional and uniformed missive on Iran: The Iranian threat isn't nuclear - it's political
The openeing graphs: During the eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, Iran has become an increasingly dangerous place. That danger, however, is not posed by nuclear weapons - which remain an uncertain and, at worst, long-term threat - but more urgently from Iran's own self-imposed collapse.
Far worse than Mr. Ahmadinejad's comic-book sabre-rattling at Israel and the West, worse than his increasingly ineffective support of extremists and demagogues, has been his effect on his own country. A decade ago, Iran was a hopeful place, moving away from the excesses of its theocratic revolution and into the outer edges of normalcy and co-operative relations with the world. The Ahmadinejad era reversed that, plunging the country into self-isolation, poverty, mismanagement and paranoia. Where to begin?
Was it Ahmedinejad that made Iran internationally more isolated than a decade ago? Iran had cooperated with the United States to kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan and to install the Karzai government. The U.S. not-so-grateful response was to name Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil and soon to introduce sanctions and more sanctions. That happened on January 29 2002. Ahmedinejad came to office only in August 2005.
Is it really then, as Saunders says, Ahmedinejad who reversed co-operative relations with the world? Did Ahmedinejad impose sanctions on Iran?
The nonsense continues: Every Iranian feels the pain of the Ahmadinejad years. Inflation is out of control, with basic staple foods and vegetables unaffordable to many working families. The rial, Iran's currency, has plummeted in value. Unemployment is the norm, with little economic activity beyond the dysfunctional state - and army-controlled enterprises. Every sentence in the above paragraph is factually wrong. During the Ahmedinejad years the purchase power parity GPD of Iran has increased through every year. The subsidized gas and oil prices in Iran were best for those who used the most energy, the rich. When Ahmedinejad cut those subsidize and replaced them with direct payments the poor Iranians gained a lot despite an increase in inflation. That is why they would likely vote for anyone he will support : "A pro-Ahmadinejad candidate will have a good number of votes," said Abolfazl Zahei, a proreform activist. "There are 2,000 villages in South Khorasan province, and most people in those villages have benefited from Ahmadinejad's government. People care about making their ends meet and welfare, not politics. While inflation in Iran is high, staple prices are price controlled and have not increased that much. They are surly not unaffordable for working families. Yes, the rial has plummeted. As it should. Japan under prime minister Abe just willfully devalued the Yen and revived Japan's lagging export industry. A plunging Rial will have exactly the same result for Iran. Imports of luxury goods will be more expensive but many people will now find work in growing export businesses. While unemployment in Iran is likely higher that the official 8% . compared to say Spain it is rather benign. Private economic activity in Iran is not low and the economy is not army-controlled. Those companies in semi public hands are owned by various insurance like pension funds that have their own interests divergent from the army or the revolutionary guards.
One wonders how Doug Saunders could come up with so much nonsense. But he also seems to believe that former president Rafsanjani can win in the upcoming presidential election in Iran. Rafsanjani is a neoliberal ultra-rich cleric who was trounced by Ahmedinejad in the 2005 presidential election. He may get, like the "reformers" in 2005, the votes from the upper middle-class people in north Tehran. But as the 2005 election proved any election in Iran is decided by the votes of rural and poor masses. They will vote for the candidate that has the support of the rather social-democratic president Ahmedinejad.
Posted by b on May 19, 2013 at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (47)
May 18, 2013
Syria: The Turning International Tide There is a change in the global political position towards Syria. Here are three recent indicators. Via FLC we learn of a significant position change in Tunisia: Tunisia wants to reopen its embassy in Syria which has been closed for more than two years and has sent a request in this vein to the government in Damascus. Tunis is yet to receive a reply from Syria's foreign ministry and a diplomatic source said that the letter has been sent to the foreign ministry since "last week." ... Tunisia quickly closed its embassy when the uprising against the Assad regime began in 2011. It will become the first country to reopen its diplomatic office in Syria if its request receives a positive response from the foreign ministry. Tunisia is especially significant as it is part of the Arab League and its government is led by the Ennahda party which is ideological affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Tunisia is threatened by the Ansar al-Sharia Salafist movement, some of who's supporters are fighting on the Syrian insurgency side, and the Ennahda government recently moved against that group.
Another sign that the international wind is changing was last weeks United Nation General Assembly vote on a nonbinding Qatari resolution against Syria. The resolution itself had to be rewritten some six times and while it gained the vote of 107 states a similar resolution last year was favored by 130 states.
A third sign is the seemingly changing position in Israel where a political mood is turning towards keeping the Syrian president Bashar Assad in power: "Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there," one senior Israeli intelligence officer was quoted as saying.
A weakened, but intact Assad regime would be preferable for Syria and the Middle East, the Times reported intelligence sources as saying. That view will likely later be reflected in Washington where the "Assad must go" crowd has yet to weaken its position.
While the above three indicators point to a change in position the Israeli change adds what can be understood as a new demand: The situation that Assad survives, maintaining power in Damascus and in the corridors to the large coastal cities, would entail the breaking up of Syria into three separate states. The Zionist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy have propagandized for such a breakup for quite some time: [T]hree Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.
"It is not that Syria is melting down -- it has melted down," said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of "In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria."
"So much has changed between the different parties that I can't imagine it all going back into one piece," Mr. Tabler said. I do not believe that a split of Syria is going to happen. The Kurds in Syria may gain some additional cultural autonomy but they will not join any other state or create one of their own. The Jihadist insurgency will be beaten and most Sunnis in Syria, as well as the minority Alawite and Christians, will not want their state to split but want to rebuild it.
Israel does not have the power to break Syria into weak statelets and other states have no interest to do so. It would only invite more trouble.
In this recent interview Bashar Assad presents himself again as a self secure statesman. There is no way that man would let Syria get chopped up though he is still expecting some additional outright intervention: "[Intervention] is a clear probability, especially after we've managed to beat back armed groups in many areas of Syria. Then these countries sent Israel to do this to raise the morale of the terrorist groups. We expect that an intervention will occur at some point although it may be limited in nature." Any further intervention will only come after the Geneva conference fails as it will because the disunited Syrian opposition will not be able to guarantee that its side will adhere to any negotiated clause.
But that failure is still many weeks away and meanwhile the trend towards more international support of Syria and against the insurgency will gain speed. Without broad international support a U.S. or Israeli intervention is likely to fail.
Posted by b on May 18, 2013 at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (50)
May 17, 2013
Syria: News Roundup Back from traveling here are some links to recent developments around Syria.
There is some background on a video that shows a Saudi al-Nusra fighter executing 12 captured and bound men. There is also new information on al-Mesreb village where locals clashed with al-Nusra terrorists who killed villagers and burned down houses.
Two suicide bombers opened an all out attack on the central prison in Aleppo which houses some 4,000 prisoners. I interpret this attack as an attempt to free prisoners to urgently get more personal for the insurgency. The attack was repelled by prison guards with significant losses for the attackers.
There are more reports of civilians clashing with insurgents as well as of fighting between various insurgency groups.
The Syrian army is still preparing to liberate the city of Qusayr which is situated on one of the main supply routes for both the insurgency as well as for the army. Civilians fleeing the surrounded city report that about a thousand insurgents in the city are digging in but are low on ammunition.
Anonymous U.S. intelligence people claim that Russia delivered a new version of anti-ship missiles to Syria. There is no mentioning of when exactly that is supposed to have happened. Last month, last year or three years ago? It also not clear why that is supposed to be a change. Syria already has able coast defense forces that would make a supply of the insurgents via a sea route quite dangerous. Additionally, as U.S. media only now note , there is new permanent Russian navy force in the Mediterranean that could challenge any attempts of a coastal siege or even a no-fly zone. The "new weapons" story seems to be a plant (to "Iraqi WMD" reporter Michael Gordon) to allege recent Russian delivery of arms to Syria even if there is no proof for such. But the claim can be used to justify the delivery of U.S. weapons to the insurgents.
The exiled Syrian opposition is now demanding new arms as a condition for agreeing to peace talks. The seem to understand that the current losing state of the insurgency does not give them any leverage in negotiations.
For the third time insurgents have abducted UN observers in the Golan height zone and looted their observation post. The Syrian government claims to have an email that prove contacts between the Qatari government and the UN kidnappers in one of the earlier cases. Qatar is said to have invested about $3 billion to keep the insurgency in Syria going and to be disliked by every side.
"Western" pro-insurgents "experts" claim that Syria is breaking up into various parts. As the facts on the ground would not yet agree to that, this campaign suggest that such a breakup is the aim of the "expert's" sponsors.
Obama met with the Turkish sultan Erdogan. There seems to be no agreement between them on how to continue their onslaught on Syria. The only point they agree on is a meaningless "Assad has to go" which would then be a starting point for "something". Zionist lobby "experts" urge the U.S. to further intervene with a no fly zone to save Erdogan's endangered political position and U.S. "credibility". In the run up to World War I it was Germany's "credibility" towards a misbehaving ally that had to be saved. That did not end well.
Posted by b on May 17, 2013 at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (53)
Posted by b on May 15, 2013 at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (52)
May 13, 2013
Syria: The Casualty Count Time magazine has a piece about a video which shows a Syrian insurgency fighter cutting the heart and liver from a man and then eating it. I swear by God, we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog! Takbeer! Heroes of Baba 'Amr, [inaudible] cut out their hearts to eat them! The man has been seen in other videos. He is known as Abu Sakkar of Baba Amro, Homs, also known as Khaled Al Hamad. He was a senior commander of the "moderate" Al Farouq brigade. "Was" because he is now dead . And no, he did not die of food poisoning. The Farouq brigade is part of the Free Syrian Army which is supported by the United States.
The British intelligence operation known as Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has put up new numbers of the allegedly total killed in Syria (it is certainly not incidentally that these numbers are put out the day Cameron meets Obama): More than 80 thousand people killed since the beginning of the Syrian uprising
As of 11/5/2013, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the deaths of 70,257 people since the beginning of the Syrian revolt (in 18/3/2011), with the first martyr falling in Der'a that day.
The dead: 34,473 civilians, including: 4,788 children and 3,048 women. 2,368 unidentified persons (individually archived with pictures and video). 12,916 rebel fighters. 1,847 unidentified rebel fighters. 1,924 defectors. 16,729 regular soldiers.
The SOHR estimates that more than 12,000 pro-regime militia, Shabiha, and "informants" were killed by rebels. First notice the weird "civilian" numbers. If the Syrian government is "indiscriminate" in killing "its own civilians" why is it that nine times more men have died than women? Were these really "civilians"?
Second: By this count the total number of killed insurgents (rebel fighters + unidentified rebel fighters + defectors) is about equal the number of regular soldiers killed.
Third: How come the number of civilians, insurgents and regular soldiers are counted exactly while the 12,000 allegedly killed "Shabiah" are only estimated? What is the difference between a "civilian" and an "informer"? Or is this new addition to the estimate just a Cameron-sees-Obama bonus?
But as unreliable these numbers may be it is still interesting to look at changes within these numbers.
Looking at some of the daily data the SOHR is putting out we find that a significant trend change has taken place. While the total numbers of dead soldiers and insurgents listed by the SOHR in this conflict is nearly equal, the daily reports over the last weeks show that now more than double as many insurgents die as regular soldiers.
Yesterday : 35 civilians, 25 rebel fighters, 2 defected soldiers, a defected officer, 8 unidentified rebel fighters and at least 17 regular soldiers. Disregarding the "civilians" 36 fell on the insurgency side while 17 fell on the government side.
Friday (Saturday data is missing): 38 civilians, 36 rebel fighters, 1 defected captain, 2 defected soldiers, 8 unidentified rebel fighters and at least 18 regular soldiers. 47 insurgents versus 18 regular soldiers.
Thursday 27 civilians (including 12 children), 20 rebel fighters, 9 unidentified rebels, 18 regular soldiers, 5 defected soldiers. 34 insurgents versus 18 regular soldiers.
The trend of twice the casualties rate on the insurgency side than on the government side has been holding for some weeks now. As I noted earlier this changed ratio, as well as some other factors like their savage behavior, is likely diminishing the insurgency's personal capacity faster than it can attract and integrate new fighters.
Posted by b on May 13, 2013 at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (100)
May 11, 2013
WaPo Fudges Libyan Protests The Washington Post lauded the intervention in Libya. The demise of Gaddhafi threw the country into deep chaos. The Washington Post is now working to instigate a like intervention in Syria. To be able to do so it has to hide the chaos in Libya. Thus we get this news report : Growing concerns over protests roiling Libya prompted the State Department to begin evacuating some diplomats from Tripoli, as the Pentagon put troops stationed at nearby European bases on high alert. The U.S. is evacuating diplomats and alarming troops because of some protests? Aren't their protests in many countries all the times without such measures taken? What are these protests about? The protests that have spread in Libya over the past week stem largely from the passage of a law that bars from public office officials who served in key roles under the deposed Libyan regime of Moammar Gaddafi. ... The unrest worsened after the country's new legislature last weekend overwhelmingly passed the bill barring certain figures from serving in government. It could unseat officials who currently hold important jobs. That is all you will learn from the Washington Post news report. Some law was passed, with an overwhelming majority we are told, that threatens some bureaucrats with being fired. Someone is protesting about that.
Except, of course, that is NOT what happened.
For over a week some unidentified heavily armed gangs had set siege onto the Foreign Ministry in Libya. They also occupied the Justice Ministry: The armed protesters have said their main goal was to push the General National Congress to pass a proposed law that would ban Gadhafi-era officials from holding government posts. ... Last month, armed protesters besieged the General National Congress for several hours in an attempt to force its members to pass the political isolation law. Gunmen later opened fire on the vehicle of the parliament speaker, who escaped unharmed. There was more : It has emerged that militiamen tried to intimidate Prime Minister Ali Zeidan when he met and negotiated with them. He said today that they had brandished a grenade and a gun at him. He did not say when this happened.
"The rebels unlocked the grenade in front of me but no one was hurt because the grenade did not explode and it was taken quickly outside the Prime Ministry headquarters," he stated today at a press conference. There was shooting at the parliament, armed gangs seized ministries and put guns to the prime minister's head. This to push for the law that the Washington Post writes was "passed overwhelmingly". Wouldn't it be more correct to say that the law was passed by very frightened parliamentarians only under very heavy duress?
There is still more that the Washington Post will not let you know: Militiamen who have been besieging the Foreign Ministry this evening fled when hundreds of pro-democracy supporters arrived at the building to demonstrate their support for the government.
Around 200 demonstrators had marched from Algeria Square along the Corniche to the Ministry but were quickly joined by others along the way, overwhelming the couple of dozen or so militiamen who were still mounting their siege outside the Ministry buildings. These protests, much bigger than the armed gangs, are against the new law. They are also defenders of democracy: Earlier in Algeria Square, around 400 anti-militia protesters brought traffic to a halt. Placards read: "With our blood we will defence the legitimacy of the government", "No to bringing down the government with arms" and "Get rid of the guns in your hands and start building Libya".
"I don't like Zeidan", said a protestor, "but he was appointed by a democratically-elected Congresss. "We must support him".
Does the Washington Post believe that these protests that pushed out the militants led to the diplomatic and military high alarm? That does not sound reasonable but from reading the WaPo piece is the only item one is led to believe. Or has the threatening diplomatic atmosphere to do with this issue: The crowd roared anti-militia chants interspersed with takbeers ("Allahu Akbar") and occasional barbs at Qatar.
"We don't want to be ruled by Mozah and Hamid," they shouted - a reference to the Emir of Qatar, Hamid bin Khalifa Al-Thani and his wife, Sheikha Mozah, who was brought up in Libya. Qatar is accused by many of interfering in Libya by funding Salafists and other Islamists. Is this attitude of the protesters or are the heavily armed gangs the reason for diplomats fleeing and military alerts? Whatever. The Washington Post will not let you know. It fudges the issue. Throwing Syria into chaos is too important to let people have second thoughts about the chaos following similar interventions .
Posted by b on May 11, 2013 at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
The Reyhanli Explosions As I wrote yesterday: But don't bet on a turn around yet. I expect some nefarious things are being cooked up right now. There are lots of talks of "massacres" without any evidence that such happen. We may soon see one with "evidence" and then should be careful when attributing that to the responsible side. Now here is a "massacre" as tweeted by the BBC's Jon Williams: Reports up to 25 dead after explosions in Turkish town of #Reyhanli on #Syria border. Transit point for rebels going in, refugees coming out. Here is a first gruesome video of the incident. Looks like a big one went off. Some gunfire can be heard in the background.
We can expect the Turkish prime minister to accuse the Syrian government over this incident and to demand at least retaliation if not outright war.
But we do not know yet how those explosions happened. There is talk of Scud missile but that seems unlikely. As I said we have to very careful with attributions.
This tweet by the Turkish journalist Mahir Zeynalov may help with assessing the incident: Two explosions outside Reyhanli municipality and post office, many wounded. This place is predominantly populated by pro-Assad Alawites.
Update: The Turkish interior minister claims a "car bomb" exploded. At least 4 dead and 18 wounded.
Update: Up to 4 carbombs, 18 dead, 22+ injuried. Some harsh words towards Erdogan from people interviewed on Turkish TV.
Update: In this video one can see the damage of the first explosion and then hear/see a second (smaller?) one aimed at first responders. Typical "double tap"?
Update: 40+ dead, 100+ wounded 30+ seriously No direct blame on Syria yet from the Turkish government but this could get serious: Turkey sends military reinforcements to Syrian border after blast The Turkish military dispatched additional troops to the Syrian border after car bombs killed at least 40 people in the Reyhanli district of Hatay on Saturday.
The Cihan news agency said the military began deploying huge number of air and ground military reinforcements to Reyhanli on the Syrian border after the blasts.
Update: Why is this guy looking so satisfied?
Posted by b on May 11, 2013 at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (110)
May 10, 2013
Syria: Short Roundup As I am busy so here are just some recommendations to read on Syria.
America's hidden agenda in Syria's war "The US intelligence officer said, 'We can train 30 of your fighters a month, and we want you to fight Al Nusra'," the rebel commander recalled.
Opposition forces should be uniting against Mr Al Assad's more powerful and better-equipped army, not waging war among themselves, the rebel commander replied. The response from a senior US intelligence officer was blunt.
"I'm not going to lie to you. We'd prefer you fight Al Nusra now, and then fight Assad's army. You should kill these Nusra people. We'll do it if you don't," the rebel leader quoted the officer as saying. Syria's protracted conflict shows no sign of abating Firstly, the FSA - that you have been hearing so much about - does not exist.
A better title would be MWG, or men with guns, because having guns and firing them in the same direction is the only thing that unites them. Wise man Zbig: Syria: Intervention Will Only Make it Worse The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict--no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth--would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario. The Syrian army continues its successful offensive. The insurgents seem to be losing on all active fronts. There seem to be lots of problems with their logistics. The arms flow has somewhat turned into a trickle. Following the U.S., France and Britain have agreed to the Geneva terms.
But don't bet on a turn around yet. I expect some nefarious things are being cooked up right now. There are lots of talks of "massacres" without any evidence that such happen. We may soon see one with "evidence" and then should be careful when attributing that to the responsible side.
Posted by b on May 10, 2013 at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (37)
May 09, 2013
Open Thread 2013-08 News & views ...
Posted by b on May 9, 2013 at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (88)
May 08, 2013
Syria: Al-Nusra With "Chemical Weapons" Sourced From Turkey One of the three alleged "chemical weapon" attacks in Syria was done by chlorine on a checkpoint of the Syrian army. Fifteen soldiers died.
Two other attacks which Israel, Britain and France alleged were done by the Syrian army were somewhat mysterious. With collaboration of two bloggers and a photographer the incidents are now likely to be interpreted very different than Israel, Britain and France alleged.
Eliot Higgins, who blogs as Brown Moses, analyzed pictures of ammunition debris found at the two alleged attack sites.
The photographer Jeffry Ruigendijk photographed a salafist Al-Nusra fighter carrying a riot control gas canister that looks very similar to the ammunition debris found at the attacked places.
Small arms expert N.R. Jenzen-Jones identified the producer of these canisters and the likely way they found their way into Al-Nusra hands: [T]he munitions do appear quite similar to those produced by the Indian Border Security Force's Tear Smoke Unit (TSU), at their plant in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Several of their production items appear to share physical similarities with the unidentified grenade, but the closest visual match is their 'Tear Smoke Chilli Grenade', seen below. This grenade contains a combination of CS gas ( 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) and 'synthetic chilli' (likely a synthetic capsaicin, such as nonivamide) - both common riot control agents. Riot control agents like tear gas or pepper spray can be deadly when, for example, used in closed rooms. The symptoms vary (pdf) but there are usually respiratory problems just as those described by the people who were under the alleged "chemical weapons" attack.
So how did the Al-Nusra fighters get their hands on a Indian Border Security Force's Tear Smoke Unit grenade? This Indian news article notes that Turkey purchased 10,025 munitions from TSU in 2007, which may indicate a possible avenue of supply, particularly if the grenades were in the hands of rebel forces, as the image at top appears to indicate. The "chemical weapon" attacks were not done by the Syrian army. They were done by so called "rebels" with chlorine and with riot control agents by jihadist insurgencies who sourced the chlorine gas by stealing it from a Syrian factory and somehow obtained riot control agents from official Turkish state stocks.
The Israeli, the British and the French government tried to instigate a wider war on Syria by making false allegations about "chemical weapon" attacks by the Syrian army. The U.S. nearly joined them in their allegations. Will all those op-ed writers that tried to use the "fact" of chemical weapon usage now call for all out war on Al-Nusra?
Don't bet on it.
Posted by b on May 8, 2013 at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)
Syria: The U.S. Has No Leverage Secretary of State Kerry's talk with Putin and Lavrov yesterday brought back the Geneva consensus from last June which then Secretary of State Clinton had thrown out of the window immediately after she had agreed to it.
According to the Geneva plan the United States and Russia will convene a conference with the aim to find some consensual new Syrian government with each side promising to bring its supported party to the table.
For Russia that will be easy to do. The Syrian government has always agreed to such talks and is willing to send a delegation that will be able to discuss the various issues and to compromise.
But the United States now has a huge problem. It itself has little leverage over the various parts of the Syrian opposition. How can it then deliver on the promises it made?
There are two identified groups the U.S. is interacting with. The Syrian National Coalition (or whatever its latest name is) and the Free Syrian Army through General Idriss. To these groups the U.S. can give money or withhold money. It can give arms or withhold arms.
Giving arms would intensify the conflict and the created the bigger problems that come with escalated fighting. Those problems can not be kept contained in Syria and there are good reasons for the U.S. to avoid such an escalation. Withholding arms does obviously not give leverage over the fighters on the ground. It condemns them to lose.
Giving money or non-military goods to the FSA does not help either. General Idriss himself admits that despite a recent $123 million the U.S. funneled through him he still has no leverage over any forces on the ground: The defected Syrian general whom the United States has tapped as its conduit for aid to the rebels has acknowledged in an interview with McClatchy that his movement is badly fragmented and lacks the military skill needed to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
Gen. Salim Idriss, who leads what's known as the Supreme Military Command, also admitted that he faces difficulty in creating a chain of command in Syria's highly localized rebellion .. ... [Idriss] acknowledged that he has little influence over what the rebels do in Syria and no direct authority over some of the largest factions, including the Farouq Brigade, whose forces control key parts of the countryside from Homs to the Turkish border. The U.S. can give or withhold money to the SNC but what is the SNC's leverage on the ground and who, except the Muslim Brotherhood, does it really represent? And if the U.S. withholds money from them will Qatar and other source do the same?
The view of the Syrian opposition on renewed Geneva terms has so far been negative . Without any leverage to change that view the U.S. will not be able to deliver on what Kerry promised in Moscow.
When the U.S. instigated the "Syrian revolution" it had planned for a short conflict and a fast fall of the Syrian government. When that did not happen it escalated by delivering communications equipment, intelligence and weapons to the insurgency and trained some of the insurgency forces.
It can now escalate again by throwing itself deeper into the fight but the risk is enormous. Countries next to Syria would likely be seriously effected and in the end the U.S. would be the one to hold the Syrian tar baby at great cost and with a severe loss of international standing.
The Obama administration has probably found that the Geneva consensus may be its only way out. But as that way will likely be blocked by a Syrian opposition over which the U.S. has little leverage the only other alternative may be a total retreat.
That still has not registered with the Obama administration.
Posted by b on May 8, 2013 at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)
May 07, 2013
Syria: A Possible Russian Move There is a currently flurry of diplomacy with regards to Syria. The Iranian Foreign Minister Salehi just visited Jordan. Salehi will next fly to Damascus. Next week the Qatari foreign minister will visit Tehran. U.S. Secretary of State Kerry just talked with the Turkish Foreign Minister Dovatoglu. Kerry is now in Moscow for a talk with the Russian president Putin (The talk starts at least three hours late. Was Putin making a point with this?) Putin recently talked on the phone with the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahoo. On May 10 the British Prime Minister Cameron will also have a talk with Putin in the southern Russian resort Sochi.
The U.S. still demands that Moscow gives up on Syria and presses for Assad to leave. Moscow will, I believe, not agree to that.
In this diplomatic context Sunday's Israeli airstrikes near Damascus were a message to Putin, certainly coordinated with Washington. "Look what we will do if you don't give in. Next time we will bomb the Syrian air fields. Then their troops." At the same time the flurry of unfounded "chemical weapon" allegations are used to prepare the "western" public for a military intervention.
The big question is of course what Obama will do after Kerry and Cameron fail to change Putin's stand. There is a risk that Obama will decide to overthrow Assad by overt military means. He committed himself to that when he demanded that "Assad must go." It will be hard, if not impossible for him, to retreat from that. Military means would include a "no-fly zone" which would start to be implemented by destroying whatever is left of Syria's air defenses. Naturally with lots of collateral casualties.
Putin should plan on how to counter that. He should send a signal that can only be understood as "Up to here and no further." He should announce it on May 9, the 68th anniversary of Russia's victory over Nazi Germany.
On request of the Syrian government a squadron of 24 Russian fighter jets could be dispatched to Syria. They would be stationed at two Syrian airports. At each airport a battalion of Russian paratroopers would take care of the local security. Some long range early warning radar and some command and control elements would also be needed.
Supplies would come through Iranian and Iraqi airspace as well as though the port of Tartus where Russia's new permanent Mediterranean fleet is just arriving.
The declared sole and exclusive task of the Russian squadron would be to defend sovereign Syria's airspace from any outer interference. The message to Washington (and Tel Aviv) would be clear. Attacking Syria means attacking the Russian air force. Might you want to think twice about that?
Such a Russian move would be a heavens gift for Obama. He could back down from his demand that Assad has to go without losing much face. He could join everyone else in Washington in blaming Putin while appearing reasonable in not risking a wider war.
There is precedence for such a Russian move: A contingent of 200 Russian troops deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina then crossed into Kosovo and occupied Pristina International Airport in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo.
Upon hearing of the deployment, American NATO commander Wesley Clark called NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, and was told "you have to transfer authority" in the area. Clark then ordered a contingent of 500 British and French paratroopers to seize the airport by force, an order that is still debated. British officer James Blunt, who commanded the contingent, questioned and did not carry out this order. His delay was sanctioned by British General Mike Jackson. Jackson refused to enforce Clark's orders, reportedly telling him "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you". The U.S. and NATO eventually backed down because they did not want to risk a wider war.
A Russian air force capability in Syria would up the risk for any outright attack to a very high level. Even if Obama believes that his "credibility" demands a regime change no-fly zone in Syria, Russian air defense of Syrian airspace would likely make him change his mind.
Posted by b on May 7, 2013 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (105)
May 06, 2013
Syria: The Feckless Left
by Malooga lifted from a comment
One must not forget the disgraceful petition put out by what calls itself the "Left" in the name of "dignity and freedom" last week, the so-called "Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution". The geo-political analysis of the screed would not pass the muster of a child, and the empty verbiage comes straight out of a George W. Bush or Barak Obama speech -- without exaggeration. In any event, don't mislead yourself into thinking the timing was accidental in the face of the collapse of the mercenary Takfiri front. Because it wasn't. When the empire finds its back against wall, it will not hesitate in pulling out all stops -- even if it means trotting out a brigade of tired old leftists in its dirty service.
And if ever there was evidence that the entire moribund left intellectual class is bought and sold, this is surely it. One should carefully examine the list of names and publicly excoriate them for their now public complicity in international war crimes and the use of chemical weaponry. Tariq Ali, Norman Finkelstein!, Richard Seymour (author of "The Liberal Defence of Murder," "tracing the descent of liberal supporters of war..."), Anthony Arnove (Howard Zinn's boy), Fredric Jameson, Vijay Prasad, Ilan Pappe, Stephen R. Shalom, Alice Walker and so on down the line, over 220 Benedict Arnolds in all. Laudable behavior in the past is no excuse for lying while supporting Takfiri murderers in the present. May every single one of them know what it is like to be exposed to DU -- in the name of freedom and democracy, of course!
According to these house puppets, "The revolution in Syria (sic) is ... also an extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation", and every other emotional struggle for justice that these betrayers can throw against the wall and hope it sticks, while, like a virus, they live off the suffering of others, with their pompous pontificating and venal obfuscating, as their salaries and position are paid for by the big boys.
I am sorry that do to personal problems I am not at present able to take the time to deconstruct the empty verbiage of that embarrassing petition line by line as I have done with others in the past (The Euston Manifesto). This document's vacuous invocation of democracy, freedom and the Geneva Convention, its selective one-sided claims bereft of any factual evidence whatsoever , its twisting of truth on its head and its transparent Orwellism against "Asad's regime" should be a deep and enduring embarrassment for any signatory of the document.
In ostensibly "hop(ing) for a free, unified, and independent Syria," (Didn't that exist, albeit with blemishes, as all power structures exhibit, until a few years ago? The same hope was evinced for Iraq after the nation was first destroyed, but why should a few well trained house lackeys quibble over cause and effect?) while "confront(ing) a world upside down" consisting of "Russia, China, and Iran," (the bad guys) and in throwing in their lot and supporting "the US and their Gulf allies" (the good guys -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar for hummus sake!) these ahistorical ignoramuses not only have the blood of innocent Syrians on their heads, but that of the multi-million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Libyans, Afghanis, Yemeni, Sudanese and many other nations killed, injured, displaced and dispossessed by the time honored imperial strategy of divide et impera , divide and conquer. Apparently, those who refuse to study the bloody history of the West's destabilization campaigns are consigned (perhaps enlisted?) to support them.
As the election of Barak Obama, supported by similar empty-headed intellectual idealists, has proved, "Hope," in the absence of an honest and rigorous economic and power analysis, a realistic and workable political strategy of opposition, and the building of a viable alternative power structure, is even more destructive than surly apathy. These intellectuals' piteous petition evinces none of the above minimal requirements for successful activism -- except, of course, for Hope, the Orwellian trope of our decade. Their elitist Hope , is misplaced from the get go, of course -- for there is no attempt in the petition to address or assay the hopes and desires of the majority of the Syrian people. Instead, it is all about their precious hope. When your car careens off the road, you momentarily "hope" you won't be killed, although you know it is too late for hope; Intellectual study, attainment and popular acclaim is supposed to provide more effective tools than hope. In this case, like petition signing, apparently.
It simply beggars belief that the Left -- which claims to pride itself on solid structural analysis as opposed to groupcentric conspiracy theory -- betrays its utter ignorance of its purported forte (the former) while buying whole hog into the later, namely into the magical conspiracy theory that the removal of an individual, Assad, rather than the democratic restructuring of a power structure and national political economy, will in any way help solve the Syrians' problems. The undemocratic abdication of the duly elected "Bashar al-Asad," as called for by the petitioners, would clearly leave a prolonged bloody power vacuum, with every interested external and internal party vying in the darkest of ways for support, thereby inaugurating in a reign of terror even worse than at present and destroying the state. The recent bloody examples of Iraq and Libya should be obvious even to the purblind pusillanimous petitioners. One might think... An honest leftist, Stephen Gowans once described this type of thinking among the left as the "Rogue's Gallery" syndrome: the demonization of individual "monsters" like Saddam Hussein, Qaddaffi, Chavez, Castro. As the noted political thinker Noam Chomsky notoriously and repeatedly opined a decade ago, (paraphrased), "Iraqis, and the world, would be much better off without Saddam Hussein." So much for the vaunted structural analysis of the left. But who, especially the tenured left, has time for historical memory in an age of evanescent tweets?
To even imagine that one could throw one's hat in with the US, Zionist Israel, bought off and dying NATO, Saudi Arabian, and Qatari interests and end up with some type of leftist anti-globalist democracy movement complying with the will of the Syrian people is absolutely and utterly laughable. The destruction of Sirte and the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha, as well as the confessional partition of Iraq, come to mind as case examples of more likely consequences, especially for a multi-confessional state such as Syria. Do these people really have academic degrees; do they study history; are they in any way capable of critical thinking? They betray the rankest of historical ignorance, and to my mind, these moronic intellectuals demonstrate the far-sighted perspective of an ostrich with its head in the sand. It is truly a left gone mad.
***2
Of more serious import, is these morons' ignorance of, and complicity in, the process of shock doctrine globalization: How are nations dragooned into debt servitude, the Washington Consensus, by the bankers, the IMF, the WTO, while a few dozens walk away with billions? The destabilization of Iceland, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, a veritable rampage of county after country demonstrates that military means need not be necessary. Politicians are bought, laws are changed without fanfare or understanding by the masses, globalist media lies, populations are mislead, non-democratic agreements are passed, and fewer and fewer corporations run by an interlocking directorate of hundreds gets stronger and stronger. The commons is privatized, safety nets are cut, and unemployment, a form of soft genocide, is abetted. Everything is privatized and centralized into non-accountable, non-democratic global corporatist hands. The entire world has become just one big "externality" for the globalized military to handle. For holdouts, stronger means are necessary: Markets, commodity prices, interest rates, etc. are manipulated by the market makers. Ethnic and confessional destabilization campaigns are funded and fomented. Anger is channeled through unaccountable foreign NGOs, globalist funded faux-democracy movements, neo-liberal and powerless placeholders for the big boys all, but with catchy brands and great graphics, led by cult-like charismatic leaders whose radiant clothes cover their programmatic nakedness: This charade is what the aforementioned signatories, without a trace of awareness or irony refer to in their petition as "civic society," a faux society of profession technicians who manage the now crumbling societies "unrealistic expectations" and resistance. George Soros would be proud!
Peaceful protests against the hapless leader who initially attempted to placate the Globalist neo-liberal order by privatizing the commanding heights of the economy, by providing rent-a-torture services to the empire, are organized by the same globalist powers who forced or bribed the nation's venal leaders into neo-liberal contortions in the first place. It is never enough for the ghouls. Once the International order has their eyes on your country, you're damned if you attempt to comply and damned if you attempt to resist. False flag attacks destabilize, and then the hired hands come in -- in Syria's case, the Takfiris. Apparently, these esteemed intellectuals, so concerned with democracy and dignity, have never read John Perkins, Naomi Klein, or the blog LandDestroyer, among others. The entire process is, as Hannah Arendt might say, banally ordinary. And the feckless left happily signs on to the banality.
Iraq, Libya, Indonesia, Panama, the Philippines, and a dozen other countries. The feckless left should have a grip on the storyline, or what they like to call "the narrative" by now. But no, like the Keystone Cops, they fall for it every time.
And yet, despite the violence and destabilization that is taking down the world, one nation at a time, in a mad, mad race to the bottom -- might one think that this is cause to organize and petition for the feckless structural left. Nay, they say! All problems will be solved once Assad goes, declares the feckless structural, magical thinking left! Get on the bus, sign the magical petition, and go Further!
***3
In 1940, the astrophysicist George Gamow published "The Birth And Death Of The Sun." In it, he described the evolutionary tracks of stars. Stars differ by mass, and composition, and thereby final fate, but their evolutionary sequences, their life paths, could now be reliably predicted, he stated. Without an intelligent, informed, organized global resistance, we are now in the same place with nations within the global world order or more accurately, world system. If they resist, they can be a Haiti, a Honduras, a Yugoslavia, an Iraq, a Libya, a Syria, perhaps even a Soviet Union. Depending on their "mass," the composition of their industries, their constituent ethnicities and religions, and the strength of their resistance to Globalism, their fate can be reliably predicted.
Its nice to talk about dignity and democracy and freedom as the wealthy petition signers do. But the reality is that there is none of that without jobs and economic security for all. And the neo-liberalism of centrally controlled Globalism that is rapidly being rolled out around the world is all about destroying that for everyone (including the petition signatories), in the name of "workplace flexibility." Corporations have freedom and dignity and democracy within globalized trade organizations, not people, these days. That is to say, they now have the legal standing and rights which people once had, no matter how much the petition's signatories may wish or bleat otherwise. To blame Assad for this globalized transfer -- theft, really -- of rights is naive and misplaced, and to expect a seriously destabilized society to provide what their own relatively more stable societies cannot is both illogical and deeply patronizing of the Syrian people.
At the present juncture, the only force strong enough to resist this shock doctrine globalism-at-gunpoint crisis methodology is economic nationalism. Sure, nationalism is a drag, outmoded, and overly narrow in perspective. Many historical complaints can be legitimately set against it. In the long run, it is not the way to go for the planet or its inhabitants. But right now it is the only force strong enough to stand up to neo-liberal globalism. At the moment, as that wicked witch Maggie famously said, "There is no alternative." A movement of a few naive students have not been able to stand up to globalism, and neither have 1 million people occupying a nation's central square. Effective resistance to this global process -- an intentional run-down to the lowest common denominator of wealth, health, security, etc., and a run-up to the highest common denominator of pollution and ecological destruction, all in favor of corporate rights owned by a few people and enforced at the end of a gun -- without an effective global strategy and sustained global support, is merely wishful thinking, i.e., hope. Yet, we are are nowhere near that point of resistance yet, and with the aid of these moribund intellectuals, fecklessly yet sanctimoniously targeting one "monster" at a time, we may never get there. In my humble opinion, economic nationalism must be seen as a stepping stone away from centralized unaccountable globalism towards a more decentralized, economically just world. If I should be mistaken, I welcome any viable alternative strategies. Perhaps the feckless left will invite me to sign their petition!
These great vaunted intellectuals have not come up with an education program of resistance to globalism for their own countries, or one for Syria. Neither have they come up with a game-plan, a strategy for resistance. They lead no great movements of resistance in their own countries. they speak not to the masses, but to other intellectuals, a privileged 10%, if that. Like ostriches all, they deny and ignore the problem. Worse, they misdiagnose it: The problem is Assad (Hussein, Qaddaffi, Aristede, Chavez wasn't good enough) -- whatever -- it is an individual problem, not a systemic and global one. He, (whomever) is a bad leader; he made concessions to the globalists; he made deals with his national elite, whatever. In the end, for these utopians, Castro was not good enough for them, and neither was Chavez. They are all "problematic." In a world with virtually no left, the existing left, such as it is, warts and all, is not worth supporting when one can idealistically envision a Platonic left. Go figure. This is a solipsistic, deeply nihilistic politics of self-absorption. And because they see the problem to be an individual one, rather than a systemic one, they call for individual solutions to the wrong problem -- which clearly will never work. But perhaps that's what these moral geniuses are paid to do: Provide unworkable solutions to fictitious problems. To monkeywrench the resistance. And to do so in a non-holistic manner. Ad hoc -- sort of like Bush v. Gore. Remove the monsters one by one and stand up in feckless disbelief when they are each replaced in turn with worse monsters and worse bloodshed. "Don't blame me, I stood up to the monster," they bleat in astonished sheep-like unison. The feckless left. The non-structural, magical left. What can one expect of a group who supported Obama, because he was marketed as "Hope?"
***4
In examining the behavior of the feckless left, it might help to focus in on one specific example -- in this case, Michael Alpert, not a signatory to this document, but an intellectual of much the same ilk -- and examine how his behavior during the Libyan intervention mirrors that of the feckless left now. Dr. Alpert, a former member of SDS, a co-founder of the well known leftist publisher, South End Press, with a doctorate in economics, is proprietor of the ZNET community, a well known group who generally consider themselves far-left political radicals in the Chomskian mold. There is a high representation of young intellectuals. ZNET has extensive source material, topical articles, blogs and discussion groups, like many other sites. In addition to this bread and butter work, Dr. Alpert fancies himself as a political theorist, particularly as the developer of an idealistic economic vision called participatory economics or parecon. I have spent a fair amount of time studying parecon, and related participatory structures, and, in my opinion, they have a lot to say for themselves in an ideal world.
With that type of background, top-notch intellectual credentials and a life spent in radical politics, along with a doctorate in economics, one might expect Dr. Alpert to understand the processes of globalization. And in theory, he might. But when the rubber hits the road, as it did in with Libya, where I tracked his site closely, he transforms into a card-carrying member of the feckless left.
In other words, he abandoned all pretense of structural analysis. Further, he abandoned any accurate historical discourse: The roots of Qaddafi's politics in nationalism, pan-africanism and socialism, his accomplishments in 42 years of guiding his nation, the war the west has fought against Libya without respite for over 30 years, how his family was bombed and killed, how Libya was falsely blamed for both the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing and the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, how Qaddaffi was finally worn down resisting and began a program of neo-liberal privatization in a country of vast wealth and resources.
At this point, as I described above, a leader is in a lose-lose position. If he neo-liberalizes he loses the support of his people, yet it will never be enough for the globalists. And if he doesn't, his nation is worn down by endless destabilization campaigns. Destabilization is almost assured at this point. This is the ubiquitous pattern which should be the basis for any thinking persons analysis of the political situation.
But not for Dr. Alpert, who came down with a bad case of "Rogue's Gallery" syndrome. Qaddafi, he declared, based upon unsubstantiated reports in western corporate media, was killing his own people. It was a close call, he stated, but like the blind umpire, he was assured of getting it wrong. We must support intervention. And what was most striking was that his language was almost exactly, to the word, the language the current petitioners employ: The empire is bad and it acts in "cynical self interest." But in this one case, that cynical self interest magically coincides with the needs of the innocent people to not be slaughtered. So, in this one case, we should support the empire in stopping the monster, but no more. We should not support the empire in intervening militarily.
All of which serves to derail any structural analysis of the left in favor of ad hoc limited complicity based upon a western created crisis designed to appeal to the emotions, and to disarm, or at least divide any leftist resistance, which, as usual, opens the door to western intervention, which magically, never foreseen by the feckless left, always causes more killing and destruction and destabilization, which to any sentient being was the point in the first place. Wash, rinse, repeat.
These are the processes of the feckless left: historically created problem not analyzed, emotional reaction, pre-engineered ad-hoc solution, short-circuiting rational analysis, which are repeated every time. But, to their credit, they always stand firm against the monster du jour.
Here is the Orwellian position of the current petition: "one where states that were allegedly friends of the Arabs such as Russia, China, and Iran have stood in support of the slaughter of people, while states that never supported democracy or independence, especially the US and their Gulf allies, have intervened in support of the revolutionaries. They have done so with clear cynical self interest. In fact, their intervention tried to crush and subvert the uprising, while selling illusions and deceptive lies.
Given that regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone, we ask you to lend your support to those Syrians still fighting for justice, dignity, and freedom, and who have withstood the deafening sounds of the battle, as well as rejected the illusions sold by the enemies of freedom."
Russia, China and Iran (the bad guys) support the slaughter of people. The US and their gulf allies (the good guys, whose very names are carefully omitted as they have no credibility whatsoever) support the revolutionaries (hurray!), but only after trying to crush -- not support -- them. Got it? But the good guys don't really support the revolutionaries enough because "regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone" an Orwellian lie on par with one of Hitler's big lies. And the bad guys are responsible for "the illusions sold by the enemies of freedom," a line which apparently fell out of a Reagan speech from 1981.
We are never told exactly how supporting leftist revolutionaries falls within the cynical self interests of the empire, but by then no one is capable of critical thinking anyway.
It is simply impossible to follow this hollywood gobly gook and maintain a rational, historical, and structural analysis of events.
***5
In a sane world, the left would first provide us with honest analysis: Foreign countries are arming, training, infiltrating and paying for an armed mercenary force to destabilize Syria. Honest leftists would call for the cutting off of all support for this foreign destabilization before all else. Until all foreigners are removed from the destabilization scene, stopped from blowing up civilians, mosques and churches, businesses, the industrial infrastructure of the country, how can anyone, in their right mind, talk of dignity, freedom and democracy? What world do these signatories live in?
In a sane world, the left would stand against Israel and the US, attacking other nations unprovoked, dropping depleted uranium on defenseless people to cause injuries and defects for all of future history, perhaps. In this world, the feckless, magical thinking left, petition against Assad.
Finally, the word "revolution" has been bandied about as a propaganda word, preventing meaningful discourse and analysis of the political economic structure of the nation being analyzed. It has all the meaning of "swish!", "goal!", or "home run!" these days; it is fashionable. It has become a media term and stripped of a meaningful descriptive role. And the feckless left promotes this meaningless glamorization: The wanton destruction of a nation through age-old divide and conquer tactics has magically morphed into "the revolution in Syria." What is happening in Syria is as much a revolution as the self-serving, sanctimonious, feckless left is a force for good in the world, that is to say zilch.
***6
As far as the Angry Arab goes, the anger over events from his childhood might be real, but he has generally comes across as a petulant, overstuffed humus eater. He is not known for presenting any viable analysis of the process of globalization, and how it effects the Arab world, nor current day real geo-political possibilities of resistance in a very bleak era, although to his credit, he is excellent at the much easier task of pointing out ever-present political hypocrisy, commentary on long past events and actors, translations of beautiful poetry, and indulging in Utopian dreams. With his position and contacts, it is inconceivable that his stance could have been anything but willful ignorance over the mercenary, mendacious, and intentionally violent and destructive of life forces nature of the Takfiri "revolution." His public mea culpa, while laudable in theory, must be viewed as a rear guard action to preserve any street cred he has left with his audience so that he may mislead them again in the future. If he is not a member of the feckless left, he is still a member of the unprogrammatic, magical left.
If you want to be looked at as a leader and teacher of human beings, a credible human rights advocate or a credible intellectual analyst, you must make the crucial calls correctly when it counts , not two years later. The Angry Arab, by his conscious actions, has condemned tens of thousands of Syrians of all confessions to the fate of his own people in Lebanon a generation ago - the crucible which supposedly formed his moral spine - and that is unforgivable. It is incumbent upon one to learn the lessons of one's own life. His, albeit small, responsibility will be on his head forever, and he will never escape the judgment of it by humane people the world over for the rest of his life. He will never be thought of seriously by any thinking person as a political force for good, a member of a programmatic resistance, and his blog will be considered a mere curiosity, querulous and quixotic, not deeply insightful or moral, more along the lines of titillating political entertainment, like Jon Stewart. There is a difference being "mistaken" and refusing to read the accounts and understand the processes (processes, as I make clear above, which have changed little in intent since time immemorial and which are repeated quite regularly the world over) which every reader of this humble blog has been aware of for well over a year. A very big difference.
***7
What can we do? It is incumbent upon us that the list of petitioner's names and the empty verbiage and puerile analysis should be deconstructed and spread far and wide to discredit these puppets. Their empty program should be exposed for the nihilism that it is and replaced with a viable program of education and resistance.
As has been well documented, for instance at Landdestroyer , geo-political plans are devised years, if not decades, into the future. What has been transpiring in Syria is no surprise to any serious student of geo-politics, and was planned and publicized long ago. The feckless left has no excuse for ignorance if they expect to be a geo-political force for good.
What, one may reasonably ask, is to be the role of intellectuals? (No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky gained renown addressing this question.) Intellectuals are presumably given a voice and widespread exposure and the following and trust of people as leaders so that they can tell the truth to us while confronting those in power. They should take the time and effort to unravel the tortuous and purposely opaque mechanisms of power and explain the process to us mere mortals in simple terms which we can understand. One might expect them to elucidate how the west and its ZATO and Arab puppets has, over several decades, created a world of artificial austerity without meaningful work for millions, a network of fundamentalist schools spitting out nihilistic fanatics devoid of humanism or critical thinking, a pipeline of illegal arms, armies of brainwashed mercenaries provided jobs and cult-like group identity, all focused on destroying nation states one by one -- Syria being the current focus of destabilization. One might expect them to line out this process to those of us who are burdened by simply getting by day-to-day and putting food on our table, a roof over our heads, taking care of our cratering health, so that we can understand and follow them. One might, at the very least, expect them to tell us what Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard) and Wesley Clark (The US will destabilize seven countries...), partisan political players both, have let on. That is the very least one might expect of a public intellectual, even if they are a member of the feckless left.
However, in these extremely bleak days it seems the so-called "opposition" is given voice, funding, positions of authority and following so that the global mafia can call in their chits when it really counts. They can lie to us and spin meaningless confections of freedom, dignity, and a democratic future for Syria. (What hopes for freedom, dignity, and a democratic future do the unemployed, the underemployed, the great mass of flexible labor have in their own countries these days?) They can lie to us and turn cause and effect on its head: "the regime has pushed for the militarization of the Syrian nonviolent movement", and by implication somehow now has responsibility for the completely unmentioned mercenary Takfiri opposition, as if a non-violent movement could be forced into violence -- sell that analysis to real leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, neither a showboat intellectual.
Real leaders, from Martin Luther King to Hugo Chavez to Gary Webb risked their life to reveal the truth instead of gallivanting with the Rolling Stones, or being feted by some astroturf group, or funded by some globalist foundation or tenured by some pseudo-intellectual organization (university) held afloat by government and corporate contracts in killingry and global domination. These chickenshit, pathetic signatories, as well as other well known "leftists" such as Amy Goodman, Juan Cole, Josh Landis, Michael Alpert, Stephen Zunes, and others, are case examples of weak, pathetic traitors to humanity worldwide. They have willfully traded honest systematic analysis for emotional string pulling -- only real lives (not theirs) are involved. Nobody forced these people to become public intellectuals; they could be greeters at Walmart nation, like the rest of us shmoos.
Those who consciously through their words and actions seek positions of power and privilege within the left are all well aware, as are all activists, union organizers, journalists, etc. of the danger this entails and the courage involved in being a real leader in a land of the deepest imperial and neoliberal reaction, while living in countries which make no pretense whatsoever these days of providing for even the most basic welfare of their own people when it stands in opposition to the needs of multi-national capital. Therefore, these house intellectuals, these whitewashers of extremism, murder and mayhem -- are as guilty as traitors, for when the chit from on high gets called in by those who supported their rise to prominence, they cravenly put their own safety and privilege over the quest for intellectual rigor, truth and justice and the trust put in them by people who only want justice and peace in the world.
Truth is hard-won in times of universal propaganda and deceit, and one must think for oneself, and not blindly follow leftist, or any other, gurus. Rather, one must ruthlessly tear down, expose and destroy the propagandists, the cloaked aiders and abettors of empire. Its the least we can do.
Posted by b on May 6, 2013 at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (118)
May 05, 2013
The Angry Arabs Will No Longer Fight Against Syria It took As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab , two years to come to his senses and to acknowledge his errors: This was never a "revolution". I among other leftists in Lebanon signed a petition early on after the events in Deraa in which we denounced the regime and mocked and dismissed its narrative of armed groups roaming the country and shooting at people. I now figure that I was dead wrong : I do believe that armed groups were pre-prepared and armed to strike when orders (from Israel and GCC countries) arrive. They had a mission and it had nothing to do with the cause of liberation of Syria from a tyrannical regime. It was quite obvious that the insurgency in Syria was preplanned and managed from professional outside forces. Why did it take so long to recognize that?
It seems that the Israeli air attacks yesterday were many and severe. They hit several Syrian army installations and units and are obvious outright acts of a war of aggression. The attacks Thursday or Friday on alleged "weapon transports to Hizbullah" were only a diversion to set a propaganda picture for today's air campaign. The U.S. will at least have known of this plan. It is likely that it helped to develop the target list.
A response will come, either through Lebanon or at sea, but not immediately. Five days ago Israel called up reservists for a surprise live fire training maneuver in the north. This supposedly to hold of an immediate retaliation for the long planned attack. But it can not keep reservist in the field for long. The economic impact is too big.
This air attack happened after the Syrian army's offense against the foreign sponsored insurgents showed some serious progress. Israel and the U.S. want to prolong the fighting. To achieve that they hit the Syrian army to "level the playing field". As even As'ad AbuKhalil finally acknowledges their aim is to destroy Syria. Not Bashar Assad, not the government but Syria the country. Their aim has not yet been achieved.
The Israeli attack and its now obvious cooperation with the so called Free Syrian Army will have a significant negative impact on the insurgency . In the early phase many Jihadist from other countries came to Syria because they believed in the propagandized cause of overthrowing an, in their view, un-islamic regime. That early flood has already changed to a trickle. It will now run dry. Likewise many Syrian patriots who had joined the insurgency will now change their mind. Defections from the army to the insurgency had already stopped. We will now see defectors from the insurgents who will be willing to (re-)join the army. They will have valuable intelligence.
In my estimate, gained from hundreds of videos and reports, the total number of insurgents has never been above 30,000. Early on casualties were compensated for by new recruitment. But the recent gains of the Syrian army already had me guessing that the number of insurgents was in decline. Either through defections, people being just tired of it and going home or due to weapon impacts. This process will now accelerate.
This hemorrhage of personal is something neither the U.S. nor Israel can compensate for without putting boots on the ground. Something neither wants to do. A dwindling number of insurgents and the drying up of their recruitment pools, while the Syrian army can still replenish its ranks (if needed from outside the country) makes it certain that the insurgency will lose. The larger formations that currently hold territory will diminish in strength and melt away into a underground terror campaign that will be more of a nuisance than a real national danger. The Angry Arabs now more and more understand what this war is really about. They will no longer fight against Syria. Israel's attack accelerated that process.
Posted by b on May 5, 2013 at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (101)
May 04, 2013
Under Pressure Insurgents Up "Massacre" Campaign The Syrian opposition is currently promoting a "massacre" that allegedly happened in the village Bayda near Banias at the Mediterranean coast. The Hariri/Sunni aligned Daily Start headlines it as Images of Sabra and Shatila in Banias where up to 3,500 Palestinians were killed by rightwing Phalange hordes under Israeli supervision.
The number of those killed in Bayda is dubious and even the propagandized numbers are much smaller than the Sbara and Shatila ones.. The insurgent supporters claim "50", "more than 100" and "hundreds" were killed. The exiting evidence does not support that: Amateur video showed the bodies of at least seven men and boys lying in pools of blood on the pavement in front of a house as women wept around them. Why does the video only show seven men when "hundreds" are supposed to have died?
There is also context missing in the English agencies reports. The German news agency DPA reported this : Activists said troops attacked al-Bayda after a bus carrying pro-regime militants, known as Shabiha, was attacked, killing at least seven and wounding more than 30. We know that the opposition calls any civilians that support the Syrian government "Shabiha".
The current evidence then is this. A bus full of presumably government supporters was attacked and seven were killed and 30 wounded. Government troops then raided a nearby village to find the perpetrators. Seven men were killed in that village, probably by the government troops.
The might have been an ugly revenge killing by the government troops or they might have fought and killed the perpetrators guilty of the earlier incident. But this was, at least according to the available evidence, not a "massacre" or a willful mass killing of women and children like in the Sabra and Shatila camps.
We can assume that there will be more propaganda "masscre" reports as part of yet another campaign to press the U.S. into an open war on Syria. The more the insurgency is under pressure and in retreat, the louder this and other campaigns will become.
Posted by b on May 4, 2013 at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (83)
U.S. Financed Independent Polls Are Not Independent Final Push Made Ahead of Tight Malaysia Vote KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Malaysian politicians are making a final push on the last day of campaigning as an independent survey showed Prime Minister Najib Razak's long-ruling coalition running neck and neck with the opposition alliance ahead of Sunday's general elections.
A survey released by polling house Merdeka Center predicted Najib's National Front coalition will win 85 Parliamentary seats, while a three-member opposition alliance led by former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim will take 89 seats. It says 46 seats are too close to call and that two seats will go to smaller parties. Such tight independent polls usually carry the smell of U.S. interference.
A tight independent poll will show the U.S. favorite candidate may win. When the election then goes against the U.S. favorite the tight independent poll will be used to claim election fraud and to instigate riots to then somehow wrestle the U.S. favorite into power.
We have seen this scheme in various color revolutions in eastern Europe, in Thailand and recently also in Venezuela.
Indeed a short search for "Merdeka Center NED" immediately brings up data that lets one doubt the independence of that polling outfit. It is the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy is financing the Merdeka Center poll: Merdeka Center for Opinion Research $60,000 To provide policy makers and civil society representatives with public opinion research that can be used to formulate policies and programs in Malaysia. The Merdeka Center for Opinion Research will conduct four public opinion surveys across peninsular Malaysia in an effort to gauge the Malaysian public's opinion on a variety of public policy issues. The NED is funding several other so called Non-Government Organizations to push for its policy objectives onto the Malaysian public. The openly admitted total of U.S. money to U.S. friendly NGO's is over $1 million. It is likely that is more money behind this.
Part of such fraud is do saw doubt about the integrity of the election commission as is already happening in Malaysia.
Malaysia will have to brace itself for some unruly weeks to come. It should, as soon as possible, push out such foreign financed political influence.
Posted by b on May 4, 2013 at 03:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
May 03, 2013
Groundhog Day Iraq The New York Times prints an OpEd, together with a specially made graphic, in which an Iraqi exile tries to compel the United States to "save Iraq" by forming a coalition of the willing to take down an Iraq strongman.
No, it is not 2002/3. Its 2013. And some people never learn. Why Maliki Must Go : Getting Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to cooperate with the United States on a new political bargain there, with Mr. Maliki out of the picture, won't be easy, but it's essential to save Iraq.
Posted by b on May 3, 2013 at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)
May 01, 2013
More Arms For Destroying Syria
As I wrote on September 30 2012 on the foreign supported insurgents in Syria:
Syria: Destruction Is Their Aim ... Destruction of the infrastructure, economy and social fabric of Syria is their and their supporters aim. Hizbullah's Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has come to the same conclusion (as translated by @Amani_Lebanon ): 10:56 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: When we look at the whole picture on Syria, israel's position, and the recent happenings, we come to come conclusion:
10:57 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: The aim is not just to get Syria out of the resistance axis, it's not just about the Arab struggle against israel
10:58 AM - 30 Apr 13- #Nasrallah: Their aim is to completely destroy Syria, all of Syria, their aim is to make sure Syria becomes unable to stand on its feet.
10:59 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: They want to destroy Syria as a people, an army, a whole nation
10:59 AM - 30 Apr 13 - #Nasrallah: They want to turn Syria into a starved, destroyed and torn one. Today "officials" are telling U.S. papers that Obama is " moving toward sending lethal arms to Syrian rebels ".
This is just political theater. These papers are conveniently forgetting their own reporting on Syria. The destruction of Syria with the help of jihadist groups has been planned since 2007 . The U.S. has been sending arms to the insurgents from the very beginning. It has also run an extensive media campaign to support the insurgency. The U.S. exports grain and other food as "aid" to Syria which is then distributed by extreme radical al-Nusra cells . The first arms to Syria came from the black market, then from Libyan stockpiles, then arms were flown in from Croatia. All by or through U.S. secret services. The deliveries were made by the CIA from its large station in Benghazi, as well as through its stations in Turkey and Jordan. The groups those arms went to were vetted by the CIA and there is evidence that these weapons have also gone to takfiri jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusra. There is definitely no reluctance in official U.S. circles to arm anyone, no matter how radical there polices are, who is willing to destroy Syria.
In the end it does not matter whether the arms the CIA delivers are coming from Libyan, Croatian or U.S. stocks. It does not matter to which groups these arms are flowing to. More arms will only have one effect. The further destruction of Syria which the U.S. had planned for from the very beginning of its campaign.
Posted by b on May 1, 2013 at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (114) |
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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009, 7:01 am * By Lindsay Beyerstein
On paper, the worst recession in 70 years came to an end in the third quarter of 2009. On the streets, things are as bad as ever. Unemployment rose from 9.8% to 10.2% in October, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday.
The economy lost 190,000 jobs in last month. So, on the bright side we've "only" been losing an average of 188,000 jobs per month for the past three months, compared to an average of 357,000 jobs per month for the three months before that.
Wall Street sees progress: Stocks went up on Friday. Financial journalists said it was because everyone was so upbeat about only losing 190,000 jobs. But averages can be misleading. October's numbers still represent the biggest payroll drop in four months.
SEPTA workers on strike at the Frankford Transportation Center on November 3 in Philadelphia. (Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images) PHILADELPHIA, PA.--Trains, buses and trolleys are moving again here after transit workers ended a six-day strike late Sunday. Members of the Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 234 are expected to ratify an agreement in the coming week, ending a dispute that had centered on pension issues. The union demanded that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) pay more money into the underfunded pension, but as of Monday morning it was unclear what pension concessions the union succeeded in winning from management. Under the new contract, workers will increase their contribution to the pension fund to 3 percent of their salaries from the current two percent, and maximum pensions will be increased by $3,000, to $30,000 a year. The five-year contract also stipulates a 2.5-percent raise in the second year, and a 3-percent raise each year thereafter. Media coverage of the strike has been marked by hostility to strikers--and a scarcity of reliable information.
Monday, Nov 9, 2009, 9:29 am * By Art Levine
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House Democrats gather for a press conference after the House of Representatives passed the healthcare reform bill 220 to 215 late Saturday night. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Union leaders joined President Obama in hailing the historic, if narrow, passage of major health reform legislation in the House this weekend.
The bill "is a fiscally responsible bill that will cover 96 percent of Americans, end insurance company discrimination and denials of care and equip health care providers with the tools they need to lower costs for families and the country as a whole," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. "The bill...does not attempt to finance reform on the backs of the working middle class. .. But we still have a long way to go."
Indeed, as this blog and other observers point out, the real sticking point in the Senate probably won't be the public option or even the extreme anti-abortion language passed in the House, but the critical issue of how to pay for the legislation. Will it be by taxing the rich, as the House does, or burdening the middle-class with new taxes and costs? That's what union advocates and the Congerssional Joint Committee on Taxation say will happen as a result of the Senate's tax on insurers that offer high-cost plans.
ATLANTA, GA.--The Fort Hood shooting has once again focused national attention on the various and often violent ripple effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the "home front." Michelle Chen's Saturday pos t examined the severe economic challenges facing vets, including unemployment and foreclosure.
In Atlanta, where thousands of mental health professionals from around the world gathered for the annual International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies conference from Thursday to Saturday, a few days ahead of Veterans Day, the Fort Hood shooting became a possible example of the subject under discussion: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Could the Fort Hood shooter have suffered from PTSD given his work experience so far? Evidence and research discussed at the conference show how the triggering and manifestation of PTSD as an occupational hazard can be much more complicated than people might realize.
(Image courtesy IAVA)
The tragedy at Fort Hood may strike Americans as a singular, incomprehensible horror. But the shock of the killings may recenter Americans' perspectives on the quieter challenges that befall military men and women every day, even when they're stateside. Countless soldiers are returning from the battlefield to a world that seems alien to them, and a hostile economy often impedes their reintegration into civilian life . According to federal data, unemployment for post-9/11 era veterans in the past year has surged past of the national rate, to over 11 percent.
Despite the military's promises of upward mobility , unexpected hardships pushes many vets into a devastating downard spiral. For some, being back home doesn't mean having one . The Washington Post reports that, according to federal data, "Roughly 131,000 of the nation's 24 million veterans may be homeless on any given night, and about twice as many are homeless each year."
Friday, Nov 6, 2009, 12:59 pm * By Art Levine
Yesterday's rally of rabid "Tea Baggers" denounced health care reform with venomous attacks on President Obama, complete with a prominent sign of dead concentration camp victims likening the plan to Dachau , just the latest sign of a GOP surrendering to its fringe elements. At the same time, the GOP has offered a new so-called alternative health plan that cannot be taken seriously: it continues to allow insurers to deny those with pre-existing conditions and would likely offer insurance to only three million uninsured Americans, leaving 52 million uninsured.
If that's what Republicans are for, yesterday's rally showed just how much extremism is driving what they're against. As David Corn reported in Politics Daily :
The angry folks at the protest -- which attracted several thousand conservatives -- held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust . A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" -- a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.
Friday, Nov 6, 2009, 12:07 pm * By Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President
Taking candy from a baby: A consortium of Chinese and American companies goes to Washington and announces plans to build a $1.5 billion windmill farm in West Texas using $450 million in U.S. Stimulus funds, which will create 2,330 jobs - 2,000 of them in China.
The baby - Washington -- doesn't cry or whine or spit in the consortium's face. That's what's really wrong with this story.
So accustomed to being bought and sold, Washington simply begins processing forms so it can hand over your tax dollars to create jobs in a turbine factory in the city of Shenyang, China at a subsidy of $193,133 each.
It's like these bureaucrats live in Wonderland. Or an America where the unemployment rate isn't 10.2 percent. Or where 40,000 American manufacturing facilities didn't disappear in the past decade. Or where banks didn't repossess nearly a quarter million American homes in the past three months.
The recovery must be here. After all, what more proof is needed than the fact that Goldman Sachs is setting aside $ 16 billion for bonuses for 2009?
Of course, conditions are not quite so swell at the bottom of the economic pyramid, as unemployment moves past the dreaded 10% level and wage cuts spread throughout the workforce. "[P]ay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression ," reports Louis Uchitelle, author of The Disposable American.
Moreover, this trend follows directly after an extended period in which American workers' real wages stood at 18 percent less in 2007 than they were in 1973 . And foreclosures are at 10 times their daily rate during the Depression, according to Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage: Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals .
Democrats are not offering solid solutions to these huge, systemic problems, even as Wednesday's defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia indicate that Democrats need to get moving on jobs.
Breaking News Breaking Down , a film by journalist Mike Walter, explores how journalists are affected by reporting in danger zones like lower Manhattan on 9/11, pictured above. (Photo courtesy BreakingNewsBreakingDown.com ) John McCusker was living his dream as a photojournalist covering his beloved and colorful hometown of New Orleans. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which put McCusker in the dual role of victim and journalist, one of the relatively few journalists who understood the city better than the hordes of reporters who soon flocked in from around the world. He worked tirelessly throughout the storm, part of the team that later won the Pulitzer Prize for the New Orleans Times-Picayune . He lost his home, nearly all his belongings and his long-time neighbors, who scattered across the country. During the flooding and immediate aftermath he managed to keep the stress and trauma at bay enough to focus on his job, shooting photos seen around the world. But as the anniversary of Katrina approached, he couldn't hold it together any longer. Having struggled to access quality mental healthcare, one day he took two anti-anxiety pill...and woke up in the Orleans Parish prison in shackles.
Big news from last week largely overlooked by the mainstream media: The United Steelworkers will join forces with MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A., the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, to start worker-owned factories in Canada and the United States.
"We see today's agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada," USW International President Leo W. Gerard said. "We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities."
Under the historic agreement, signed October 27, USW and Mondragon will try to integrate collective bargaining with Mondragon's collective practices. The two sides have also pledged to explore new approaches to bargaining in order to encourage worker participation and labor/management cooperation. |
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump is falsely claiming that "bad legislation passed by the Democrats" has forced his administration to separate children from their families at the border, even though no such law exists.
TRUMP'S TWEET
Trump tweeted Tuesday: "Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can't get their act together! Started the Wall."
THE FACTS
No law mandates that parents must be separated from their children at the border, and it's not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress.
Children are probably being separated from the parents at the border at an accelerated rate because of a new "zero tolerance policy" being implemented by Trump's own administration. Announced April 6 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the policy directs authorities to prosecute all instances of illegal border crossings, even against people with few or no previous offenses.
Administration officials are quick to note that Sessions' policy makes no mention of separating families. That is correct. But under U.S. protocol, if parents are jailed, their children are separated from them because the children aren't charged with a crime.
So while separating families might not be official U.S. policy, it is a direct consequence of Sessions' zero-tolerance approach. (Worth noting too is that John Kelly, now Trump's chief of staff, spoke in 2017 about possibly separating parents from children as a way to dissuade parents from trying to cross the border.)
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 650 children were separated from parents at the border during a two-week period in May.
Jeff Crouere
The U.N. human rights office has called on the Trump administration to "immediately halt" the separations, saying "detention is never in the best interests of the child and always constitutes a child rights violation."
Trump might be referring to a 2008 law passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush, but that legislation is focused on children who illegally cross the border without a guardian, known as unaccompanied minors. That law calls for releasing children into the "least restrictive setting" -- often to family or a government-run shelter -- while their cases slowly wind through immigration court.
Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck |
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, sighting down the barrel of an AK-47 machine gun looking toward Afghanistan, in the Khyber Pass.
The recent film "War Machine," made by Brad Pitt and released by Netflix, centers around an egotistical general commanding U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Its message boils down to this one truth: If you invade someone's country, they're going to shoot at you and tell you to get out.
A whole generation has grown up since the U.S. CIA first began training and arming a covert opposition force in Afghanistan in 1979. The first regular U.S. armed forces were sent there in 2001. Since then, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan, allegedly to "help" a succession of Afghan governments that were put in place by the occupiers.
This war began under Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and has continued throughout the terms of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Now Donald Trump is considering an increase in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 50,000. (bloomberg.com, May 17)
It is the longest U.S. war ever. Why?
Today, it is supposedly a war against the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaida. But these groups are descended from the "warlords" that the CIA first turned into fighting units against a government led by the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which had taken power in 1978.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died last month at the ripe old age of 89, was the foremost architect of that vicious war as Carter's national security adviser. Once it became known that the CIA had created a covert army in Afghanistan, the story given out by the U.S. government was that it was helping the Afghan people resist a Soviet invasion. This became the rationale for an increasingly bloody and expensive war that eventually overthrew the progressive government of Afghanistan.
But Brzezinski himself later bragged that the CIA operation had begun six months before the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan. In fact, the Soviet intervention was not an "invasion." It had been requested by the Afghan government to defend it against the CIA's covert war.
Brzezinski bragged the truth
Brzezinski revealed the truth to the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998: "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."
Asked by the interviewer if he now regretted anything, Brzezinski replied, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" (Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 15-21, 1998)
The timing of the covert CIA operation had already been revealed by former CIA Director Robert M. Gates in his book "From the Shadows" (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Gates wrote: "The Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to the insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet, Marxist government of President Taraki at the beginning of 1979. On March 5, 1979, CIA sent several covert action options relating to Afghanistan to the SCC [Special Coordination Committee]." A meeting of the SCC "was finally held on July 3, 1979, and -- almost six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan -- Jimmy Carter signed the first finding to help the Mujahedin covertly."
Yet, despite these admissions by top government officials, the narrative in the U.S. media continues to be that the U.S. set up, armed and trained the "Mujahedin" to counter a Soviet "invasion." So that was just a cover story. What were the real reasons for the U.S. spending billions of dollars and destroying half the country in an effort to bring down the government of Afghanistan?
To answer that question, it helps to know a little about Afghanistan's history and how it had remained independent for more than a century, even as the European and U.S. imperialist powers seized much of Asia, Africa and Latin America as their colonies or neocolonies.
1839-1919: Three British invasions fail to conquer Afghanistan
Britain, which controlled neighboring India, invaded Afghanistan three times -- in 1839, 1879 and 1919 -- but could not keep a puppet colonial regime in power there. Each time, popular uprisings drove out the British troops. However, London did force the Afghan government to accept British influence over its foreign policy, and in 1893 the British drew up the Durand line. This supposedly temporary division became the border between Afghanistan and British India -- the part that today is Pakistan.
The last invasion, in 1919, provoked an uprising that overthrew the government of Habibollah, who had capitulated to the British. Inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution, the new regime of Amanollah then signed a treaty of friendship with the Bolshevik government, being one of the first countries to do so. From then until the 1970s, Afghanistan would not join any military alliance against the USSR.
1965: PDPA launched to end feudalism, gain women's rights
The Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan was formed in 1965. Its program was anti-feudal and included land reform, canceling the debts of the peasants and democratic rights for women, including an end to the dowry and establishing education and health care open to all women and men.
By the 1970s, the Afghan government of Mohammad Daoud was moving to the right in its domestic policy and toward NATO in its foreign policy. The vast and mountainous countryside was under the iron grip of feudal landlords. In Kabul and a few other cities, however, the PDPA had developed much support among students, especially young women, as well as low-paid civil servants and soldiers.
On April 26, 1978, even as the arch-imperialist and billionaire Nelson Rockefeller was on his way to visit Daoud in Kabul, the government launched an assault on the PDPA, arresting almost its entire leadership. This came right after a massive funeral for members of the PDPA who had been killed by Daoud's police. Clearly, Daoud meant to assure the U.S. that his regime could repress any opposition that might arise to its pivot toward imperialism.
Within a day, however, army units had mutinied and liberated the PDPA leaders from their prison cells. In one case, soldiers used a tank to break down the walls of the jail where PDPA leader Nur Mohammad Taraki was being held. Taraki went on to become head of what was known as the Saur Revolution.
1978: Revolution begins land reform, ends bride-price
The U.S. Department of Defense has published "Country Study" books about countries around the world. They contain useful information meant for U.S. government employees sent abroad and can be more truthful than the propaganda put out by other government bodies, because the people using these books need to know what conditions are really like in the countries they are being sent to.
The version of "Afghanistan -- A Country Study" that was published in 1986 contains startling admissions that go against the established government narrative about Afghanistan. For example, it says that "when the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both landownership inequalities and usury." The book added that the PDPA also canceled mortgage debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners. It set up extensive literacy programs, especially for women, and printed textbooks in many languages spoken in different parts of Afghanistan.
Said the Pentagon book, "The government trained many more teachers, built additional schools and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans." Among the very first decrees of the revolution were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice in marriage.
This should be kept in mind today, when the propaganda machine prettifying U.S. imperialism's long war of oppression in Afghanistan makes it seem that defending women's rights is among Washington's top priorities.
But in 1978, when Brzezinski and the Carter regime launched the war against the Afghan revolution, they knew it was a progressive regime trying to move this very underdeveloped country out of feudal oppression. That didn't stop them from arming and financing a counterrevolution.
Within a few years, the contras who had been armed, trained and financed by the CIA were assassinating idealistic young teachers, women and men, who had gone to the countryside to teach literacy to the people.
One of these contras was Osama bin Laden. Under the excuse that it was defending "freedom of religion," the U.S. undermined the secular government of the PDPA by creating an army that opposed the PDPA's progressive reforms in the name of fighting for an Islamic state.
At the same time, however, U.S. imperialism was trying to undermine the Islamic republic in Iran, which took power in 1979 after a huge revolution there against the Shah, a puppet who had been put in power by the U.S. and British oil companies. That revolution also encompassed many progressive, secular fighters, but the Islamic leaders had the strongest organization among the masses and proved capable of driving out the Shah and his grouping.
Religion is not the real issue
Clearly, the issue of religion is not what motivates the imperialists. Nor do they care about women's rights. They will use any excuse and make any temporary alliances as they try to reassert their economic domination of the region. What motivates them is their need to plunder the world, especially the areas rich in oil, for the benefit of the billionaire U.S. ruling class.
But when you invade a country, the people will shoot at you and tell you to get out.
That is what has happened in Afghanistan. Once the progressive forces were destroyed, there was a vacuum of leadership to resist the imperialists, who still occupy the country and hand pick its government officials. The armed resistance to this has, for now, coalesced around forces organized on a religious basis, some of whom espouse an extremely reactionary agenda. Nevertheless, they have won many recruits who are even willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to get the U.S. out.
No amount of escalating the supposed "war on terror" can erase this terrible situation. On the contrary. Every bomb dropped on villages in Afghanistan only intensifies the hatred of imperialism, no matter what form it takes. Every political attack on Muslims by Trump or his counterparts in Europe only deepens the anger of those who are oppressed.
In any kind of war, it is the ordinary people, whether soldiers or civilians, who bear the brunt of the suffering. It is the wealthy who have the means to protect themselves even as they profit from a victory.
The "war on terror" has taken its toll not only on the people of Afghanistan but also on people just walking the streets of major Western cities, who are made to pay for the crimes of the ruling classes. It has taken its toll on young soldiers who are told nothing about Afghanistan's history and who, if they survive deployment to that war zone, have to fight just for decent medical care back in the U.S.
This war is not in the headlines, even when the blowback from it is. It will go on forever -- unless the people stop it. U.S. out of Afghanistan! |
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, sighting down the barrel of an AK-47 machine gun looking toward Afghanistan, in the Khyber Pass. |
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ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that shines a light on "abuses of power and betrayals of public trust." They are investigating a new group of white supremacists in Southern California they say that law enforcement is paying little attention to, despite a growing threat. The group was at the center of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia - a day that lives in infamy for America. One young counter-protestor died, and Trump still claimed "very fine people" were among the neo-Nazis.
A California white supremacist group, R.A.M, is full of violent felons.
Law enforcement pays it little attention. https://t.co/eS0V5cVDXJ
-- ProPublica (@ProPublica) October 22, 2017
The Rise Above Movement, or RAM, is a group of 50 from Southern California who made their way across America to Charlottesville, after violent appearances in Huntington Beach, and Berkeley. The group's purpose is reported to be "physically attacking its ideological foes." They are an "alt-right street-fighting club," according to the director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
They adhere to the "14 words" white supremacist slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The slogan is a worldview that a "rising tide of color" believed to be controlled and manipulated by Jews threatens to doom the white race to extinction.
ProPublica has exposed the criminal histories of the members. One of the members is a 24-year-old man in Southern California who trims trees for a living. That man, Ben Daley, was involved in Charlottesville attacks and once served seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Daley claims to have signed up for the military recently.
Other members have convictions for stabbings, drugs, resisting arrest and assaulting officers, possessing switchblades and illegal guns, disturbing the peace, DUI, and felony robbery charges. They associate with larger and more organized groups like Hammerskins Nation, "the best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group known," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
These extremists see Trump as a validation of their belief systems. They have attacked journalists with shouts of "Fake news!" while punching and shoving, which is all something Trump himself has encouraged.
Even with ample video footage of violent clashes by the group, police haven't responded by bringing charges against RAM, and have claimed they lack resources to carry out thorough investigations.
Meanwhile, the group has a public image for white supremacist media outlets, wearing skull masks and goggles to prevent pepper spray, and appearing boxing and showing off physical fitness. They even have a logo derived from the crusades -a sword with a cross on it and an evergreen tree.
They portray their cause as defending Western civilization from Jews, Communists, Muslims, and brown-skinned immigrants. Their motto is "courage, identity, and virtue," which is of course entirely at odds with their bigotry and violence.
More paradox: Their leader also denies accusations of racism or fascism and claims not to know what the word "racism" means. Members use overtly racist and anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media. The use of social media allows them and other extremist groups to grow an audience quickly.
The group has a sense of victimization by leftist academics, politicians, and workforce standards and sees their movement as an "antidote to the 'complete degeneracy' of contemporary American life."
Hate groups today attempt to hide behind the term, "alt-right." Even our former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to Trump, Sebastian Gorka, aligned with the alt-right. Trump's current senior advisor for policy, Stephen Miller, still remains and is also reported to align with the views of the alt-right/neo-Nazi movement.
According to a former neo-Nazi, using the term "alt-right" "helps white supremacists to legitimise their hatred." It's a disguise that rapidly wore thin as the term rose to the level of a household name.
See the video about RAM from ProPublica below:
Featured image: Screenshot via YouTube |
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There's little doubt, outside circles filled with self-delusional reactionaries, that religion is probably the most important force in continuing the oppression of women worldwide. Around the world, various abuses from coerced marriage to domestic violence to restricting reproductive rights are all excused under the banner of religion. More to the point, women's rights have advanced more quickly in societies that put religion on the backburner, or like the United States, have strict laws separating church and state. But even in the U.S., the main result of the growing power of the religious right is the rollback of reproductive rights and other protections for women's equality.
Former president Jimmy Carter, who is probably the country's most prominent liberal Christian, is willing to set aside his enthusiasm for faith to admit this. While doing press promoting his new book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power , Carter told the Guardian that "women are treated more equally in some countries that are atheistic or where governments are strictly separated from religion."
This isn't because atheists and secularists have fewer people in their ranks that have ugly and backwards attitudes toward women. It's because, by never having religion in the discourse about women's rights in the first place, discourse in secular circles and societies never gets mired in endless, irresolvable debates about what God wants. Instead, secular societies can get straight to the facts and policy debate. When you stop worrying what God wants and start worrying about what people want, it's much easier to argue that women should have full human rights. After all, women are half the human race. When everyone is talking about what God supposedly wants, it becomes very easy to forget that ultimately, the issue of women's rights is about ordinary, everyday men and women and what goes on in their lives.
It's hard not to suggest that what you need is more religious people making full-throated religious arguments for women's equality, to counter the inevitable reactionaries that use religion to oppress women. It's clear that Carter thinks he can lead such a movement. He is an evangelical Baptist, albeit a fairly liberal one, and hopes this will help him reach audiences that perhaps would be less interested in this kind of pro-woman argument coming from, say, atheists and secular feminists.
It's certainly a breath of fresh air having Carter explain, in his patient and comforting way, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that religion mandates sexism. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to ignore the fact that religiosity and sexism go hand in hand, and the solution might need to be something more than simply demanding better, less sexist religions.
Carter, like many liberal Christians, is happy to criticize more conservative religious leaders who want to oppress women. Still, it's hard not to have doubts that Carter's own devout Christianity might make him less critical than he should be of the role religion plays in the oppression of women. The sticky point when it comes to advocating for a kind of Christian feminism is that the Bible is undeniably sexist. And it's not just the Old Testament, where women are told they were created from men and told, repeatedly, that they are basically property to be disposed of as men see fit. The New Testament has plenty of verses that should cause feminist eyebrows to shoot up.
Consider Ephesians 5:22-24, the verse that the Southern Baptist Convention upholds but Carter disagrees with:
"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."
There's not a lot of wiggle room around that, as Carter freely admits. The Bible is pretty straightforward in its description of women as inferiors who should treat their husbands like masters. Fundamentalists who cite this verse in order to justify the continued oppression of women have a pretty strong argument.
Jimmy Carter's rejoinder to this is that it's cherry-picking. He went on the Diane Rehm show and argued , "If you read the words and actions of Jesus Christ, he not only never discriminated, but he also exalted women far beyond any status they had ever enjoyed before that, and even since then. But there are some verses in the 36,000 or so in the Holy Bible that you can extract in their isolation, and you can prove almost anything you want." He also tried to sell audiences on the idea that Paul commanding women to be silent and submissive in church was somehow just a local issue and not somehow reflective of a broader view of women's roles, though he did not explain how on Earth it could ever be okay to tell women that they are to be silent and submissive "as the law says."
The problem is both Carter and the fundamentalists he denounces are cherry-picking Bible verses. Carter likes to cite Galatians 3:28, which states, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," as proof that the New Testament supports a view of female equality. But there's no real reason to think that verse "counts" more than the number of verses that are quite clearly stating that women are inferior to men.
Indeed, it's worth noting that it's not just liberal Christians that ignore Bible verses that are just too reactionary for our times. There's some parts of the Bible that are too conservatives or backwards for every stripe of conservative, no matter how conservative. Protestant fundamentalists ignore the parts of the Bible that instruct women to be silent in church, and even the Catholic church doesn't take that part so literally that nuns and female Sunday school teachers are not allowed to teach religion. And pretty much all stripes of Christian, from the most conservative to the most liberal, pointedly ignores the parts of the New Testament that endorse slavery and instruct slaves to obey their masters.
What we're left with is the unavoidable conclusion that both fundamentalist and liberal Christians have a tendency to decide first how they feel--do they believe women are equal to men or inferior to men?--and then they start mining the = Bible for verses to back up the point of view they've already decided on. Since there's no outside reference point to show which verses are the truest, best ones, this is the only way that it could work. All stripes of Christian, in addition, are happy to switch up what verses they believe "count" and what do not according to the changing tides of their time.
Carter touches on this briefly, writing, "There is no need to argue about such matters, because it is human nature to be both selective and subjective in deriving the most convenient meaning by careful choices from the thirty-one thousand or so verses in the modern Christian Bible." However, it's a brief thought, almost an aside. He is far more interested in playing the verse vs. verse game, even though he tacitly admits that it's a pointless game that no one will ever win because, as he says, religious authorities will always end up just accepting "the version they prefer."
It's a shame, really, because exploring this idea--that all religious people are, on some level, making it up as they go along--would be a lot better use of a liberal Christian's time than trying to match fundamentalists verse for verse, hoping your Galatians cancels out their Corinthians, all while knowing that no one is ever persuaded this way. What liberal Christians could do, instead of quibbling endlessly with conservatives over theology, is stand up and say, "No one knows either way what God wants or what Jesus would have wanted, so let's table the argument and start discussing the facts and evidence instead."
Jimmy Carter is running around doing press arguing that Jesus didn't want to oppress women. It's probably helpful for the press to remember that "religious" is not the same thing as "misogynist." But reminding people that liberal Christians exist does very little to convince them that liberal Christians somehow have a better read than fundamentalist Christians do when it comes to what God thinks about women's equality. What would be better is if Carter broke the mold and demanded a different debate between Christians about these issues? Carter has a unique opportunity to go on TV and ask his fellow Christians to stop trying to suss out what God wants when it comes to women.
The biggest fallacy in our modern political discourse is this belief that because one believes in God, one has to involve God's wishes in your decision-making. The problem with that, as Carter understands, is no one actually knows what God is thinking and so they are simply asserting what they believe and assuming God is along for the ride. The best thing Carter could do to advance the cause of a liberal, feminist Christianity is to challenge his fellow Christians to get past this endless loop of Bible-mining and instead to join the secular world in putting the real-world evidence first and seeing where it leads them. |
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A "dennis the menace" cartoon shows a little girl and her friend asking two little boys whether they want to play "primary health-care provider." This curious bit of insurance company jargon that has been substituted for "doctor" -- a phrase that internists and family physicians find so demeaning and depersonalizing -- has now reached the comics pages and become common parlance. In a way, the joke made about primary care is emblematic of the crisis in which primary care now finds itself. The issues are important not only to physicians. To the degree that people are patients or consumers (however the two may differ), the outcome of the turmoil in primary care will determine what to expect at the most basic level of health care in the future.
Stephen Schroeder, a recent president of the $ 8 billion Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, notes that primary care has been on a roller coaster. In the early 1990 s, managed care attempted to use primary physicians and nurse practitioners to improve access and quality while, at the same time, keeping costs down. There was talk of the primary physician as the coordinator of all medical care. It didn't work, and the backlash resulted in a decline in prestige, job satisfaction, and income for primary physicians. Many of the young physicians who flocked to the field felt cheated and misled. At the same time, the average medical student's educational debt has climbed to just under $ 110,000 today. More than 25 percent of students are burdened with a debt greater than $ 150,000 -- a figure that further affects career choice for the next generation of physicians.
Graduates of American medical schools filled only 47 percent of residency training positions in family practice in 2002 , a drop from 73 percent six years earlier. Similar trends are present in general internal medicine. The reduction in satisfaction that affects most branches of medicine is worst in primary care, according to Schroeder and others. Both the public and physicians in training are fascinated by new technology, and this is increasing interest in medical and surgical specialties at the expense of primary care. Income differentials are considerable and increasing.
These details are of more than academic interest, even though, as an editor once put it to me, "The public has trouble empathizing with physicians because it is difficult to identify with them." Nevertheless, walking the proverbial mile in the moccasins of both primary and specialty physicians can provide insights available no other way.
"Anatomy of an Internist"
S peaking of "my doctor" typically has meant a primary physician with generalist training. In the United States, however, patients with such diseases as arthritis, diabetes, lung disease, or heart disease would often choose corresponding medical specialists -- rheumatologists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists, or cardiologists -- as their principal physicians. Since all medical specialists have had training in internal medicine, they often came to fill the dual role of specialist and generalist, most often for patients with ongoing illnesses in their specialties. This brought considerable depth and expertise into primary care. It also narrowed the specialist/generalist divide that is characteristic of medicine in the rest of the world.
Managed care managed to disrupt this arrangement. Whereas specialists predominate in the United States by a margin of 2-1 (the reverse of the ratio in most other Western countries), managed care typically forced physicians to declare themselves either specialists or generalists, and it was easier and more lucrative to be a consultant rather than a jack-of-all-trades.
What began as a desire for administrative simplicity by health insurance carriers (and no doubt as a way to obtain care more cheaply, since specialists tend to use more resources) had the perverse effect of weakening primary care and contributing to a reduction in the work force. Patients were forced to change physicians without being entirely sure why. Some were dropped when their doctors decided to limit their practices to a specialty, but others with ongoing diseases had to find a different specialist when their doctor decided to register with a given hmo as a primary physician. Such decisions were, and continue to be, made specifically with each insurance carrier. Thus, where formerly the doctor filled both roles, a confusing matrix of practice limitations resulted. Sometimes physicians were in effect required to continue to do both jobs, but to be paid for only one.
The quest for price and volume efficiency by managed care has brought an increasing number of nurse practitioners and physician extenders into the role of "primary care providers." The three-way relationship between physicians, these non-physician providers of care, and patients is unusual. They are well-accepted by patients, and they help busy physicians. But they also create competition for physicians and probably lower their earnings to the degree that professionals with less expensive training can replace them. Though consumers surely appreciate a brake on fee increases, non-physician providers can't really offer the full range of services for which physicians are qualified. How this complicated relationship will work out over time is uncertain and not often discussed.
Another managed care anomaly is the assigning of a primary physician to all hmo patients. Traditionally, patients chose a physician on their own when they wished to. An entire popular literature developed in the 1970 s and 1980 s describing how to make that choice wisely. Patients who opted not to have a physician or who neglected to choose one often met their future primary physician upon their first need for care. It could have been for something as trivial as conjunctivitis or as serious as a myocardial infarction. (Both situations were common in my own experience in internal medicine and endocrinology.)
Alternatively, a clinic or an emergency room served the same function, but with the patient's loyalty attached to an institution rather than a particular physician. The distinction is not perfect; Kaiser Permanente patients often responded, when asked the name of their physician, "Kaiser," even when they had their own physician within the organization.
But being asked either to name a primary physician or to have one assigned is new. Doctors consequently become names arbitrarily printed on patients' insurance cards, a process that engenders little respect for the doctor. Furthermore, naming the primary physician as a "gatekeeper" whose approval is required by hmo s before patients can see a specialist suggests more of an obstacle than a caregiver. Personally, I have never encountered rudeness like I saw from hmo patients who came to see me because they were required to do so rather than because they wanted to. This is especially true when they had no interest beyond obtaining a referral slip to see a specialist whom they had already chosen themselves. It is difficult to know how to feel toward such patients and to function properly as a physician for them.
Blurred role definition affects internists in particular. For more than 50 years, internal medicine has struggled to define itself. The American Society of Internal Medicine, an organization created by practicing internists, coined the term "personal physician." But in reality, the internist was defined more by what he or she didn't do (no surgery, obstetrics, fracture-setting, or young children). A casualty of increasing fragmentation caused by the separation of medical sub-specialists into their own organizations, the asim merged with the American College of Physicians in 1998 .
The acp has also taken its turn at redefining the internist and in 2001 settled on "Doctors for Adults." Once again, it is hard to be sure what this means, because all other specialists except pediatricians also treat adults. And it still isn't clear how the internist can be involved in general medicine and still be a specialist. This is probably a legacy from pre-World War ii days when internists were often called "diagnosticians." The highly intelligent and knowledgeable medical sleuths of the past (and also recent years) now have to compete with more precise diagnostic tests such as ct , pet , and mri scanners -- to their disadvantage.
Nevertheless, the brilliant physicians who held forth in what doctors refer to as "The Days of the Giants" are sorely missed. No matter how precise our new machines are, they still lack perspective and the human dimension that were the hallmarks of the great physicians of the past. These skills are hard to define, harder to measure, and even harder to compensate in an age in which computers and statistic-generation seem to dominate policy. Perhaps this contributes to their apparent shortage nowadays.
I never could bring myself to display the wall chart that the acp created to make the meaning of "internist" clearer. "Anatomy of an Internist" portrays a sad, elderly female face atop a skeleton, surrounded by images of half a dozen internal organs and descriptions of 13 internal medicine sub-specialties. The composite effect is neither uplifting nor accessible. Though internal medicine is the largest primary care specialty in the United States, internists are still sometimes confused with interns -- doctors in the earliest phase of their hospital training.
Physicians and hospitalists
I nternal medicine arose at a time when general practitioners had only one year of training after medical school. The requirement that all physicians take a three-year internal medicine residency following a one-year internship contributed greatly to increasing the quality of medical care. And internal medicine was an integral part of the march of modern medicine into even the smallest towns in the years after World War ii -- something that many Americans take for granted, but which is hardly standard around the world.
In 1968 , traditional general practice was significantly upgraded when the American Academy of Family Physicians established its own three-year residency program plus a requirement of recertification every six years after entry into practice. The organization then embarked on a highly successful advertising campaign to market the new family practitioner. The appeal of the old general practitioner was brought up to date with the assurance of better and continuing scientific training.
The subsequent years have seen a steady convergence between internal medicine and family practice, particularly in urban and suburban areas. In more remote places, one is still able to find general internists who insert cardiac pacemakers and pass endoscopes into the stomach and beyond, functions that are performed in more populous areas by cardiologists and gastroenterologists. Rural family practitioners may do more surgery and orthopedics than their urban and suburban counterparts. In addition, pediatricians give primary care to children, and obstetrician-gynecologists frequently extend their focus on women's health to include other primary care services for women of childbearing age and older.
All these nuances are confusing to patients, and they continue to evolve. One unique feature of American medicine -- patient care by the same personal physician both in the office and in the hospital -- is slowly disappearing. New residency programs are turning out "hospitalists," and both private and community hospitals are seeking to employ them. These 7,000 to 8,000 physicians treat only hospital in-patients, and more than 80 percent have training in internal medicine. A few primary physicians who are tired of the pressures of running office practices also become hospitalists.
Primary physicians who remain in practice, but who believe they can no longer afford the inefficiency of working both in the office and in the hospital, are voluntarily turning regular patients over to hospitalists. This is especially prevalent in areas highly penetrated by managed care, where the economic pressures on physicians are greatest. Furthermore, some hospitals make such transfers mandatory. Hospitalists do tend to get patients out of the hospital sooner and to save money for the hospital. (This happens because Medicare and many hmo contracts pay a fixed amount for each diagnosis treated regardless of the length of patient stay.) Given present trends, having one's own doctor in attendance during a serious illness may become as much a luxury in the United States as it is in Europe, where physicians tend to work either in the hospital as specialists or in outpatient clinics and offices as generalists.
San Mateo County, California, is one place where portents of the future may be seen. Restructuring of health care is proceeding slowly but steadily in response to the economic pressures of managed care and the top-tier cost of living. There is a trend toward bigness. Mills-Peninsula Hospital in the northern part of the county has affiliated with Sutter Health, a network of more than two dozen northern California hospitals and other health facilities. The large multi-specialty Palo Alto Medical Clinic has also joined the network, presumably seeking both greater market share and a better bargaining position with large insurance carriers. "Bulking up" is being replicated elsewhere in the country.
Primary care is a necessary, but not dominant, activity in the health care institutions in San Mateo County. Greater size and resources and the promotion of state-of-the-art specialty care are important in competing with both the centralized Kaiser Permanente managed care system and university-based Stanford Medical Center. Primary care tends to get swept along, but there are intriguing eddies of smallness around the edges of growing bigness. Small office-based primary care practices stubbornly persist in the face of the high cost of regulatory compliance, office administration, and insurance, with only limited ability to adjust fees upward to offset rising expenses. A handful of physicians are even leaving the large institutions and setting up their own practices, desiring more influence over how they provide care and a more personal and less bureaucratic relationship with patients. (Kaiser Permanente has recognized this phenomenon and in response has embellished its amenities while putting an emphasis on patients building a relationship with the same physician rather than repeatedly using drop-in clinics.)
Many private physicians have begun to abandon the lowest-paying managed care contracts with insurers. This involves not only hmo s, where primary physicians are often paid a fixed monthly fee to care for their patients called "capitation," but also the Preferred Provider Organizations ( ppo s) that are fee discounters. So far, there has been little disaffection with Medicare, except for that portion which has fallen under the hmo umbrella and in high-fee areas with little managed care. A small number of primary physicians have established "boutique" (sometimes called "concierge") practices. These doctors promise ready access and more personal service in exchange for complete elimination of contracted third-party payment. Clients either pay a monthly retainer fee or make other arrangements based on the services they receive. Other physicians accept insurance as partial payment.
It is not simple to gather information on how these different arrangements, which appear to coexist uneasily, work in practice. I encountered considerable concern with being quoted and offending competitors, especially when now-independent physicians had formerly been members of institutional staffs. Even considering that doctors are generally very busy and unprepared to be observed in action, the institutional bureaucracies I approached were lackluster in their cooperation. Thus, learning what to expect when trying a new style of primary care practice remains, at least in my own experience, a matter of obtaining information by word of mouth -- possibly from advertising, but also by trial and error. Ironically, this is very far from the collusion that is often attributed to "the medical establishment."
The trends that are fragmenting the delivery of medical care outside integrated large clinics are increasing the professional isolation of primary physicians. Not going to the hospital to care for patients also means not meeting new physicians in the community, not catching up on local professional matters, and not buttonholing colleagues for the curbstone consultations that contribute to patient care without cost or requiring them to make an appointment. Isolation, in addition to the continuous pressure to do more, may well be a contributor to the burnout and declining morale reported among primary physicians.
Voicemail is a new kind of isolation that is familiar to non-doctors but has had a special impact on primary care. Voicemail frequently greets physician calls to other doctors or even the hospital laboratory. One physician who experienced this indignity once too often, orthopedist Ned Grove, avows, "Voicemail has killed civilization." He has a point. Too many people consider it demeaning to pick up the phone directly. But not doing so makes callers waste an enormous amount of time. For doctors under constant time pressure and for whom information and communication are essential to their work, voicemail can be especially frustrating. So too with being kept on hold. Grove found it quicker to locate and talk with a physician in New Zealand than to reach a doctor across the street.
Planned unavailability debases our lives. Patients may be surprised to learn that it may be as hard for doctors to find some doctors as it is for them. In addition, pharmacists may be too busy "counseling a patient" when physicians call with a prescription. Nurses no longer come to the bedside to jointly attend patients on rounds, and nursing home staff often don't know the patient we have come to see -- and often don't seem to care. Altogether, the effect on the primary physician, who depends on so many other people, is one of being left to do a tough job with nobody to help.
Perhaps the most irritating events are 4:00 and 5:00 am telephone calls from the nursing home informing the no-longer-sleeping physician that a patient has slipped to the floor but shows no signs of injury -- in other words, calls that are inconsiderate and pointless, other than to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement of California law that the doctor be contacted for any potential "injury" at any hour. These encounters are particularly alienating because yielding to the temptation to respond other than by saying "thank you" would unleash feelings that would prevent any chance of falling asleep again.
I dwell upon these details because they convey a flavor that could not be appreciated otherwise. It was not always thus. The past four decades have seen a transformation from a cooperative to an adversarial set of relationships in health care. According to health policy scholar Deborah Stone, insurance carriers, using financial carrots and sticks, blatantly manipulate physicians in order to reduce their own financial liability and to mold physician behavior. Until the late 1970 s, carriers would call physicians' offices to get missing information in order to pay insurance claims more quickly. Employers prized prompt and pleasant servicing of their employees' claims and might intercede with the insurer when there was a problem. Any such assistance would be surprising today.
Rising financial pressures
P robably the greatest factor to affect the availability, character, and quality of primary care will be the health benefit reform measures that Congress adopts in coming years. The wrangling over the $ 400 billion Medicare outpatient drug benefit of 2003 is illustrative. Intense lobbying by drug manufacturers has won a Medicare payment increase for more than 100 drugs used in hospital outpatient procedures while Medicare physician fees were scheduled to decrease by 4.2 percent in 2004 . A failure to keep up with rising practice expenses, now subject to political horse-trading, will disproportionately affect primary care. That is because its many low-dollar services still require expensive administration and are provided at the physician's own expense in the office rather than at the hospital.
Health care is also becoming something of a zero-sum game in which a benefit obtained here results in a loss somewhere else. In this, both patients and physicians are impinged upon. The technique of rationing expensive drug use through inconvenience, which has been perfected by managed care, is certain to extend to any Medicare drug benefit. Prior approvals, limitations, and queries over clinical justification are inevitable. Farsighted physicians, while happy that their patients stand to obtain help with drug bills, shudder at the daunting task of complying with the expected regulations. Once again, primary care will be hit the hardest because of the large number of prescriptions and wide variety of medications associated with primary care practice. As the lowest earners among physicians, and without access to capital for expensive technology and extra staff, this may even affect willingness to see Medicare patients.
Given rapidly rising health costs and the larger share of those costs that employers are transferring to employees in the form of higher deductibles and co-payments, the financial pressures facing physicians are certain to evoke more than the usual amount of skepticism. Protecting physician incomes is not a high priority for most people. Indeed, a Kaiser Family Foundation telephone poll found widespread concern over the cost and quality of health care over the next six months -- to a degree that exceeded fear of losing a job, losing money in the stock market, or becoming the victim of a terrorist attack.
Relevant details are therefore in order. Operating a primary care office is estimated to cost between $ 150 and $ 200 per hour per physician. In my own practice, with very careful attention to expenditures, I could not get below those numbers. Primary physician overhead -- the amount that must be collected to cover professional expenses -- has gone from one-third to two-thirds of revenue in the past two decades. The meter ticking -- the appetite of the office for staff, salaries, insurance, supplies, licenses, and the like -- whether I was there or not made me reluctant to attend medical meetings because there would be no revenue to offset expenses. My own net income fell from what seemed to be a good living in return for hard work to too little for even harder work. These sentiments are typical of physicians in high managed care areas, especially the West Coast and parts of the East Coast as well as scattered enclaves elsewhere.
Physicians leaving practice report amazement at the sense of release they experience. Typically, they say that they loved seeing patients but not practicing medicine. Volunteer clinics have consequently become popular with retired physicians -- whenever malpractice insurance can be provided to protect them. The physicians of Samaritan House in San Mateo, California, for example, are enthusiastic about treating patients who are too poor to afford regular care but too well-off to qualify for Medicaid. Working only part-time, they seem to find medicine a wonderful profession now that they are no longer trying to earn a living in practice.
Of course, unconcern with income is not a solid foundation for the future. The days of noblesse oblige and indifference to income that occurred when wealthy families supported their sons during long years of training and the early years in practice (or longer) are unlikely to return. Great Society thinking reduced charity medical care to a near-sin because it was thought to be demeaning to the poor. Consequently, a single payment scale was created for Medicare and Medicaid patients, and it was based on "usual, customary, and reasonable fees," a sum that was accepted by most physicians and private insurers.
Ultimately, this became unaffordable for the Mediplans. Fees were ratcheted down, and all pretense of keeping up with market rates ended during the Nixon administration with the imposition of a fee freeze. After 1991 , Medicare actually reduced physician fees four times, causing them to fall 14 percent below practice cost inflation. Commercial insurers found it advantageous to follow suit and, with both the private and governmental insurance sectors cutting back to arbitrary take-it-or-leave-it fee schedules, American medicine fell under the sway of third-party payers. No longer were doctors free to exploit paying patients. But neither did medicine remain a free and liberal profession. With constant haggling over fees and details of coverage, the sense of participating in a noble enterprise was clearly under assault. Altruism in primary care became especially difficult to maintain because primary care is not a matter of isolated selfless gestures but consists, rather, of repeated contacts with the same patients. One may donate an operation, which is complete once it is done, but a free visit to diagnose diabetes is of less benefit to the patient unless it includes lengthy follow-up.
The moral dimension
T here is a moral dimension here that has received insufficient attention in the mechanistic analyses that create deep gulfs between doctors and non-doctors. Commentators often portray medicine as a monopolistic system in which the American Medical Association deliberately used the report of Abraham Flexner in 1910 to close quack medical schools in order to limit the supply of physicians. Supposedly, this was an attempt to control the market and eliminate competitors exclusively for financial gain, and nothing has changed since then. Indeed, Milton Friedman has spoken of abolishing professional licensure in order to enhance competition. There is evidence to support these positions. Medical Economics income surveys showed that between 1930 and 1980 physicians increased their constant-dollar income enough to move collectively from the lower-middle into the upper-middle class.
Nevertheless, this physician recalls that in the 1960 s and 70 s, physicians who earned high salaries were not highly respected by their peers. Star surgeons and "society doctors" were not the objects of envy and emulation that celebrities have become today. In fact, there was something slightly disreputable about making too much money. A conscientious surgeon told me at the time, "A good doctor worries about his patients." The physicians I worked with in a suburban practice near San Francisco were cautious in raising prices and generally prized their reputations for professional excellence. Nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators, and the rank-and-file medical assistants and clerical personnel who staffed our clinics, hospitals, and offices mirrored this attitude. Self-interest was always present, but it did not run rampant.
The 1980 s introduced business into medicine. Cost-effectiveness and a "businesslike approach" were newly deemed appropriate, even essential, to health care. New financing schemes such as hmo s and ppo s combined with utilization review and other management tools to enhance productivity and control costs. Hospital administrators became executive vice presidents. Physicians formed new organizations to meet the new era, and doctors became their chief executive officers. Contracting for access to groups of patients replaced unorganized word-of-mouth referrals.
This legacy continues, and it has created severe strains within medicine. The business ethic and the medical ethic coexist most uncomfortably. Real-world financial considerations do allow the more businesslike actors in health care to abuse those who are less businesslike. The necessary delicate balance between humanism and rational economic behavior has yet to be achieved. I say this with full awareness that medicine was never totally blind to business considerations, nor were physicians saints. But joining management was not the road to professional success that it has become.
Moreover, patients sense that something is very wrong. Physicians are supposed to contract with insurers, whose job it is to enroll them into networks for the lowest price they will accept either individually or through organizations that evaluate the contracts on their behalf. Naturally, physicians are not happy with this arrangement, but in high managed care areas, few physicians can function entirely outside the prevailing structure. The initial idea was for physicians to drop their prices in exchange for an increased volume of patients attracted by the lower prices. In order to determine true market rates for reimbursement, however, physicians must reject contracts that they think are too onerous while insurers continuously test the market with lowball offers until it becomes hard to find takers. Patients benefit from the resulting lower prices, provided the prices are not so low that they drive the doctors away and restrict the availability of services. It's all gotten very complex. (So complex that a Harvard game theorist visiting the Hoover Institution told me there are too many variables to even try to model the process.)
In some ways, contracting for physician services resembles a labor negotiation, in which the doctors play the role of labor, but there is a crucial difference. Physicians who drop a contract drop the network connection they have with all the patients in that plan. It's an unintended consequence, but total loyalty to patients now means accepting any contract that's offered no matter how bad or unaffordable it is. Patients who lose their doctors -- or who lose the ability to see them for the most favorable "network" prices -- are not happy; they, or the news media acting on their behalf, may become abusive when this happens. In one instance, the Oregonian ran a front-page Sunday feature about Oregon doctors who drop out of hmo contracts. The newspaper accused these doctors of abandoning their patients. As one physician put it, "The concept that the docs did not leave the patients, they left the insurance . . . just didn't register." The option of continuing to see the same physician out of network for a higher fee was not promoted as an acceptable alternative.
This kind of relationship-destroying confrontation is most significant for primary care. Losing frontline doctors, who are patients' entry point into the health system, is an especially unwelcome surprise. Half of all outpatient visits are made to the one-third of doctors who practice primary care, according to the National Ambulatory Care Survey. When specialists decide not to renew contracts, fewer patients are immediately affected. Consequently, primary physicians must be prepared to confront significant anger when they leave health plans. It is a far cry from turning down a shipment of mattresses because of a price disagreement. The fiduciary relationship distorts the underlying economics.
Is the picture as uniformly bleak as I have painted it? Not entirely. The majority of new physicians opt for employment rather than establishing their own independent practices. This shields them from many of the difficulties facing medical practice today. And while medical school enrollment is dropping, there is no overall shortage of physicians or of qualified applicants to medical school so far.
Still, primary care does not repay the time and money invested in training in comparison to careers in law or architecture, and this is expected to impact future manpower. The Martin Fletcher 2003 Survey shows that a family physician can expect to earn from a low of $ 130,000 to an average of $ 155,000 . The corresponding figures for internists are $ 140,000 to $ 179,000 (though the latter numbers are inflated by the inclusion of some higher-paid medical specialists). Nevertheless, internist compensation in large medical groups fell by 2 percent in 2002 , and median pediatrician income dropped by 4 percent. Specialty training remains a good investment, however, and physicians, as a group, remain relatively high earners.
The bloom is off the rose for primary physicians in terms of prestige as managers of managed care services. While not eliminating primary physicians as "gatekeepers" whose approval is needed for hmo referrals to specialists, public backlash against the constraints imposed did reduce their prestige. At the same time, the gap in earnings between primary and specialty physicians has widened from 30 percent 40 years ago to more than double in many cases now. Fletcher reports average anesthesiology income at $ 282,000 . Average cardiology compensation is $ 325,000 , and orthopedic surgeons earn $ 387,000 . These discrepancies reinforce a long-held belief that simply seeing patients, the principal activity of primary physicians, does not pay for itself. Procedures and operations, whether low- or high-tech, are far more rewarding. This has been called the "cognitive-procedural" differential, and it has become more acute as the ready availability of medical information in the media and on the internet cheapens the value of medical advice, typically the purview of the primary physician, and enhances the relative value of "doing things."
In areas where there is a relative shortage of physicians, incentive bonuses and income guarantees have long been offered. Now, the same is true in places where managed care has made medical practice less desirable than elsewhere. Specialists are the most sought after and usually command the largest sums. However, primary care physicians are also being offered monetary inducements in the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the national survey results, general internists can expect offers of only about $ 80,000 to join private practices in San Francisco. This contrasts with $ 70,000 to $ 90,000 for physician assistants and $ 95,000 or more for beginning pharmacists. Hospitals and health systems in the surrounding communities offer better opportunities. However, not all primary physicians receive the support they request, and they then face a real struggle to establish themselves. Supply, demand, and political factors presumably make the difference.
Declining competition
I t is not clear that lower earnings are the principal problem in the falling popularity of primary care, particularly of internal medicine. Incomes for generalists have always been lower than incomes for specialists. In the early days of internal medicine, however, internists served as consultants for complex cases, gaining a little in income but much more in status as compared with family practitioners. More recently, various specialists have taken over most of the consultations, and the prestige of the internist has fallen along with earnings. To a lesser extent, the same has happened to pediatricians.
In my own practice, income fell 40 percent in the past five years (which is not unusual in the area in which I work), but this actually troubled me less than the fact that overhead has progressively risen to nearly two-thirds of earned income. Like high taxes, this leads to a sense of working for everyone but oneself. It also takes hard work to pay for $ 20,000 or more monthly in office expenses. Furthermore, financial pressures make other problems less tolerable. Conversations with colleagues from around the country and the correspondence sections of medical magazines suggest that this is more the rule than the exception.
Managed care has particularly hampered primary physicians by sharply curtailing internal subsidization. Traditionally, when an emergency room in the hospital, for example, was losing money, that loss might be made up in the laboratory. Something similar occurred with physicians. Extra time for complicated patients, time in the library and for other continuing education, care given at inconvenient times as well as to non-paying patients -- all were subsidized by more lucrative activities such as comprehensive examinations (annual physicals) and diagnostic tests. If the mix came out right, the internist was satisfied.
Currently, insurers and government seek the lowest price for every service. There have been drastic cuts of two-thirds or more for electrocardiograms, breathing and hearing tests, and blood and urine analysis. This is the supermarket equivalent of putting every item on sale at the same time -- highly unusual and probably unsustainable. Moreover, hmo s and some ppo s restrict physicians from performing any lab work (and sometimes other diagnostic testing) on patients they cover. Contracts are made with outside facilities based on competitive bidding. This lowers costs to the health plan, but it delays treatment and is inconvenient for patients as well as time-consuming and costly for physicians. In general, doctors do not have the option of either submitting bids of their own or offering to accept the negotiated rates paid to outside facilities.
Healthy medical competition in primary care has diminished as the opportunity to build better mousetraps has been seized by insurers. There is a reduced ability to find better ways to provide ordinary services and, instead, a temptation to add costly high-tech substitutes in the form of more complex diagnostic procedures to preserve revenue in the face of rising expenses. It also seems as if the locus of competition has shifted from physicians to insurance companies. Formerly, patients chose doctors based on availability, reputation, professional manner, and the amenities of their offices. Now insurance carriers exert considerable control over the provision of care. Lists of network physicians limit choice. Additions and subtractions are frequent. So are changes in insurers by employers, again changing the composition of lists of available physicians. Consequently, many patients choose their personal physicians at random from lists. In response, physicians feel less attachment to patients.
Insurers are attempting to counter this by keeping scorecards on doctors' performance in getting their patients to comply with accepted clinical guidelines. Sometimes, patient satisfaction is also monitored. But physicians resent being judged by computers and personnel with less understanding of medicine than their peers. The trivial (e.g., 5 percent) performance bonuses being offered by some carriers are as likely to offend as please the physicians who receive them. And given their history of dubious financial tactics in contracting with physicians, there is little trust that such "quality-enhancing" programs will be more than a shell game in which money is taken away from some doctors and given to others, sometimes unfairly.
As professional freedom and the confusion of dealing with the changing requirements of many insurance companies continue, there has been a role reversal between small-office and large-clinic physicians. Doctors in the Kaiser Permanente system sometimes chafed under the restrictions imposed by large group practice. Private physicians, in contrast, felt free because they set their own office policies. Now Permanente physicians have to deal with only one set of restrictions -- their own -- while community physicians must deal with as many restrictions as there are insurers with whom they contract. A survey of 1,000 physicians conducted by Stanford University and the San Mateo County Medical Association showed that the vast majority of doctors in the county are unhappy (independent of income considerations), but that Permanente physicians were less unhappy than physicians in private offices.
If physician individualism is now being battered, independent primary care physicians are at a special disadvantage in having to deal with many different taskmasters while still trying to please patients. Time and money constraints have dramatically degraded the ability to cope and the quality of professional life. Larger organizations have the advantage of being able to spread the cost of complex software and hardware and technical experts over a larger base. They can also do their own internal subsidization to keep the supply of internists, family practitioners, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants in balance with the corps of specialists. Thus, Kaiser Permanente now has a competitive edge by offering new primary physicians higher salaries than surrounding private practitioners can afford to pay their new associates. This is the reverse of the historic situation. It is also telling that the very large Veterans Administration and Kaiser Permanente systems are currently in the forefront of adopting the latest information technology.
Until now, Americans have had a wide selection of practice styles to choose from. Small, independent offices have created the image of the family doctor. Yet the powerful forces of managed care are predicted to spread further because the economic logic appeals to employers, who fund most non-governmental care. They can use insurance carriers (who must do their bidding or ultimately lose the employers' business) to alter physician behavior and lower costs. Individual practices and small partnerships are endangered species in this conflict, and where the conflict is intense, their number is shrinking. California, a bellwether state in social and economic trends, has been a leader in adopting managed care and is consequently a leader in experiencing the fallout from such "private regulation" of health care.
Lately, insurers have trimmed the heavy-handed and labyrinthine procedural controls that have saved money but interfered with care and infuriated patients. Instead, restricting utilization is being replaced by increasing the patient's share of the cost of care. Higher annual deductibles of $ 1,000 or more (triple the national average) and co-payments of $ 35 to $ 40 for office visits are becoming common. In addition, the availability of traditional "indemnity" coverage, based on what the physician actually charges rather than what the carrier chooses to pay, is shrinking rapidly. This move away from inflationary first-dollar coverage leaves patients surprised by unaccustomed financial liability despite controls on physician fees.
The effect on primary and specialist physicians is subtler. Specialists continue to find their expensive services largely covered by major medical insurance. This accords well with consumers' desire to be protected against the rapidly rising costs of catastrophic medical events. In contrast, primary care is being rendered, to a greater extent, in the window of deductibles and co-pays, leading primary physicians to seek an increased proportion of reimbursement from the patient rather than the insurer. The resulting (usually non-interest-bearing) bills must compete with expensive credit card debt for payment priority and will therefore tend to go to the bottom of the pile. Depending on how far this trend continues, the solvency of primary care will be further undermined.
This prospect leads some physician-managers to predict a coming split in American medicine. Frustrated primary physicians may well abandon the last vestiges of independence and join together with non-physicians and activist academic physicians in promoting single-payer national health insurance. (At present, there are only a few thousand physicians committed to this change.) Specialists will have no such compelling motivation. Neither will large health systems like Kaiser Permanente or the Mayo Clinic and other well-known institutional practices that have long thrived by charting their own destiny. It is telling that once go-it-alone Kaiser Permanente, the institution upon which the original hmo Act of 1973 was modeled, now actively promotes participation by its physicians in organized medicine because it sees its future linked to the viability of private health care alternatives.
Looking forward
T here seems little likelihood of passage of national health legislation now, but that could change. In that event, the freedom to innovate and the variety of health care choices that have been available to American consumers would be likely to diminish substantially.
Proponents claim that increased efficiencies will generate sufficient funds to cover the uninsured and that this alone justifies the adoption of a single-payer model of health care for the United States. National health insurance might serve to resurrect traditional primary care, restoring long-term relationships and decreasing the many complexities that bedevil current practice. But even that is far from certain. It would make sense, for example, to centralize preventive medicine such as mammography for breast cancer and colonoscopy for colon cancer. The same is true for immunizations. Reminders and follow-up are also done more efficiently in large numbers. Primary physicians could then focus on the treatment of illness and become more involved in the promotion rather than the delivery of preventive services. On the other hand, similar centralization of preventive services is also possible without national health insurance. For instance, Blue Cross has opened centers for periodic screening laboratory tests, and Aetna has sent out cards for checking the stools of new patients for occult blood. Insurers already keep track of the frequency of preventive services. There might be significant economies of scale in such ventures, but at the risk of loss of convenience for patients and a reduction in privacy.
Replacing (or resurrecting) the traditional internist's role as the coordinating physician for the care of patients with complex illnesses is also problematic. Hospitalists have had only limited success in fulfilling this need because they do not know the patients. If internists shun the hospital as unaffordable, then perhaps some hospitalists will become consultants who are hospital-based and who may even begin to see ambulatory patients in clinics. Internal medicine might then bifurcate into consultant and non-consultant branches. However this goes, some type of primary physician will remain essential to counterbalance specialists' inclination to perform more specialty care without necessarily considering the global needs of the patient. The cost of neglecting this aspect of the total picture could be very high.
Non-physicians as providers of primary care are sure to increase in number and in the scope of services that state governments, which license them, will permit them to offer. Physician assistants, who usually receive two to two and a half years of training after completing college, and nurse practitioners, who begin with a degree in nursing and then usually take an additional nine months to two years, should flourish regardless of how health care is financed. Patient acceptance and the allure of lower prices and more time during visits will remain attractive in any event. Expansion of an already existing movement to practice independently will ultimately lead to a turf war between physicians and non-physician providers.
While there is every likelihood that patients without chronic illnesses will receive more of their primary care from non-physicians, patients with chronic illnesses may fare somewhat differently. This is because the success of specialty care for ongoing medical problems is partly dependent on the quality of ancillary primary care. Should able general internists become less available or less interested in handling complex cases, specialists may have to return to their traditional role as the principal physicians for patients whose underlying chronic disease is within their purview.
There are suggestions of movement in these directions for both types of patients. First, some California medical groups already give independent billing to nurse practitioners as primary care providers alongside primary care physicians. Presumably, they will address the less complicated patients. Second, specialists are complaining that under managed care, many of their patients hardly ever see their primary physicians, whom they may not even know.
As specialists have, by default, consequently become principal physicians to patients with chronic illnesses, some have hired nurse practitioners and physician assistants to do something that comes close to primary care under their supervision. It would not be much of a leap for a group of specialists to go on to hire primary physicians to provide even more extended care within their own practices. The creation of integrated groups within medical specialty practices would facilitate professional synergy and enhance the overall quality of care. Patients would find care to be more convenient and better coordinated.
Entrapment upon entrapment
U nless national health insurance is adopted with a monolithic approach to care, there will be a need for continuing innovation to assure the availability of a variety of styles and prices in medical practice and to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions. Two decades ago, I wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the value of the nearby Kaiser Permanente hospital and clinic to me and the value of private practitioners, including me, to Kaiser Permanente as competitors. Both offered slightly different but overlapping products and served slightly different but overlapping clienteles. Our healthy competition kept either option from being the only game in town, and the public benefited as we competed on price and service.
Since that time, deliberate obstacles to free-market competition in medicine have been imposed. It is not the "medical establishment" that is creating them. Given the vehement support for national health insurance by some members of Congress, of whom Senator Ted Kennedy is most prominent, and a similar attitude among senior Medicare officials over the years, there is reason to believe that a succession of measures adopted have more than one goal. Regulatory hamstringing of private practice, while ostensibly aimed at protecting the public, also undermines rather than facilitates healthy growth of the existing system, thereby paving the way for national health insurance.
In 1981 , for example, Congress authorized civil monetary penalties ( cmp s) for Medicare fraud and abuse. Since then, according to a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services bulletin, "Congress has dramatically increased both the number and types of circumstances under which cmp s may be imposed." The secretary of health and human services has wide discretion to impose additional assessments to the mandated fines and to exclude offending physicians from participation in the Medicare program for significant periods of time.
The fines are massive: $ 10,000 per item or service in noncompliance and up to three times that amount for some violations. Aggregating many small items makes the fines potentially hundreds or thousands of times greater than the charges for the disputed services and far greater than penalties for nonmedical infractions. Physicians often feel singled out for special punishment, especially since some of the 35 reasons for prosecution involve matters of interpretation on which reasonable people may differ.
Few people are aware that their own civil liberties are also at issue. Currently, the circumstances are limited, but the courts have upheld the right of Medicare to restrict services, even if beneficial to the recipient, if there is a general advantage in doing so. So, based on federal law, a Medicare patient who requests an assistant surgeon during a cataract operation is participating in an illegal act, even if he is willing to pay out of pocket for the service. Medicare has a blanket prohibition against payments to assistant cataract surgeons (Section 1842 (k)), and the patient who desires the extra security of another person in attendance is simply out of luck. The request would be perfectly legal one day before age 65 , but once one is on Medicare that right is lost -- unless, that is, the patient is willing to give up all other Medicare benefits, a truly grisly penalty for noncompliance.
The physician version of this conundrum is deciding to "opt out" of Medicare. This involves a complex and hazardous procedure in which the physician agrees to exclusion from the Medicare program for no less than two years. Only then is he or she free to contract with patients, formally or informally, for services that are mutually agreed on but may not fit the web of Medicare criteria as spelled out in 125,000 pages of regulations.
A physician seeking such freedom, perhaps in order to charge more than Medicare allows, can expect close monitoring and severe punishment for infractions. But the same is true when independent-minded physicians wish to charge less than Medicare would pay and pass on the administrative savings to their patients. One doctor in the latter category points out the consequences of standing apart. Having voluntarily excluded himself, neither he nor his patients can submit bills to Medicare for his services, even if only to partially reimburse the patient. In addition, the doctor is not allowed to work for anyone who does any business with Medicare. Thus, he cannot legally help out in the emergency room of the nearby hospital to relieve a severe shortage of er doctors, as he would like, even though he has earned board certification in internal medicine and emergency medicine. Opting out makes a doctor virtually unemployable.
And as if that were not enough, doctors must remember to "re-opt out" every two years. Failure to do so automatically and involuntarily re-enrolls them in the Medicare program, subject to all its restrictions and sanctions. Forgetting to re-opt out criminalizes all the services the physician has billed to his willing patients thereafter. As usual with Medicare violations, physicians are subject to conviction without any need for the government to prove criminal intent. The fines collected are being used to hire more investigators: entrapment upon entrapment upon entrapment.
The creeping control of Medicare has found its latest expression in new proposals to criminalize charging Medicare more than the lowest price paid by anyone else. This would be added to current criminal penalties for providing free care to anyone covered by Medicare without adjusting downward what is charged for all other patients (on the grounds that any free care necessarily lowers the doctor's composite "real" fee and Medicare should therefore share in the "reduced rates" and pay other bills on a discounted basis). The inability to help a colleague or a relative without invoking legal jeopardy is so bizarre that it serves as the basis for considerable physician paranoia in dealing with Medicare.
The fetters placed on physicians who wish to offer services that are legal but who cannot escape the ever-constricting regulatory snare -- which is both private and public -- also impact patients. The restrictions decrease physicians' efficiency and sap their energy, quite beyond the awareness of patients, and quietly invite eventual surrender to total control. It is intriguing that civil libertarians do not appear to consider the compromising of physician rights to be of any concern or any threat to the civil liberties of others. It is also noteworthy that socialized medicine in multiple European countries permits private alternatives to national health systems to thrive side by side. This is quite unlike the situation in the United States, where Medicare exerts significant control over nearly all citizens over age 65 and virtually all patients with renal failure, the single disease state-covered by Medicare at all ages.
Seniors who are considering boutique care as a way to purchase primary care services that Medicare restricts may also fall into a regulatory trap. Representative Henry Waxman has asked for an investigation into the legality of providing increasingly popular boutique care to Medicare-covered patients, specifically with regard to violations of the False Claims Act. No clear guidelines have emerged after administrative review and a commentary by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. The legal complexities are exploding, and the long list of "questionable" or "dubious" services may well have a chilling effect on their availability. Medicare has done a great deal of good for the elderly. However, its regulatory history is a cautionary tale for what can be expected from any further extension of federal control over health care.
Even so, the struggle to integrate increasingly potent and costly scientific advances into affordable medical care is a worldwide problem. As more people become aware of the dilemmas that physicians face, the aggressive consumerism of recent years appears to be abating and is far less strident, but the view from the Capitol has not evolved apace. Medicine remains the focal point for a long list of societal conflicts.
Medicine and the American character
L ooking back, it is easy to wax sentimental about a time when all these concerns were unimaginable. That period includes patients and physicians who could relate the medicine of television's Marcus Welby, M.D. to their own doctor-patient relationships. Faith and strong personal bonds, while once the essence of primary care, may no longer be appropriate to our own era, with all its sophistication and its powerful centrifugal forces.
One of the penalties of losing the innocence of a time when "doctor knows best" is the need for much broader participation in health care policy development without the comfort and security (no matter how illusory) of a paternal figure. To replace the all-knowing physician without succumbing to the siren songs of quick fixes and inflexible ideology will be no small task. The scientific and humanitarian traditions of medicine together with the uniquely entrepreneurial and compassionate American character offer a template that should guide us.
The first principle is pluralism. Imposed one-size-fits-all and one-fee-fits-all solutions are incompatible with the American tradition and will not work. Choice and diversity must be maintained if American medicine is to remain vibrant, creative, and attractive as a career.
Second, the regulatory and legal distortions that run so counter to the American "can-do" spirit must be reversed; oppression is never healthy. Charitable impulses, on the other hand, are healthy and should be encouraged rather than scrutinized as potential violations of trade laws that were never intended to deal with charity.
Third, economic distortions must be addressed. Too much of the health dollar is spent on paperwork. Too many list prices have been inflated to joust with managed care and Medicare and are no longer real -- unless they are billed to the uninsured, who are then grossly overcharged. Insurance carriers and governments also impose too many administrative costs on the providers of care.
Finally, space for both small business and big business within medicine must be preserved and encouraged. Information technology that will allow even the solo physician to cope with medical and insurance complexities can be used to accomplish this, but the high costs of creating and maintaining information systems must not be allowed to price individual physicians and small groups of physicians out of the market. New ways of financing medical practice must be found if we are to maintain the diversity of choice on which American patients have come to rely.
All of this will take inspired political leadership. Otherwise, we will continue to drift and to tinker. |
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This curious bit of insurance company jargon that has been substituted for "doctor" -- a phrase that internists and family physicians find so demeaning and depersonalizing -- has now reached the comics pages and become common parlance. In a way, the joke made about primary care is emblematic of the crisis in which primary care now finds itself. |
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Events like May Day are a temperature check for the collective hive mind of the left reflecting on the year behind them. Because it is a tradition that skates back more than a hundred years, it rarely stands out as the most pressing of days, mainly because it is part of a regular organizing cycle. Good years or bad losses, May Day comes on the same day.
In Portland, Oregon, it was the obvious confluences of forces, the ongoing revolt happening in Trump's America, that helped to ignite the substantial growth around its activities. How the Portland May Day Coalition planned for this year's event was largely based around the practical work of the groups involved, how it tied into the ongoing projects of the component organizations. The Portland Committee for the Human Rights in the Philippines (PCHRP) held an earlier event in the day along with the Brown Berets and Gabriella outlining the JustPeacePH project, supporting the peace talks currently happening between the Government Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the People's Democratic Government of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). They were then leading the anti-imperialist contingent in the following march, linking together the struggles against colonialism in the Global South and the increased victimization of Latinx immigrants from the Southern U.S. border and the long-standing history of workplace organizing that May Day signifies.
The Burgerville Workers Union was celebrating the anniversary of its break-out campaign, one that went public in multiple shops a year ago, bringing with it one of the most dynamic and persistent struggles seen from a direct union shop in the Pacific Northwest. The showing from organized labor was large, as it usually is, and there was a clear openness to the growing linkages between social movements as the possibility of nationwide Right-to-Work and the further erosion of state programs lends urgency to an already dire attack on working people.
You wouldn't hear about any of this, however, because what came next was a full-frontal assault on the long-planned event, its organizers, and their neighbors.
From the march of almost a thousand people through the streets of the Southwest Downtown district came the militarized invasion of hundreds of police, letting loose with explosive weaponry and laying siege on a crowd comprised of families, people with disabilities, and many raising their voices for the first time. From many photos from that afternoon it is hard to see what happened, a haze that filled the gap between skyscrapers from the canisters of "tear gas" that were fired with only seconds in between. When the police forcefully rushed the crowd, which had already formally dispersed, they began a frightful chase through the streets of the commercial and financial territories. It would be obtuse to point out that the narrative that the police offered, which began even before the actual force was felt as they took to Twitter to premeditate the media stories, was dishonest. Instead, it showed a clear set of priorities, ones that double back on several decades of crowd control, ones that had evolved to avoid the kind of escalation that was doubled down on here.
The Cop in Our Heads
In Mike King's recent treatise on the repression of Occupy Oakland, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland (Rutgers University Press, 2017), he reflects on the way the repressive police measures evolved nationally to the more complex web they have today. During the wave of confrontations starting the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the urban uprisings that rocked urban areas in the 1960s, police used heavy handed dispersal tactics that were aggressive to forcefully put down that unrest. While some would argue they are tame by today's standards, they were an outgrowth of the institutionalized white supremacy that was holding on for dear life. Starting in the 1970s, police entered a new phase acknowledging that the "brute force" strategy they were employing was only escalating and mobilizing increased opposition, and it began radicalizing a generation of those injured in street fights. They began systems of negotiation and compromise with protest movements, offering up permits for demonstrations. This concept relied on the negotiating power of the state, and a large majority of American social movements have been brought in on these agreements, usually accepting some limitations in exchange for less direct police repression. A permit is much easier than going through a mass crackdown on a simple street march, so why not?
The effect of this change was, by and large, for the police to transfer their authority of containment from the station to the protesters themselves, turning the organizations and leadership themselves into the acting agents of the state's boundaries. If protesters were given legal leeway, they would then police themselves, and it could even hold a few people in leadership roles accountable for the actions of participants. This can and does have the effect of turning many in a project against other elements, where those engaging in certain tactics are necessarily blamed for putting others at risk, all outlined in the structures of the permitting system. This created a structure that, when mixed with a moderated police presence, would both contain the social movements and make sure that the effective repression came without social backlash. As the years went on and the war on drugs, gangs, and poor people broadly took shape, the structure of police engagements increased volatility across the board, until now the police that surround broad-based political rallies look liked they are armed to "liberate" Fallujah.
Since centrist Democrat Ted Wheeler took the reigns of the Portland Mayor's office, he has made the decisive move to crack down on the growing discontent in the city. The election of Trump, the organized resistance to gentrification and displacement from housing organizations, and the reaction to ongoing police killings of black and brown "suspects" has led to a climate of resistance that is growing exponentially. This hit a fever pitch in the days after the election where thousands flooded the streets, blocking every major highway and shutting down businesses. The direct action taken by some protesters, amounting to broken windows and other property destruction, was not out of bounds for the city's history, nor was it maliciously interpersonal as the police department persisted. Nonetheless, the police, under oversight from the mayor's office, went after suspects aggressively, charging some with compounded multiple felonies in stacked cases that shocked even the most jaded activists. In one case, a protester is facing upwards of thirty-months in prison for some broken car and bank windows, using riot charges to compound the offense and turn it into a veritable "anarchist scare." In another, they tried to charge different broken windows as separate offenses so as to make the case eligible for a state statute that allows excessive sentencing if the acts of property destruction are seen as separate incidents.
Wheeler's actual approach seems to be done within an amnesia of institutional memory, the lack of a known history. "Little Beirut," as Portland was named in the 1990s by George H.W. Bush, has always had a long history of militant street protests and projects, from the Earth First! and ELF campaigns of the 1990s to the more recent Black Lives Matter insurgencies. For Wheeler to lean on the side of aggressive policing, especially in situations where the police appear as the clear instigators, he is acting without a clear understanding of the role of police in the escalation of confrontation. The police were not there to quell unrest, they were the foundations of that unrest, and their presence, violent victimization of protesters, and unwillingness to even own up to their own "let them police themselves" idea has ended the specter of the police as an institution of "public safety."
What they destroyed with their flash grenades was the police in the protester's head, not the willingness of protest movements to take the streets.
So what happened?
Twenty minutes into the march on its negotiated route, as they went down 2nd Ave, the police summarily announced that the "permit for this march has now been revoked." This mid-march revocation is a new concept for the city, one more step in the extra normality the events took. This decision was allegedly because a window at the Federal Courthouse had been cracked and some in the Black Bloc had thrown Pepsis at the riot cops that were encroaching on the route, a reference to the disastrous recent Pepsi ad with Caitlin Jenner and the "peace" brought by handing the police soda. Apparently, that doesn't work in real life.
While some will see even that as an escalation, it comes after the police honed in on the rally park beforehand, confiscating mundane objects like flag poles and surrounding march attendants, often destroying materials. The conception of the permitted march as one that would be free of police intervention seemed dashed quickly, so the impetus to follow the narrowing constraints was compromised.
Within a few minutes of the first notifications an order of dispersal came that, because of their position at the back of the march, only a few people could hear. Many of the families, younger children, people with disabilities and special needs, and others were towards the front. The first they heard of this dispersal was when flash grenades started indiscriminately flying into the crowd. Dozens flowed in violent bursts in the next few minutes as protest goers frantically tried to figure out just what was happening. Security volunteers were ushering people to safety, yet there seemed to be no safe spot as flash grenades were going off in every corner and there was literally no sidewalk area that people could crowd into in compliance. Legal observers from the ACLU tried to document this in flurried rushes, but as full tear gas canisters began flowing into the streets, there was mass confusion, especially as people were collapsing, struggling to breathe in the chemical cloud.
The response from the Black Bloc came in kind, with debris being lit on fire in the area between the cops and the protesters, the windows being busted out at a Target location, and a police SUV vandalized. The police chased protesters around the city, bum rushing crowds with dozens of officers in formation, attacking those that appeared the most vulnerable. Many noticed riot police prioritizing a houseless woman in the area, while others saw that anyone in marked attire, whether or not they were a part of the Black Bloc, was suspect. By the time many arrived back at the park where the opening rally was the police were in tow behind, declaring that this was "now officially a riot," and promising the use of projectile weaponry.
Unity Through Struggle
While there are often disagreements over tactics and strategy, the May Day Coalition immediately placed the blame on the police, both for instigating violence and propping up false allegations on their social media and PR outlets.
Today the Portland police chose to violently escalate a peaceful march. The people asserted their (lawful) right to be in the street and express solidarity with immigrants, with workers, with Indigenous sovereignty, and against capitalism. The Portland Police Bureau responded by
1) Forcibly removing the accessibility vehicle, which was present to allow those with mobility issues to participate and raise their voices
2) Fabricating stories about "Molotov cocktails" being thrown at them, which thousands of eyewitness reports will refute
3) Trying at every step of the way to force themselves into a crowd that very clearly did not want them there
4) Arbitrarily revoking the march permit and informing only the rear of the march, while the elderly, youth, and folks with mobility issues were at the front
There will be a lot of articles about "the march turning violent" but make no mistake, the PPB attacked a permitted march whose only goal was to keep moving along its planned route because some noisemakers and name-calling were enough of an excuse for them to use their large surplus of explosives and chemical weapons against those who had committed to rise, resist, and unite, against fascism and capitalism.
In general, the local media parroted the police as well as they could. There was minor vandalism of the KOIN news truck while KGW did their best to turn the event into a veritable "car chase," complete with their helicopter live-streaming the protest locations. The Portland Mercury , which leans a little to the left of the rest of the regional outlets, did a large spread of photos and videos, indicating that the police charged after very minor vandalism and even went after a press photographer. Even in their photos you can see protesters flung to the ground as twenty-five were arrested, reporters being screamed at to walk away from their posts.
After the arrests were made and the streets cleared, mayor Wheeler eventually made a public statement echoing the kind of liberal non-committal signaling that many "progressive" Oregon politicians are known for.
In Portland we respect peaceful protest, but we do not and cannot support acts of violence and vandalism. That's not political speech. That's crime... Last night was another chapter in a story that has become all too familiar in Portland: Protests that began peacefully but devolve quickly due to the actions of those whose only desire is to damage people and property.
This "tough on crime" rhetoric seems perfectly in line with the language of Trump's administration, and it could be simply that Wheeler does not want to deal with what will likely be several years of escalating conflict as the austerity and white supremacist machinations of the political state unfold. He thinks that by demonizing protesters, using extreme acts of violence, and shifting the narrative, he will be able to create a ghost of fear in the collective left, and turn them in the direction of moderate parades like the Women's March instead of the more militant formations. The police have followed up with broad requests for information on protesters, and will likely do what they have done in the past: post pictures of people they are suspecting for different activities to try and get the community to turn them in.
This is not, however, the historical legacy of the city, nor the pattern that the growing revolutionary spirit has had over the past decade. Instead, the truth is that this will not actually stop the organizations from participating in growing demonstrations, but instead show them that the middle ground provided by state actors offer little comfort. Long-term movement building and organizing is what will actually create a force capable of resisting the mission of Trump and the profiteers in Portland, and even these kind of momentary showings of force from the police are not going to scare off those who have committed to confronting this terror. As Trump attempts to rename this as Loyalty Day, and the Alt Right and white nationalists acted as the strong-arm of the police in many cities, the flung Pepsi cans seem to fade in importance.
On May 2nd, the organizers in PCHRP, the AAPRP, the Burgerville Workers Union , and all the other organizations and projects continued their work. No matter how the police and mayor's office intend on reframing this work, the projects themselves have a life that goes far beyond one repressed event. The question is if the state will make it a priority to put down these social movements as the administration continue to speed to the right, and how we will respond. This highlights why the movement against police violence is at the critical intersection of all other struggles, but also why we need to make this a collective fight with our arms firmly linked together. The revolutionaries of the city are more unified than they were before the event, the realities of repression has a way of firming up alliances in defiance. The opinions about the efficacy of the Black Bloc are diverse(and principled), but an understanding was forged clearly, and the sight of the Black Bloc defending protesters and acting with conscious unity has bridged a divide that, at times, seemed unresolvable. Many in the Bloc brought in large Black Widow props, owing to the defensive actions that the spiders take in mutual aid and lending to the language of direct action.
When the grenades landed, we were seen as one large mass, all dangerous (though people of color and other marginalized identities took on a special focus from state actors). Our fate is firmly in the hands of each other since, as has been the record, the only way we are to continue is if we find solidarity even in these moments of repression. If the state wants to instigate violence, then they will see our numbers grow, our resistance mount, and our spirit firm up into the vocalized rage. The next time will be larger, permit or no permit. |
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In April of 1995, I visited Washington D.C. as a junior in high school for a journalism conference. It was an exciting time for politics and journalism because of the 1994 "Republican Revolution" and Contract with America. I didn't identify as a Republican at the time, I just knew that I often argued with my teachers about political matters. I liked then-Speaker Newt Gingrich because he shook up the establishment on both sides (sound familiar?) and bringing him up in a positive light in class really annoyed the teachers.
A little over 10 years later , I witnessed former Speaker Gingrich reinvigorate the conservative movement when I was the Director of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). In his speech harkening back to one of Ronald Reagan's CPAC speech, Speaker Gingrich spoke about a conservative movement that paints with "bold colors not pale pastels" on issues of tax reform, deregulation, and fighting government bureaucracy.
Another 10 or so years later, Speaker Gingrich has just released his latest book, Trump's America: The Truth About Our Nation's Great Comeback , which details how many of the bold measures he talked about at his speeches at CPAC have come to fruition in just over 500 days. President Trump's style may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no denying the results - unprecedented unemployment and economic news, which made the New York Times declare in a recent headline, "We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are."
Speaker Gingrich is not only a master at bridging historical and political moments of importance, but also a pivotal figure himself. I am honored that the man who inspired my rebellious streak as a teenager took the time to think about some less important subjects for the latest Dozen interview.
The De Pasquale's Dozen asks political figures, free market-minded writers and entertainers to take a break from politics and talk about their culture obsessions.
1. What's your favorite movie line and to whom would you like to say it?
"You played it for her, you can play it for me. ... If she can stand it, I can. Play it [Sam.]" I just like the line and can't imagine using it, but Bogart did well with it in Casablanca .
2. What canceled show would you put back on the air?
Downton Abbey
3. If you could be paid to do anything besides your current job, what would it be?
I would be a zookeeper or a paleontologist.
4. What advice do you remember your mother or father giving you?
To never give up.
5. What's the best present you ever received as a child?
My favorite childhood present was a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo.
6. What's the best present you ever gave?
I think that would be when I took the family to Alaska on a cruise.
7. If you hosted a late-night show, who would be your guests and band?
I would probably have a boring program with no band and lots of scientists and inventors as guests --maybe better for C-SPAN than commercial television.
8. What books are on your summer reading list?
Daniel Silva's The Other Woman , Gerald Seymour's No Mortal Thing , Ezra Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China , along with books by Thomas Ricks's Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom , and Lindsay Powell's, Marcus Agrippa: Right-Hand Man of Caesar Augustus .
9. How do you unplug from the news cycle?
I will ignore it for days at a time. Instead, I watch movies, read books, go to the zoo, and do other things that I enjoy.
10. What's the last picture you took on your phone? The last picture I took was of Callista talking to a famous Estonian composer.
11. What can the Left learn from Trump's America ?
That America needs solutions, and a Left that offers real solutions will do much better than a Left that offers ridicule and hate.
12. What can doubters on the Right learn from Trump's America ? That we are in the midst of an amazing period of historic change. While President Trump can be tactically frustrating - even infuriating - he is strategically an amazing historic figure, and America is at a point where we need leadership willing to confront and change our problems. The approach of the past has not worked. |
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This week, ALEC and FreedomWorks introduce Kansas State Representative Ron Ryckman. Representative Ryckman serves as Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives. He was raised in western Kansas and has spent the past 25 years in Johnson County. As a student athlete at MidAmerica Nazarene University, he was dedicated to teamwork and learning business, which built the foundation for his achievements. His civic leadership runs strong. Ron has served on the Olathe City Council since 2009, and been elected to the Kansas House of Representatives first in 2012, then 2014, and again in 2016 where he shortly after was elected as Speaker of the House. He previously served as chairman of the House Social Services Budget Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. Ron and his wife Kim have been married for 22 years and have three children, Haley, Christian, and Chase.
Why did you run for office?
My father was a teacher and community leader in my home town of Meade, Kansas. He has always been a positive role model and is someone I have always looked up to. He first ran for the Kansas House in 2010 and inspired me to follow in his footsteps and run in 2012. I had the distinct privilege of serving alongside him in the House from 2013 to 2016, which was one of the most rewarding opportunities of my lifetime.
If you could "wave your magic wand," what would you like to see immediately implemented in your state?
If I could wave a magic wand, I would return the power of the purse to the legislative branch in Kansas. As the people's elected representatives, it is our responsibility to prioritize spending and appropriate funds accordingly. We are held accountable by the voters. Amending the Kansas Constitution is the only solution to guarantee a clear and defined separation of powers when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars.
Do you serve on any committees? If so, which committees and why? How do you think you have impacted them?
As the Speaker of the House, I serve as chair of the Legislative Coordinating Council, a committee composed of legislative leadership charged with making executive decisions concerning the Legislature. I also serve as chair of the Interstate Cooperation Committee, vice chair of the House Calendar and Printing Committee, and the State Finance Council with the governor and legislative leaders. Before my term as Speaker, I chaired the House Appropriations Committee.
What project or law are you most proud of?
I am proud of one of the first bills I carried in the Legislature, now in statute, which requires welfare and unemployment recipients suspected of using illegal drugs to be screened. I am also proud to have led the implementation of performance-based budgeting which ensures that tax dollars are spent as efficiently as possible throughout the appropriations process.
How has ALEC helped you as a legislator?
ALEC has afforded me several opportunities to confer with other legislators on the similar issues that impact our respective states. I have found that ALEC events hosted across the country help identify commonsense approaches to the multifaceted issues facing today's legislatures.
What is your favorite thing about Kansas?
Kansas is my home. It's where I was raised, and where my wife and I raised our children. We have great schools, strong businesses, and a unique, collective sense of community. Kansans exemplify a sense of compassion and altruism that I have yet to see anywhere else.
Can you share a fun fact about yourself that's not in your official bio?
I was born in Germany, started my first business in the fourth grade, and owned a baseball card shop in high school. Published: July 30, 2018 Tags: Legislator of the Week |
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Florida congressman Mark Foley, who sparked a firestorm of controversy when he called a press conference in May to denounce rumors that he is gay, on Monday touted his support for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act while speaking to a group of members of the Spirit of '76 Republican Club of Pasco County, reports the St. Petersburg Times. At the event, in which Foley was stumping for votes in his run for the Republican nomination for Bob Graham's U.S. Senate seat, Scott Factor, treasurer of the Pasco Republican Executive Committee, asked Foley about his votes on two gay rights measures. One proposal would have banned adoptions by gay people in Washington, D.C.; the other would prohibit the use of federal funds for a San Francisco ordinance requiring benefits for "unmarried domestic partners." Foley voted against both measures, saying Congress should not meddle with issues decided at the local level. But Foley confirmed that he voted for DOMA, which denies federal recognition of same-sex unions, and said he does not support adoptions by gays.
Factor, apparently, was unconvinced. "He's clearly in favor of gay rights, and he refuses to address that issue to a mostly conservative crowd," Factor said. |
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We've gone over the benefits of saving oneself for marriage (read Waiting Till the Wedding Night - Getting Married the Right Way ): mutual trust with your partner, disease prevention, no unexpected pregnancies... Also not getting thrown in jail if you live in a place like Abu Dhabi, which loves to throw people in jail. Especially women .
Yep, that's our segue. A pregnant woman was tossed in da clink for being unmarried and with child. Now she's being forced by the government to undergo medical tests to determine when she gave away her flower. Yes, really. It's of national interest, apparently ...
A pregnant Ukrainian woman held in Abu Dhabi with her South African fiance faces medical tests to see when she lost her virginity... [The couple] were arrested for unlawful sex outside of marriage when a doctor discovered the pregnancy.
Having sex outside marriage is illegal in the UAE, and those who are convicted can face long jail sentences. The couple have reported been detained since January 29, but details of their arrest are just emerging. They have not, however, been charged because authorities are still investigating the paternity of the child, how long the couple was sexually active and are testing [the mother's] HIV status.
According to The Times, [the man's] mother, from South Africa, said: 'How can they determine how long she's been sexually active? It must feel as if she is being raped by the authorities.'
Firstly, if you had any doubts about the pervertedness of Islamic countries like the UAE... Wonder no more. This should put those questions to rest. The male-dominant government measures women's virginity and lobs threats of jail at those it deems unclean. Which is usually women. Sounds rather sexist, right? If you answered anything other than "yes," promptly relocate to the Middle East. Also slap yourself. Because this is what actual sexism looks like, and it's a big part of Islam (see Qatar: Dutch Woman Reports Rape and SHE'S Jailed For It... ).
You've likely noticed how feminists are eerily quiet on this issue... Possibly due to being too busy trying to defund American colleges guilty of fake rape culture or morally crucifying those who fall victim to verifiably false rape accusations (see Students Accused of Rape Suspended, Lose Scholarships. Except the 'Victim'? She Lied... ). Priorities.
While those of hairy-armpitted, leftist persuasion attack America for fake rape culture, they ignore Islam's actual rape culture. And sexism . And terrorism . This is why Islamophobia is a thing.
By the way, normal people? For the love of all that is good and non-halal, stop going to Muslim countries. They don't want you. Clearly...
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT ! IT'S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE . |
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They say that even the horses were shod with silver in the great days of the city of Potosi. -- Eduardo Galeano , Open Veins of Latin America
J ulio Morales Zambrana is furious. Our window into the mountain is about to close.
"Hurry!" yells Julio.
" Momentito , por favor ."
We stand at the entrance to La Negra mine in Potosi, Bolivia, at the base of the infamous Cerro Rico. It is November 2007. The nation around us is once again on the verge of shearing apart.
The first 300 metres of La Negra are very dangerous, says Julio. The shaft is low and narrow, and there is nowhere to hide. Moments ago, a trolley filled with ore came barrelling out of the mine's mouth. The longer we delay out here, the better our chances of being annihilated inside by the next delivery.
Jason wrestles his camera gear, and I try to calm my nerves. I stare at the mine opening, a two-metre-high hole blasted into the wall, the trolley tracks disappearing into it like the rails of a ghost train. A small plaque commemorates La Negra's reopening in 1988 after centuries of disuse. High above looms the summit of the Cerro, a cool and handsome cone of stone.
Finally, Jason is ready. We steel ourselves, duck down, and follow Julio into the darkness. Soon there is nothing but the bog of mud between the tracks, our splashing footsteps, and the serpentine hiss of the air compressor that powers the jackhammers. The only source of light for the next six hours will be the headlamps affixed to our hard hats. Though I can't see them, the walls are so close they scrape my elbows.
Julio runs and tells us to do the same, but I am nearly a foot taller than the average Bolivian. Bent double, I go as fast as I can. Then I smash my head at a particularly low point, and my world collapses. My lamp goes out. My glasses fall from my face. I call out for Julio, but he can't hear me. He's howling deep into the mountain, pounding on the pipes, announcing our presence to the trolley runners, who are surely bearing down on us.
Jason is somewhere behind me, his back seizing up. Blind and shaken, I trawl the swamp at my feet with my hand. I think of the mountain opposite this one, the hill called Huakajchi. For the Inca, the spring water gushing from its slopes suggested tears.
Somehow I find my glasses. Then I bash my hard hat with my fist, and the light miraculously returns. We rush on. Ten minutes later, we find Julio resting in a small nook carved into the wall of rock, the first hiding spot in La Negra. "In through your nose, out through your mouth," he says. At nearly four kilometres above sea level, every breath in Potosi feels frantically wrung from the air.
The mountain begins to rumble. A clang sings out from the air compressor pipe, and Julio's face stretches into a smile. As the trolley careens past, chased by three young Indian men cloaked in grey dust, their cheeks packed with coca leaves, I sneak a peek down a side shaft and glimpse a familiar red figure.
"Not yet," says Julio, reading my mind as he disappears into the darkness. "We must go deep before we visit the devil."
L ast week, shortly after Jason and I arrived in La Paz, the city's streets erupted in demonstrations. Labour strikes, riots, and roadblocks swept through many of Bolivia's eastern departments, the unrest reaching its climax when at least three protesters were killed in the city of Sucre. La Razon, the most widely read newspaper in a country all too familiar with strife, called special attention to these events by dubbing the spreading crisis Black November, a reference to the violence of Black October in 2003, when sixty-seven people, most of them indigenous, were killed in El Alto in confrontations with the army.
Three years ago, in a profound break with history, Bolivia elected its first fully indigenous president. Evo Morales is an Aymara Indian, a former bricklayer, a trumpet player, a cocalero (coca leaf grower), and a darling of the radical left. He won an absolute majority, securing over half the vote, and immediately set to work on a mandate to "refound" the Bolivian Republic after years of corrupt neo-liberal leadership. "Capitalism is the enemy of the earth, of humanity, and of culture," Morales told Benjamin Dangl, an independent journalist and the author of The Price of Fire : Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia . "If the nineteenth century belonged to Europe and the twentieth century to the United States, the twenty-first century will belong to America, to Latin America."
Morales -- along with his political hero, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela -- fast became a figurehead of the populist New Left wave sweeping across a politically reinvigorated South America. As the leader of the mas , or Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism) party, his stated goal is to empower the nation's historically oppressed Indian majority. "The poor don't want to be rich," he said after casting his vote in the historic election. "They just want equality." His platform promised to redistribute land to poor campesinos, assist coca growers in their struggle against a mendacious war on drugs, reject US-backed free trade policies, nationalize Bolivia's natural gas industry (which he did in 2006), and convoke a constituent assembly to rewrite Bolivia's constitution.
It was this promise of a new constitution -- the country's seventeenth in under two centuries -- that led to the most recent round of violence. Bolivia's age-old divide between the privileged, post-colonial elites and the impoverished farmers and miners who suffer the legacy of the Spanish Conquest has once again been thrown into high relief. The deadline for delivery of the new document to congress is December 14, a few weeks hence, when it will be subjected to a national referendum.
The morning after the killings in Sucre, Jason and I saw hundreds of Aymaran women wearing long black braids, pleated pollera skirts, and black bowler hats scurrying down Avenida 16 de Julio toward the Plaza del Estudiante in La Paz. Firecracker blasts echoed off the walls of the surrounding Choqueyapu canyon, and we felt the will of Bolivia stir. As thousands of miners and their campesino brethren marched up Avenida Villazon to join the women -- arms linked, chanting slogans of solidarity, the imposing visage of Mount Illimani behind them -- we realized that the mines of the Cerro Rico might have something extremely pressing to say about the country and its perpetually tenuous future. The next night, we boarded an overnight bus bound for Potosi.
F our hundred years ago, the Cerro Rico, or "Rich Hill" of Potosi, was the richest silver mine in the world. At a time when all of Latin America was about to be transformed into one big mine -- a bottomless bank account for the royals of Europe -- the extraordinary wealth of the Cerro became the chief economic engine for the Spanish Conquest, and arguably the first real swig of mother's milk for young Western capitalism.
Legend has it that the Inca knew about the riches lying beneath the Cerro. According to Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, an Inca named Huayna Capaj led a team of treasure seekers to its summit long before the Spanish arrived. As they began to dig, though, a fearsome voice thundered from the heavens. "This is not for you," it warned. "God is keeping these riches for those who come from afar." The Incas fled, terrified, but not before dubbing the mountain Potojsi, Quechua for "to thunder, burst, explode."
In 1545, during the early days of the conquest, the prophecy of the mountain came true. An unlucky Indian named Huallpa spent a shivering night on the Cerro, after passing the day in pursuit of an escaped llama. By the light of his campfire, he glimpsed a huge vein of pure silver glittering on the mountain's surface. Word spread quickly, and, as Galeano puts it, "the Spanish avalanche was unleashed."
The Spaniards opened the mine that same year. Within three decades, Potosi had grown more affluent than Paris or London, making it the New World's first genuine boom town. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, named Potosi an Imperial City, and upon its shield were inscribed the lines "I am rich Potosi, treasure of the world, king of the mountains, envy of kings." Popular theory holds that the old mark of the Potosi mint (the letters ptsi superimposed on one another) was the precursor of the modern dollar sign.
The true amount of silver extracted from the Cerro is impossible to measure, but Bolivians often claim that enough was chiselled from the mountain to build a shimmering bridge from the summit all the way to Madrid. In Spain, even today, if something is "worth a Potosi," it is worth a fortune. But this astonishing wealth came at an awful cost: untold numbers of indigenous workers perished inside the mines, after living lives of incomparable torment.
N ow pay attention," says Julio. "We are late, so I explain just once." We crouch, wheezing and coughing and spitting up phlegm, on the lip of a vertical shaft. An antique ladder of rotting wood drops down into the metre-wide hole, as does a manual winch cable. Above, at what would normally be shoulder level, a vein of zinc runs along the ceiling, a glimmering trail criss-crossed by supporting timbers and studded with luminous beauty marks. "The mountain is like my hand," says our guide. "Its veins are my veins."
Julio spent two and a half years labouring in the Cerro Rico before quitting to start his guiding company, Green-Go Tours. Now in his early forties, he is a respected mestizo tour guide and professional historian fluent in Quechua, Spanish, and English. "In colonial times, the silver veins were called 'mother veins,' thick like the trunks of trees," he says. "But no one mines silver anymore. Now they mine the branches."
These days, Potosi is still the highest city in the world, and the Cerro still lords over it like a senile king. But the silver inside the Rich Hill is long gone. By the mid-1800s, miners were sweeping the last breath of silver from these tunnels with brooms, turning their attention to secondary minerals such as zinc and tin. After the Bolivian Revolution in 1952, the government nationalized the tin mines. Then, in October 1985, global prices collapsed and the mine closed, leaving 23,000 unemployed. The face of Potosi became even more worn, as the young fled and older miners, many of whom had spent their entire lives working the Cerro, remained in its shadow.
As necessity -- or, more accurately, poverty -- is the mother of invention, the veterans quickly banded together to form mining co-operatives. The state, still the legal owner of the Cerro, agreed to lease concessions, and the miners returned to the mountain as their own bosses. Today more than 10,000 destitute mestizo, Quechua, and Aymara Indians scrape a living from the sparse deposits of lead, zinc, and tin still embedded in the Cerro's warren of exhausted halls. Most are members of one of several dozen co-ops; collectively, they operate more than 300 active mines, many of which date back to the conquest.
"But remember," says Julio, pointing to the zinc in the ceiling, "we don't take everything. If we take everything, the mountain will collapse."We begin our descent. Visceral images of disaster flood my mind as I pick my way down the rickety ladder. Every year, dozens of miners are crushed, suffocated, or blown to pieces inside the Cerro. Cave-ins occur almost weekly, and lethal pockets of carbon monoxide and sulphurous gases lurk behind every wall. Winches fail, cables snap, trolleys run out of control, blasting caps are fumbled to the ground -- and yes, old ladders routinely snap. Safety is more than a passing concern down here, but few can afford its wages. Julio installed these ladders himself, to make La Negra more accessible for visitors. Until a few years ago, miners scrambled up and down the shafts using nothing but measures of knotted rope.
On the next level down, we turn acrobatics through the gloom, across the shaky, mud-slick timbers that lie between us and a ten-metre plummet. As we go deeper, the walls begin to play tricks, supporting me until I lose my footing, then backing off and leaving me dangling, scrambling for purchase. At level three, crawling on hands and knees toward the next ladder, I become lodged in a particularly narrow section. For a short, terrifying moment, I am trapped. I can't move my arms or draw a proper breath. I curse the backpack that, ludicrously, I hadn't thought to remove. The more I struggle, the more wedged I become.
Julio pokes his head up from the vertical shaft just ahead. "No force," he says into the dark. "No muscle."I stop wriggling, close my eyes, try to relax into the mountain. My breath reluctantly returns. I slither forward cautiously, reverently. Somehow my arms come free, and I'm able to pull myself through. My panic subsides. The Cerro has released me.
B olivia is perpetually gripped by social conflict, having suffered more than 188 coups d'etat since its founding, in 1825, by the father of Latin American rebellion, Simon Bolivar. The constitutional crisis raging outside is fuelled by the same cultural and socio-economic divisions that have defined Bolivian life and politics for centuries. On one side are the poor, indigenous majority of Quechua, Aymara, Chiquitano, and Guarani campesinos, factory workers, and miners for whom Pachamama, or Mother Earth, is a sacred deity. On the other are the relatively prosperous right-wing mestizo elite, of mixed European and Indian descent, who pray to the distinctly more secular god of market capitalism. Until now, either the mestizo or the military has essentially ruled Bolivia since the Spanish left.
This profound rift is apparent even in the nation's geography. Bolivia is divided by South America's two most significant topographical features: the Andean mountain range in the west, where most Indians live and where Potosi and La Paz, both Morales strongholds, are located; and the resource-rich Amazon rainforest in the east, home mainly to mestizos and that bastion of anti-Morales sentiment, the wealthy jungle city of Santa Cruz, which is responsible for an estimated 45 percent of Bolivia's economy.
The meetings of the constituent assembly charged with drafting the constitution were proving a most theatrical forum for this divide. Rife with controversy since its formation in 2006, spiked with overt racism on both sides, and stricken by months-long debates over voting rules and at least one rollicking fist fight, the assembly had polarized the country more profoundly than any mountain range or economic philosophy ever could.
Morales, whose mas party held 137 of the 255 seats, envisioned that the new constitution would redistribute the nation's wealth more equitably. mas planned to nationalize Bolivia's oil and gas sectors, cap land ownership at 10,000 hectares, and replace the Senate with a body that better represented the country's indigenous majority, including the miners. Opponents of m as, led by podemos , the nation's Santa Cruz-based right-wing party, held just sixty seats. They were crusading to maintain the neo-liberal status quo of freewheeling foreign investment and private ownership, and to shift more control over natural resource revenues away from La Paz and into the hands of local elites.
Although mas failed to win the two-thirds majority required to control the assembly, the new constitution was expected to follow the party's prescription. And so we had the violence of Black November. The white-walled city of Sucre in flames. High-heeled women, men in business suits, and right-wing youth groups rampaging through the streets. At least 100 prisoners escaping the San Roque Jail. At least three demonstrators shot dead. Bolivia, in the view of many, on the verge of civil war -- the Andean Wiphala flag versus the Spanish Cross.
For good reason, constitutional issues in Bolivia are routinely couched in the rhetoric of a centuries-old culture clash. But as the miners of Potosi know all too well, the schisms here are fuelled by something more fundamental than race or creed. After all, the eastern lowlands aren't just home to the mestizos. They also host enormous deposits of natural gas, South America's second-largest reserves behind Venezuela's. It is the allocation of this bottomless bank account, tops on a long list of mineral riches, that the people of Bolivia are really fighting over.
O n the fourth level of La Negra, we find Julio at a fork in the shaft, perched on a pile of blasted stone. He is laughing with three edgy young Quechuans. This is the drilling team. Their mandate: open a set of twelve holes in the wall around the corner. These will later be packed with dynamite. The men are clothed, as are we, in the ubiquitous uniform of the Cerro Rico miner: hooded full-body overalls, black rubber boots, hard hat, headlamp, and an overcoat of ghostly grey dust. They are following a vein of zinc to the east.
One of the men wears an additional piece of equipment over his nose and mouth: an old-school half-face filter mask. At his feet lies a hulking mass of rusted machinery, an ancient pneumatic jackhammer with a chisel the width of my wrist affixed to its end.
"This man is expert driller," says Julio.
"How old? " I ask.
"Twenty-two."
The driller mumbles through his mask in Quechua, and Julio translates.
"He says his mask is broken, but he can't afford a new one."Trolley runners may get lucky and outrun cave-ins, and explosives experts hold their fortunes in their own hands, but the average life expectancy for drillers is barely more than ten years from the day they start. The leading cause of death in the mines is not accidents or gas leaks but mal de mina: miner's sickness, or silicosis of the lungs. The disease is caused by inhalation of the crystalline silica dust thrown up by the drills. Death by silicosis is a slow, agonizing demise. The suffering miner literally loses his breath as the alveoli of his lungs become inflamed and overgrown with fibrous tissue. Symptoms progress from shortness of breath, fever, and weakness to bluish skin, cracked fingernails, dramatic weight loss, respiratory infection, and heart failure. The health care packages offered to the workers by the government are based on the ravages of silicosis. When a miner is judged to have suitably sacrificed himself to the mountain -- that is, when he has lost 80 to 90 percent of his lung capacity -- he is legally entitled to a modest retirement package. A good mask with a particulate filter costs upwards of $50, two and a half times the average miner's take-home pay for a very good week.
The air compressor pipe suddenly hisses to life, and the miners leap from their seats. The driller hefts his jackhammer, adjusts his useless mask, and disappears into the dark. As we crouch around the corner -- we are not permitted to watch -- my insides shudder, my face quivers, and I can feel the vibrations in my teeth. I touch the wall, and the concussions rattle up my arm and throttle my throat. Julio yells something, but I can't make it out, so he grabs my shoulder and motions for me to retreat. Just then, an otherworldly cloud rushes around the corner and swallows us.We abandon the drillers and stumble back the way we came, choking and coughing and trying to hold our breath. "Tourists don't come down here," says Julio as he leads us through a labyrinth of shattered hallways. "If I bring them, they start to cry."
S oon we find another group of men. They sit on mounds of crushed stone surrounded by the tools of the Bolivian miner: pickaxes, shovels, coils of white safety fuse, piles of silver blasting caps, a few threadbare rice sacks, and countless sticks of dynamite. Though we've walked a fair distance from the drillers, the walls still hum with their cacophonous industry.
" Refresco , refresco ," says one of the miners, and I obediently retrieve bottles of singani (muscatel grape liquor), soda pop, and puro (rubbing alcohol) from my backpack. Puro is 192 proof. Cut with soda, it is the macho drink of choice inside the Cerro Rico. Friday is a day of celebration in the mountain. Tomorrow the miners will sell their meagre hauls of zinc and tin to the co-op in return for their meagre wage.
I watch the men perform their delicate work by the light of their headlamps. One of them sieves a pinkish sand from the rice sacks while his partner packs the resulting powder into paper tubes. These cartridges of explosive ammonium nitrate will be set alongside the dynamite. Two other miners wrestle with coils of safety fuse, snipping off an arm's length at a time and affixing a blasting cap to one end. Each flick of their wrists has the potential to usher us all to oblivion. The blasting caps are live; if one falls and contacts stone just so, we'll be blown to smithereens.
This doesn't stop the boozing. On the contrary, now that we've arrived the men are working one-handed, fuses and caps in one hand, bottles in the other. Before each sip, they sprinkle a few drops of liquor on the ground as an offering to Pachamama. Finally, the booze makes its way to me. I grab it with my left hand, and Julio explodes. "Right hand!" he yells, alerting me to a less tangible danger. Andean superstition holds that it is very bad luck to drink alcohol with the left hand.
A new anxiety soon sets in. As I strip the stems of coca leaves with my teeth and chew the energizing greens, I stare at the man sifting ammonium nitrate. His face has a strange smoothness to it, a fleshiness in the cheeks. Then it hits me: this miner is not a man. He is a boy, no older than twelve.
unicef estimates that 10 percent of all miners in Bolivia are children. They are drawn to the dark from across the country, and are often their families' sole breadwinners. This boy's father died a few months ago, so he quit school and moved to Potosi with his mother and two sisters to find work. The need to enforce child labour laws is one of the few points both sides in the constituent assembly agreed on, but for the moment the practice continues.
The air becomes unnervingly grey; the dust from the drilling has found us. As we take our leave, I realize the two youngest miners aren't wearing masks. "When you are young, you think you are king of the world," says Julio. "You don't think of the future."Even if this little boy becomes a relatively well-paid driller, I realize, he'll probably be dead by the time he's twenty-two.
A mine is not a metaphor. A metaphor flowers along the fertile boundary of reason, where there is still room to manoeuvre, a little mental space in which meaning might bloom. A mine has none of these things. There is nothing fertile about these long-plundered hallways (though the walls may bear meagre fruit). There is no space down here, no room to manoeuvre. And nothing down here blooms.
A miner is not a symbol but a man working, hauling, digging, clawing, scraping, dragging, drilling, falling, crashing, blasting, crying, coughing, screaming, laughing, earning, dying. A mine is a man living -- here, 10,000 men. Add in their families, and this mountain is tens of thousands of living children, brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, and wives.
A mine is a medieval thing. Blast a hole in a mountain. Dig out its innards. If they glimmer, put them in your pocket; if not, toss them to the shadows. Hide your glimmer in an attic, in a bank account, in another hole in the ground. Base your society on the glimmer, even.
A mine is simply a hole in the ground in which everything is shattered, seized, stolen, sold. A mine is not a metaphor.
This is what I tell myself as we emerge from the depths of level four, half drunk and shaking with exhaustion, cheeks fat with coca, our fears of catastrophe banished by booze. We pass toppled trolleys, strewn dust masks, black sacks heavy with ore, men with the gleam of the berserk in their eyes. The miners fall in line behind us, drawn by the promise of more puro and, I soon learn, a tremendous sense of duty. At the end of a shift on a Friday afternoon, the climb to level one of La Negra has the air of a pilgrimage.
I begin to recognize our surroundings: the parallel shimmer of the trolley tracks, the swamp at my feet. But before we reach the respite of the mine's mouth, Julio leads us down a short side shaft, the one I'd peered down six hours earlier.
At the end of the cul-de-sac looms a fearsome figure, a two-metre-high clay statue of a seated man coated in chipped red paint. He has a shaggy woollen beard, a cut physique, curved black horns, and a thick, erect phallus. Countless cigarettes spill from his mouth, colourful ribbons drape his shoulders, and empty booze bottles and piles of coca leaf scatter his lap. This is the Tio. Uncle. The devilish landlord of the Cerro Rico.
We sit before the Tio, and the miners speak a few reverent words in Quechua. Then the puro begins its rounds. Before each sip, we stand and sprinkle a few drops onto the statue with our right hands. In no time, we are profoundly drunk. "When the Spanish first came to America," says Julio, "the Incas and Aztecs were idolaters. The Spaniards said, 'The Indians! They are full of vices! They have to be converted to Christianity!' So the Spanish began to teach of heaven and hell. The question is, where is hell? " Julio smiles sloppily, gesturing at the stone walls. "This is the world of darkness. This is the world of darkness! And who is living here? The Tio, the devil."
Every mine in the Cerro has at least one statue of the Tio, a pagan custom that dates back to the conquest. By the light of day, most miners are pious Roman Catholics, but in the dark of the mountain they become devout devil worshippers. At the end of each week, they visit the Tio to make offerings of coca, liquor, and cigarettes. If a miner is feeling especially hard done by, he might bury a llama fetus -- or, if local legend is to be believed, an unborn human one -- at the Tio's foot. "If the miners don't want to have injuries, they must offer presents," says Julio. "If we offer the Tio good things, he will give us back a good area."
Andean spirituality holds that the rich veins of minerals in the Cerro are the result of sexual relations between the Tio and Pachamama -- hence the massive phallus. Every February, during the annual miners' carnival, a man dressed as the Tio dances down from the mountain and joins the drunken mobs on the streets of Potosi, hunting the souls of earthbound sinners. Hence the rainbow of ribbons over his shoulder. "If we don't give, the Tio will be hungry," says Julio, leaning close, his eyes glazed with booze. "Hungry means he wants to eat something. But what will he eat? "
I shrug.
"Bodies," he says. "Understand?"
I nod, and Julio leans closer.
"They say the miners are eating the mountain," he says, flicking a few drops of puro up onto the Tio's knee before drinking deeply. "But the mountain is eating the men."For the next hour, inebriated discussions veer from the laughably sexual to the tragic, the men posturing as Casanovas in one breath, then relinquishing their fortunes to the Tio in the next. More miners join us, dusty phantoms at shift's end. We drink the puro down and start in on the singani . A distant explosion rumbles through the shaft -- the dynamite we saw earlier, packed and blown. One of the men, his face tinged blue from silicosis, motions for me to return my hard hat to my head.
Dig down to the heart of Bolivian rebellion, and you will find a trove of natural resources. Whether it's silver, gold, zinc, copper, water, land, gas, or tin, it is the wealth beneath the soil, and sometimes the soil itself, that has been the protagonist here ever since the Span-ish arrived. The mines of Potosi (silver), the Bolivian Revolution in 1952 (land and tin), the Cochabamba water war of 2000 (municipal water), the deadly gas war of 2003 (natural gas) -- control over resources, the money and power that arises from their extraction, has been the real social and political organizing force here ever since Huallpa lit his feeble campfire.
Bolivia's fractured history lies beyond the grasp of a single journey into one infamous mountain. But sitting deep inside the Cerro Rico, where the cleaving of Bolivia and the pillaging of a continent began, as the violence of Black November rages outside, it is hard not to feel as though I'm in a living museum, where past and present are indistinguishable, and the future threatens to join them in the dark. Three weeks from now, Evo Morales will welcome the draft constitution on the steps of the presidential palace. Five months from now, the nationwide referendum will be postponed amid fierce cries for eastern autonomy over gas revenues. Nine months from now, Morales will win more than 67 percent of the vote in a voluntary recall election. And in September, the curse of Bolivia's resource wealth will rear up again as thirty or more protesters are slain in the streets.
But these events lie ahead. For now, Julio Morales Zambrana is falling-down drunk and talking to himself, leading us back to the light.
"This bullshit is the hell," he says. "Where? Underground. If the sinners go to hell, to purgatory, to have the punishments...where do they go? At the sky? At the heaven? No. Underground. Underground! Not the Cerro Rico. Wherever you go. There are Tio all over Bolivia, inside the mines. But underground. The devil is everywhere! Not just in the Cerro Rico. Every-where! But underground. Underground. Miner filling paper tubes with ammonium nitrate for blasting inside La Negra mine. Potosi, Bolvia. Entrance to La Negra mine in the Cerro Rico or "Rich Mountain" of Potosi, Bolivia. Miners drinking, smoking and chewing coca with the "Tio" during a break inside La Negra mine. Potosi, Bolvia. |
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Entrance to La Negra mine in the Cerro Rico or "Rich Mountain" of Potosi, Bolivia. Miners drinking, smoking and chewing coca with the "Tio" during a break inside La Negra mine. Potosi, Bolvia. |
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Here are quotes from Linda McQuaig on various life and family issues:
McCuaig decried the Harper Conservatives for not allowing abortions in Africa to become part of the government's Maternal Health Initiative: "There's much that urgently needs scrutiny, starting with the Harper government's use of the G8 summit to score points with its ultra-conservative base by launching a "maternal health initiative" that denies abortions to the world's most desperate and impoverished women." [Column on LindaMcCauig.com, "G20: Protest-phobia", May 31, 2010]
Her response to a gay-activist reporter about her thoughts on federal funding of a Christian charity who does development work abroad: "These groups are also anti-women, anti-abortion. That's the Conservative agenda right there. An NDP government would have totally different priorities. We need to get our priorities right. We need to establish that we shouldn't be funding discrimination. " [DailyXtra.com, "Toronto Centre by-election: NDP candidate Linda McQuaig", Nov. 17, 2013] |
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Rep. Maxine Waters attacked President Donald Trump on Saturday for "undermining" former President Barack Obama, saying she will push for Democrats to "reverse" the "GOP tax scam" if Democrats retake control of the House in November's midterm elections.
During an interview with MSNBC , Waters threw a hissy fit when she was asked by host David Gura about the whopping 4.1 percent GDP growth in the second quarter.
Rather than offer the Trump administration an ounce of credit for the booming economy, Waters got defensive and claimed the president's economic proposals were "undermining" Obama's legacy.
"Of course, the economy has improved, and of course he would like to take credit for all of that. But in the final analysis; when this country understands and feels what has been done with the tax scam and what that's going to do for our deficit in this country, it's going to be reversed. A combination of the tax scam and the tariffs will undermine all that has been done in the economy that was started by Obama."
She also claimed Obama was responsible for the booming economy, which isn't logical given the economy and markets have hit unprecedented levels that Obama was never able to achieve when he was in office for eight years.
Watch below:
Her bizarre comments came one day after the U.S. economy grew by 4.1 percent in the second quarter of 2018, marking the fastest economic expansion in nearly four years.
Waters also said she wants Democrats to repeal the GOP tax cuts, which has helped create millions of new jobs and accelerated the markets to historic levels. Waters is apparently so blinded by her own hatred toward Trump that she wants to undo one of his most important accomplishments because it has arguably benefited the nation far more than anything Obama ever did.
Her insane rant on Saturday also comes after she called for Americans to scream at Trump Cabinet officials in public.
Last week, the California Democrat claimed she was " sent by God " on a mission to get Trump and hold him accountable for his actions.
Her calls for violence resulted in pro-Trump Florida Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi being spit on and harassed by liberals, a mob of deranged liberals swarmed the home of DHS Secretary Kristjen Nielsen, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to get a Secret Service unit.
And now she has made it abundantly clear that she will push for Democrats to repeal Trump's tax cuts if Democrats retake the House in November. |
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With the election season fully in bloom, the aroma of deceit and desperation is growing more pungent by the hour. Mitt Romney, The Original Bankster , continues to be evasive about his international business affairs, and he refuses to release more than a single year of tax returns in order to quell speculation. His electoral prospects have not been noticeably enhanced with the addition of Wisconsin congressman, and extremist right-winger, Paul Ryan to the ticket. Consequently, the GOP PR machine (aka Fox News) has swung into action to attempt to cauterize the wounds and manufacture some positive spin on behalf of the struggling Republican standard bearers.
The most effective contribution of the Fox spinners is their expertise in disseminating brazenly dishonest propaganda without shame or fear of reprisal. They construct fabrications that benefit their patrons and broadcast them to an audience that is so undiscriminating that they'll watch Sean Hannity more than once. And since the majority of rational news consumers will never see much of what Fox works so hard to invent, we have complied a list of some of the most dishonest moments so far in the 2012 election cycle. [Note: in order to pare this list down to a manageable length, it has been limited to just just the last eight weeks. There's only so much bandwidth on the Internet]
1) President Obama Did Not Call Mitt Romney A Felon Mitt Romney claims that he had ceased to be involved with Bain Capital in 1999, although his signature on SEC documents affirms that he was the sole shareholder and CEO as late as 2002. Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, pointed out that Romney had to have lied on either the SEC forms or his public statements that contradict them. Fox News turned that into an accusation by Obama that Romney is a felon. However, there is a big difference between calling someone a felon and simply noting that if one were to commit a felony they would be a felon, which is all that Cutter had done. But Fox is not inclined to miss an opportunity to invent a controversy where none actually exists.
2) Fox News Built That In a speech to supporters in Virginia, Obama praised the hard work of individuals and businesses while also noting the collective value of American investment in economic prosperity. So Fox News plucked an out-of-context soundbite from the speech that said "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." What Fox deliberately left out was that Obama was referring to public services like teachers and police, and to infrastructure like roads and bridges that contribute to the success of all businesses. It's a position that Romney himself has taken. However, Fox News blew this distortion up into such a frenzy that the Romney campaign adopted it and now have made the Fox-built fallacy the theme for the GOP convention in Tampa. [Note: The GOP convention is being held in the Tampa Bay Forum, a facility that was built with mostly public funds]
The tactic of taking quotes out of context has been a favorite of the Fox News gang this year. They did precisely the same thing with remarks Obama made about the economy (the private sector is doing fine) and his record in office (we tried our plan and it worked). In both cases Fox left out critical language surrounding these remarks that revealed just how purposefully dishonest the Fox News team is.
3) The Swift-Boating Of President Obama Fox News has proudly announced the commencement of a Swiftboat campaign against President Obama. The organization set up to carry out the assault is described as "A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives," but in reality is a partisan assembly of Republicans and professional Obama haters. The Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund (SOOEF) plans to produce and distribute videos and advertisements that will criticize Obama for "taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden." This is an archetypical implementation of Swiftboating whose purpose is to spread lies about a key achievement of Obama's leadership as Commander-in-Chief.
The assertions by the SOOEF that Obama has improperly heralded himself for the demise of Bin Laden are demonstrably false. Their video features gross misrepresentations of Obama's statements on the subject that loop portions of his speech referencing himself, but leaves out his abundant praise for the military and intelligence operatives who carried out the mission. The opening line of the President's address to the nation announcing that Bin Laden was dead explicitly and unselfishly stated that "the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden." He went on to thank "the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," and he praised "the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country."
None of that was in the SOOEF video which Fox has featured in numerous broadcasts. What's more, Fox actually uses the term "Swiftboating" to describe the anti-Obama campaign. Either they have completely given up on trying to pretend that they are a "fair and balanced" news enterprise (which no one believes anyway), or they don't know that Swiftboating means lying.
4) Fox Nation Ignores Polls By CNN, Reuters, And -- Fox News Virtually every time a new poll on presidential politics is released Fox News will make a point to publish the results - so long as the poll shows Obama losing. In a particularly egregious example of this bias earlier this month, Fox prominently reported on a poll by the right-wing Rasmussen operation that placed Mitt Romney in the lead 47-43. What Fox neglected to report was that there were three other polls released at the same time that all put Obama ahead. And the most striking part of this omission was that one of the polls that Fox declined to cover was conducted by Fox News itself and put Obama ahead of Romney by nine points.
Fox couldn't even bring themselves to report on their own poll conducted by their own pollsters. That's the sort of biased cherry-picking that is the hallmark of Fox's "news" charade. And it's a crystal clear message to pollsters from Fox: If you want to be covered, you better say what we like. And that goes for Fox's pollsters as well.
5) Welfare-To-Work Rules Were Not Weakened By the Obama Administration The Romney campaign recently accused Obama of directing his administration to relax the welfare-to-work provisions of Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill. That accusation is directly refuted by the facts. What Obama did was to permit waivers for states that could affirm their progress in moving people from welfare to work, and allowing them flexibility to enhance their programs. It's a modification that Romney himself had requested when he was governor of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, Fox News picked up the accusation and ran with it. In every segment on the subject they portrayed the issue precisely as Romney had framed it despite every fact-checking operation concluding that Romney's charges were entirely false.
And speaking of fact-checking, Romney has been rated untruthful 67 times by PolitiFact, and 14 of those were "Pants-on-Fire" lies (including the welfare lie). In fact, 43% of PolitiFact's findings on statements by Romney are rated as untruthful. He's downright pathological, but Fox has not yet reported that fact.
6) Obama Did Not Sell Amnesty For $465.00 After Obama issued a directive to the Department of Homeland Security not to advance the deportation of young immigrants who had been brought to this country by their parents and who had demonstrated achievement in school or the military, there was a rush of dishonest reporting from Fox News that Obama was placating law breakers and opening our borders to criminals, drug traffickers, and terrorists. Of course, none of that was true. News reports from more objective sources correctly noted that the beneficiaries of the program had broken no laws and that the public overwhelmingly supported the President's plan.
After the initial drama subsided, Fox News decided to take another stab at promoting their false narrative. They began running reports alleging that Obama was "selling amnesty" to illegal aliens. What Fox was grossly misrepresenting was that the program had an application fee to help offset its costs. One would think that deficit minded conservatives would have approved of that fiscal responsibility. But Fox chose to present it as the purchase price for amnesty even though no one in the program would receive amnesty.
7) Soldiers Were Not Prevented From Voting In Ohio The issue of voter suppression has been a major factor in this years election contests. In states across the country Republicans have been working strenuously to reduce early voting availability and impose unreasonable identification requirements that serve to disenfranchise mostly voters who are minorities, seniors, students, and low income. But perhaps the worst example of distorting the issue occurred when Fox News accused the Obama administration of seeking to trample on the voting rights of people in the military.
The actual story is that the Republicans in the state of Ohio passed a bill that reduced early voting for everyone in the state except the military. The Obama Justice Department contested the move arguing that the same early voting privileges should be available to all Ohio voters. So the Obama administration was actually advocating for expanding voting rights for everyone, including veterans who would have been excluded under the GOP bill. The characterization by Fox News was 180% opposite of the truth.
8) Fox News Reports Obama Birth Certificate "Definitely Fraudulent" In a stunning piece of journalistic malpractice , Fox News reported assertions that Obama's birth certificate was "definitely fraudulent." The remarks were from Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, and while they were correctly attributed, nowhere in the article did Fox note that the birth certificate had been authenticated and that every credible source agrees that it is valid. The only references to the birth certificate's authenticity were framed as merely "claims." And Fox being "fair and balanced" regards all claims as having equal weight, even those without any substance to back them up.
This is a necessarily abridged collection of Fox falsehoods. There are far too many more to list here. But in the last eight weeks Fox News has disseminated some glaring whoppers in an attempt to prop up the flailing Romney campaign. Expect this to continue through the upcoming conventions and straight through to November. Because when you are supporting a candidate who refuses to reveal his taxes, his business history, or even his proposed policies, all you have left is what you can make up.
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Mitt Romney, The Original Bankster , continues to be evasive about his international business affairs, and he refuses to release more than a single year of tax returns in order to quell speculation. His electoral prospects have not been noticeably enhanced with the addition of Wisconsin congressman, and extremist right-winger, Paul Ryan to the ticket. Consequently, the GOP PR machine (aka Fox News) has swung into action to attempt to cauterize the wounds and manufacture some positive spin on behalf of the struggling Republican standard bearers. |
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PLEASE, PERMIT ME TO VENT MY SPLEEN A BIT!
by Dr. Thomas E. Davis , Colonel, USA (Ret), (c)2016
(Aug. 21, 2016) -- Without doubt, there are poor misguided souls who fall hook, line and sinker for the deceptions and outright lies passed around "cooperatively" by the MEDIA, mainstream or tributary. The following link is demonstrable evidence that most, if NOT all, the so-called NEWS is the result of a cut-and-paste job from a single source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/world-class-journalist-admits-mainstream-media-completely-fake-we-lie-cia/
Much of the "news" comes from the sycophantic minds of "little" no-talent jerks like Sissy Chrissy Matthews, who says he gets chills or thrills running up and down his leg when he hears "The One" pontificating in front of the White House press corps. Chrissy and his counterpart, the idiot import from jolly old blighty, Piers Morgan, the sanctimonious know-it-all. Contrast these two sanctimonious non-journalists with investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, who is most critical of these wannabes who lack the moral courage to report honestly the information they report as "the news" rather than the bogus substitutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmMieu3Kug&feature=youtu.be
Attkisson reveals in her book "Stonewalled" how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama administration and its scandals and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today's media. Sharyl appears to be one of the last in a long list of top-notch investigative reporters. Her book is truly revealing, just what our servants think of us versus them. I have no idea exactly how much Sheryl has uncovered regarding the criminal activity of the Obama administration. But, of this I am certain, Walter Williams founded the Missouri School of Journalism and wrote the Journalist's Creed which stands engraved in bronze at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. but is likely unread by all but the most diligent and honest members of the Fraternity.
For the moment, let's take a look at how our servants, the Congress, the Executive and the Judiciary regard themselves. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State." However, that caveat fails to deter the servants from setting the manner in which We the People are expected to address them formally as "The Honorable" Representative or Senator or Justice, when as a matter of fact, the majority of THEM are dishonest, untrustworthy, derelict in their sworn duties, simply spoiled or discourteous. These majestic beings oftentimes go to great lengths to avoid being questioned regarding certain of their activities. Many are simply downright arrogant.
The same applies to most of the "talking heads" of ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. Money is their most important value, ranking well above character, honesty, Judeo-Christian ethics, patriotism, loyalty, courtesy and humility. Give me one Sharyl Attkisson any time before even suggesting an egoist like a Matt Lauer, Bob Schieffer, Scott Pelley, Bill O'Reilly, or Megyn Kelly. Those last five seem to have lost their American loyalty. None has called for the indicting, trial, conviction and execution of Barry Soetoro-Obama, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, John Kerry, or Huma Abedin or even "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, all traitors.
In the early days of our republic, the members of the Congress worked more days during a session than the current Congress and those of the recent past: this, in spite of the fact that travel time has been shortened from days or weeks to hours. Communications to and replies from our congressional representatives are, for the most part, a one-way activity. Replies from or even acknowledgements of receipt of an email, fax, letter or phone call are rare to non-existent. Of course, the same applies to O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Greta Van Susteren and Fox News when I had the audacity and even the temerity to suggest that Megyn, Greta, Kimberly Guilfoyle or Dana Perino might be a viable candidate to become America's "first" female president. Oh! Silly me. As a matter of fact, I was very serious, and now we have a perverted, derelict, foul-mouthed, liar and TRAITOR attempting to buy the presidency. And, speaking of Hilly: George Stephanopoulos used an interview with Schweizer on ABC's "This Week" to point out what other "nonpartisan" journalists have found: There is no "smoking gun" showing that donations to the foundation influenced Hillary Clinton's foreign policy decisions. Where did they find a "journalist?" Probably among the White House press sycophants.
Just one final momentary rant: We have been in existence as a Democratic Federalist Republic since September 17, 1787, just 27 days short of 229 years. The "Democratic" portion of that title refers to and means We the People; "Federalist" refers precisely to the form of government the Founders intended for We the People to elect periodically. "Republic" expresses the mode of government as "a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them."
That notion remained sacrosanct until 1828, when the poison of party politics became the drink of choice for the power-brokers, their benefactors and all the graft of which they could conceive. Their devices and deceptions have brought "God's Chosen Republic" to the brink of extinction. We have deferred to sloth, sapphism, homosexuality, gratuitous sex, pornography, drugs, and all manner of activities inconsistent with the lives of our founders and their ancestry. We were forewarned by 55 Christian intellectual giants to be ever vigilant; we have failed our responsibilities to preserve this Republic for our heirs; we must be ashamed and repentant and change direction back to our Creator and Father.
At the very ripe old age of 91, I have no fear for me and mine; I fear only for the continued life of my beloved America. I am headed for a better place, my Father's House of Many Mansions, one of which has been reserved for me. As long as there is a spark of life left in me, I intend to pursue two goals only:
1. Do all that I am able to bring this rabid animal, our faux president, to a judicial termination of his worthless service in the company of Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Kerry, Leon Panetta, Martin Dempsey, Valerie Jarrett, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice and Cheryl Mills for their treason against America and its legal residents.
2. Do all that I am able to force the Congress to call an Article V Convention of States in order that those in attendance might offer some few needed amendments to the Constitution which the 50 States may consider and ratify.
Sources of Nonsense On or In the News added on Sunday, August 21, 2016 |
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"Federalist" refers precisely to the form of government the Founders intended for We the People to elect periodically. |
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After years of living amongst the violence of political turmoil and strife, Nancy Adossi and her family left Togo in West Africa when she was nine. They settled in Houston staying on a visitor's visa that expired after a year.
Twenty years later, Adossi remains in Houston. The 28-year old graduate of the University of Houston is undocumented and only protected under former President Barack Obama 's 2012 administrative action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
As of September 2017, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that there are 689,800 active DACA recipients. They came to this country as children and are exempt from being deported while also receiving permission to work (subject to renewal). Last year, Donald Trump's administration announced that it would end the DACA program, forcing Dreamers to return to their home countries.
Adossi has worked tirelessly to receive both her masters and doctorate degrees focusing on the education of foreign medical graduates. She currently consults with immigrant organizations like the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the UndocuBlack Network doing advocacy work and research on how Black immigrants are treated in America.
Her story is not all that uncommon. She is one of the many undocumented Black immigrants who are seeking a pathway to legal citizenship. As of 2016, there were 4.2 million Black immigrants living in the U.S. with 39 percent of the overall foreign-born Black population coming from Africa, according to a Pew Research Center study of U.S. Census Bureau data.
As Congress continues to work on a bipartisan deal, the Dreamers are left wondering what will happen to their American dreams after the March 5 deadline. Adossi explains what life is truly like for an undocumented young, Black woman and what's going through her mind as she waits for the government to decide her future.
theGrio: Why did your family come to the United States? Nancy Adossi: We left Togo because of political strife. I grew up around a lot of military action and rules. It was a tough environment to live in, so in 1997, my dad came to America, leaving my mom, my older brother and I in Africa. A few months after he left, we were attacked in our house by rebel forces. They rounded us up with the intention of killing us, but someone decided otherwise. Instead, they told us if we could make our way across the border to Ghana, we would be spared. My mom packed as much as she could. My brother was 10 and I was eight and together, we were escorted with guns to our heads to the Ghanaian border, which was about a 10-minute walk away. They told us, don't look back and don't come back and that's exactly what we did.
theGrio: What happened to your family in Ghana? Nancy Adossi: When we got to Ghana, we didn't have anywhere to go. We didn't know anyone there. We were basically homeless. Fortunately, we found a place to stay for a few weeks until it was announced that the government had regained control in Togo and that we could go back. Our home had been ransacked and it was no longer safe to live there. We stayed with some family members, but during this whole time, my dad couldn't get in touch with us for a month. He thought he'd lost us after the news reached him that we were attacked. When he found out we were safe, that is when he decided that no matter what, he would never be separated from his family again.
theGrio: When did you arrive in Houston? Nancy Adossi: It took exactly one year. I was 9-years old when we arrived in Houston. Before he left Africa, my father worked as an economist for the Bank of West Africa, but when he came here, the only job he could get was as a taxi driver. He already had a two-bedroom apartment for our family. My brother and I were enrolled in school three days after we arrived. I didn't study English at all in Togo so it's the strangest thing to be in school when you don't speak the language.
theGrio: Why didn't you renew your visa? Nancy Adossi: We were supposed to stay for less than a year, but in December, it will be 20 years that I have lived in the U.S. without proper documentation. I used to live in fear of being deported , but now I have protection through DACA and I qualify for the DREAM Act. Adossi's younger brother and father in 2002 (left) and with her mother, four months after arriving to America. (Photo courtesy of Nancy Adossi.)
In order for me to get a green card or permanent residency, I would have had to return to Togo and start the process all over again. Also, my family is known to have left the country because we didn't want to be there. We would be going back into the same situation we left. People don't realize that immigration is not merit based. The only way you can come and stay in America legally is either you have a place of employment or a family member sponsoring you.
theGrio: Was there any opportunity to file for asylum? Nancy Adossi: My father tried, but his petition was rejected. One of the problems Black immigrants face is the stigma that if you are Black, you are expendable. I believe there is more recognition for those asylum victims who are from the Middle East and Eastern Europe than from African nations.
theGrio: Why do you think that is? Nancy Adossi: If you are from the Middle East, you have lighter skin. North Africans get a lot of these asylums because they look mixed. When you are West African, there is no doubt you are Black.
Just like what President Trump said, America wants anyone who looks white. It is easier for them to assimilate into a country where being white means being the best. For example, the Diversity Visa Lottery program gives people from countries with low immigration numbers the opportunity to come to the U.S. and was originally created for Irish immigrants to come here legally. I cannot tell you how many Irish undocumented immigrants are living peacefully in America. Nobody is double-checking them. Trump said exactly what the immigration policy in America has dictated all along.
theGrio: Explain to people what being undocumented means. Do you pay taxes? Nancy Adossi: I pay my taxes. I do not have any criminal record. Every undocumented person I know is the perfect citizen. Even when we are wronged, we are scared to scream at people in public because we don't want any trouble. One of the best things about living in Texas is that there is in-state tuition available for undocumented immigrants. I took advantage of that and I worked hard for my undergraduate, masters and my doctorate degrees. I have had no less than four jobs since I was 17 because I never know what's going to happen and I always have to have a backup plan.
theGrio: How are you feeling about the bipartisan meetings in Congress regarding DACA? Nancy Adossi: I was scared when I was younger. What I feel is like my soul is tired. It has been 20 years of struggle and hearing the same old promises. Waiting on these papers for my life to start is like I'm waiting to exhale. I see myself as an American. It's all I know. When I talk to people back in Togo, they don't see my as Togolese. I don't know the history of my country or even the full history of my language.
theGrio: Do you know anyone who has been deported? Nancy Adossi: My father had a mental break in 2005. He reported himself to ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials and they deported him. He lives in Togo and I haven't seen him since the day they took him to the detention center. I always considered myself a daddy's girl, so it has been really hard. I was 15 when he left, and I didn't know how to process that. I support him financially and send money overseas.
theGrio: What will you do if something tragic happens to him? I don't know. I'm at the point in my life when I realize I need to take care of him, but I don't know how to do that from another country. It is something that I think about just about every day.
theGrio: Have you thought about what you will do if they repeal DACA next month? Nancy Adossi: I don't know, but I know I will survive. I will figure out a way. I have come to see myself as a true warrior to be in a country that does not want you or your kind. To be undocumented and rejected by even African-Americans because you are still considered an "other."
theGrio: Are you saying the African American community has rejected you? Nancy Adossi: Every African who comes to America has probably felt this--dealing with the misconception that Africa is a jungle and Black kids would make comments about the way I smelled. When I was a teenager, it was hard for me to befriend them. I wanted to connect to people who looked like me, but they would tell me you speak like you're white. Then, in college, I hung out with other immigrant students because I felt closer to people from other countries than to the Black community. In the work place, I've encountered Black Americans who say they don't like Africans because we come here and take their jobs.
theGrio.com: What's your response to that? Nancy Adossi: I've become more assured of who I am as a woman, so when I am rejected by a Black American person, I remind them that we are both Black. Listen, I get the fact that as a Black person born in this country and trying to get ahead it is hard to see another Black person come along who seems to be doing better than you. You may think I have a better deal, but really, the white person you think is giving me a chance is really just making me the token.
theGrio: Are you at all optimistic that the lawmakers will be able to come up with a fair option? Nancy Adossi: I have hope, I don't know if that's the same as optimism. Everything happens for a reason and I don't think God would put me through all of this only to leave me with nothing. I have appreciated my life story and the 20 years that I will have spent in the US as an undocumented Black, female immigrant because it has given me so much hope in the impossible. |
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During Tuesday's episode of "The View," actor Kevin Costner told the show's panel how he does not recognize the United States anymore because of President Donald Trump and his administration.
Co-host Joy Behar specifically asked Costner about illegal immigrant families being separated after being caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
"This is a hard thing to say, but I'm not recognizing America right now," Costner replied as the audience clapped.
"I don't recognize its voice. I don't recognize any individual statements," he continued. "I feel people going with the flow, and there's people right in the middle. We're in a really weird spot, and it takes a high level of compassion, empathy, and intelligence to work our way out of this."
Watch the video below:
"We have to do better. We've been about more. We can be about more, and right now, we are acting really small," Costner added.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep detained illegal immigrant families together.
Displaying the Executive Order to keep families together, Pres says his wife and daughter feel very strongly about the separation of families, as does he. "Anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it," but reaffirms policy against people entering US illegally. pic.twitter.com/2SW7fKlOZL
-- Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 20, 2018
"We want security for our country," Trump said stated before signing. "The Republicans want security and insist on security for our country, and we will have that. At the same time, we have compassion. We want to keep families together. It's very important. I'll be signing something in a little while." |
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During Tuesday's episode of "The View," actor Kevin Costner told the show's panel how he does not recognize the United States anymore because of President Donald Trump and his administration. |
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The decennial census has undergone significant changes as the U.S. population has evolved. Rapidly changing demographics continue to present challenges to the U.S. government in its effort to collect demographic data.
By Farah Z. Ahmad and Jamal Hagler
As concepts of race and ethnicity evolve, the methods and language used by the decennial census to capture data are key to ensuring that policymakers recognize and understand all communities, particularly growing communities of color.
By Farah Z. Ahmad and Jamal Hagler
Despite an improving labor market, other indicators show that we are far from the healthy economy Americans need.
By Michael Madowitz and Danielle Corley
Targeting economic policies at the state rather than the federal level may produce more tangible assistance for struggling communities of color.
By Sam Fulwood III
The president's fiscal year 2016 budget makes smart investments in international climate finance that are, at their root, inseparable from domestic climate actions.
By Pete Ogden and Gwynne Taraska
The Access to Contraception for Women Servicemembers and Dependents Act and other policy changes are critical to address the reproductive health care inequities that women serving in the armed forces face.
By Julia Rugg and Donna Barry
While most the current research focuses on women and mother's experiences balancing family life and paid employment, addressing the issues facing men and fathers is equally important to promoting greater equity at home and at work.
By Erin Rehel and Emily Baxter
A ruling for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would take away quality, affordable health care from millions of Americans.
A new proposal to update the No Child Left Behind Act includes a provision that could substantially redistribute federal dollars away from the students who need them the most.
By Max Marchitello and Robert Hanna
Despite a fourth-quarter slump, Big Oil posted big end-of-year profits.
By Danielle Baussan and Miranda Peterson
Policies and programs aimed at homeless youth routinely fail transgender young people, and the disparities they experience in health, safety, and social and economic well-being hold them back.
By Hannah Hussey
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill ignores opportunity to improve U.S. school systems for students with disabilities.
FACT SHEET
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill ignores opportunity to improve U.S. school systems for communities of color.
FACT SHEET
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind, proposed bill reduces parent access to information about their children's progress.
FACT SHEET
With U.S. GDP growth so dependent on consumer spending, there is reason for concern, despite positive numbers.
Tuesday Aug 14, 2018 10:00 AM From Community Schools to Community Districts: Building Systems for Student Success
Tuesday Sep 25, 2018 08:30 AM 2018 Smart on Crime Innovations Conference |
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When you meet the feminist punks of Pussy Riot, you might find yourself fighting off deeply uncool, motherly urges to hug them, offer them a cup of tea, and ask if they're OK.
For one thing, we only know about them because the Russian government has made the past couple years very rough for Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova and Maria "Masha" Alyokhina. They're just 24 and 25, respectively, but you can read a wary curiosity in their otherwise youthful looks, a toughness born of the habitual questioning that probably comes with serving out nearly 500 days in Russian prisons, where Tolokonnikova went on a hunger strike to protest horrifying conditions and briefly disappeared to a distant gulag , before they were released two days before last Christmas.
The holiday spirit of the early commutation of their two-year sentence is notable: Their August 2012 conviction was for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." In the simplest terms, their crime was performing an obscene, antigovernment song in a beloved church. Less than a minute of off-key, screeching activism catapulted them into a global spotlight, not for quality of performance but for the zeal of the responding government repression and the anger inspired in Russia's born-again religious nation, Pussy Riot's lesser target. Many Russians have taken up open worship with relish since the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of the enforcement of godless communism in 1991--that year the share of adults identifying as Orthodox Christian was 31 percent, rising to 72 percent by 2008. With religion has come conservative pressure for women to conform to mom roles--which Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina (and any good feminist) reject as a pure societal mandate, though they both have young children.
Add up their ages, and Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina are still younger than their main foe, a political target who must hold some sort of record in the "amount of time spent shirtless , global leader over 60" category. At 61, Russian President Vladimir Putin openly disdains Pussy Riot and the lesser-known elements of his opposition. During an hour-long show that aired on state-run television to honor his 60th birthday, Putin lauded Pussy Riot's sentence, saying they "got what they asked for." Though they didn't: Pussy Riot's anti-Putin "punk prayer" asked the heavens to "drive away Putin." (As most Ukrainians can tell you, Putin is still around and very much so.)
What's more, when you meet Pussy Riot, it gets really hard to imagine that the leader and legal system of the largest country on earth (double the size of the U.S., fully an eighth of the world's inhabited land) found the art of these young women to be a jailable insult. Pussy Riot members have been attacked in the streets by Cossacks and targeted by pro-Putin protesters and have been taking measures to improve their security in Russia.
In an interview at the TakePart offices on Friday, the first question I asked Tolokonnikova was this: Do you feel safe in Russia?
"Well, in Russia, you should understand, the louder you become, the more pressure you begin receiving," Tolokonnikova began, speaking through her translator and husband, Pyotr Verzilov.
"So for us, well, it's not a safe situation, and we try not to think about it too much (in a broad sense), but we try to think about practical situations and take security precautions," Alyokhina continued, with Verzilov's help.
"And since we still want to live in Russia and make changes in Russia, you have to treat all these security problems as something you acclimate to, like the weather outside," Tolokonnikova said.
Unlike the chill the women are adapting to year-round in Moscow, the weather was sunny and warm when Pussy Riot visited Los Angeles for the first time this week, the latest stop on their global human rights campaign. They're here to talk about their causes and a documentary, Pussy v. Putin. Shot mostly by insiders, the pastiche of film cobbled together by Journeyman Pictures captures the fierce antagonism they've faced as rabble-rousers in Russia. In their fight for a Russia where it is free and safe to express opposition, they are launching a nongovernmental organization, called Zona Prava, that's focused on the protection of prisoners' rights and legal reform in Russia.
Sitting in our conference room, Tolokonnikova's and Alyokhina's eyes searched the walls, eyeing posters for the films and documentaries produced by our parent company, Participant Media. At one point, Tolokonnikova gestured and said in English, " Food !"--expressing her admiration for Food, Inc. , our documentary on the cruel turns industrial farming has taken, adding that she loved the title's nod to corporatism.
When you meet Pussy Riot, another thing is clear: In an impossibly cool and casual way, they embody the ethos of punk women everywhere. They are fearless, smart, and totally unapologetic in their demands for what's fair. Their shock, anti-jock approach is clearly calculated, and they're focused. You don't have to tell them that Pussy Riot is more than a band of women who don balaclavas to perform caterwauling tunes. They know that from the aggression they've been fielding from Russian authorities, yes, but also from the response they've been inspiring in the world's other leading women and human rights activists.
Madonna is kind of obsessed with them, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently praised them after posing for a photo-op --and they're riding the media wave, full speed. So is it weird for their anticorporate, antiauthoritarian stances to be taken up by global leaders and pop stars?
"Every person who's now [backing] Hillary Clinton also has a certain punk background," said Alyokhina, upping the likely 2016 presidential candidate's cool factor exponentially. And getting support from other powerful people doesn't change you, said Tolokonnikova.
"If you have your own set of values, you don't disappear and dissolve into someone else's set of values," said Tolokonnikova. "And besides that, in the media, if we meet these people, we navigate."
Charting their own course hasn't been easy. Plenty of Russians call bullshit on Pussy Riot's antics, saying their antireligion, antigovernment shtick isn't what's best for Russia. And that brand of nationalism appears poised to spread: Armed, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine are looking to cede independence and allow Putin to take power, while NATO warns that Russian troops are amassing along the country's eastern border.
For Pussy Riot, current geopolitical upheaval is an unsurprising outcome of the thuggish government they have decried through public martyrdom--and they're only expecting it to get worse.
As George Orwell wrote in the dystopian novel 1984 :
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina went to prison for more than a year for what amounts to yelling in church, and their minds have come back untorn and ready to agitate.
But are they reaching Putin in a meaningful way or changing other minds? The answer to the former relies on the unlikely admission of a foe, but the latter is where they hope to make their mark.
"The opposition is usually an indicator of tolerance, of a government's ability to communicate with a society," Alyokhina said. "Putin pressures down all opposition in Russia, and in our case it's really illustrative."
That's why, most of all, when you meet Pussy Riot, you feel certain that they're going to meet everyone you know, or reach them, somehow. |
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When you take a look at the entertainment industry over the last several decades, there are countless fictional characters that have caused women to question their sexuality. Just within the past few years, straight and queer women alike have fallen for androgynous female characters such as Shane McCutcheon from The L Word , Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in The Runaways , Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , and pretty much every character in Orange is the New Black . These are women who inspired bi-curious conversation, or simply reaffirmed already apparent queerness, making them go down in queer history as some of the most fantasized about characters of all time. Yet, for me, it wasn't a '70s rocker or a Swedish hacker that sparked my queer awakening, because, by the time I saw those films, I was already well aware of my sexuality. Instead, one of my first instances of sexual curiosity came from the 21st century cult classic Mean Girls and I still have a big lesbian crush on Janis Ian, played by Lizzy Caplan.
Although Janis Ian's sexuality was used as a homophobic bullying tactic by Regina George and the Plastics, many found her "dykey-ness" to be a total turn on. Sure, Regina may have poked fun at Janis's gothic wardrobe and pin-straight black hair, but it was her badass sense of style and no-fucks-given attitude that made her a queer sex icon.
I was 10 when Mean Girls came out, which was a few years before I began to seriously question my sexuality. As I entered middle school and began my teen years, Mean Girls played a key role in the pop culture of the time, and like every other 12-year-old, I was just trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into society. I related to Cady's struggles to fit in, but as I got older, I found myself identifying less with the film's protagonist and more with the brazen and eccentric supporting character. By the time I was halfway through high school, I had seen the film over twenty times, and I knew that instead of wanting to be Janis Ian, I wanted to date her.
There was something in the way that Janis unabashedly dismantled patriarchal standards and navigated high school to the beat of her own drum that got teenage me all hot and bothered, and to this day I still find her to be a total babe. Even though in the end, Janis may not have been a lesbian (although I still don't totally buy her relationship with Kevin Gnapoor) and I was left secretly hoping that Regina and Janis would hook up in a sequel of their lives after North Shore, she is still a queer role model in my eyes. And while we were never rewarded with a follow-up confirming Janis Ian's sexuality, Showtime's Masters of Sex has given fans a second chance at drooling over Lizzy Caplan. Sure, the characters are about as dissimilar as you can get, but throughout her acting career, Caplan has continually played feminist characters, which are sexy no matter what.
Nevertheless, today on October 3rd, also known as Mean Girls Day, let's all take the time to honor the women of the big screen and the silver screen that affirmed our blooming lady love and reassured outsiders everywhere that it was okay to be different. So whether you're team Ruby Rose or still shipping Naomi and Emily from Skins, be sure to think back to the fictional feminists that made sleepovers just a little bit hotter.
Photos and GIFs Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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On March 14, which is this Saturday, people will gather together in communities across Canada for an emergency Day of Action to stop the government's "secret police" law Bill C-51. If you are not able to attend these protests, you can sign one of these OpenMedia campaign or Leadnow campaign or this one from Amnesty International .
If you'd rather get out into the street, here is a listing of protests across Canada this March 14. Many thanks to the folks who put together this resource , who note that if your city is not listed, protests are to be held at your local MP's office.
Find the protest in your community (this list is always growing so if you don't see your city, please click here ):
Bancroft 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Meet at the millennium Park parking lot, Hastings Street
Barrie 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Meet at the office of MP Patrick Brown, 299 Lakeshore Dr, Suite 200
Brampton 2:00 p.m. Meet at the office of Conservative MP Parm Gill 180 Sandalwood Parkway East
Brantford 2:00 p.m. Meet at 108 St. George Street
Calgary 12:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Meeting place at City Hall
Castlegar 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at Spirit Square, 460 Columbia Avenue
Charlottetown 11:30 a.m. Meet at MP Gail Shea's office, 119 Kent St
Collingwood 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Kellie Leitch's office at Hume/Pretty River Pkwy
Courtenay 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Meet in front of the court house, 420 Cumberland Rd.
Edmonton 1:00 p.m. Meet at Canada Place , 9700 Jasper Avenue
Fergus Time TBD, Meet at the office of MP Michael Chong, 200 St. Patrick St. East, Suite 5
Fredericton 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at City Hall 35 York St
Hamilton 7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Meet at Hamilton City Hall , 71 Main Street West
Kitchener 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., Meet at Kitchener City Hall
Lindsay 9:30 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. Meet at MP Barry Devolin's Constituency office, 68 McLaughlin Rd
London 2:00 p.m., Meet at Victoria Park 509 Clarence Street
Moncton 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., Meet at the City Hall
Montreal 2:00 p.m. Meet at Jarry Park
Nanaimo 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Commercial St. and Terminal Ave, 14 Commercial St
Nelson 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Government building/court house.
Orangeville 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at MP David Tilson's Office, 229 Broadway
Orillia 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at MP Bruce Stanton's Office, 575 West Street South
Ottawa 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at 80 Wellington Street
Peterborough 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at City Hall, 500 George St N
Prince George 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at 1584 7th Ave
Regina 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Meet at City Square Plaza - Victoria Park
Saint John 12:00 p.m. Meet at MP Rodney Weston's office on King Street
Salt Spring 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Meet at Salt Spring Island Centennial Park
Sarnia 10:00 a.m. Meet at 1000 Finch Drive, Unit 2
Saskatoon 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Meet at CITY HALL Civic Square - 3rd Ave N and 23rd St E and march to 904 22nd Ave MP Kelly Block's office.
Stratford 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at Freeland Fountain, Ontario St. above Erie
Thornton 12:00 p.m. Meet at 23 Paris Street
Toronto 12:00 p.m. Meet at Nathan Phillips Square , 100 Queen Street West
Vancouver 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby Street (This event is hosted by openmedia.ca, leadnow.ca, and BCGEU)
Vernon 12:00 p.m. Meet at 3105 29th Street
Victoria 12:00 p.m. Meet at Fisgard/Government. We will march south on Government, East on Courtney, to the Courthouse. At the Courthouse, for a rally and music.
Winnipeg 1:00 p.m. Meet at Winnipeg City Hall, 510 Main St.
West Kootenays 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Meet at the Spirit Square, 460 Columbia Avenue
Windsor 1:00 p.m. Meet at the Paul Martin Building
Yellowknife 12:00 p.m. Meet at the Greenstone Bldg
Press release for Day of Action can be found here . |
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Perverse creatures that we are, many of us find the sight of a piece of broiled eel on a bed of rice extremely attractive. The appetite for unagi , the sweetest sushi, is causing big trouble for the eels. With nets and dams, we're messing up the most significant event in their lives, an odyssey we know amazingly little about. Their migration to spawn--from freshwater to the ocean depths--is a feat of navigation and endurance that makes the march of the penguins look like the proverbial day at the beach. For more, read the full text of " Spaghetti With Eyes ." Photograph of an eel by Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.
The Skunk
It is the skunk's confidence in that potent defensive weapon that makes its personality appealing. The critters, the size of a small cat but with a wider rump and a bit of a waddle, are the opposite of aggressive. Most of the time they're curious, playful, fearless, and calm (though in late winter, mating season, the males go haywire). A devil-may-care attitude does not serve them well on the highway. The poor creatures stick their tails straight up as a warning to a car. It doesn't work; most of us know the smell of skunk musk from road kill. For more, read the full text of " Skunks ." Photograph of a skunk by Comstock Images/Thinkstock.
The Snapping Turtle They're shy but not beautiful, these creatures of the mud, and I have seen them up close. A couple of summers ago, I was swimming in my upstate New York pond and saw, a few yards away on the surface of the water, a curious combination of moving body parts. There was a glossy, ridged back, then another glossy back, a scaly paw with bearlike claws, and part of a thick, thorny tail. Breaking any previous pond freestyle record, I swam to shore. For more, read the full text of " 'These Dirty Filthy Mud-Turtles ." Photograph of a snapping turtle by Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.
The Vulture Under threatening circumstances, an angry bird can aim green vomit at you from as far away as six feet. Normally, though, a turkey vulture's sociability extends to human beings as well as to its fellows. The people who care for injured wild birds report that vultures are gentle, inquisitive, and smarter than hawks and eagles. Here's the bottom line, according to one expert: "Once they get to know you they don't regurgitate on you." For more, read the full text of " Vulture World ." Photograph of a vulture by Hrvoje Polan/AFP/Getty Images.
The Tick Ticks not only extract blood, they ooze pathogens from their salivary glands into the wound they've sliced with their tiny claws and penetrated with their barbed mouthparts. ... I managed to locate Willy Burgdorfer, the scientist who identified the Lyme spirochete in 1982, and asked, "Why did God make ticks?" "I don't have the answer," Dr. Burgdorfer said. "There are a lot of things we assign to the good Lord and we ask the question, why? All I can advise is to check yourself for ticks and remove them fast." For more, read the full text of " A Tick's Life ." Photograph of a deer tick by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Jellyfish A profusion of jellyfish is often described as an invasion or an attack. Which is laughable, given the guiding principle of jellyfish behavior--"whatever." No brain, no spine; they don't have the capacity to plan a beach invasion. We bump into them, and because we're too big to eat, they perceive us as attackers. Planning is not their forte. In place of a brain, jellies have a nerve net. Jellyfish are the free-floating relatives of sea anemones and corals, much older than fish, and not much changed for more than 600 million years. They ruled the ocean, in their passive way, when there was almost nothing but ocean. Now they drift into their food or their food drifts into them. The pulsing creates a current that pulls prey within reach. For more, read the full text of " The Life of a Jellyfish ." Photograph of a jellyfish by Mark Ralston /AFP/Getty Images.
The Hyena Hyenas, particularly the African spotted hyena, with its massive jaws, hulking shoulders, and startling laugh, have been terribly misunderstood. The creatures may not be beautiful, but they don't deserve contempt. They are intelligent and gregarious with a well-organized social system of clans patrolling discrete territories. The clans are ruled by females. Maybe the female hyenas gain a little extra authority or assertiveness from the surprising fact that male and female hyenas have nearly indistinguishable external genitals, about 8 inches worth. Their appearance has aroused amazement, confusion, and sometimes disgust. For more, read the full text of " Sad Yowlers? The story of the hyena ." Photograph of a hyena by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
The Slug In most kinds of slug, the penis is about half the length of its body. ("Is that a Kalashnikov in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?") It's not clear why such anatomical grandeur might be important for survival: Slug experts discount the idea that the oversize penis functions like a peacock tail, as a display of virility--they point out that the chemical signaling and seduction occurs before the magisterial organs even come into view. In any event, the chosen mate isn't likely to be impressed, since most slugs possess both male and female sexual organs. During a single coupling, slugs can mate reciprocally--with each partner inseminating and being inseminated--or one can serve as the recipient. For more, read the full text of " Feeling Sluggish ." Photograph of a slug by Gregory Badon, found on Wikipedia.
The Mosquito Biology professors like to ask what animal kills the most people. Their poor students humiliate themselves by calling out grizzly bear, tiger, cobra, even hippo. The right answer, of course, is the female mosquito--no fur, no fangs, just a hypodermic needle on the wing. She's less than a quarter-inch long, has six legs, and is the most efficient transmitter of disease in the animal kingdom. She uses scent to find us, attracted by the lactic acid and other ingredients in perspiration. She also senses the carbon dioxide in our exhalations and follows the slipstream back to our faces. The more you sweat and pant as you shoo her away, the more attractive you become. For more, read the full text of " A Hypodermic Needle With Wings ." Photograph of a mosquito by Leslie Vosshall lab at Rockefeller University. |
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There are many ingenious ways to raise awareness of how to check for early signs of cancer, but perhaps none quite so retro, as an ancient male fertility symbol getting made-over with a mustache for Movember. The Cerne Abbas Giant, in Dorset, England, a large feature carved into the chalky hillside, is imposing in a lot of ways, but it is fair to say that his most noteworthy feature, is his, er, how shall we say this, erect male member.
The 180 foot figure has been dated as 1694, and he stands there, proud and tall, to symbolize both fertility and spirituality, dominating the landscape with his awesome virility. He is now helping, 500 years on from his creation, to create awareness of a threat to male health. The twin deadly killers of prostrate and testicular cancer. By sporting his own handlebar moustache, made out of grass seed, the giant has added his facial hair support to an important campaign. Men who are participating in Movember will be hard pressed to emulate his awesome whiskers. They measure 36 feet by 9 feet.
Spokesman for the National Trust, Rob Rhodes, who looks after the land that the giant inhabits, said "It's all a bit of fun to highlight an important subject" and also "I am sure the giant would approve."
The Cerne Abbas giant, who wields a mighty club in one hand, became internationally renowned when he temporarily got a new buddy in 2007. This was when a chalk figure of Homer Simpson was carved adjacent to him as a promotional gimmick for The Simpsons movie. Now he has a new starring role as the poster boy for raising cancer awareness in his retro mammoth mustache which as makeovers go, could probably done wonders for his image as a fertility symbol if he had been wearing it all along. All he needs now is a gold medallion.
Movember has been a highly successful campaign to bring additional support to the understanding of prostrate and testicular cancer in men. The movement also shines a spotlight of attention over mental health problems. Men are notoriously reluctant to seek advice when they become unwell, or have problems that demand a greater level of review. Movember is a jovial way for all men to sprout some facial hair, give up shaving for a month and join in the brotherhood of braving up to these very real threats to their well being.
The MD from British Seed Houses, who provided the grass seed for the giant's handsome 'mo said "Movember is an important charity and with many men working in our industry, it's one we are keen to back." He also noted with no word of a lie "The giant is an iconic male symbol." He is indeed. There is no getting away from the fact that the Cerne Abbas giant is every inch of a male!
No one really knows the true history behind the original sculpting of this extraordinary male specimen into a quiet and rural corner of the Dorset countryside. Some say he was meant to be a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, although this is just a theory. If is is true, it is particularly apt, as Cromwell was also the bearer of an especially splendid mustache. Serious historians are more inclined to believe that he dates back a lot further than that - possibly to the Iron Age.
As male fertility symbols go you cannot really get more fertile looking than the Cerne Abbas giant with his enormous, er, club. Now that he also sports a healthy upper lip he is doing his bit to raise crucial awareness of cancers that attack the male body. He may be retro, but he is really quite in with the times, as he joins in with the Movember madness and wears his metropolitan makeover with an indisputable dash.
By Kate Henderson
Cancer Awareness Goes Retro as Male Fertility Symbol Gets Movember Makeover added by Kate Henderson on November 3, 2013 View all posts by Kate Henderson - |
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ancient male fertility symbol getting made-over with a mustache for Movember. |
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21 January, 2016 Countercurrents.org
(The most important and the very first act of the "popular" government should have been to take action to prevent the future floods. Nothing tangible seems to have been done so far!)
T he sudden passing away of the former Chief Minister has thrown the state into a very uneasy state of uncertainty. One is not sure how long will the Governor's rule continue nor is any definite indication about the date of swearing in of the new Chief Minister. One of the negative fall outs of this uncertainty is the stalling of urgent measures for taming the River to prevent future floods. The Governor in a high level meeting held recently had ordered the Secretary Irrigation and Flood Control to immediately start dredging of the River Jhelum and also strengthen its embankments. The process was directed to be completed in a given time frame and had also to be continuously monitored. This is the most important assignment which has to be carried out in the shortest possible time by some resourceful agencies.
In fact, there are already detailed reports and plans on the subject of flood prevention with the concerned department. They had even submitted some of these plans to Government of India few years back but after that the whole thing seems to have gone into limbo, the result of which was the destructive flood of September, 2014. The destruction could be easily classified as criminal negligence on the part of all concerned. In any other country, there would have been a thorough probe and the guilty would have been tried and punished. However, in Kashmir, the "Accountability" has been the first victim of the turmoil of the recent years!
Even last year some experts have conducted detailed satellite survey of the flood. It has been pointed out by the experts that most of the flood basins of the River have been fully silted or encroached upon. The River and its spill over channel have not been dredged for decades. Apart from this the water shed of the River has been deforested thereby allowing the rain water to run off immediately after it falls. There is hardly any retention because of the denuded soil. It has also been observed that there is a definite climate change which has resulted in either very little precipitation sometimes while as some other times like during the start of the month of September, 2014, there is too much precipitation. Keeping in view all these reports and observations, it is the most immediate need to implement specific flood prevention measures. Rehabilitation and restoration of the infrastructure even if delayed, will not be as fatal as neglecting measures for prevention of future floods. Moreover, no one would like to be once again rehabilitated after yet another disastrous flood. People already rehabilitated have still not forgotten the nightmares of the last trauma!
The work of dredging has to be undertaken throughout the length of the River, especially, at Baramulla and Sopore in the downstream area and beyond Sangam in the upstream area. During Maharajas time there used to be a dredger permanently stationed in Baramulla.
According to Environmental Policy Group almost all the wetlands have been silted up. These too need to be desilted. The Srinagar City itself is now in continuous danger of getting submerged with every sizeable flood. The areas across towards Mahjoor Nagar, Natipora, Barzulla, and Bemina and so on formed the flood basin of the River. These have been encroached upon and a major portion of the Capital City is housed there. Most of the water bodies in and around Srinagar have either disappeared or have shrunk due to encroachments. To restore all these will take quite some time. The immediate solution to save the City from yet another disastrous flood would be immediate and sizeable dredging of the River all along its length and strengthening of the embankments on the its two sides as it passes through the City. This task can be successful only if it is entrusted to a very resourceful agency with sufficient equipment and trained manpower. Piecemeal dredging here and there will not solve the problem.
The Governor has initiated a very good people friendly move. It would be in the fitness of things if he continues to supervise and monitor the operation even after the installation of a popular government. This being the most fundamental requirement for the safety and security of the people, all the political parties should have no objection to such a project initiated in the public interest! Let us hope some good sense prevails and people rise above all petty considerations!
Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir |
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When Michelle Obama put her arm round the Queen at Buckingham Palace, some of the more excitable elements of the media - particularly us Americans - suggested she may have been guilty of a breach of protocol.A It's true, you just don't go around hugging the Queen of England.
Although there is no official book of 'do's and dont's' and the Queen has made clear in recent years that she does not expect people to curtsy or bow any more, the "no-touch" rule has always been sacrosanct.A A ( Here is the protocol from the Queen of England's website -- which applies even to her own subjects )
Members of the public introduced to the Queen are told they should wait until she extends her hand for them to take it and kissing is totally frowned upon.
When the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating put his arm around the Queen in 1992, he was branded the "Lizard of Oz".A His successor, John Howard, didn't fare much better and was forced to insist: 'We firmly deny that there was any contact whatsoever' when he was accused of touching the royal person.
Barack Obama on HM Queen Elizabeth II -- " She reminds me of my grandmother, only with a bigger house ".
Obama Bows to Saudi King at G20 Summit ( watch the video ).A A Americans do not bow to foreign monarchs because that act signifies the monarch's power over his subjects.
Obama Bows to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
And then, it was an ipod gift to the 80 yr old Queen of England loaded with Obama Speeches.. actually I take that back.... one of the first embarrasments was when PM Brown from England came to visit President Obama.
It is well understood that visiting diplomatic delegations come bearing gifts and gift giving is returned in like fashion by the host country. It is an ages old human practice in diplomacy after all. Usually the gifts are valuable, representative of the products of the nations involved, or at least symbolic of the history of those nations.
For his part, PM Brown gave two symbolic gifts and one that expressed national pride. Brown came bearing a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of that which gave the wood to create the famous "Resolute Desk," the desk that has been in America's charge since 1880. He also gave Obama the framed commission for that famous ship, the HMS Resolute. His third gift was a seven-volume biography of one of England's greatest leaders, Winston Churchill.
So, what did President Obama give the British PM? 25 movies on DVD. Yeah, that's it. Brown gives a symbolic gift like the pen holder fashioned from a famous British warship and Obama responds by sending a staffer to WalMart to pick up a few quick movies.
And I'm not the only one to scoff at this thoughtless gift. The entire British press is up in arms . Many in Britain are seeing this as entirely gauche and indicative of the low esteem in which the Obama's hold England.
Worse, no one is 100% sure that Obama was smart enough to know that DVDs made in America don't play on European DVD players. American DVDs are created in the "Region One" format while those in Europe play in "Region Two" format. A U.S. DVD just won't play on a machine made for the English market.
Not to be out done in tastelessness by her husband, Michelle got into the act, too. Mrs. Brown came bearing two outfits for the Obama girls from Topshop, one of Britain's trendiest and expensive women's wear retail outlets.
In return, Michelle apparently had a staffer run down to the White House gift shop and grab two toy Marine One helicopter models for the Brown's boys.
Class all the way.
All of this is on top of the snub of the Brits that Obama tossed off immediately upon entering office. One of his first official acts was to summarily return to the Brits the generous gift of the most famous bust of Winston Churchill that has sat in the Oval Office since the attacks on 9/11.
This threw British diplomats into a tizzy really blindsiding them. Even when they reiterated that Obama could keep the generous gift to the American people, he rejected it without comment leaving the Brits at a loss for words. |
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Barack Obama on HM Queen Elizabeth II -- " She reminds me of my grandmother, only with a bigger house ". |
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He had 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. He did not need a single GOP vote to pass some type of reform.
Furthermore, the president did not call the congressional leaders and demand a reform. Unlike President George W. Bush, who spoke to the nation in 2006, President Obama was dead silent about the issue. He gave Cinco de Mayo speeches but never followed them with any proposals or calls to Congress.
Last, but not least, the president and the Democrats did not put the DREAM Act to a vote before the 2010 election. They waited until after the election, when most Dems did not have electoral consequences.
The Wall Street Journal reminded us a few years ago that the Democrats are always a lot better at making immigration reform promises than actually delivering a solution:
Samantha Bee's choice of words was awful, and her knowledge of history is no better.
Before beating up President Trump on immigration, let's remember that President Obama and the Democrats had all the votes and did not pass immigration reform or a DREAM Act.
He had 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. He did not need a single GOP vote to pass some type of reform.
The truth is that he did not try and took Hispanics for granted. He showed zero respect for the millions who voted for him in 2008.
Furthermore, the president did not call the congressional leaders and demand a reform. Unlike President George W. Bush, who spoke to the nation in 2006, President Obama was dead silent about the issue. He gave Cinco de Mayo speeches but never followed them with any proposals or calls to Congress.
Last, but not least, the president and the Democrats did not put the DREAM Act to a vote before the 2010 election. They waited until after the election, when most Dems did not have electoral consequences.
On the other hand, President Trump actually put a solution on the table regarding the "DREAMers."
The Wall Street Journal reminded us a few years ago that the Democrats are always a lot better at making immigration reform promises than actually delivering a solution:
We understand the political imperative, and these columns have favored liberal (in the 19th-century sense of that word) immigration policies since before the current crop of Republicans was born. But a shrunken, bureaucratic guest-worker program that lets unions define job openings and determine wages is worse than the status quo. It won't help the economy but it will guarantee that illegal immigrants keep coming. Then in 15 or 20 years Republicans can enjoy debating what to do with another 11 million illegals who want a path to citizenship.
Let's not forget Senator Obama killing McCain-Kennedy in 2007 with that "poison amendment" about guest worker visas.
So why is Miss Bee picking on Ivanka? Why not the Democrats who failed to keep a campaign promise about immigration?
The answer is that Samantha Bee is a partisan ignoramus with a mouth that belongs in the gutter and not on a TV network.
PS: You can listen to my show ( Canto Talk ) and follow me on Twitter . |
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It's the New Year, when many of us vow to kick-start our workouts. If you're a woman shopping for new gym gear, however, beware. Pink kit is everywhere, and it may leave you looking like an escapee from Barbie's Dream House.
The colour's sheer ubiquity only dawned on me recently while looking for some new trainers. In the shoe aisle of a major sporting goods retailer, I encountered a colour divide as drastic as a toy shop's. On the men's side, blue, black and splashes of neon yellow. On the women's side, a hot pink hellscape. I searched carefully for some non-pink shoes and then started to wonder. Was I in the kids' aisle?
If you don't believe me, consider these snapshots. At the time of writing, on JDSports.co.uk, 70 per cent of the Nike accessories specifically for women only come in pink. Just five products meant for women, a few bags, a cap and some head bands, eschew pink for other colours.
At the time of writing, nearly 70 per cent of the women's running shoes on Decathlon's website have pink on them, as do almost half of those featured on JohnLewis.com. Almost 60 per cent of the women's running clothes in Sports Direct's Karrimor line that are not black, white or grey are pink, or have pink trim (and that's not even including the Karrimor logo that often appears in pink).
What is going on? When I think pink, I think Power Rangers. My Little Pony. Peppa Pig. "It's a very infantilising colour," says sports sociologist Professor Cheryl Cooky of Purdue University, Indiana. "It's a colour we associate not simply with femininity, but with a kind of youthful femininity, a girlish femininity."
A selection of women-only Nike items available on JDSports.co.uk in December 2016. Photo: a collage of images from JDSports.co.uk
Even if not every women's sports item is pink, it's hard to argue that the colour is not overrepresented. Why are brands and retailers dressing adult women like pretty, pretty princesses?
There's no denying that pink is a political colour. Just look at the furore raised recently when an English Football Association document intended to get girls into sport recommended providing them with "pink whistles", as well as pink water bottles, pink shin pads, pink gloves and pink hairbands . "We aren't brainless Barbie dolls. We don't all like the same colour (pink)," one ten-year-old footballer called Grace wrote in response .
The movement to end "pinkification" of products for girls has been gaining momentum for years, with campaigns like Pinkstinks and Let Toys be Toys convincing children's retailers to give up their "pink for girls", "blue for boys" signage and marketing. But what about grown women? Are we happy to accept our pink water bottles and hairbands?
This isn't just a matter of colours. As with toy shops, it's about suggesting, even subconsciously, which activities are appropriate for which gender. John Lewis sells own-brand hand weights , for instance, which progress from bubblegum pink to purple to grey to navy as they get bigger, implying that your femininity drains away as you lift heavier weights. If you doubt that this colour-coding carries any meaning, imagine if it were the other way around, and the heaviest weights were baby pink. (John Lewis responds that "there is not a conscious link between the colours and the weight".)
On the JD Sports site, meanwhile, there's a "shop by activity" tab, which, for women, offers "Running, Gym, Yoga, Spin, Cardio". For men, there's "Football, Basketball, Tennis, Running, Rugby". At the time of writing, footballs are included in the men's accessories section, but not the women's. What would the young footballer Grace have to say about that?
When I contact stores to ask why they stock so many pink sports items, the reasons vary. John Lewis says that "to a large extent" their colours are "predetermined" by suppliers. Decathlon says its palette of pink and turquoise is a feminine version of the red and blue it uses for men: "Originally, [the colours of sportswear for men] were [mainly derived from] flags and blazons. Products intended for a male public. Blue, white, red dominate flags and thus became the basic (basal) colours of performance. To widen the target to the feminine market, the pink and turquoise replaced the red and the blue."
It adds: "Pink and turquoise are sport colours [used for] ten years in Decathlon. After black and white, which are the more basic colours, blue and red (so turquoise and pink for women) were the two other colours added in our ranges."
Both Decathlon and John Lewis, however, also point to sales as a driving force. While John Lewis' most popular sportswear is black and grey, pink and particularly purple have recently "generated great interest and sales", a spokesperson says. And Benoit Buronfosse, the brand design manager of Decathlon sub-brand Kalenji, notes that, based on a decade of sales figures, "pink is the preferred colour for women!"
JD Sports and Sports Direct declined to comment.
Sports industry analyst Matt Powell , who writes the blog Sneakernomics for Forbes, backs this up. "Brands don't make many products that no one wants to buy," he says. "Tough way to stay in business."
But if pink is popular with women, there's still the question of why. After all, it wasn't until the 1980s that pink became associated with femininity, according to historian Jo Paoletti, a professor at the University of Maryland and author of the culture blog Pink is for Boys . "This stuff is culturally constructed, it's artificial, it changes over time, it's different in different cultures. So the idea that women have a natural desire to dress in a certain way is just wrong," she says.
To be sure, some people just look good in the colour. But Purdue's Professor Cooky suggests there may be something else. "Sports in most societies are still male-dominated," she says. "For some female athletes and fans, wearing pink may be a way to reassert a notion of conventional femininity in those highly masculinised spaces."
In other words, if you're a woman in the sports world, you may feel the need to wear things that shout, "I'm not a dude!" The stereotype of the manly sportswoman clearly weighs on the mind of many female athletes. In a day and age when Serena and Venus Williams can be referred to publicly as " the Williams brothers " by a member of the International Olympic Committee, no wonder active women are reaching for hyper-feminine signifiers.
Still, there is evidence that not all women want all pink, all the time. Take the USA's National Football League. Around the year 2000, the NFL entered the women's apparel market. (Women, it turns out, account for nearly half of NFL fans.) At first, the NFL focused on pink products that could stand out on the shop floor. "At the time it was maybe the easiest way to communicate that we had moved into that space," says Rhiannon Madden, the NFL's director of apparel.
Since then, however, the NFL has broadening the range to include team colours in green, yellow, red and brown. "As we got smarter and engaged more with our fans, and learned more about what they were looking for, we expanded our offering," says Maddon. The switch, and an ad campaign in 2012 to promote it, resulted in a triple-digit growth in sales .
The NFL's early approach, common in the sporting industry, has come to be known as "shrink it and pink it" - the practice of downsizing a men's product and slapping a "girly" colour on it. And while many companies have come a long way from "shrink and pink", there's still room for improvement, says Powell. "The female consumer has been horribly underserved by the sports brands. There are not enough women-specific products," he says, adding that companies need to focus more on products that will, "help female athletes perform at a higher level".
In the meantime, it would be nice if sports retailers would offer us more non-pink options. Using the colour may, like the FA's pink whistles, simply be an attempt to include women in sports. But, as Professor Cooky points out, it can also alienate those who "may not wish to subscribe to that sort of girly colour palette". One such woman, a friend in her early 30s, told me how at the two triathlons she has raced in, the women were handed pink swimming caps. Her reaction? "Give them to the dudes!" |
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Many people have asked me for specific examples of my problems are with Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Here is my experience.
On 14 January 2016, Jeremy announced that he had appointed me as a shadow minister for arts and culture without my knowledge or consent while I was in the middle of cancer treatment.
He then sacked me the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else's role.
But didn't bother to tell me that either.
By the time I had sought and received confirmation from the Labour Whips' Office that I was indeed shadow arts and culture minister, to serve under shadow culture secretary Maria Eagle MP, my office had been besieged by the press and the story was out.
I decided to make the best of it and to serve. I worked on his arts policy while I was still having treatment but in Bristol. Bristol West constituents said they were delighted - a good fit for the constituency, and a good decision to ask someone who has an arts background, which I have.
Six weeks later, after being asked every week to do so by Maria Eagle when she met him at shadow cabinet meetings (I wasn't a member of the shadow cabinet, only the shadow secretaries of state sit in that meeting), Jeremy finally phoned me.
I discovered then that he had made a mistake back at the start and having given me part of someone else's role, gave it back the next day. I said that I was not happy about this, as I had spent six weeks working on his arts policy, getting in touch with arts organisations and so on. He invited me to come and have a chat with him the following week.
Contrary to what he frequently says, Jeremy is not easy to "have a chat with". My parliamentary assistant could not get an appointment with him until she went to his office and explained over and over again that I had been promised one.
When my assistant and I met him, I asked how I was supposed to explain the confusion to Bristol West members or constituents. I was faced with the choice of telling the truth that he had made a series of errors, or say I had changed my mind about accepting the role. Either way, I would inevitably face a pile of criticism from his supporters.
Corbyn supporters had already piled onto me for disloyalty when I had had to miss votes for cancer treatment. I had no confidence that he would explain the situation to his supporters, or ask them to trust him that it wasn't my fault. I knew he wouldn't do anything to stop the criticism - I had seen from my own experience that he didn't directly call on his own supporters to follow his slogan of "kinder, gentler politics".
At this meeting, despite the fact he had had six weeks to come up with some idea for how to deal with this, he had nothing to say. No idea what to do. It took my boss Maria Eagle to explain to him that, as he was leader, he could reappoint me if that was what he wanted.
I then worked hard for him on his arts policy, loyally didn't go to the press about the above, got stuck in and worked. And yes, I enjoyed the role; it is one of my dream jobs in parliament and I worked hard for Jeremy and the Labour party. Millions of people work in the arts and culture sectors and they valued being involved in policy-making. So it was never my intention to resign.
However, I kept hearing from other colleagues on the front bench just how difficult or impossible it was to get a decision out of him on important policy issues - the very thing Jeremy is supposed to be good on. I also noticed that the policy-making process through the National Policy Forum was being slowed down by lack of decisions from the Corbyn office.
But then he was missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week's holiday three weeks before the day of the vote. I found that unforgivable. I was doing all I could for the campaign, phone-canvassing to conserve my energy, and kept hearing Labour voters saying "but your leader wants out, doesn't he?" His team didn't send anyone to the EU campaign meetings in Westminster and his lack of enthusiasm showed.
On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit. My constituents want exactly the opposite and were telling me so in their hundreds, and voted strongly to remain.
That was the tipping point for me - you cannot remain on the front bench while taking an opposing view to the leader on something so important.
I therefore had to resign.
The reason I then voted "no confidence" in him as leader is because I have no confidence in him as leader. See above. Plus I had found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Jeremy is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.
Since then he has stated publicly that he isn't prioritising winning elections. How can I support a Labour leader who doesn't want to form a Labour government when working people, the old, the young, the poor, the country, need a Labour government above everything?
I want a Labour government more than anything, because that is how we change the world and how we help millions of people, just as the 1997-2010 Labour government helped millions of people - my own family included.
I profoundly wish I never had to say all this publicly, but people keep asking, and I believe they have a right to know the truth about what Corbyn's leadership is like.
We cannot win general elections with a leader who is unable and unwilling to learn how to communicate with, listen to and persuade people with whom he doesn't already agree - we need to convince swing voters who voted Tory last year in southern seats to vote Labour next time, and we need Labour voters in Wales and the North to continue to vote Labour. Without this we can't win a general election.
That is what's at stake. Not having a Labour government again is unbearable. I will do anything I can to help to ensure this. It's the constitutional duty of all Labour MPs, especially the leader, to try to secure a better life for working-class people through parliamentary means. And that's what I will continue to do.
I hope that's clear.
Thangam Debbonaire is the Labour MP for Bristol West. This article was originally posted on Thangam Debbonaire's Facebook page . It has since been published on her blog . It is republished here with her permission.
The Extroadinary Life and Momentous Times of J M W Turner by Frannky Moyle is published by Viking (508pp, PS25)
Young Mr Turner: the First 40 years (1775-1815) by Eric Shanes is published by Yale University Press (552pp, PS85) |
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Rachel DiCarlo Currie
Reuters correspondent Edward McAllister reports on the growing number of federal lawmakers from Texas -- America's biggest oil-producing state -- who believe it is time to jettison the Ford-era ban on U.S. crude exports: "Even representatives of districts that include large oil refineries, the owners of which have expressed strong opposition to exports for fear it would increase the price of crude, told Reuters that they would support the shipment of oil overseas." Enacted in 1975, following the first global oil shock , the 39-year-old ban seems more than a bit anachronistic in the Age of Shale , during which the United States has become the planet's top oil producer . Moreover, the export ban is now a significant obstacle to key U.S. foreign-policy goals. Back in March, for example, after Russian forces invaded Crimea, Harvard scholar Meghan O'Sullivan -- who served as a deputy national security advisor in the Bush administration -- noted that the most potent short-term energy weapon to use against Vladimir Putin would be U.S. crude-oil exports, rather than U.S. natural-gas exports. "Russia's real vulnerability lies in the price of oil, not in the realm of gas," she explained. "Revenue from gas sales abroad make up 8 percent to 9 percent of the Russian budget, while oil revenue accounts for a much heftier 37 percent to 38 percent." In the current issue of National Review , historian Arthur Herman makes the larger economic and strategic case for scrapping the 1975 export ban : "[T]here are sound economic arguments for lifting the ban, including creating new jobs and increasing government revenue, as well as using American sales of crude to stabilize world prices. But even more important from an energy-security standpoint, the United States would then be free to use its oil exports to support our allies in times of economic or geopolitical crisis, for example if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz or China cut off shipments of oil to Japan and South Korea via the Strait of Malacca. "We could use exports not only to stabilize prices but also to exert a steady downward pressure on them. A new Brookings Institution-sponsored study by NERA Economic Consulting predicts that lifting the export ban could lower world crude prices by as much as $6 a barrel just in the first year. That would mean significantly less revenue for despots and terrorists, even as our exports made the market more efficient and responsive to normal supply and demand instead of to the whims of countries such as Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. "Indeed, U.S. exports could prevent OPEC from ever again using the threat of an oil cutoff to blackmail our allies. At the same time, American tankers carrying oil to developing countries in Africa and Asia could make 'energy diplomacy' as integral a part of America's foreign policy as 'Chinook diplomacy' is today -- but in a less symbolic and far more potent form. "Critics of lifting the ban have argued that allowing U.S. crude exports would force domestic gasoline prices up at the pump because there would be less oil to refine. This claim, however, misunderstands the nature of the current North American oil market. Domestic refineries in the Midwest and on the Gulf Coast are geared for refining a heavier crude than the light crude from today's shale production. The latter -- known as 'tight oil,' since it is fracked from tight shale formations -- is ideally suited, however, for refineries in Europe. And if the Keystone pipeline is completed, American refineries will have plenty of heavier oil flowing in from Canada. "Far from raising gas prices, U.S. exports would -- by raising the amount of crude available to be refined worldwide -- actually push prices down at home by as much as twelve cents a gallon, according to an estimate by the Houston-based firm Cambridge Associates. This would save consumers some $420 billion a year. "America's oil weapon will work according to a simple economic formula: supply and demand. By keeping world supply up, the United States can put downward pressure on prices. This not only would promote economic growth around the globe and especially in emerging economies, but also would squeeze the revenues of OPEC and Russia, the key sponsors of terrorism and aggression worldwide, as their share of the global market shrank." |
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There may be no issue which shows how far apart President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump are than religious liberty. The following is a chronological account of important religious liberty issues that both presidents addressed in their first year in office.
Three days after assuming office, Obama announced that he would overturn restrictions on funding abortions overseas.
Less than a week later, he said he would restore U.S. funding to the U.N. Population Fund, which pays for abortion.
In February 2009, Obama's newly designed Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships was announced. Its focus was not religious liberty. Instead, its goal was to decide on a case by case basis which funding requests were constitutionally acceptable, calling into question the hiring rights of religious non-profit organizations.
In March, Obama appointed Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). An abortion-rights zealot, she was a defender of Dr. George Tiller, who performed more than 60,000 abortions. She also accepted money from him.
Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, thus allowing the government to be in the business of killing nascent human life.
Dawn Johnsen was nominated to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. She started her legal career in the 1980s by working with the ACLU to strip the Catholic Church of its tax exempt status.
Harry Knox was appointed to the Advisory Council of the faith-based initiative. He had been denied ordination in the United Methodist Church for being a sexually active homosexual. He denounced Pope Benedict XVI's comments on AIDS, calling the pontiff a liar. He also maligned the Knights of Columbus.
When Obama spoke at Georgetown University, his advance team insisted on covering up all religious statues so that none would be seen on television.
The Obama administration reopened a case against Belmont Abbey College, challenging the school's decision not to cover abortion, artificial contraception, and sterilization in its healthcare coverage.
Obama rolled out his healthcare bill -- which included funding for abortion.
In September of 2009, Kevin Jennings was appointed safe school czar. He was known for promoting unsafe sex practices at several homosexual conferences, and for his Christian bashing. He also publicly condemned God.
Chai Feldblum was nominated to join the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). She was known for arguing that sexual rights, which are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, should trump religious rights, which are cited in the First Amendment.
The religious elements of Christmas at the White House were downplayed. Ornaments of a mass killer were displayed on a White House Christmas tree.
On Feb. 1, 2017, Trump chose Judge Neil Gorsuch to take Antonin Scalia's place on the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch is a strong proponent of religious liberty, holding that conscience rights are paramount.
Trump endorsed educational equality, championing the cause of tax incentives to businesses that fund private schools. He directed his support for school choice at poor minority families.
Trump issued an executive order on religious liberty which, while lacking specifics, sent a clear message to his cabinet on how to proceed with such matters.
A bill to allow the states to strip funding from Planned Parenthood was signed into law by Trump. The "Trump Effect" was noted in several states that chose to pass bills restricting abortion. A decision to provide direct assistance to persecuted Christians in the Mideast was announced. A religious exemption to Obama's HHS mandate was granted by Trump.
The religious elements of Christmas at the White House were celebrated.
The stark contrast between the two administrations' approach to religious liberty was illuminated in two Rasmussen surveys. In 2014, under Obama, 30 percent of the public said government was a protector of religious liberty; 48 percent saw it as a threat. In October of 2017, under Trump, 39 percent named government as a protector of religious liberty; 38 percent saw it as a threat.
The conclusion is obvious: Obama was not a religious-friendly president, but Trump surely is.
Dr. William Donohue is the president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Donohue is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of seven books, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community. Read more of his reports -- Click Here Now. |
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Obama was not a religious-friendly president, but Trump surely is. |
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What, you've never seen a man and woman in formal dinner wear attempt to save pigs before?
Last night on Downton Abbey , "pigs" were mentioned ten times by seven different characters. This may not seem like much for an hour-long episode, but when there is so much going on inside Downton--Lady Edith is pregnant with a bastard child; Cousin Rose is romancing a black jazz singer; Anna has been raped by a neighboring valet; Lord Grantham is managing the estate with Monopoly money; and the Dowager Countess is bedridden--it seems rather superfluous to have pigs randomly dominating the household discussion, even if it does result in some slapstick mud comedy. (Though that whole over-the-top sequence was more befitting of an episode of I Love Lucy than Downton .)
On closer inspection of the pig-related references, we worry that Downton 's writers were simply playing a pork-themed game of ad libs in the writers room. Below, take a look at every single pig reference made in the episode and note how easily "shape-shifting werewolves," "cake-eating monkeys," or literally anything could have been substituted for "pig" in these comically vague lines.
"We're just discussing the pigs." - Tom
"The arrival of the pigs and the departure of their master." - Dowager Countess
"Are the pigs a good idea, Mr. Blake?" - Dowager Countess
"Good luck with the pigs." - Robert
"I'm meeting the new pig man!" - Branson
"Did the pigs arrive?" - Charles Blake
"Do you have a good pig man?" - Charles Blake
"Should I fetch the pig man?" - Mary
"I gather you were the heroine of the pig drama." - Evelyn
"Some pigs arrived." - Mary
In case you didn't catch on, the estate has received a shipment of pigs. And despite the fact that Mary claims she has hired a very good pig man to take care of them--"pig man," we imagine is the technical term--he has not given them any water. On a walk with Mary, Charles Blake, suddenly a pig expert, notes that the pigs are wildly dehydrated. "If they haven't had water this long, you must give it to them gradually!" Blake commands, jumping over a fence several times to show that he is passionate about saving these pigs. Cut to Mary and Blake hauling buckets of water through mud for the pigs and, we presume, saving them. We don't know for sure if they were saved because once Mary and Blake are adequately covered in mud, Julian Fellowes determines that their chemistry is more important than the pigs' welfare. After smearing mud all over each others' faces, the duo do what anyone might in that situation. . .
. . .steal away to the kitchen to drink wine and eat eggs while still covered in pig filth.
Although this anecdote seems like it will make for a great wedding toast one day--"And then Mary and I spent an entire episode talking about pigs for no reason, ha ha ha. Here's to a lifetime of more innocuous pig conversation!"--we aren't quite sure Charles Pig-man Blake will be Mary's next match. Because the very next day, Mary finally finds herself in the company of the three men who have recently fallen for her: Pig-man Blake, Evelyn, and Lord Gillingham.
Elsewhere, in less pork-heavy subplots, the Dowager Countess falls ill with bronchitis and Isobel attempts to Annie Wilkes her back to health. Only Isobel's Misery -style nurse punishments consist of something even worse than scalding soup spills and rogue bone breaks--hers center on incessant conversation ("She's like a drunken vicar," the Dowager complains) and terrible food. "She doesn't know what she's talking about!" Isobel shouts, when the Dowager deliriously disses her toast.
Lady Edith confides in her Aunt Rosamund that she is pregnant and the two manage to enact an entire abortion-related story arc without ever uttering the horrible word. Rather, the two consider "it," visit an alley-way clinic, and ultimately decide that Edith will keep the child even though the phrase "meet my niece and her charming bastard child" doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue. Gregson, Edith's baby daddy, is still mysteriously M.I.A., and even more mysteriously, no one suggests that maybe he "hit it and quit it." Surely, the Brits have a more eloquent phrase for that sentiment. Now we must wait for Edith to broach the subject with her family. . .
Lady Mary finds out that Anna has been raped and tries to channel her best sexual assault crisis counselor, asking her if she should see . . . uh, a doctor . . . or describe the ruffian robber who roughed her up. Anna says she can't talk about it.
"Even to me?" Mary asks incredulously, as if it is insane for her lady's maid to not want to talk about being sexually assaulted by the slimy valet of one of her employer's paramours.
Elsewhere, Gillingham's valet surprises the household with an appearance at the end of the episode. And although Anna and Hughes have vowed to keep his identity a secret from Bates, their expressions of surprise and disgust upon his re-entrance cannot mask much.
Meanwhile, Cousin Rose spends a day in London "shopping."
And lastly, Lord Grantham is jetting off to America--not for a wild Vegas vacation, but to bail her Ladyship's brother (played by Paul Giamatti in a future episode) out of some sticky situation. As we know, Lord Grantham falls at the very end of the list of Downton-ites from whom one should solicit help--he is last, after Isis and Thomas's skeletons--and we can only think of one crisis situation in which a trans-continental visit from Robert would actually help. Our guess: her Ladyship's brother needs to lose a family fortune in the fastest, most careless, and most efficient manner possible. And has rightly called upon Lord Grantham to do so.
Line of the episode: "I've been married, I know everything," Lady Mary tells Robert after he questions how she knows Thomas has a thing for handsome male stewards.
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"It don't matter to me. What's gonna happen?" says officer Williams to assert his 'above the law' power. By Matt Agorist @ The Free Thought...
The world is made up of systems. Economics, politics, religion, and more. These larger systems are very powerful. When designed and implemented efficiently these systems...
A Texas legislator has introduced a new bill to derail the enforcement of virtually all federal gun control measures within the state's borders. By Michael...
Tom discusses Net Neutrality with Ben Szoka of Techfreedom.org. "The barriers to entry (for ISPs) are primarily government created" "To the extent that we want...
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Statement comes days after Obama authorized doubling the number of U.S. troops deployed to the country By Deirdre Fulton @ Common Dreams General Martin Dempsey,...
For the first time in its history, the Maryland Libertarian Party met the vote test to retain ballot access. @ Libertarian Party It was also...
By Timothy Geigner @ Tech Dirt Well, this is fun. We just recently wrote about how Chicago's speed cameras, ostensibly all to do with safety,...
Neither your state nor your country is sovereign. In fact the only thing that can legitimately be sovereign is yourself, but let's save that nugget...
Net Neutrality is the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or...
"My whole take on libertarianism is simply that I don't know what's best for anybody." - Penn Jillette This quote from Penn Jillette perfectly sums...
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous "suicide letter" from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter,...
On Halloween, a concerned citizen in Vancouver, WA called 911 to report the location of the car of a shooting suspect who was the object...
Last weekend, John Vibes appeared at the Alt-Expo in Austin, Texas. This was the first stand alone Alt-Expo event, which originated from the renegade stage...
In response to the back and forth arguing that took place on several Net Neutrality related posts yesterday, we've created a poll to find out...
Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and...
Former lawmaker Ron Paul says he expects the current political climate in the United States will hardly change as a result of last week's midterm...
An historic meeting took place at Weiveld Boerevereniging, Parys, on Friday 17 October 2014, when twenty four farmers agreed to pay R750,000 to a land...
On how he wanted to be remembered: 'I fought as hard as I could to keep another me from coming back to Iraq' By Andrea...
This week, an operation carried out by Interpol and the FBI shut down a number of popular online drug marketplaces which were spread out throughout...
After months of plans to create "high-speed" and "slow-speed" broadband connections at different costs, President Obama has come forward urging the FCC to reclassify the...
Currently, Brazil is not exactly a bastion of freedom. The Economic Freedom of the World Index, put out by the Fraser Institute, ranks Brazil way...
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A police officer, responding to a call of armed robbery, sees a fellow officer lying on the ground, shot. He immediately runs into the line...
Illinois residents John Kraft and Kirk Allen, who run an anti-corruption non-profit called the Edgar County Watchdogs, have waged a campaign against crooked public officials...
In 2014, there were 22 states with Libertarian candidates on the ballot for U.S. Senate. Six candidates got at least 3%. The average Libertarian percentage...
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A recent viral video of a woman walking down the street in New York, posted by Hollaback, sets out to expose the evils of catcalling. The...
In Washington DC, the measure - known as District Initiative 71 - allows residents to grow up to six marijuana plants in their homes and...
Libertarians sure are a contentious group; they love to quarrel. Did you know that Murray Rothbard wrote a one-act play satirizing Ayn Rand called "Mozart...
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I've long held that in this age of information the whistleblower is a true hero of the people. As such, I've begun to recognize an... |
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There are three types of people in the world. Those who acknowledge reality, those who seek to change it and the third type, which ignores reality altogether, instead focusing on such lofty goals as creating new hashtags and championing causes which are, to put it delicately, completely stupid. Also known as SJWs (read Surprise! SJWs Rage Over #TheTriggering Twitter Movement ).
This is a story which concerns all three types of people. Following a stabbing spree of Israelis at the hands of Palestinians , an Israeli diplomat (a Christian of Arab descent) was giving a speech at UC Davis, when pro-Palestinians channeled their creative might into chants including "Allhu Akbar." Feel free to watch...
"Palestine will be free, fight white supremacy!" they chanted along with, "Israel is anti-black!"
Either the speaker or someone in the audience questioned that assertion, asking, "Is it though?" evoking a chuckle from the audience.
Israelis of African and Middle Eastern descent enjoy equal rights under the law as other Israeli citizens. During the 1980s and 1990s, Israel flew thousands of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Israel.
Besides their vocal support for the intifada uprising that has plagued Israel with nearly daily stabbing and other violent attacks since September, the California protesters chanted another slogan that suggested they support violence against Israelis.
"When Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified," they shouted.
Emphasis mine. Because that's the money shot. When Palestine is occupied, Muslims are totally justified in stabbing people. See how that works? We didn't want to stab them, but they were in our country and deserved it. So there.
Here's where the opening commentary comes in. Those of us who are type one, who see reality for what it is, know exactly what's going on here. Pro-Palestinian rabble-rousers need a cause for violence. Not just because they're part of the religion of peace (trademark pending) though that's a big reason. In order for Pro-Palestinians to even be pro-Palestinian, they need an enemy to hate. The jews. See also Michigan Muslim Woman Openly Defends the Stabbing of Jews. Yes, All Jews...
If you seek to change reality, you might believe that if Palestine were "free," then attacks on Israelis would stop. This is of course complete poppycock. The Muslims and the Jews have been fighting for hundreds of years. Nothing will ever change that. If pro-Palestinains laid down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no Israel.
Now comes the third type of person: he or she who ignores reality. You are the most harmful of our citizenry. Sadly you're gaining in numbers despite aborting your children. You know neither reality nor history. You receive information through the feelings generated through chants like those in the video above, or hashtags you peck out with your never-worked-a-real-job fingertips. Put some lotion on them.
You believe in the falsely aggrieved while ignoring those who have been stabbed to death in the name of an unjust cause. Because of how you feel. Worse, you feel these Palestinians are justified because of how they feel about this "occupation." It's feelings all around. Excuse me while I barf.
Well tough toenails, folks. The Allhu Akbar chanters would just as soon see you cut down, feelings or not. All that matters is the caliphate, the spreading of Islam. Anyone who stands in its way, hashtag creating or not, is an infidel.
Don't believe me? Since you love to live in your feels, imagine this scenario instead: a pro-Palestinian speaker is addressing a group of Muslims about how evil Israel is. A student group comes in to protest, chanting "Long live Israel." What happens next? Use your imagination. Hint? There might be some blood. And by some I mean buckets.
So enter the real world. Stop it with the chants (which just repeat in lieu of actual facts), get educated. Israel isn't the bad guy. Learn it, live it, love it. |
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"When Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified," they shouted. |
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craftivist collective / flickr via wikimedia
A recent Australian survey on violence against women, found that people's attitudes to violence are largely determined by two factors: attitudes to gender equality, and understanding of violence against women. With 1 in 5 Australians believing women are 'partly responsible' for being raped if they are drunk, and 1 in 6 believing "that when women say no to sex, they mean yes", the importance of getting to the heart of such attitudes is evident.
It turns out that one's attitude to gender equality is the best predictor of one's understanding of violence against women, and this in turn is the best predictor of one's attitude to violence. So what does it mean to have a negative attitude towards gender equality?
Gender equality is defined as "the state in which access to rights or opportunities is unaffected by gender", a definition which is nonetheless open to a range of interpretations and ideological biases.
Adding substance to this basic definition, the VicHealth report incorporated a Gender Equality Scale, comprising factors which contribute to one's attitude towards gender equality. These factors include the beliefs that "Men make better political leaders", "Men have more right to a job than a woman", "University education is more important for a boy", and "Men should take control in relationships and be the head of the household". They also include "A woman has to have children to be fulfilled", "It's okay for a woman to have a child as a single parent", "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the workplace", and "Women prefer a man to be in charge of the relationship".
The highest levels of negative public attitude toward gender equality were in favour of men being better political leaders, women preferring men to be in charge of the relationship, and it being not okay for women to have a child as a single parent.
What the VicHealth report is saying is that those who have negative attitudes towards violence against women are likely to score poorly on the Gender Equality Scale, which is discomforting because some of the items on that scale are areas of debate among those who of us who critique prevailing sociocultural norms. For example, the idea that a woman has to have children to be fulfilled is false. However, it is equally false to pretend that women do not enjoy a unique form of fulfilment through having children, a fulfilment that can't be met through other means. Having children clearly brings fulfilment to both parents, albeit in different forms as befits the differences implicit in their relationships with the child.
While gender equality is good in principle, in practice it is not always possible to separate it from other, more questionable, ideas. There is, after all, nothing in 'gender equality' that requires women to put off having children for the sake of career advancement, only to find years later that they may have missed their opportunity. Yet such outcomes may occur anyway as society over-compensates for the past rigidity of gender roles.
Another pertinent example that doesn't fit into a basic dichotomy of gender equality versus inequality is the debate over how our society values the work associated with raising children and managing a household. That is, how our society routinely and discriminately undervalues the duties and responsibilities of those who dedicate themselves to raising children.
As far back as 1910 the British writer G.K. Chesterton attempted , in his characteristic way, to turn the typical critique of 'narrow' domestic work inside out: To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
We can forgive Chesterton his lack of lived experience in childcare because the sentiment of his idea is a noble one, and one equally endorsed by 'traditional' families struggling to survive on single incomes, as well as by feminists keen to ensure that the predominantly female domestic workforce receives its due recognition.
But whether one is a 'traditionalist', feminist, or jovial 19 th Century journalist, it is important to remember that critiquing a progressive orthodoxy is very different from having resisted the advances of that orthodoxy in the first place.
For those of us raised with no sense of deeply significant difference between the sexes, it is easy to forget that for a minority of the population, difference is all there is. I never met misogyny until my late teens when I discovered that some among my peers had been raised to view women as peculiarities: on the one hand enticing, on the other hand more trouble than they are worth. Those of us keen to critique the excesses of new orthodoxies need to remember that there is an uglier sector of society which never adopted the new orthodoxy, and for whom rigid gender roles and inequality are the unconsidered status quo.
The underlying logic of a firm belief in gender roles and a failure to understand violence against women is clear and disturbing. As the VicHealth report indicated, an expectation of rigid gender roles can lead to an endorsement of violence in situations where women are seen as 'subverting' or shirking their duties, or where participation in the workforce and the earning capacity this implies begins to change the balance of power between male and female in the relationship.
The expectation or implication that women ought to stay at home because this is their role and duty as women is entirely different from the recognition that mothers have unique bonding relationships with their children which are greatly enhanced if, ideally, the mother can care for the child in its early years. It's one thing to agree with one's spouse after considered discussion that she will care for the child; it's quite another thing to expect that this will happen, ought to happen, because she is a woman and that's just the way life is.
Yet from the outside the outcomes may look the same, and it may be tempting to diminish the informed decision of what is best for mother and child to the more basic predetermined gender role. But so doing risks not only misrepresenting the nature and dignity of the informed decision, but also lending credence to people who hold a superficially similar yet markedly inferior perspective.
People can intelligently criticise and critique cultural norms without succumbing to the faults of an uncritical unintelligent conservatism. We need to be careful that in critiquing the predominant culture we do not lend strength to those whose unconsidered views are little more than prejudice.
Zac Alstin is a freelance writer living in Adelaide, South Australia. He blogs at zacalstin.com . |
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A Gaza-based j ournalist has started the "rubble bucket challenge" as a way to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza. Rather than dump ice water over his head as part of the wildly popular ice bucket challenge , Ayman al Aloul used a bucket of rubble, saying it is far more abundant than ice in the war-torn region, NBC News reported .
"If five famous people in the world like actors or presidents will do the challenge, that means I succeeded in sending the message about Gaza," he said. Ayman al Aloul, a Gaza-based journalist, started the "rubble bucket challenge." (Image via YouTube)
A Facebook page created in support of the rubble bucket challenge describes its purpose as "a campaign to raise awareness about the war on Gaza, where people are are bombed inside their homes."
"It came to my mind that it's good idea to show the whole picture -- how Gaza looks now, rubble, destruction, cement with sand, small rocks," Aloul said.
You can watch the rubble bucket challenge video, below:
(H/T: Mediaite ) |
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Immigrant rights supporters rally outside Wrigley Field before an Arizona Diamondbacks game Thursday in Chicago, Illinois.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS NEW: Baseball players union, Urban League, fraternity voice disapproval of new law Arizona Legislature amends law to address accusations that it will lead to racial profiling Critics call law unconstitutional, file suits, plan boycotts; backers say it's needed, urge "BUYcott" Protests to take place in at least 21 states, District of Columbia, 2 Canadian provinces
An Arizona police officer, Martin Escobar, says he doesn't want to have to enforce the new immigration law and is suing. Find out why on " AC360 ," tonight at 10 ET on CNN.
(CNN) -- Demonstrations in support of immigrants' rights are scheduled Saturday in at least 21 states, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces. In all, protests are planned for 47 cities.
The demonstrations come amid a swirl of controversy surrounding a new immigration law in Arizona that allows police to demand proof of legal residency. Arizona lawmakers say the law is needed because the federal government has failed to enforce border security with Mexico, allowing more than 450,000 illegal immigrants to move into in the state.
Critics say the law is unconstitutional and will lead to racial profiling, which is illegal. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and others who support SB1070 say it does not involve profiling or other illegal acts.
The Arizona legislature passed a series of changes to the law late Thursday in an attempt to address the accusations that the measure will lead to profiling .
Video: Supporters: Arizona law a right solution
Video: Officer sues over immigration law
Video: Saying goodbye to undocumented husband
Video: Shakira's immigration mission
The law, which does not go into effect for 90 days, has already drawn at least two lawsuits and condemnation from the Mexican government and other Latin American nations. Prominent entertainers, including Shakira and Linda Ronstadt, also have spoken out against the law.
Some critics are calling for a boycott of Arizona, urging that tourists stay away and that no one do business with companies in the state.
On Friday, two San Francisco, California, officials wrote a three-page letter to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig to ask that the 2011 All-Star Game be moved from Phoenix, Arizona, if the law is not repealed.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, the players' union, is also voicing its disapproval of the law.
"The recent passage by Arizona of a new immigration law could have a negative impact on hundreds of Major League players who are citizens of countries other than the United States," Michael Weiner, executive director of the association, said in a prepared statement Friday.
"These international players are very much a part of our national pastime and are important members of our Association. Their contributions to our sport have been invaluable, and their exploits have been witnessed, enjoyed and applauded by millions of Americans. All of them, as well as the Clubs for whom they play, have gone to great lengths to ensure full compliance with federal immigration law. ...
"The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members."
Also Friday, National Urban League President Marc Morial announced that the civil rights organization is suspending consideration of Phoenix -- which had submitted a bid -- as the location for its 2012 conference "as long as this unfortunate law remains in effect."
"The law is repugnant not just to people of color but to all Americans who value fairness, decency, and justice," said Morial, who added that no site in the state would be considered unless the law is repealed or overturned.
The organization is expected to announce the winning location for the convention at its 2010 conference in late July.
In addition, the African-American Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity announced it is pulling its July 2010 convention from Phoenix and moving it to Las Vegas, Nevada, because of what its board called "the egregious immigration act signed recently by the governor of Arizona."
"It was the full opinion of the board that we could not host a meeting in a state that has sanctioned a law which we believe will lead to racial profiling and discrimination, and a law that could put the civil rights and the very dignity of our members at risk during their stay in Phoenix, Arizona," the fraternity's board said.
Though perhaps not as vocal, the law also has plenty of supporters. Some have launched a "BUYcott," in which they urge people to spend money in the state to support the measure. Backers applaud Arizona legislators for taking seriously their concerns about illegal immigration and crime.
Arizona's new law requires immigrants to carry their registration documents at all times and mandates that police question people if there is reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. The measure makes it a state crime to live in or travel through Arizona illegally.
It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.
Brewer signed the law last week, and the legislature changed some language in it Thursday night in an attempt to make it less ambiguous as to how and when people can be questioned about their residency.
Brewer signed the changes into law Friday, saying they will ease concerns about racial profiling.
According to the bill the governor signed April 23, police would be able to detain an individual based merely on the suspicion that he or she entered the country illegally. A change that legislators approved Thursday night, however, says police could check on residency status only while enforcing some other law or ordinance. An officer could ask about an immigrant's status, for example, while investigating that person for speeding, loitering or some other offense.
In addition, the law says Arizona's attorney general or a county attorney cannot investigate complaints based "solely" on factors such as a person's race, color or national origin. The changes that legislators approved Thursday night would remove the word "solely," to emphasize that prosecutors must have some reason other than an individual's race or national origin to investigate.
The Arizona law will be the focus of Saturday's May Day immigration demonstrations, which have been held yearly since 2006.
Eleven protests are scheduled in California, with two in Los Angeles. New York has eight protests slated, including five in New York City.
In Canada, demonstrations are planned in Toronto and Vancouver.
The protests are being organized by the National Immigrant Solidarity Network and are being billed as "May Day 2010 -- National Mobilization for Immigrant Workers Rights."
Demonstrators want immigration reform that will lead to an easier path toward legal residency and citizenship.
"We have an immigration system that has been neglected for 30 years," said Clarissa Martinez of the National Council of La Raza. The Arizona law is not the answer, she said.
"That leads to greater chaos over that broken system," Martinez told CNN.
President Obama has called on Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law this year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other top Democratic senators unveiled the outlines of that legislation late Thursday.
But House Minority Leader John Boehner said at a briefing Thursday that "there's not a chance" that Congress will approve the measure this year, especially after the recent passage of health care reform.
Obama conceded this week that immigration reform is not likely this year.
The Arizona law has raised concerns in Mexico and throughout Latin America, U.S. officials say.
"It comes up ... in every meeting we have with the region," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday. "We are hearing the concerns of the hemisphere loud and clear."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States will work to "understand and mitigate" Mexico's concerns. The Arizona law, she said, will be on the agenda when Mexican President Felipe Calderon visits Washington on May 19.
One of the two lawsuits against SB1070 was filed Thursday by a police officer in Tucson, Arizona, who asked that local law enforcement be exempt from enforcing the measure. Officer Martin H. Escobar says in the federal suit that the law will "seriously impede law enforcement investigations and facilitate the successful commission of crimes."
The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders also filed a federal lawsuit Thursday.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Arizona and the National Immigration Law Center said Thursday they also plan to jointly file a lawsuit.
Supporters of SB1070 cite high levels of illegal immigration and crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants as a reason for the new law.
"Border violence and crime due to illegal immigration are critically important issues to the people of our state," Brewer said at the bill signing. "There is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona. We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of the drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life."
But statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and the FBI indicate that both the number of illegal immigrants and violent crime have decreased in the state in recent years.
According to FBI statistics, violent crimes in Arizona dropped by nearly 1,500 reported incidents between 2005 and 2008. Reported property crimes also fell during the same period, from about 287,000 reported incidents to 279,000. These decreases are accentuated by the fact that Arizona's population grew by 600,000 people between 2005 and 2008.
According to the nonpartisan Immigration Policy Institute, proponents of the bill "overlook two salient points: crime rates have already been falling in Arizona for years despite the presence of unauthorized immigrants, and a century's worth of research has demonstrated that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be behind bars than the native-born."
Federal officials estimate there are about 10.8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, of which about 6.6 million come from Mexico and 760,000 from the rest of Latin America. About 1 million come from Asia.
Arizona, which is on the Mexican border, has about 460,000 undocumented immigrants, the federal government says. At least five other states, including California with 2.6 million, have more undocumented immigrants, the government says. The other states with more illegal immigrants than Arizona are Texas, Florida, New York and Georgia.
A Pew Research Center survey late last year found that Americans believe Latinos are discriminated against more than any other major racial or ethnic group in American society.
The Pew survey also indicated that about one-third of the nation's Latinos say they or someone they know has experienced discrimination. About 9 percent said they had been stopped by police or other authorities and asked about their immigration status in the year before the survey.
Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they worried that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported.
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On Dec. 16, the Federal Reserve--the U.S. central bank, and under the dollar system the world's central bank--announced an increase in its "policy rates" of interest, the first since before the Great Recession. These rates include the rate at which commercial banks lend reserves to one another overnight (the federal funds rate) and the discount rate (for lending to commercial banks by regional Federal Reserve banks). The decision by the Fed's Open Market Committee brings these rates more into line with rising money market rates.
Money market rates have been in an uptrend since mid-2011, about two years after the initial recovery from the devastating Great Recession got underway in 2009. For example, the interest rate on two-year Treasury notes has risen from barely above zero to about 1 percent currently. (See chart below.)
Market-based interest rate of two-year Treasuries
Despite the widespread belief that the Federal Reserve controls interest rates, the fact is that the Fed typically sets its policy rates to follow , in stair-step fashion, market-based rates down when those rates are declining, and follow them up when they are rising, with a lag in each case. The money market rates fluctuate in accordance with the capitalist industrial cycle--falling sharply during an overproduction crisis and subsequent depression phase and rising after a recovery gets underway, as shown by the above chart.
Fed unusually cautious
This time the Fed waited an unusually long time to raise its policy rates, worried that the sluggish recovery would be aborted if it acted "too soon." Moreover, the increases are small--for example, only 0.25 percent for the Federal Funds rate (from 0.0-0.25 percent to 0.25-0.50 percent) and the same for the discount rate (from 0.75 to 1 percent).
Commercial banks have followed suit, raising their "prime rate" (offered to the most credit-worthy customers) as well as credit card, auto loan and other rates.
Although the Fed normally follows but doesn't set money market interest rates, it does control its "monetary base," the paper dollars it prints and digital dollars it creates electronically. The resulting "bank reserves" over and above the minimum required to back up deposits of commercial banks provide the basis for new lending by those banks. Most of what is called "the money supply" is created by such lending activity (via credit cards, auto loans, house mortgages, student loans, and so on) and shows up as bank deposits, mere accounting entries, called by economists credit money.
The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee controls the Fed's policy rates by expanding or contracting the size of its monetary base, mainly through its "open market operations"--hence the name of the committee--buying and selling securities. If it decides to raise policy rates, like it has just done, it must contract the monetary base (by selling securities from its holdings). When later it wants to reduce its policy rates, it will need to expand the monetary base (by purchasing securities).
'Quantitative easing'
Normally, the Federal Reserve's open market operations involve short-term (mostly government) securities. However, because the entire banking system teetered on the verge of collapse during the Great Recession, the Fed was forced to expand these operations to long-term government and mortgage bonds--called "quantitative easing." As part of bailing out the "too-big-to-fail" banks, the Fed purchased huge quantities of these bonds, paying for them by crediting the banks' accounts with the Federal Reserve, thereby greatly augmenting the banks' reserves and therefore the Fed's monetary base. As a further gift to the banks, the Fed agreed to pay 0.25 percent interest on the humongous bank reserves, now raised to 0.50 percent.
The following chart shows the unprecedented increase in "excess reserves"--starting from the "normal" level of close to zero in 2008 and preceding years--that resulted from three rounds of quantitative easing, each round followed by a pause reflected in the decline or leveling off of the amounts shown in the chart. The Fed ended its third round of QE last year, and the excess reserves initially declined but then leveled off at about $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000).
The pauses shown on the chart actually represent monetary tightening by the Fed, even though it didn't raise its policy rates, until now. Each pause in the face of continued, if sluggish, economic expansion meant that short-term interest rates would rise--as in fact happened, as shown in the first chart above.
The Fed's big gamble
The latest move by the Fed further tightens credit, since it will require a further contraction of the monetary base to implement. If the economic expansion continues, that will inevitably mean a renewed rise in market interest rates, which in turn will require the Fed to raise policy rates again, and again.
A Credit Suisse research note issued after the Fed's rate hike stated: "In some ways, it seems odd that the Fed would increase interest rates in the current circumstances. Commodity prices have collapsed, credit and emerging markets are showing distress, and our measure of global risk appetite is hovering near 'panic' levels. On top of that, ISM [Institute of Supply Management] headline and new orders have fallen below 50 for the first time in three years and US industrial production has contracted in eight of the last eleven months."
In its statement, the FOMC sought to reassure the financial markets by saying that it expects the ensuing rate increases to be "gradual"--in small increments and spaced out. This means the Fed expects (really, hopes) market-based rates--determined not by the Fed but by economic developments beyond its control--will rise only gradually.
The Fed's move suggests the recovery will continue and a new boom phase of the industrial cycle will get underway in the not too distant future, followed at some point by a new overproduction crisis--though as always the Fed hopes (but will fail) to avoid such a crisis. An extended recovery is by no means certain, however, as hinted in the Credit Suisse research note. There are many signs of a slowdown of the global economy happening now, with some economies--notably Brazil but others as well--falling back into recession.
The countries hardest hit are exporters of primary commodities such as oil and natural gas, copper, platinum, palladium and iron ore. The prices of such commodities, which are priced in dollars, have plunged in the face of the pause in the growth of the dollar monetary base following the third round of quantitative easing. Oil, for example, has collapsed from well over $100/barrel in mid-2014 to around $35 currently.
Since most oil-producing countries--for example, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq and Saudi Arabia--depend on oil exports for a large portion of government revenue, and most of the big oil producers in these countries are state-owned, the response to falling prices is at first to increase, not decrease, production. This pushes prices down further in a deflationary spiral.
That has been bad for one sector of the U.S. economy, the rapidly growing fracking industry, but has been beneficial for most other sectors, acting like a big tax cut for businesses and consumers alike. The net result for the U.S. has been positive so far, which made possible the latest Fed tightening move. However, further declines elsewhere in the world could bring a premature end to the current expansion.
'Junk bonds' fiasco
Another risk to the economy is a collapse of the high-yield--so-called junk--bond market. Many of these bonds, floated to finance exploration and production of oil in the fracking sector, are already in steep decline. The following chart shows the steep decline in the share value of a prominent junk bond fund from its peak earlier this year.
Banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions invested in junk bonds for their high yields and now face defaults and heavy losses. One major mutual fund, Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund, recently went belly up due to a panicky wave of redemption requests by shareholders that it could not meet. This disastrous run on the fund occurred despite a $200 million cash reserve built up in the days before its collapse.
A further major default on debt is looming, and that is the $2 billion in debt payments coming due at the end of this year owed by the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. It's bonds, which paid exceptionally high interest, are owned by a wide spectrum of financial institutions, including hedge funds, mutual funds and even pension funds.
Congress failed to pass legislation granting Puerto Rico the right to declare bankruptcy and go through an orderly, if highly unjust, process for getting out from under its debt burden like Detroit did. Therefore, this could end up in a disorderly default that could further rile the financial markets.
Another danger is a stock market correction that turns into a crash. As a result of years of super-low interest rates, along with massive stock buybacks by corporations, share values have soared since the market hit bottom in 2009. (See following chart.) Now with the prospect of rising interest rates, these levitated share prices could turn down--possibly with a vengeance as panicky investors rush for the exits at the same time.
If all or some combination of these losses start a serious contagion that threatens the big banks, the Fed may be forced to reverse course and begin a fourth round of quantitative easing--and on a massive scale. But that would risk a new run on the dollar, such as began in late 1979 and early 1980, before the sky-high interest rates of the famous Volcker Shock saved the currency from total collapse. Since a strong dollar is crucial for the continued dominance of the U.S. empire, ensuring that status has the highest priority for U.S. finance capital.
Socialist planning and regulation must replace capitalist anarchy
The conclusion is inescapable: The glory days of capitalism in general and the U.S. empire in particular are receding into the past, never to return. The system has reached the point that the most basic needs of major parts of society are going unmet or in serious jeopardy--especially in the oppressed countries but increasingly also in the "advanced countries."
Wars multiply and escalate. One country after another is torn apart, its infrastructure and institutions destroyed. Austerity bites ever deeper. Climate change threatens the livability of the planet for many species including our own. Mass unemployment and poverty spread. Policy brutality and mass incarceration (along with surveillance) reach unprecedented levels. Racism is on the rise, and fascism has raised its head. The capitalist system has to go. |
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Wrong Turn: Learning to Drive Loses its Way
Wrong Turn: Learning to Drive Loses its Way
Unlike the bracing feminist essay it is based on, Learning to Drive struggles to move beyond fantasy and stereotypes. Maxine Phillips ▪ August 28, 2015 A scene from Learning to Drive (Broad Green Pictures)
Early on in her wrenchingly funny tell-all essay about being left by her lover, feminist writer Katha Pollitt fantasizes that after she learns to drive she mows him down at a crosswalk, where he just happens to be standing with his new wife and at least one other former lover. Pollitt imagines she will be sent to prison for decades, where she will reorganize the library and become a lesbian. Her story will be made into a movie.
Well, it has been made into a movie, and that's not the story it tells.
First published in the New Yorker in 2002, the essay is a clear-eyed account of a middle-aged woman finally taking charge of her life, symbolized by her learning to drive. In the process, she skewers the unnamed lover with the literary leftist version of revenge porn. Pollitt is not afraid to expose her own insecurities even as she verbally flays the philandering lover.
The essay caused a stir when it came out, because women like Pollitt, that is to say, strong feminists, aren't supposed to slash their wrists over men, even if metaphorically. She was excoriated for being too personal, but the essay struck a chord among many and eventually became the title of a collection of perceptive and poignant essays about her childhood, a stint as a proofreader of porn, her obsessive internet stalking of the ex-lover, being a mother, aging, death, and feminism. And even though my own life doesn't parallel Pollitt's, I can relate. We are children of the fifties who came to our feminism in the sixties. We have tried to pass on feminist ideals to our daughters. I still won't drive in New York City. And, we both look at a man's political portfolio before gazing into his eyes.
Like Pollitt, I, too, stayed with someone long past the due date because of his politics. And, like her alter ego in the film (literary critic Wendy Shields, played by Patricia Clarkson) I, too, was once dumped by a man during a meal in a restaurant. Unlike Wendy, however, I didn't follow him onto the street screaming that he was a coward for choosing a public place. This opening scene tells us that Wendy is a woman who speaks her mind. Conveniently, the cab into which she pursues her fleeing husband is driven by Darwan Singh Tur (Ben Kingsley), who also has a day job as a driving instructor. When Darwan returns a manuscript she has left in the cab, she asks for his card. Her daughter is dropping out of school to work on a farm in Vermont, and if Wendy is to visit she will need to learn to drive.
What was once the story of a passionate feminist intellectual who refused to abandon a life of the mind in order to give blow jobs to her lover every morning has morphed into an "odd couple" comedy that its creators hope will appeal to a wide audience.
Director Isabel Coixet worked with Clarkson and Kingsley on Elegy , an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, in which Kingsley plays the kind of guy Central Casting should have sent to portray Pollitt's real-life lover. However, Coixet told an interviewer, she "realized all my films are full of tragedies and darkness, and I wanted very badly to make a film that showed some kind of hope and lightness." But could such a film capture the subtleties of Pollitt's essay?
The title essay and those that make up the book are about a subset of heterosexual women of a certain age who, while not pioneers of feminism, rode the Second Wave into adulthood and have spent their lives navigating the shoals of leftist politics, sexism, love, parenthood, and work. These are women who came relatively late to motherhood, after they had made career choices, women who are fully aware of the ways that they are objectified but who still worry about those extra pounds that cling to their hips. They are women who can remember a time when people "believed in some big triumphant idea like science or reason or socialism or art, or even a small, cozy hope like everyone having a place to live and nobody having to eat cat food." And, in the most poignant essay, they are women who live with men who (statistically) will die before they do: "No more staying up listening to each other's old records, no more reading Don Quixote to each other in bed, no more sex--strange to think that there will be an actual, specific last time for that."
OK. I get it. A feature film has to have wider appeal.
In the essay, the driving instructor is a Filipino man named Ben who gives sage advice about driving and, hence, about life ("Observation, Kahta, observation! This is your weakness." Yes, Pollitt thinks, "I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer . . ."). In the film, the instructor is a Sikh with a backstory of religious persecution in India and a long stint in prison that explains why such a paragon of virtue is unmarried. Ben and Darwan represent the anti-jerk.
According to Coixet, the film tells "a great story about human connections surpassing race, age, time and religion." This, of course, is part of the American Dream, which Coixet, despite being Spanish, is happy to propagate. She also admits that the story grabbed her because she'd just been left by the father of her child and she, too, does not know how to drive.
The original book jacket showed a long road heading off into daybreak. The movie poster shows a smiling, airbrushed Clarkson in the foreground, coquettishly holding a half-eaten Popsicle, while in the background a turbaned, airbrushed Kingsley looks at her in a way that made a young Indian friend exclaim, "Do they get involved with each other?" There is no car or road in sight.
"How stereotypical that they made the driver a Sikh!" snorted my friend. "Ben Kingsley couldn't have played a Filipino," I countered, as she gave me a withering look. "He can play any ethnic role he wants," she said. "They must have made the character a Sikh because of the stereotype of Indians being so spiritual."
I hadn't seen the movie yet, but she was right. At every moment when Darwan does the honorable thing or offers sage advice and Wendy expresses amazement, he attributes his actions to his religion. The director says that creating Darwan's character presented an opportunity to learn more about Sikhs, who are often confused by many in this country with Muslims and have faced discrimination and violence because of this misperception. Seriously though, how many people who can't tell the difference between Muslims and Sikhs will watch this movie?
In the essay, all the action takes place either in the car or in Pollitt's memory, as she ruminates about her past (her mother never learned to drive, either), the execrable ex-boyfriend's philandering, and her own bemusement about why she has so far declined to learn to drive. This refusal, of course, is incomprehensible to the rest of the country, where driving may be third only to breathing and gun ownership as an inalienable right.
Readers most likely to relate to the essay are, perhaps, those for whom politics comes second to breathing. Here, the only overt politics comes when Wendy's sister sets her up with an eligible banker and Wendy asks in horror whether he's a Republican. She goes to bed with him, the question unanswered. The fact that she looks at her watch during the interminable tantric sex that ensues tells me the script was written by a woman (Sarah Kernochan).
Despite the brief sexual interlude, which may or may not have also been a satirical look at Western fascination with Eastern practices, Wendy remains focused on learning to drive. And unlike Thelma and Louise, she's not going off a cliff.
Like myriad precursors, the film focuses on putting your life together after a relationship ends, not on what kept you frozen in place for so long. These days, the largest group of spouses fleeing the nest is middle-aged women, but Wendy never got the memo. She is the main financial support of the family (ex-husband Ted asks for 25 percent of her income in alimony), and there is nothing except her sexual attraction to him and, perhaps, some love of literature that seems to have kept them together. Except for a good body, Ted (Jake Weber) has nothing going for him. "He couldn't even get tenure after twenty years," sniffs Wendy. We never hear the ideas that seduced Pollitt or the words that are supposedly important to Wendy. Pollitt's essay made it clear that she was attracted to "G" because he combined good sex with a brilliant mind and that, at least for a while, he was drawn to her for the same reason.
If Wendy has a life of the mind, we do not see it, even though Ted accuses her of having spent too much time at her work and not enough with him. As soon as he leaves, though, she is too heartsick to go into the office of what appears to be a New Yorker -type magazine. When Ted comes to pick up his books, the only one they reminisce about is The Joy of Sex , which leads to a cringe-inducing scene in which she attempts to recapture some of that joy while Ted recoils in embarrassment. When she does try to think about what went wrong after two decades, we only hear her blaming herself. This is a literary critic, not a feminist, presumably because that is an identity with wider appeal. But at such moments, the contrast between the film character and the real-life woman behind it could not be more stark.
The person we do hear from is Darwan, whose story slowly unfolds in parallel to Wendy's. The driving instructor may have been cast as a Sikh because of the spiritual stereotype, but he also fits another trope, that of the educated immigrant (he's got a PhD) relegated to a more menial occupation than in his home country. He, too, is stuck. Having lost several members of his immediate family to political terror (most likely the pogroms against Sikhs in India in 1984) and been granted political asylum and citizenship, he has buried himself in work.
We see Wendy alone in her spacious Upper West Side brownstone as Darwan returns to the crowded basement apartment in Queens that he shares with several undocumented compatriots, including his nephew. The contrast between her clueless white privilege and his outsider status is driven home in scenes where some white adolescents taunt him by yelling, "Osama, I thought we killed you," and another in which she causes an accident and the police start hassling Darwan. An indignant Wendy screams at the black officer, "I have two words for you: racial profiling!" Earlier, the viewer has seen Darwan lose his housemates during an immigration raid. As a citizen, he is safe from deportation, but is harassed daily.
While Wendy's sister urges her to move on, fixing her up with men such as the aforementioned banker, Darwan's sister sends photos of potential marriage partners. Despite misgivings, he finally agrees to an arranged marriage with a woman named Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury) from a neighboring village. Jasleen's unmarried state is explained by her betrothed having been murdered in the same wave of terror that sent Darwan to prison. The fear in her eyes when he greets her in the airport and during the wedding ceremony scant hours later does not abate. Her English is limited, but Darwan, who has been warm and understanding with Wendy, refuses to welcome his fiancee in their native tongue. He presents her with a book of poetry by Wordsworth (suggested by Wendy, who had received such a gift from Ted). He insists that Jasleen read to him, and when she stumbles over the words, he asks whether she can even read English. She tells him that her brother took her out of school at age fourteen.
He criticizes her cooking, having lost his taste for so much ghee. She is too scared to leave the house, and he is never home because of the two jobs. She is no doormat, though, realizing long before he does that he is attracted to Wendy.
However, the film, as its website declares, is a "feel-good, coming of (middle) age comedy about a mismatched pair who help each other overcome life's road blocks." Even though she barely gets fifteen minutes in the film, Jasleen, too, overcomes some roadblocks. Having run out of sanitary pads, she ventures out to a store, where she meets a compatriot who soon introduces her to the neighborhood's other immigrant women. The women gather at her house to catechize her to this new world. When Darwan arrives home to this scene, he rejects her offer to run into the kitchen and urges her to enjoy time with her new friends. Soon, Jasleen is taking English classes.
So much for Jasleen's story arc, which would have made a fascinating movie in its own right. Could Wendy and Jasleen have bridged their cultural differences? Will Jasleen and Darwan? Unfortunately, we see too little of them interacting. No tantric sex for them. No poetry. No driving lessons.
It won't be giving away the ending to say that we know from the many times we've seen this story play out that Wendy will either discover romance with someone better looking and more sensitive than Ted or face the future alone and unafraid. Or both.
There are so few movies made by women about women that it seems petty to criticize this one for not moving beyond fantasy and stereotypes. In the real world, when men leave women or vice versa, it is women who almost always suffer a major loss of income. In cinema, such women are thin, good-looking, and have beautiful homes that they do not lose after the divorce. In a country where the median salary for women ages fifty-five to sixty-five is $41,000, these fictional ex-wives have jobs that allow them to maintain their upper middle-class standard of living. Wendy may have to sell the brownstone, but instead of downsizing to Queens, she relocates to a spacious Upper West Side apartment. The biggest fantasy, though, is that she and Darwan always find parking in Manhattan.
If the movie had focused on the ideas that drew Pollitt to her lover, we would be living in another country (France?). If the driving instructor hadn't had a PhD, we might have had to confront class issues as well as race. Again, we'd be living in another country (the United Kingdom?). Instead, we're living in the United States, where we can ignore both.
At the screening I attended, the audience was silent at the end. I muttered to the other person in my row, "It's not like the book." She gave me a "What did you expect?" look and said, "It's enjoyable." That it is. Clarkson, Kingsley, and Choudhury are certainly worth the price of the ticket. The sight of Weber's bare behind isn't bad, either.
But, if you like your comedie humaine with both wit and verite , read the book.
Maxine Phillips is editor of Democratic Left and former executive editor of Dissent . |
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October 26: The Heartland Institute's 34th Anniversary Benefit Dinner
On Friday, October 26, 2018, The Heartland Institute will celebrate its 34th Anniversary with a reception and dinner with speakers at The Cotillion, a fine banquet hall in Palatine, Illinois.
By Alyssa Carducci
An audit of Lafayette, Louisiana's municipal broadband network has revealed it operated at a loss of about $45,000 a day during the 2010-2011 fiscal year. The revelation supports muni wi-fi opponents' claimsthat such projects are costly and ill-advised.
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This issue is one of those cases where no matter how much contrary evidence you produce -- no matter how unimpeachable your sources are, the other side will simply plug their ears, sing "la-la-la-not-listening!" then regurgitate the same response over and over. In this case, their refrain is, "Torture worked, and we were scared after 9/11." It's like debating a brick wall or a member of a cult -- with apologies to walls and cult members. The tactic, of course, is to repeat the same nonsense over and over until it feels truthy.
And to be fair, they're half right. Sort of. In the wake of September 11, Americans were utterly terrified and probably would've acquiesced to allowing the CIA to do whatever the hell it wanted as long as the evildoers were smoked out. But one of the reasons why we have national security and law enforcement officials is to serve as cooler heads in a crisis; to make rational decisions that history can live with based on our long-term values, rather than catering to the panicked whimsy of a horrified, shell-shocked public.
The other half of the refrain, "torture worked," has always been horseshit and ultimately irrelevant.
Almost immediately following the release of the Intelligence Committee's mind-blowing summary report on the Bush-era use of torture in the Global War on Terrorism, three former Central Intelligence Agency chiefs along with their deputies published an extended, predictably defensive cover-your-ass response in the pages of the most receptive, unchallenging forum possible: The Wall Street Journal editorial page. George Tenet, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, along with deputies John McLaughlin, Albert Calland and Admiral Stephen Kappes, essentially wrote "torture worked" over and over again using 2,400 words, hoping enough readers will give up and exclaim, "Okay! Fine!"
See if you can tell what they left out of their primary counter-argument:
First, its claim that the CIA's interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:
* It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
* It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
* It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.
A powerful example of the interrogation program's importance is the information obtained from Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda operative, and from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, known as KSM, the 9/11 mastermind. We are convinced that both would not have talked absent the interrogation program.
Answer? The word "enhanced," as in "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs), was suspiciously and conspicuously absent from the start. This is important because the CIA also used other non-torture interrogation methods that, in fact, worked. These guys are clearly obfuscating what happened by speaking in generalities rather than coming out and saying, "When we waterboarding so-and-so, or forced another so-and-so to stand in a stress position on his broken legs, we eventually learned where Bin Laden was hiding."
And besides, one interrogation expert after another has sworn that "enhanced interrogation techniques" don't work. Detainees end up saying any old thing just to make the pain stop. Here's Special Agent Joe Navarro, a (I'll just copy and paste his bio) 25-year veteran of the FBI where he served as both an agent and a supervisor :
Torture is not an effective way to get information , and the American people need to know that. That's why the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11 is important. [...]
I recall when I learned that cruel techniques were being used. I spoke with several long-term CIA officers and CIA polygraph experts with whom I had worked over many years, and we were all appalled, not just by its immorality, but because we knew it would be counterproductive .
This article wasn't published in Mother Jones or The Nation . It was published by Fox News Channel .
Professional interrogators have lined up in opposition to enhanced interrogation simply because it does not work, and if it doesn't work, it's ineffective and therefore makes us less safe.
Here are another 20 names: Retired CIA officer Frank Anderson, former DIA Guantanamo interrogator Jennifer Bryson, Bronze Star Award-winning interrogator in Iraq Tony Camerino, DEA veteran Donald Canestraro, former CIA counterterrorism strategist Glenn Carle, former Immigration and Customs director Charles DeVita, covert CIA operative Barry Eisler, Army Arabic linguist Eric Fair, national security consultant Mark Fallon, Brigadier General David Irvine, USA (Ret.), Colonel Steven Kleinman, USAF, Colonel Brittain Mallow (Ret.), NCIS special agent Mike Marks, law enforcement veteran Robert McFadden, NCIS veteran Matthew E. Parsons, Army interrogator William Quinn, former FBI agent Oliver "Buck" Revell, Ken Robinson, Mike Rolince and Lieutenant General Harry Soyster, USA (Ret). All of these experts agreed in a printed statement , "Torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are illegal, ineffective, counterproductive, and immoral."
You know who else determined that EITs are ineffective? The CIA. According to a document first published by Kurt Eichenwald in his groundbreaking book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars , and subsequently covered in the Intelligence Committee's summary yesterday, the techniques didn't produce actionable intelligence that hadn't been ascertained using other methods. From the summary:
[A]ccording to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody. CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were usually subjected to the techniques immediately after being rendered to CIA custody. Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques.
Torture produced useful intel less frequently than other methods. Information was volunteered even without the use of torture. But some who might have volunteered useful information were never given the chance, as the CIA showed a predilection for torturing first and asking questions later. And those who were tortured did what they could to end the torment.
While being subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and afterwards, multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.
Put another way, if your goal is to hammer a nail into a wall, you might be able to get the job done by bashing the nail with your clenched fist until your hand is a bloody stump. Or you can use a more effective technique, like a hammer. Duh. The CIA basically opted to reject effective and moral interrogation techniques and went with a far less effective means that's absolutely damaged America's reputation and endangered American lives.
And that leads us to the over-arching counterpoint to this ridiculous "torture works" crapola.
It doesn't matter.
Let's say it worked like gangbusters -- it doesn't, but let's suppose it does. It's deeply immoral, for so many reasons, and it's a violation of international treaties. What we read about yesterday, including the waterboarding, beatings, stress positions and rectal force-feeding are all torture techniques. It's the sort of thing our enemies do, but which we should never do. It's efficacy or lack of efficacy should be entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Hell, we could unilaterally nuke every town and village from Gaza to Tora-Bora. It might work to kill some terrorists, and it might even prevent another 9/11 attack (maybe), but the world would line up against us, and whatever national security gains we might reap from the effort, we'd surely experience decades of blowback and perhaps exponentially more 9/11-style attacks than would've otherwise occurred. Whether torture "works" isn't the hinge in this debate, any more than it'd be if Bush and Cheney had rounded up all American Muslims in the United States and shoved them into concentration camps.
What the previous administration failed to understand is that maintaining a strong national defense has to include preserving an ethical and moral high ground, in addition to the basics -- weapons and soldiers. Most foreign policy and national security disasters have occurred when the government abandons that high ground out of fear or zealotry. And we still don't know the full extent to which this disaster will come back to haunt us in very deadly ways. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday :
"I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn't about our enemies; it's about us. It's about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It's about how we represent ourselves to the world. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea...that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. Our enemies act without conscience. We must not."
That's the beginning and the end of any debate on this issue. There is nothing else.
Bob Cesca is the host of the Bob Cesca Show podcast , a twice weekly political talk show. He's also a contributor to Salon.com. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook . |
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In the West Bank and Jerusalem, seven people--four Palestinians and three Israelis--have been killed amid a wave of violence and protests over Israel's refusal to remove metal detectors from the holy al-Aqsa Mosque.
On Friday, an Israeli settler killed 18-year-old Muhammad Sharaf, and Israeli soldiers killed 17-year-old Muhammad Khalaf and 20-year-old Muhammad Ghanam. On Saturday, an Israeli soldier killed 21-year-old Yousef Abbas Kashour. About 400 more Palestinians were wounded as Israeli troops opened fire against protesters with live bullets and tear gas.
Meanwhile, on Friday night, a Palestinian teenager killed a man and his two adult children in their home in an Israeli-only settlement in the West Bank. The three victims, whose names have not been released, were sitting down to Shabbat dinner when they were stabbed to death.
This is Abed al-Jaleel Alabed, the father of the Palestinian teenager who killed the three Israelis.
Abed al-Jaleel Alabed : "I have no idea about what happened, and I am against any attack. Our children are young, and the occupation is responsible for the attack, not my son. The occupation caused this attack, after pressing on al-Aqsa Mosque."
On Sunday, the violence appeared to spread to the Israeli Embassy in Jordan, where an Israeli security officer killed two Jordanians, after one stabbed him. Israel has deployed more troops to the occupied West Bank amid the growing protests. The U.N. Security Council is set to convene an emergency meeting over the violence today.
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Unfit for Command: Presidential Historian's Horrifying Warning About Donald Trump (VIDEO)
Last week may have been the worst one so far for Donald Trump's floundering presidency. His new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, unleashed a profane rant against his White House colleagues. His Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, got the boot. The attempt to kill healthcare went down in flames as a Republican controlled Senate couldn't pass three different versions. He misfired with an illegal proposal to discriminate against transgender soldiers. And the Boy Scouts felt compelled to issue a public apology after Trump's politicized rant at their Jamboree. These failures cap a six month span of domestic dysfunction and international embarrassment.
[LATE BREAKING:] Scaramucci has been fired . Sources say that the new White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, wanted to select his own team. Translation: Get that vulgar piece af crap out of my White House.
Not surprisingly, Trump is living in a bubble of narcissistic grandiosity. He is convinced that everything is going tremendously and that he is the bestest president ever. He tweeted Monday morning:
Trump Tweets:
Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages raising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2017
Of course, the performance of the stock market, the economy, and employment, has to be credited to the Obama administration. All of those metrics were ascending throughout his term and were the result of his policies. There has not been a single Trump initiative implemented that would impact any of them. Nothing on taxes, trade, jobs, and no budget has been passed in Congress. Trump is running on Obama's fumes.
What's more, if wages are "raising" (sic), it's only because Democrats increased the minimum wage despite the opposition of Republicans. And if the border is secure, then we don't need that damn wall anymore, right? As for the Supreme Court, the Senate couldn't get Justice Gorsuch through without blowing up the rules to allow a 51-vote confirmation. Considering all of the above, Trump's assertion that there is "No WH chaos" is absurd in the extreme.
Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was asked about the state of the Trump administration. Host Brian Stelter noted that observers from across the political spectrum were stunned. They've been using words like "crisis" and "chaos" to describe the current White House. Brinkley responded with his view that "It's in utter disarray," and that "Donald Trump [is] unfit for command." Then he spelled out in detail where it has all gone so horribly wrong (video below):
Douglas Brinkley Speaks
"I think when you have a White House communications director that uses the kind of foul language that he does against fellow employees of the federal government, and makes threats the way that he did, and that's supposed to be your solution to the United States' way they are going to communicate to the world? It means Donald Trump picked the wrong person to be his communications director.
"He has a White House that's leaking like crazy. As just mentioned, there are people ready to whistle-blow. He thinks that you can govern by chaos and it's not working. It is true he has that 36 percent of the American public backing him, but that means over 60 percent of Americans think that he is doing a miserable job. And the rest of the world is laughing.
"We have a crisis in North Korea and we're playing these reality TV, big time wrestling games because Donald Trump was weaned and raised on television. And it's become like a TV episodic president where every day you've got to say something sensational to make sure that your name is in the headlines.
"We had a problem with Nixon. If there is any president this is like, it's Nixon. You listen to the Nixon Watergate tapes - the secret tapes - and you hear Nixon ramble and it sounds like Donald Trump's tweets. And it didn't turn out well for Nixon."
'Nuff Said
It's hard to add anything that. Except for what Brinkley himself added:
"The key to Donald Trump is just this kind of blind fierce loyalty, and that's what Franco expected in Spain. It's what Mussolini wanted in Italy. These are kind of ways in which you're asking people to march in lock-step with you."
In other words, Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator. He has demonstrated that he has never had the intelligence, experience, or character to be a legitimate president. He is a joke who parlayed his role as a TV game show host to the White House on the strength of his celebrity and ability to lie. But now the consequences of making such an incompetent, unethical fraud the head of state are becoming painfully clear. Hopefully he won't be in charge of anything for much longer.
Historian Douglas Brinkley: "Trump thinks you can govern by chaos -- and it's not working." https://t.co/9HvyJxk7I4
-- Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) July 30, 2017
Mark Howard is the artist/author responsible for News Corpse , a website dedicated to analysis of the media and the right-wing bias inherent in a corporate-dominated media marketplace. His work has been published by nationally known progressive outlets such as Alternet and Salon. Follow News Corpse on Twitter and Facebook .
Mark Howard is the artist/author responsible for News Corpse , a website dedicated to analysis of the media and the right-wing bias inherent in a corporate-dominated media marketplace. His work has been published by nationally known progressive outlets such as Alternet and Salon. Follow News Corpse on Twitter and Facebook . |
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Chicago saw a roughly 16 percent decrease in homicides in 2017 compared with 2016, the deadliest year in two decades, but the city still finished the year with a death toll that, before 2016, was not seen since the early 2000s.
The city reached 670 homicides in the past year, according to data kept by the Tribune, down from the 792 in 2016 when it hit a level of gun violence Chicago had not seen since the mid-1990s.
"It's no secret that some of our neighborhoods have felt the effects of illegally obtained firearms," Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters just after the new year started Monday morning, "and the offenders who are willing to use them for far too long."
Despite the reduction from 2016, homicides from the past year surpass those in 2014 and 2015, when the city reached 494 and 446, respectively, according to the Tribune's data.
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Before 2016, the last time Chicago broke 600 killings was in 2003, according to data kept by the Chicago Police Department.
In overall shootings, Chicago reached more than 3,500, down from the more than 4,300 of 2017 but up from the more than 2,900 of 2015.
Figures released by the Police Department tallied the 2017 homicide total at 650, compared with 771 for 2016. The numbers differ because, unlike the Tribune, the department does not count homicides on expressways as well as fatal shootings by police officers and homicides considered justified.
Johnson said the reduction has sparked hope in some neighborhoods, and he credited the decrease to community engagement and data-driven policing.
He pointed to a sharp decrease in homicides in the Englewood and Harrison districts, 43 percent and 26 percent, respectively, over 2016, which were the first of six districts to be equipped with intelligence centers that use real-time data.
"There's still a lot of work ahead of us, but we're heading in the right direction," Johnson said.
(c)2018 the Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
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(via TrueActivist ) You might not know this, but there are thousands of women and men being held captive by the terrorist organization Daesh . In fact, a large percent of those are from the Yazidi community. According to the United Nations, approximately 3,500 are still being held against their will, and most are young women and girls.
In 2014, reports Alalam , an attack against the Yazidi community resulted in about 5,000 men, women, and children being taken captive. Since then, about 2,000 have survived - but all with gruesome tales to relay about the experience. From rape and abuse to witnessing their loved ones being massacred in front of their eyes, the escaped survivors are not only pissed , they're ready to take out the bad guys responsible for so much hurt.
The surviving women - who call themselves the 'Force of the Sun Ladies' - have taken up arms in the quest for revenge.
It was the women's collective desire for vengeance that inspired them to form an all-female battalion. Now, they preparing for an offensive on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul where many of the women were exchanged by militants to serve as sex slaves.
Capt Khatoon Khider, a member of the all-female battalion, told the media:
"Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims.
Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die. Our hands were all tied. We couldn't do anything about it.
Now we are defending ourselves from the evil. We are defending all the minorities in the region. We will do whatever is asked of us."
Khider is one of 100 Yazidi women who have trained with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Another 500 are waiting to follow suit.
"Our elite force is a model for other women in the region," Khider said. "We want to thank all the other countries who help us in this difficult time, we want everyone to take up weapons and know how to protect themselves from the evil."
According to multiple sources, ISIS considers the Yazidi to be devil worshippers, even though their ancient faith is a blend of Christianity , Zoroastrianism and Islam. |
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
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The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
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The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.
About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
Ethics Policy
The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity. |
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Donald Trump's can-do optimism is his most prepossessing trait. As Georgetown's Joshua Mitchell observed just before the election, positive thinking has been his life-long creed:
In New York City, Trump's pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, whose 1952 blockbuster The Power of Positive Thinking was a palliative against the haunting presence of sin for the Anxious Christian, as well as against the dark psychological view of the human condition offered by Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents .
That is how Trump's much-maligned musings about the Civil War should be understood. "Why couldn't that one have been worked out?" he asked in a radio interview . "I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart." No sane person could fail to ask why 700,000 Americans (and nearly 30% of Southern military-age men) had to die in our bloodiest war. By the same token, no reasonable person could fail to ask why the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be resolved.
America has no experience of tragedy, and Americans are poorly equipped to understand the tragedies of other peoples. Civilizations die, I argued in my 2011 book, because they want to. President Trump's optimism is born of good will, but it is misguided. If he relies on the presumption that positive thinking and good will can solve all the problems of the world, he will waste his political capital wrangling with tragic problems.
In fact, the Civil War helps us understand why the Arab-Israeli conflict can't be resolved, not any time soon, and not without considerable suffering, as I wrote in this 2003 Asia Times essay entitled, " More Killing, Please! " The Civil War was a tragedy, and not even Andrew Jackson (whose personal wealth derived from slave ownership) could have stopped it. No one should blame President Trump for his rescue fantasy: America has refused to acknowledge the depth of its own tragedy since we propagated the myth of the Gallant South and the Lost Cause, and a revoltingly apologetic pop culture version of the Civil War in works like "Gone With the Wind." We aren't inherently stupid. We have made ourselves stupid by averting our gaze from our own history.
More killing, please! (from Asia Times, June 12, 2003)
"I think people are sick of [killing]," said President George W Bush of the Israeli-Palestinian war. The contrary may be true. People may want the killing to continue for quite some time, as the Palestinian radical organizations suggest. A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side.
Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.
Mut der Verzweiflung , as the Germans call it, courage borne of desperation, arises not from the delusion that victory is possible, but rather from the conviction that death is preferable to surrender. Wars of this sort end long after one side has been defeated, namely when enough of the diehards have been killed.
Don't blame the president's provincialism. This has nothing to do with Bushido, Nazi fanaticism or other exotic ideologies. The most compelling case of Mut der Verzweiflung can be found in Bush's own back yard, during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The Southern cause was lost after Major General Ulysses S Grant took Vicksburg and General George G Meade repelled General Robert E Lee at Gettysburg in July 1863. With Union forces in control of the Mississippi River, the main artery of Southern commerce, and without the prospect of a breakout to the North, the Confederacy of slaveholding states faced inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces of the North.
Nonetheless, the South fought on for another 18 months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the two decisive battles of the war fought within the same week, 100,000 men had died, bringing the total number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter of a million. Another 200,000 soldiers would die before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865. The chart below shows the cumulative number of Civil War casualties as the major battles of the war proceeded.
The chart is demarcated into sections labeled "Hope" (prior to Gettysburg and Vicksburg) and "No Hope". Geometers will recognize a so-called S-curve in which the pace of killing accelerates immediately after Gettysburg and Vickburg and remains steep through the Battle of Cold Harbor, before leveling off in the last months of the war. Not only did half the casualties occur after the war was lost by the South, but the speed at which casualties occurred sharply accelerated. The killing slowed after the South had bled nearly to death, with many regiments unable to field more than a handful of men.
In all, one-quarter of military age Southern manhood died in the field, by far the greatest sacrifice ever offered up by a modern nation in war. General W T Sherman, the scourge of the South, explained why this would occur in advance. There existed 300,000 fanatics in the South who knew nothing but hunting, drinking, gambling and dueling, a class who benefited from slavery and would rather die than work for a living. To end the war, Sherman stated on numerous occasions these 300,000 had to be killed. Evidently Sherman was right. For all the wasteful slaughter of the last 18 months of the war, Southern commander Lee barely could persuade his men to surrender in April 1865. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, called for guerilla war to continue, and Lee's staff wanted to keep fighting. Lee barely avoided a drawn-out irregular war.
What will happen now in the Middle East? At the outbreak of the war, Grant and Sherman were unknown. They rose to command because the nerve of their predecessors snapped at the edge of the abyss. The character of the war was too horrible for them to contemplate. Bush's nerve appears to have snapped, as I predicted ( Bush's nerve is going to snap , March 4), "The danger is that America will find itself fighting a sort of Chechnyan war on a global scale. President George W Bush cannot wrap his mind around this," I wrote then. "The blame lies at the doorstep of the neo-conservative war-hawks who persuaded the president that America should undertake a democratizing mission among a people who never once voted for their own leaders."
For that matter, Ariel Sharon's claim before last week's Likud party congress that Israel had achieved victory against terrorism was both accurate and misleading. Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted. Sherman's 300,000 fanatics could not face the mediocre circumstances of a South without slaves and were willing to die for their way of life.
Three million Palestinians packed into a narrow strip of land one day may accept the modest fate of a small and impecunious people, but their young people do not seem ready to do so. We do not know how many ever will. The killing will continue for some time before we find out. |
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Canadian band The Grey can't enter the US for five years because they told US border guards they weren't playing a gig in the US. The guards checked the band's online touring schedule and went ballistic.
We were treated as terrorists at first. When we first went, one by one, into the room with the interrogating officer they used that line about "America is at war, and Canada may not take that seriously..." and "since 9-11, we take these things seriously." Then they realized that we were not making any money doing what we do, and that we were more naive than anything else. Some of the other guards even told us that the whole thing was bullshit, and that it was overzealous and a waste of paperwork.
The decision to deport and ban us from the US was made entirely by officer Kurt Tennat, the supervising officer. He said he had consulted his supervisor by phone, but we don't know for sure. No court proceedings, no legalities, no chance.
Reader comment: Michael Sider says:
Bands travelling from the U.S. to Canada often have had similar experiences, even long before 9-11. I brought many U.S. bands to Vancouver in the early 90's and they were mercilessly hassled, often turned back to the U.S. We kept trying to determine what exactly the rules were, but every response was different. We managed to contact someone high up in Canadian Immigration through a friend of a friend, and their response was that the laws are intentionally ambiguous so that it is up to the discretion of individual border guards whether ANYONE crosses the border, and no recourse if you don't like their conclusion. One trick that often worked was if the band told the border guards that they were coming to Canada to record (helps to have someone in Canada willing to confirm the story), as this means they are going to be spending money in Canada rather than earning it... may work for bands going to the U.S. as well, don't know. |
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A note of caution regarding our comment sections:
For months a stream of media reports have warned of coordinated propaganda efforts targeting political websites based in the U.S., particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
We too were alarmed at the patterns we were, and still are, seeing. It is clear that the provocateurs are far more savvy, disciplined, and purposeful than anything we have ever experienced before.
It is also clear that we still have elements of the same activity in our article discussion forums at this time.
We have hosted and encouraged reader expression since the turn of the century. The comments of our readers are the most vibrant, best-used interactive feature at Reader Supported News. Accordingly, we are strongly resistant to interrupting those services.
It is, however, important to note that in all likelihood hardened operatives are attempting to shape the dialog our community seeks to engage in.
Adapt and overcome.
Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News |
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By Sheila Kennedy [Originally published at SheilaKennedy.net on January 25, 2015] Pew's Research Center recently noted that financial insecurity has a range of what it called "secondary effects" for communities, including diminished participation in civic and political life. The question that immediately occurred to me was: is this a feature, or a bug? Ever since Ronald Reagan identified government as the problem rather [...] Continue reading >>
By Sheila Kennedy [Originally published at SheilaKennedy.net on December 14, 2014] A recent opinion column on Talking Points Memo began On Tuesday, CNBC asked, if housing is getting more affordable, "why aren't Millennials buying?" A piece in USA Today last month called us "skittish from the recession"--Hmm, wonder why?--and Bloomberg Businessweek thinks we're just discerning shoppers. The most egregious of the what's-up-with-Millennials articles, [...] Continue reading >> |
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Californians who work for the state government will be prevented from traveling to Oklahoma as of June 22. Oklahoma has apparently violated a California law which prohibits state-sponsored travel to states with laws that allow discrimination based on sexual or gender orientation.
Oklahoma recently passed a law forbidding state adoption agencies from placing children with same sex couples.
"Our taxpayer dollars do not fund bigotry," Becerra said. "No exceptions."
In Oklahoma City, an official with the Oklahoma City Convention and Visitors Bureau said she is unaware of any cancellations in visitor bookings because of the dispute, but that it could be too soon to tell.
"I've not seen an effect," said Sandy Price, vice president of tourism sales. "I'd hate for there to be a downturn because of this."
Cynthia Reid, vice president of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, said her chamber and its members had fought against the adoption law.
"We opposed the legislation, as we oppose all discriminatory legislation," she said. "One of the reasons we opposed it is for this reason (the California ban) right here."
The California ban could have a "marginal impact on any (Oklahoma) conference involving California state employees," she said, adding that the chamber "hasn't done a full assessment."
Last month, Oklahoma's governor signed the fiercely debated bill, opposed by gay rights groups and many businesses, that also allows private agencies to refuse to place LGBT foster children in homes.
"Every child deserves a loving, supportive family, and it's neither pro-child, nor pro-family, for Oklahoma to deny them one," said Rick Zbur, the executive director of Equality California, a gay civil rights organization based in Los Angeles. "California taxpayers won't subsidize Oklahoma's -- or any state's -- discriminatory policies."
I'm sure there are plenty of California laws that Oklahomans object to, not least of which are sanctuary laws that spit in the face of the rest of the country when it comes to allowing illegal aliens to enter with impunity. California cannot guarantee that all those illegals will remain in California. No doubt some will end up in Oklahoma, placing a burden on state residents who did not vote for sanctuary policies. California cannot invoke federalism in one instance and not in another.
If "bigotry" is the standard by which a state is judged, California should clean up its own house. There are other kinds of bigotry besides idiotic notions about race, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation. If the definition of bigotry is a "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own" then California should be kicked out of the union. There is no state more intolerable of minority political beliefs. There is no state more intimidating to the free flow of ideas. There is no state more hostile to free speech and freedom of thought.
Eventually, California will get around to banning travel to most states. They will define bigotry more and more broadly until only the most rigidly politically correct states will be left. If that happens, they may as well fall into the sea as they will have separated themselves from the majority of Americans who disagree with them. |
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Samuel G. Freedman : A resolution 70 years later for a father's unsettling legacy of ashes from Dachau
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David Muhlbaum: Smart Tax Deductions Non-Itemizers Can Claim
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Sharon Palmer, R.D.: Go ahead and snack between meals!
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MSNBC host and hack Toure let his vile show again this morning. He not only retweeted a disgusting tweet that said "Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win," but he doubled down on the moral bankruptcy by adding "this" in front of his retweet.
Twitter users were quick to react to this revolting remark.
Eeks! @TwitchyTeam @michellemalkin Toure agreeing people need to "get their abortions in now in case Reps win" https://t.co/iPMFmqI3
Kidding me right? RT @Toure : This!!! RT @IamEnidColeslaw : Girls, get your abortions NOW in case the Republicans win
-- Shawn (@LivesInThought) September 4, 2012
@kenndawg1 Please tell me this was a poor attempt at a joke. @Toure @IamEnidColeslaw
To the Left, the killing of innocent children is hilarious. And celebrated. This utter disregard for not only women, but for life itself, is repugnant.
https://twitter.com/ManAhMean/status/243005725343891456
@toure Do the women who get abortions get a signed letter of congratulations from #obama2012 or is it auto pen?
-- Hockey Dad (@SafeSchoolsCzar) September 4, 2012
"Girls," hurry up and dispose of your child; you don't want to be "punished" with one, right?" Plus, you silly girls are probably too incompetent to handle a child. It takes a village to raise a child, if the Left believes you deserve one and are fit enough.
Revolting.
https://twitter.com/kristinaguess/status/243008888817987584
And they are using children, and pushing the killing of them, in order to scare women from leaving the Democrat plantation. Economy, shmonomy! "Girls" should only care about their fancy wombs and should despicably believe that their rights are solely predicated on the legal ability to abort their unborn children.
Oh, and Toure? Why are you so racist? Hurry up, girls, and kill those black babies! After all, the majority of babies killed in the womb are minority babies. In New York City alone, nearly 60% of unborn African-American children were aborted . Perhaps he is following in the footsteps of Ezra Klein, who said that pesky babies should be aborted because they are oh-so-pricey. Or in the despicable footsteps of Hillary Clinton, who also seeks to use the killing of the unborn as a cost-saving tool .
Toure pitifully plays the race card and whines about people calling President Obama "angry. " Totally racist! But the genocide of black children? Hunky-dory and should be encouraged. |
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Earlier this week, a viral video of a child who cried about his cleft lip went viral. Now both the child and his family have become targets of online bullying.
In the heartbreaking video, 11-year-old Keaton Jones sobbed about the experience with his mother, Kimberly Jones, which she later put online at his urging.
In true Internet fashion, the video made the rounds on social media, garnering support and sympathy for young Keaton. Many, including athletes and celebrities like Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown and Captain America himself, Chris Evans, sent the child virtual hugs and invited him to join them at movie premiers, football games, and more.
The video served to highlight the issue of bullying. In the video, Keaton tearfully told his mother how students taunted his appearance, poured milk on him, and put food down his shirt. They told him he had no friends.
"I don't like that they do it to me," said Keaton. "And I, for sure, don't like that they do it to other people, cause it's not OK! People that are different don't need to be criticized about it. It's not their fault."
This is Keaton Jones, he lives in Knoxville and he has a little something to say about bullying. https://t.co/coyQxFp33V
Following the outpouring of sympathy, a man named Joseph Lam set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations for the family. It received over $57,000 before being put on hold.
Now both Keaton and his family has become the target of bullying as accusations of racism are being hurled at him. The Univision-owned African American culture website the Root accused Kimberly Jones of being a "racist money grabber."
The article cited MMA fighter Joe Schilling, who spoke to a person pretending to be Jones, who made references to "us whites," and demanded he give the family money instead of tickets to shows and other non-monetary gifts.
Further investigation reveals that the account once belonged to a teenager unconnected to the Jones family.
Schilling recorded the conversation with the fake "Kimberly Jones," creating no small amount of outrage toward the family after he published it on Instagram. He deleted it after learning of the hoax, and urged his followers to donate to the Speak Out Against Bullying non-profit organization.
Despite the update, the anger against the Jones family remains unabated.
In the post, the Root 's Yesha Callahan claims, without much evidence, that Keaton "may have called a few classmates the n-word," describing his mother Kimberly as "using his pain for her own interests."
Callahan cited a post purportedly made by Kimberly Jones on Facebook, in which the Tennessean mom wrote a short rant about "butt hurt Americans" upset by politics. In the post, some of her family members held up the American flag, while others carried the Confederate flag.
"It's ironic that she's willing to accept money from black athletes and other celebrities that she would probably consider 'butt hurt Americans,'" writes Callahan, even though Jones never set up the GoFundMe donation drive herself.
Professional race baiter Tariq Nasheed joined the chorus of condemnation against the Jones family, describing the mother as a "suspected racist who makes very problematic posts bullying Black protesters." His tweet was accompanied by several photos of the Jones family standing next to the Confederate flag, and has since gone viral with over 19,500 retweets.
The tweet created significant outrage on Twitter, with many social justice warriors focusing their ire on Keaton himself.
Following the backlash, Kimberly Jones told CBS News in a segment that aired on Tuesday explaining the Facebook post, which she says were intended to be "ironic."
"(Those were) the only two photos on my entire planet where I am anywhere near a Confederate flag," said Jones, who added that she spent much of her life being bullied herself because she didn't share those racist views.
Jones reiterated her claim that it was Keaton's idea to make and upload the video. "I knew it could be great and I knew it could be awful, and it has been," she said.
On Twitter, Jones' daughter Lakyn said that the posts were not intended to be racist, and denied allegations that her brother Keaton used the "n-word."
The latest Tweets and replies from Lake (@Lakyn_Jones). It is what it is LMU'22. The 865
The efforts to torment and bully Keaton Jones only highlight the hypocrisy of so-called "social justice warriors," who adhere to no moral code--not even their own--targeting anybody or anything that may further the agenda, no matter the cost.
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Have A Good 2009
Sorry for the light posting, I'll try to make up for some of it next year.
I am not optimistic about 2009. Only then will the economic downturn really unfold. The worldwide social-political consequences of the crisis will be huge and in some cases violent. It will take more time and social unrest for the people in charge to understand what this is about. Only after that happens the system will start to change.
But that is the sad big picture world. The small picture can be much prettier. My little niece laughing and giggling is giving me a lot of fun and hope for the future. I plan to plant lots of flowers in 2009 and give them away for smiles.
To all of you I simply wish the very best: peace and love.
Posted by b on December 31, 2008 at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (46)
Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2008 - the same Israeli rational , the same outcome.
Will they ever learn?
Posted by b on December 30, 2008 at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (51)
Detroit Deals
Hey, if everyone here puts in a buck, we can buy a MoA house in Detroit.
Thinking of Detroit. GMAC, General Motors Financing Arm, was supposed to become a bank and eligible for TARP money if it was able to restructure debt it has into equity. But some GMAC bondholders did not want to convert the GMAC bonds they own into stocks of lesser value and boycotted that solution. PIMCO being the biggest one of them .
On one side it risked that GMAC would go bankrupt and default on the bonds PIMCO owns. On the other side was the chance that the Treasury would break its own rules and bail out GMAC no matter what and the bonds would be paid for in full.
PIMCO won. The Treasury caved in :
The Treasury said it would use $5 billion from the $700 billion financial rescue fund it oversees to buy preferred stock from the company. It said it would also lend $1 billion to General Motors, which owns 49 percent of GMAC, to allow it to invest further in the firm.
Someone should please explain the next grafs to me.
GMAC also will get an investment of $1.25 billion from General Motors and Cerberus, the private equity firm. Cerberus, which owns 51 percent of the company, will invest $250 million. General Motors will invest $1 billion that it is borrowing from Treasury.
The deal is lopsided -- such investments are generally proportional to existing ownership stakes -- and it could have the effect of restoring GM to majority ownership of GMAC.
The distinction would be short-lived, however, because the Federal Reserve has required both companies to divest most of their ownership stakes as a condition of allowing GMAC to become a bank holding company.
GM is, by demand from the Fed, supposed to lower its stake in GMAC as a condition for GMAC to become a bank. Now the Treasury lends a billion to GM to buy more of GMAC so GMAC has the equity to become a bank. Something does not compute here.
But this deal might reignite the great credit machinery:
GMAC, the automobile financing company, said Tuesday morning that it would immediately resume financing to a wider range of car buyers, a day after the Treasury Department injected billions of dollars into the lender. ... And General Motors said Tuesday that it would begin to offer zero-percent financing on some models as it tries to jump-start sales. ... "This is exactly what some of the government money was intended to do -- stimulate credit, stimulate business," Mr. LaNeve said.
That is healing the consequences of the last binge with more hard drinks. That may work as long as the consumer's liver is able to cope with it. I doubt that's still the case.
Posted by b on December 30, 2008 at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Israel of GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs as well as associated equipment and services. The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as $77 million. ... Israel will have no difficulty absorbing these additional bombs into its armed forces. The proposed sale will not affect the basic military balance in the region. Defense Security Cooperation Agency - Israel - GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs , Sept. 9, 2008
The bombs now get "absorbed" by people in Gaza.
The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday.
The missile, called GBU-39, was developed in recent years by the US as a small-diameter bomb for low-cost, high-precision and low collateral damage strikes.
Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month ... IAF uses new US-supplied smart bomb , Dec. 29, 2008
Notice the fast, just in time, delivery ...
Posted by b on December 29, 2008 at 01:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (117)
December 28, 2008
A Story On Free Trade And "Trustfrei" Marketing
Just back from visiting my brother. He owns and runs the family wholesale business in the fifth generation. For a long time that business also dealt in tobacco products.
While there I came across this artifact.
The thing above is ceramic and about 4 inch long and 1 1/2 inch high. It contains thin pieces of wood.
The artifact is a promotion tool for, obviously, a cigarette brand. These were given to pubs and guesthouse where they were set on the tables. The sticks were used to pick fire from a candle to lighten up cigarettes and cigars.
The company Eckstein & Sohne (Eckstein & Sons) was owned by a well settled Jewish family in Dresden up to 1928 when it was sold. As the front side is emphasized that the company employs about 2,300 workers.
The interesting about this is the use of "Trustfrei" (trust-free) as a product marketing argument. It also allows to date the piece.
Trust here is an economic term :
Trusts gained economic power in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some but not all were organized as trusts in the legal sense. They were often created when corporate leaders convinced (or coerced) the shareholders of all the companies in one industry to convey their shares to a board of trustees, in exchange for dividend-paying certificates. The board would then manage all the companies in 'trust' for the shareholders (and minimize competition in the process). Eventually the term was used to refer to monopolies in general.
In the U.S. the American Tobacco Company was one of such trusts. Around the turn of the century it gained a horizontal monopoly with 80% of the tobacco market share in the U.S. and was vertically integrated from tobacco plantation down to its own retail outlets.
The equivalent in Great Britain was the Imperial Tobacco Company which was formed in 1901 out of 13 independent tobacco and cigarette companies in defense against, but in the same spirit as ATC. A year later both of these giants made a contract that excluded each other from their home market and formed a joint venture, British-American-Tobacco to capture and monopolize new markets, especially in continental Europe. Due to anti-trust legislation ATC had to sell its share in BAT in 1911 but Imperial held on to it until 1980.
BAT's attempt to capture the continental market met resistance. While, like in the U.S. and UK, it tried to get market share by bribing wholesalers not to sell any competitors products, the response was less enthusiastic than it had expected.
In 1901/02 the continent was in a deep economic crisis and in Germany there was a long and hefty national discussion for (the industrial side) and against (the agrarian site) free trade. The conservative and nationalistic agrarian side included the tobacco growers and small business like my grandfather's who himself rolled some of the cigars his company sold. There were more than a thousand cigarette factories in Germany in the early 20th century which employed ten-thousands of people. (Until 1918 cigarettes were mostly produced by hand.)
The owners and their workers lobbied hard. They founded an "Association for the Defense Against the Tobacco Trust" and marketed their products as "Trustfrei". Later in 1915 and going with the general nationalistic streams of that era the associated "Committee for Good German Advertising Language" issued a "Germanization Brochure for Commercial Advertising", urging that commercial entities employ "No foreign term for what can well be expressed in German."
"Trust" is not a German word, so the reason why "Trustfrei" on those wooden sticks above is printed in quotes may well be related to the anti-foreign language thrust.As the ceramic does not put quotes around "Trustfrei", but the refill sticks do, I think it was made between about 1910 to 1914.
Their nationalistic push was also reflected in the collection pictures that came with each pack of cigarettes.
There were series with pictures from German colonies, 'heroic' German historic figures (above Henry the Lion ) and the German military. Dads smoked and the children collected and exchanged the pictures. They glued them into special albums of which millions were printed: Nationalistic education through product marketing.
One of the original famous Eckstein brands is still available today.
It is a filter-less cigarette and even for this role-your-own addict quite strong stuff.
British-American-Tobacco, which is still conducting dubious business, never got a hand on it. But in 2002 one of BAT's original parents broke the "Trustfrei" spell. Eckstein, Dresden in 1928 sold to Neuhaus, Cologne which was bought by Reemtsma, Hamburg in the 1950s. In 2002 Reemtsma was sold to the British Imperial Tobacco Company which thereby today owns the Eckstein brand.
With the current economic crisis and huge world-wide corporations again overwhelming local markets we may again see "Trustfrei" like campaigns (Private Equity Free?, Hedge-Fund-Free?) as a defense against all-out free trade.
This time, hopefully, without the nationalistic attitude that killed so many in the first half of the 20th century.
Posted by b on December 28, 2008 at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)
Bombing Gaza
For month Israel blocked the Gaza Strip from nearly any supply. No paper for schoolbooks, too little fuel, only little medical stuff. On November 5 it broke the truce [corrected] Hamas had held for nearly five month.
That truce officially ended a few days ago and Hamas as well as other groups started to again to launch ineffective homemade rockets onto Israeli ground.
Yesterday Israel let some 80 trucks with supplies into Gaza. That was not to get relief to 1.5 million prisoners there, but to prepare for the onslaught that started today. Too little supplies in Gaza would let too many people call for a 'premature' stop of the ongoing war against the Palestinian people there.
The first day of a brutal bombing campaign killed at least 195 people , all of them 'militants' and Hamas 'extremists' we are told.
The killing will go on for at least a week and more likely up to February 10 when Israel holds elections. Every politician in Israel seems to run a 'I will hit 'em harder' campaign. This is totally useless violence for the most cynic reason I can think of - to boast the personal egos of Livni, Barak and Netanjahu.
Posted by b on December 27, 2008 at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (101)
December 25, 2008
The Yuan Goes To Trade
As the U.S. dollar is likely to sink further relative to other currencies, its status as the main monetary exchange medium in world trade will be looked on unfavorably by a lot of trading partners.
The euro has its own trouble and will not take the dollars role either.
I expect a trade weighted bundle of three currencies to be the future monetary exchange medium. For a start one third dollar, one third euro and one third renminbi/yuan with periodical modifications if trade balances deviate between these anchors.
This was futuristic as China until now used the dollar as exchange medium in external trade and tightly coupled the yuan to the dollar. But now the first steps are taken to use the yuan in foreign trade:
BEIJING, Dec. 25 -- The yuan will be used in transactions with neighboring trade partners as part of a pilot project - in what could be the first step on the road to making it an international currency. ... The Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and Yunnan province will be allowed to use the yuan to settle trade payments with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members. ... The mainland's trade with Hong Kong, Macao and ASEAN nations has been rising rapidly over the past years to reach $402.7 billion last year, or 20 percent of the mainland's total trade volume.
It is a big move and one of the long term adjustments that will follow from the current crisis.
Posted by b on December 25, 2008 at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)
RIP Harold Pinter "We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us." - HP BBC obit
Noble Lecture 2005: Art, Truth & Politics
Real Player and MS video here .
Posted by b on December 25, 2008 at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Some Wishes Come True
I wish you all some contemplative, hope- and peaceful holidays.
May all walls come down. Picture courtesy of the Bethlehem Association
Posted by b on December 24, 2008 at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)
"Nobody wants war"
Let me be clear: no one wants war . ... If the international community once again shows a lack of resolve, there is no chance that Saddam Hussein will disarm voluntarily or flee - and thus little chance of a peaceful outcome. ... 17 times the UN has drawn a line in the sand - and 17 times Saddam Hussein has crossed that line. As last week's statement by the eight European leaders so eloquently put it: " If [those resolutions] are not complied with , the Security Council will lose its credibility and world peace will suffer as a result." Donald Rumsfeld, The Global Fight against Terrorism: Status and Perspectives , Munich, Feb. 8, 2003 ---
"The issue is not war. Nobody wants war ," Dr Singh told media persons outside Parliament when asked to comment on the present stand-off with Pakistan over the Mumbai terror attacks.
He said India wanted Pakistan to make 'objective efforts to dismantle terror machine' and added that Islamabad 'knows what it implies'.
'Talk of war, surgical strikes is ill-advised'
Referring to 'many' UN resolutions prohibiting member countries from allowing terrorism to emanate from their territories, Dr Singh said Pakistan should " comply with those resolutions".
At the same time, he said: "The international community should use its power to persuade Pakistan (to end terrorism)." Nobody wants war with Pakistan: Dr Singh , New Delhi, Dec. 23, 2008
Posted by b on December 24, 2008 at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Open Thread 08-44
I am traveling and will likely post little over the next few days.
Open thread ...
Posted by b on December 23, 2008 at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (84)
India - Pakistan Prepare For War
While the terror assault in Mumbai was still ongoing, I developed a conspiracy theory speculating that it was a diversion to kill anti-terrorism officers that were investigating right-wing terror against Muslims by Hindutva with ties to the opposition BJP party :
This coordinated attack brought out all anti-terror units in Mumbai. That, I think, might have well been the intended aim. The attacks seem to have been designed to do and to create direct battle situations with the anti-terror forces. ... The attack, designed to created fight-outs with police, killed the man who was the biggest danger for the BJP as he was revealing Hindu terrorism and made the BJP campaign against Muslim terrorism seem bigot.
Did the Indian minister Antulay read my piece ?
Union Minority Affairs Minister A R Antulay today kicked up a political storm when he raised doubts over the circumstances around the killing of Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare and suggested a link with the Malegaon blasts that the officer and his team were investigating.
Calling for a CBI probe into his death, Antulay said "there is more than what meets the eye" as Karkare was investigating cases in which "there are non-Muslims also" and "somebody wanted Karkare killed". That "somebody", Antulay claimed, sent the officer to the place where he was killed.
The ministers remark led to a storm in the Indian parliament, accusations of treason and unpatriotic behavior are raised and he will probably get pushed out of his job.
Meanwhile India and Pakistan prepare to go to war. 120 Indian ambassadors met in New Dehli and were briefed by the foreign affairs minister:
"We have so far acted with utmost restraint and are hopeful that the international community will use its influence to urge Pakistani government to take effective action," Mr Mukherjee said. "While we continue to persuade the international community and Pakistan, we are also clear that ultimately it is we who have to deal with this problem . We will take all measures necessary , as we deem fit, to deal with the situation."
India allerted quick reaction forces, is concentrating troops at the border and ups air defense:
"Runways, hangars, main roads, ammunition stores and other sensitive places have been provided with additional cover. Sophisticated radars are installed at a few air bases and we are keeping watch on each and every cross-border activity," said an IAF personnel.
Pakistan yesterday and today scrambled fighter jets over major cities. India's army chief rushed to inspect border troops, leave of military personal was canceled.
The rhetoric is getting more heated at both sides by each day. India demands that Pakistan hands over 20 people accused of various issues. Pakistan will not do so.
Now what?
Posted by b on December 23, 2008 at 03:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (67)
December 22, 2008
Bad Assets - No Trust
For about a year now, the Fed is pushing more and more money towards banks, but even a trillion and some dollars later, nothing seem to have helped. Sure interbank landing rates came back a bit from the record values we saw before, but they are still much higher than they should be. More important lending to even good real economy companies has slowed to a crawl.
One reason is the counter intuitive Fed policy. To somewhat sterilize the expansion of its balance sheet the Fed is now paying interest on the reserves banks keep with it. The result :
Last week, banks were sitting on about $800 billion in excess reserves with the Fed, doing absolutely nothing with them.
But the real issue is trust. Some banks are insolvent, but we do not know which one is or which one is not. The Fed and the Treasury repeat the mistakes made in the 'lost years' in Japan where insolvent banks were kept alive until, six years into the crisis, then economics minister Heizo Takenaka got one thing right and finally forced them to come clean and write off their bad assets. Sweden did the equivalent when it nationalized the banking system, eliminated the shareholders and forced the banks to write down bad debt and to restructure before returning them to normal business.
As I wrote before when I demanded Declare All Credit Default Swaps Null And Void trust is the important issue and there is only one way to get it back.
As Ilargi says :
All of the money spent so far, all the trillions, every penny of it, will be a complete waste if these [toxic] assets are not forced out of their closets. Everybody talks about the need to restore markets by restoring trust and confidence. Well, Mr. Obama, here is your key to reviving that trust. Find your own Elliott Ness, this one specialized in derivatives, get him the people he wants and needs, and start raiding the banks' vaults, and the hedge funds, and the pension funds. Force it all out into the open. Refuse to give them even one more nickel, until all of it is on the table. All of it, not just some of it. If that doesn't happen, the US economy will not recover, because there will be no trust and no confidence."
Gloomy as s/he is, Ilargi looks at Obama's advisers and does not expect this to happen. Maybe it will take six years?
There is now some prominent support.
Wolfgang Munchau comments in the Financial Times (reg.req.):
I am sceptical about the benefits of the Fed's new policy of quantitative easing. We do not have a liquidity crisis, but a solvency crisis , which expresses itself in large spreads and dysfunctional money markets. I cannot see how adding more and more liquidity to the system solves this problem.
Instead of propping up each bank, and swamping the market with cash, we need to restructure and shrink the banking system , as a first step to a sustainable solution to this crisis. Quantitative easing without deep structural financial reform could cause lot of trouble in the long run.
In Japan Takenaka was perceived by some as a puppet of 'western' economic advisers because many 'western' economists pushed with him for writing down bad assets and bank restructuring. Now Japanese economists make the same case for the U.S. But I see little push by their 'western' colleagues.Why?
Posted by b on December 22, 2008 at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Truly Exceptional
The shiny city upon a hill meme is bread and butter of U.S. politics since the first Puritan colonists arrived and it is asserted by about every modern politician since JFK. Anna missed digs into its variants ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ) much deeper than I can. It is an entitlement the U.S. claims to have.
Here is another example, not mentioned in the media, where the U.S. stands out from the world. Where it is truly exceptional:
By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food , by which the [UN General] Assembly would "consider it intolerable" that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world's present population. (See Annex III.) ...
Approved by a vote of 177 in favour to 1 against (United States) , with 2 abstentions (Canada and Israel), the resolution on the right to development would have the Assembly call on the Council to continue to ensure that its agenda promotes and advances sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals and to lead to raising the right to development as set out in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, to the same level and on a par with all other human rights and fundamental freedoms (Annex IV). ... The Committee also approved a draft resolution on the rights of the child by a vote of 180 in favour to one against (United States) , with no abstentions. Among other things, that omnibus text would call upon States to create an environment conducive to the well-being of all children, including by strengthening international cooperation in regard to the eradication of poverty, the right to education, the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, and the right to food. UN Sixty-third General Assembly - Third Committee (via Lenins's Tomb )
And no, I would not bet that this will change under a different president.
Posted by b on December 22, 2008 at 02:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (43)
More And More Troops To Afghanistan
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen wants to increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 next summer. One wonders where these troops are supposed to come from given that Mullen and other generals are trying to sabotage Obama's plan of retreat there. As the British leave, some troops will now also be needed to cover Basra.
Following their masters, the Brits also plan a troop increase in Afghanistan. This time by 3,000. They may be able to so because the Iraqi parliament just denied them a stay in Iraq beyond January 1.
Not everyone seems to be on board though:
U.S. military officers, speaking privately, concede that the bleak outlook in Afghanistan will probably prompt a scaling back of US goals for the country. There is widespread belief in national security circles that the Bush Administration's goals for Afghanistan were too ambitious. Whether new boots on the ground will bring anything other than short term tactical gains is the big question to which few in Washington have an answer.
But when in Afghanistan, how will those troops get supplies?
The road war in Pakistan continues. Another convoy of NATO/U.S. supplies was attacked yesterday and three drivers were killed. Additionally:
On Thursday, more than 10,000 protesters in Peshawar demanded Pakistan prevent Western use of the supply route to Afghanistan, saying the equipment transported was being used for attacks on Pakistani soil.
The U.S. will increase the bribe/protection money it is paying the Pakistani military:
The United States will provide more than $300 million a year in military aid to Pakistan over the next five years, diplomatic sources told Dawn. ... [Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell]said the proposal for new assistance for to Pakistan has come from the Central Command and is at early stages. The proposed funding is in addition to existing programmes, including the coalition support fund and foreign military financing.
This may induce the Pakistani military to do more for convoy protection near the Khyber pass. But that would only move the problem down south to the port of Karachi where the convoys start and where a sizable Pashtun refugee population lives.
NATO is negotiating with Russia over opening a new supply route through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The U.S. plans a different route through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. There might well be additional ideas behind this plan:
Another dramatic fallout is that the proposed land route covering Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan can also be easily converted into an energy corridor and become a Caspian oil and gas corridor bypassing Russia. Such a corridor has been a long-cherished dream for Washington. Furthermore, European countries will feel the imperative to agree to the US demand that the transit countries for the energy corridor are granted NATO protection in one form or the other. That, in turn, leads to NATO's expansion into the Caucasus and Central Asia.
I doubt that the effort will succeed. Russia will have a say in this no matter how much bribes the U.S. is willing to pay the dictators of those countries.
Posted by b on December 21, 2008 at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)
Avraham Burg - A Gerechter
A short NYT portrait of Avraham Burg, an Israeli politician who became a gerechter ( chassidey, righteous) .
[F]our years ago Mr. Burg not only walked away from politics, but also basically walked away from Zionism. In a book that came out last year and has just been translated and released in the United States, he said that Israel should not be a Jewish state, that its law of return granting citizenship to any Jew should be radically altered, that Israeli Arabs were like German Jews during the Second Reich and that the entire society felt eerily like Germany just before the rise of Hitler. ... MR. BURG has shifted the title of his book over the years. When he was writing it, he called it "Hitler Won." When he published it in Hebrew he called it "Defeating Hitler."
Partly, he said in the interview, his thinking is evolving, and partly his American editors made some smart cuts and suggestions. But it also seems clear that he has modified and adjusted his arguments, especially for a foreign audience. The English version does not have some of his more alarming assertions in the Hebrew one -- for example, that the Israeli government would probably soon pass the equivalent of the Nuremberg laws, with provisions like a prohibition on marriage between Jews and Arabs.
So the editors thought that was too much for the foreign audience to take?
Aside from such: Let me recommend last years discussion/interview about the book between Burg and Ari Shavit in Haaretz (part 1 and 2 ):
The end may be optimistic, but throughout its entire course the book repeatedly equates Israel with Germany. Is that really justified? Is there sufficient basis for the Israel-Germany analogy?
"It is not an exact science, but I will describe to you some of the elements that go into the stew: a great sense of national insult; a feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars. And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity. The place of reserve officers in society. The number of armed Israelis in the streets. Where is this swarm of armed people going? The expressions hurled publicly: 'Arabs out.'" ... Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel?
"I think it is already here."
Posted by b on December 20, 2008 at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (36)
More Weapons To South Sudan
While the capturing of the "Faina", a Ukranian ship loaded with tanks and other military stuff, by the Somali coast guard/pirates was noticed around the world, little has been reported in English about another ship that delivered a load of weapons late last year.
The earlier ship was the German fund owned heavy lift ship "Beluga Endurance" , IMO 9312169. There were reports on this in Der Spiegel , Nord-West-Radio and the Hamburger Abendblatt , all in German.
The ship is on long term charter with Beluga Group , a heavy lift shipping company. In November/December 2007 the ship was on secondary charter with ACE Shipping, a company on the British Isle of Man which shortly before was sold to some Ukrainian interest.
The ship then was ordered to the Ukrainian harbor Oktjabrsk in the Black Sea. There the state owned company Ukrinmasch loaded the ship. SPIEGEL says it has documents showing 42 T-72 tanks, 15 anti-air canons, 2 multiple rocket launchers, 2 tons of RPG and 95 tons of Kalashnikov guns and accessories were loaded. The freight was declared to be "general cargo: power generation machinery and vehicles."
From Oktjabrsk the ship went to Israel for unknown purpose and from there to Mombasa, Kenia. Israel is known for upgrading/refurbishing Ukrainian weapons as it did with tanks for Czechia and multiple rocket launchers for Georgia. Note that the "Faina" is owned by an Israeli who is negotiating its release and there are rumors of contacts between the pirates and the Israeli prime minister Olmert.
The load delivery papers refer to "GOSS" as acceptor. This is supposed to stand for Government of South Sudan. Eye witness reported that the weapons did go there.
Neither the Ukranian nor the Kenian government acknowledges the above.
South Sudan gained some autonomy after a long civil war with the north. A referendum is scheduled for 2011 on whether to remain in the greater Sudan or to become an independent nation. There is a UN observer mission in South Sudan which has officially not seen any of the weapons. Weapon delivery to South Sudan is forbidden.
The BBC quoted a Jane's Defence Weekly correspondent who says that more than 100 T-72 and T-55 Russian tanks have been received by the South Sudan in recent months. All together five ship loads were said to be involved.
One wonders who pays for these weapons and how they can escape more scrutiny.
Posted by b on December 20, 2008 at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
The Carmakers And The TARP Deal
As the first tranche of the $700 billion is nearly gone, the Treasury will tell Congress that help to Detroit through the TARP program can only be given if Congress immediately and unconditionally hands over the full second tranche.
Today:
The conditionality of an auto bailout on releasing the second half of TARP is not made explicit, but that they are announced together is very suspicious:
Citing danger to the national economy, the Bush administration approved an emergency bailout of the U.S. auto industry Friday, offering $17.4 billion in rescue loans in exchange for deep concessions from the desperately troubled carmakers and their workers. ... At the same time, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Congress should release the second $350 billion from the financial rescue fund that it approved in October to bail out huge financial institutions.
Only yesterday the White House said it was considering bankruptcy for the automakers. That was certain to build pressure. Only three days ago Paulson said he will not ask for the second TARP tranche at all. Now he does. Now he knows he will get away with it.
I believe there is a deal behind this. Bush pressed Reid and Pelosi to not block TARP part II as a condition for a TARP loan to the automakers.
To formally get the second half of TARP Paulson needs to send a plan to Congress on how he wants to spend it. Congress then has 15 days to block the money. Bush could veto that block. Congress could override that veto.
But what if Reid and Pelosi do not call Congress back to Washington between Christmas and new years eve to stage a difficult fight to block the second $350 billion?
The second TARP tranche will sail through quietly. Congress will aprove it by not convening. And the automakers are safe for now.
Posted by b on December 19, 2008 at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
Emmanuel Todd on Europe
In 1976 Emmanuel Todd predicted the down fall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire , first published in French in 2001, he predicted the (relative) decline of the United States. From a 2003 review :
Todd makes the following key points: ... 3. The United States economy is headed for a crash and is only buoyed up by foreign investments. The United States trade deficit is a disaster that is fed by US firms which push their factory jobs overseas and gut the nation's industrial base. Some 10% of American industrial consumption depends on foreign goods for which there is no corresponding balance in national exports. America no longer has the economic and financial resources to back up its foreign policy objectives. The United States is becoming a nondemocratic, arch-conservative society split between the very rich and the service sector; ... 5. The United States is economically dependent on those countries which hold its bonds and debt-China, Japan and Europe. The US needs a certain amount of global disorder to offset this dependence in order to maintain the US political-military presence in the Old World; and,
Seems like he got some things right.
Now Todd published a new book, this time on Europe. I have not yet read it, but this from a Financial Times review sound interesting:
In his latest book, Apres la democratie (After Democracy), [Todd] conjures up the alarming possibility of a post-democratic Europe reverting to ethnic scapegoating and dictatorship.
... Mr Todd paints a picture of a collusive political-media elite that benefits from globalisation while being disconnected from the people who suffer from it. As arrogant as the aristocracy on the eve of the 1789 revolution, this elite blithely ignores the views of voters whenever it suits them. French voters rejected the European Union's constitutional treaty, but a modified version was later adopted by parliament. Britain's voters protested massively against the war in Iraq, but the government sent in the troops regardless.
Ordinary workers blame cheap-wage China for killing jobs and compressing wages. Instead, France's leaders scapegoat Muslim immigrants and target militant Islam, justifying an unpopular intervention in Afghanistan. Employees want Europe to protect their jobs but, in spite of his increasingly protectionist rhetoric, Mr Sarkozy - and the opposition Socialist party - still adhere to the free-trade dictates of the EU and the World Trade Organisation.
In Mr Todd's reductionist view, globalisation is simply the exploitation of cheap workers in China and India by US, European and Japanese companies. He is therefore an unabashed champion of European protectionism. Erecting trade barriers would increase European wages which, in turn, would increase demand and boost trade, he argues. The "social asphyxia" that is sucking the breath out of democracy would disappear.
The British, whose very identity is wrapped up in free trade, will never buy protectionism, Mr Todd suggests, but Germany and the rest of the EU could be persuaded.
Hmm ... Possible? Likely? What do you think?
Posted by b on December 19, 2008 at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)
Two Crises - One Depression
The world economy is facing two distinct crises, one in the financial sphere and one in the productive sphere. While interlinked in their creation, they demand different remedies.
The creation of these crises originated in the financial part of the economy:
Over the last 15 years, increased competition (within the industry and increasingly from non-banking institutions) and the reduction of earning from the commoditisation of products forced banks to rely on "voodoo banking" - performance enhancement to boost returns.
Voodoo banking created money out of nothing, pushed it down the throats of gullible consumers and sold the such created debt assets to gullible investors.
The regulators stood by or were even complicit in the gigantomaniac Ponzi scheme. The fictitious financial industry grew ten times bigger than the real one it was betting on.
Driven by brutal marketing the consumers indebted themselves more and more. They used the money to buy more and more stuff. Houses, cars or whatever China could produce for them. This artificial demand created production capacity that under more benign circumstance would never have been created. World wide car building capacity now by far exceeds plausible demand.
But finally the consumer was exhausted. Even at 0% interest and no income questions asked there was no one left to take on another loan to buy another house at astronomic prices. The bubble burst.
The financial pyramid came down first. Investors found out they had been lied to. Banks found they held the toxic stuff they had created in their own portfolios. Lehman crashed and took everyone with it.
The feds and governments of this world try to pump money into the financial industry black hole to reanimate the bubble economics. This will inevitably fail. The financial industry is mostly insolvent. No one will lend to another financial entity unless it knows it will get its money back.
As everyone by now recognizes, no one can trust the statement of a bank CEO, balance sheet numbers, the rating agencies ratings, the regulators neutrality, finance media talking heads or politicians.
No one lends in such an environment no matter how much money is thrown into the game. Bernake's quantitative easing will fail.
In the end all financial business is based on trust. Trust in the system and in counter-parties is gone.
The only way to revive some kind of financial system is to sort out the bad apples, to open the books, to re-regulate to very clear and simple standards. And yes, throw some folks into jail. Unless that gets done, trust will not come back.
The real world has a different problem. The artificial demand created by debt peddled to the consumer has evaporated. The production capacities that were created to satisfy that demand are now standing still. Unless debt gets forgiven the consumers will, for many years to come, not be able to go on another buying binge.
Lots of people will now become unemployed. The production capacity will rot away one way or another just like many of those cheaply build overpriced houses.
There is no way to avoid this now. The government can create some demand and put some people to work with infrastructure investment. But it can not replace all the artificial consumer demand that has withered away. If it tries by pumping up money supply it might well create an immense inflation in the mid of a depression.
My grandfather left me some Reichsmark notes. One has 100 million printed on it. But before it was issued the 100 million got overprinted in red with 1 billion. It may have bought a loaf of bread at that time.
The fixing of the financial realm will come when authorities get real with re-regulation and shutting down zombie institutions.
A fixing of the real economy is not possible. Production capacity has to shrink back to a more realistic demand level. Public programs can help to soften the slump. What can and should be done is to help those who lose their jobs, be that by public works or some payed retraining. To let wages fall, as soon some will argue for, will only decrease demand further.
Such crashes as the current one happen every century or so. Usually after the generation that lived through the last crash is gone. Then people forget and redo the errors their ancestors committed.
Unfortunately the politicians that have the task to find ways out of the crisis also redo the errors their ancestors committed.
Instead of cleaning up the Augean stable that the financial industry is, they feed the animals to produce more dung. Instead of letting over-production capacity decay, they will try to keep it going through subsidies and tariff barriers. It will take years until some sanity will get into their action.
Stable societies can survive such storms. Unstable societies may see large revolts and wars. Some stable societies may join in on those wars as domestic Keynesian programs. To created demand at home, to put unemployed into uniforms and in hope to capture this or that natural resource.
Let's hope that will not happen.
But I am not optimistic anymore. This is not just another recession. This is a depression and a global one. Not a great one, but greater.
Posted by b on December 17, 2008 at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (74)
December 16, 2008
On Values, Human Rights and Their Interpretation
The Chinese take a neutral stand on foreign internal issues. Like on Sudan, where China buys oil and does not loudmouth much about remote struggles in Darfur, liberal interventionists and their neocon brethren damn them for such behavior whenever it suits their goals.
There are some basic issues where all nations agree upon, like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights . But even there the interpretation of these rights already varies, and this not only between the 'west' and others, but between each pair of societies. 'Everyone has the right to life,' says the declaration. How does that fit with the death penalty and opinions thereon in Europe and the U.S.?
Then there is the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which most parties have signed with the notable exception of a bunch of Arab countries at the Persian Gulf, most of whom are allies to the 'western' countries that ratified the treaty. How can that be?
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights includes the 'right to work' and the 'right to social security'. It has 159 full parties. The U.S. signed the treaty in 1977 but is one of the very few countries that never ratified it.
Which is to show only that such rights are never really universal, especially when it comes to interpretation of internal issues in other countries.
The French President Sarkozy recently received the Dalai Lama in official capacity. When China expressed concern, Sarcozy cited 'European values'. The Chinese remember those very well.
I like the Chinese stand on this:
China on Tuesday said it doesn't accept the French leader Nicholas Sarkozy using "European values" as a pretext to defend its act that hurts fundamental interests of other countries.
" We will not interfere in the values adopted by other countries. At the same time we cannot accept using these values as an excuse for act that hurts the fundamental interests of other nations and peoples ," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told the regular Tuesday press briefing. ... Liu's said this when asked to comment on French President Sarkozy's recent remarks that the French side would like to restart dialogue with China, but "not at the price of renouncing our own European values."
The Chinese spokesman took a traditional stand on Westphalian sovereignty which is some time tested real European valuable consideration.
My personal stand on 'rights' and 'values' discussions between nations was well expressed in a recent interview (in German, my translation) with the former German chancellor Schmidt:
I have great sympathies for human rights, but I am very concerned when, in the name of human rights, political aims, or even strategic aims, are pursued.
Over the last years the U.S. neocons used 'human rights' as a sales argument for their destructive policy aims. The incoming Obama administration will use the argument even more. Whether that will be from genuine conviction or as a tactical argument will be difficult to decipher in the onslaught of propaganda that will accompany it in this or that case of 'needed' military intervention.
I for one will adhere to Schmidt's warning and take the Chinese standpoint. You may not like the 'values' of others. But that is not an argument to force your 'values' onto them, especially not with force.
Posted by b on December 16, 2008 at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (63)
Posted by b on December 16, 2008 at 03:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (91)
Stimuli And Global Balance
Obama is preparing a bigger stimulus package for the U.S. The rumored size is now $1 trillion. The U.S. already has a huge current account deficit. It consumes more than it produces. The stimulus will likely make that deficit bigger. But Paul Krugman will be happy now because he demanded a bigger package.
Germany, like China, has a large current account surplus. It produces more than it consumes. The German government is dragging its feet over spending more money on stimulus measures. Today Krugman bashes Germany for not launching a bigger stimulus on its own.
We have a group of countries, the U.S. UK, Spain, ... that had a credit induced spending binge and produced little, while others, China, Germany, Japan, ... produced for exports and saved.
There is an imbalance between those groups which will have to be adjusted one way or another.
When Krugman prescribes stimulus for both sides of the game there is something wrong with his thinking. Stimulus on both sides of the scale can not help to regain a balance. It only freezes the current situation.
So should the U.S. do a Keynsian stimulus at all?
As Yves Smith argues it is probably the wrong thing to do:
The US in the 1920s was the world's biggest creditor, exporter, and manufacturer. Our position then is analogous to China's now. Indeed, Keynes in the 1930s urged America to take even more aggressive measures, and argued that it was not reasonable for the US to expect over-consuming, debt-burdened countries like the UK and France to take up the demand slack. So even though most economists are invoking Keynes, it isn't clear he's prescribe such aggressive stimulus for the US and UK now.
The big U.S. stimulus package risks to crash the dollar. That may help to reignite local production, but will make the accumulated debt burden harder to carry as lenders will demand sharply higher interests.
Could China and Germany launch big stimuli programs to create local demand for all the surplus goods they export?
Michael Pettis, Professor for Finance at Peking University, says no:
The problem with this solution is that the scale of the adjustment is beyond the capacity of most countries. A decline in US consumption equal to 5 per cent of US GDP, for example (which is a low estimate), would require an increase in Chinese consumption equal to 17 per cent of Chinese GDP - or a nearly 40 per cent growth in consumption. This is clearly unlikely.
The German current account surplus this year will be some $250 billion. The total German government spending for 2009 is planed to be $400 billion. I doubt that Germany could raise that by 60% for a big stimulus and ignite consumption of that size.
M. Pettis:
That leaves one other way to adjust - a sharp decline in global production , with massive factory bankruptcies to end overcapacity. The burden of the adjustment will fall on trade-surplus countries, unless trade-deficit countries are willing to absorb a large part of it. But given political realities it is Asian production which is most likely to decline. The economic pain will be high and potentially destabilising.
There seems to be no way out.
Stimulus programs in the U.S. will help to soften the crash a bit, but they will not solve the basic problem of the need to global re-balancing. A controlled dollar decline over time might help in longer terms.
Stimulus in the surplus countries might induce a bit more consumption there, but will not solve the quite huge problems either. Whatever is available in financial means in these countries will be needed for social measures when production shrinks sharply and unemployment rises.
There was and is over-consumption in the U.S. and overproduction elsewhere. Both, global consumption and production, will decline for now to a globally lower level. Over the longer term, a re-balance of production capacity to consumption capability towards a more local level will have to be made.
All the current stimulus talk simply papers over this.
Posted by b on December 15, 2008 at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)
Then he adds:
These new weapons for the Iraq will be delivered in 2013, and they are sophisticated and difficult to operate and maintain, so will require training and technical help from the US military.
McClatchy writes : Striking someone with a shoe is a grave insult in Islam. Duh. Is throwing shoes a sign of affection in Christianity? Do Buddhist throw shoes at each other to express gratitude?
Posted by b on December 14, 2008 at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)
To Juan Cole
Juan Cole cites some Iraqi weapon purchase:
* 20 T-6A Texan trainer aircraft. * 36 AT-6B Texan II Light Attack Aircraft. * 26 Bell 407 Armed Helicopters, each equipped with a M280 2.75-inch Launcher, a XM296 .50 Cal. Machine Gun, and a M299 Hellfire Guided Missile Launcher. '
Then he adds:
These new weapons for the Iraqi Air Force will be delivered in 2013, and they are sophisticated and difficult to operate and maintain, so will require training and technical help from the US military.
Dear Juan, you obviously think otherwise, but planes, helicopters or whatever else are not really too sophisticated and difficult for Arabs to operate and maintain them on their own.
Posted by b on December 14, 2008 at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)
Madoff And Realistic Returns
In a piece about the fall of Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme, two NYT writers show a profound misunderstanding of basic economics:
Mr. Madoff's promised returns were relatively realistic -- about 10 percent a year -- though they were unrealistically steady.
The quasi risk free return on 10-year U.S. treasuries over the last 10 years was less than some 5 percent. A return of 10 percent per year can then only be relatively realistic if the risk of a loss of the invested capital is relatively high. That is the point Madoff's investors failed to understand too.
On another aspect of that fall: In a comment dan of steele says:
[O]ne possible positive outcome outcome from all this will be a bit less cash available to AIPAC.
That is likely as the NY Times emphasizes the Jewishness of many Madoff investors:
The Wilpon family, the main owners of the New York Mets, and Yeshiva University both confirmed that they had invested with Mr. Madoff, and a Jewish charity in Massachusetts said it would lay off its five employees and close after losing nearly all of its $7 million endowment. Other investors included prominent Jewish families in New York and Florida.
In another piece the Jewish charity from above is specified :
The news was equally devastating for the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation by sending teenagers to Israel and supporting other Jewish education efforts.
Sound a bit like Lebensborn to me. It is better for all if such stuff loses its financing.
Posted by b on December 13, 2008 at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)
A Missed Faux Pax
It seems that all major U.S. media did not report this faux pax:
Secretary of State Condolezza Rice said Thursday that the establishment of a Jewish state would serve as a solution to national aspirations of American Hebrew citizens.
"Once a Jewish state is established, I can come to the American Hebrews, whom we call American Jews, and say to them 'you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere,'" Rice was quoted by National Public Radio as saying to students at a New Yorker high school. Rice: American Hebrews should move once Jewish state established
She later took that back - somewhat:
The American secretary of state has backed off from an earlier stance favoring expulsion of American Jews once a Jewish state is created.
"The national aspirations (of the Jews) should be realized elsewhere, but there is no question of carrying out a transfer or forcing them to leave," said Condolezza Rice Rice retracts racist remarks
Posted by b on December 13, 2008 at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
December 12, 2008
Ring The Bells: Iraq Wins - Shrub Shuffles Off
by Debs is dead lifted and edited from a comment
If you are wondering why the media coverage of Iraq was not amped up after the election as many expected, why the American invaders hadn't gone back to their murdering and thieving ways now an election no longer depended on quiet, the answer is simple, the status of forces agreement which finally draws a line under America's attempted theft of a sovereign nation details such a resounding defeat for the American empire, that the Bushites 'neglected' to release an English language version of the final draft enacted in the Iraqi parliament last week.
Long term Baghdad correspondent Patrick Cockburn provides the inside running on America's full spectrum defeat, news of which was swamped by the Mumbai attacks last week. One wonders why; since despite America's attempt to shift the focus of it's wanton slaughter from Iraq of the Mid East, to Pakistan, West Asia, there can be little doubt that the eventual outcome of that crime will be America getting it's head handed to it there, also. The Americans have gained nothing and whilst the Iraqis are hurting from the loss of more than a million citizens slaughtered in this inexcusable breach of national sovereignty, they should have an under-lying sense of pride in the fact that they fought the evil empire and won. So what is in the Sofa that makes it such a win? All American troops will be pulled out of all cities by June 2009 and out of the Green Zone within a few weeks. All American troops of any sort have to leave within the next three years. There will be no enduring bases. All military operations must have the prior approval of the Iraqi Government. Immunity has gone and the blackwater mercenaries will be tried within Iraq under Iraqi law like the common criminals they are. No operations against other nations can be mounted from within Iraq.
Cockburn commented:
Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.
Cockburn goes on to say that the last minute hold ups were the result of a recognition by the Sunni and Kurd minorities that the Shia clique will dominate the political elite and they were holding out for as many concessions as possible realising that a lever such as this won't be available once the power shift has occurred.
He also highlights the role that Muqtada al-Sadr played in this great victory, in that the Sadrists outspoken opposition to any 'compromises' by the weak-kneed American owned factions ensured that the parliament was solid in it's opposition to any last minute surrender (IE bribery or extortion by America). The Iraqi citizens of all sects particularly the ruling shia made it plain that any pol who gave in to any of America's demands would be punished politically and probably personally. Sadr's 'extreme' position created the space for the 'moderates' to gather in unanimous opposition to the ceding of Iraqi sovereignty.
Americans will never hear of this great defeat. It's amazing that such a thing could happen but unsurprising really. I mean to say the fact that Americans are queuing up in droves to see "Frost Nixon the movie" rather than watching the original interviews kinda says it all.
Nixon's persona has been re-crafted, his reputation has been salvaged by Ron Howard's revisionist rewrite of history. I mean the original interviews were bad enough. I'm sure many other remember the original with it's evasions and distortions. Over 80% of the interviews were edited out so as to begin the distortions to rehabilitate Nixon. Howard's film is the end of that process. A necessary revamp to re-affirm the fantasy that the American prez is an omniscient, omnipotent being - incapable of error let alone corruption, dishonesty or a callous disregard for his 'subjects'.
In the same way no one will discuss Iraq for the next 5 years - then a revisionist mockumentary/docudrama distortion masquerading as reality will be pushed down the throats of the American population. naturally there will be some disagreement by those wanting to set the record straight.
The makers and the shrub-ites will stonewall making the most absurd denials of facts we know to be correct. They won't care because their assertions that WMD were found in Iraq and that Saddam organised 9/11 will resurface a few years later - all spelled out in banner headlines - news stories right before the empire tries this crap on again.
But we must salute Mesopotamian strength and resolute determination and total sacrifice. (American sacrifice is summed up by the FA-18 pilot who ejected over a suburb leaving his plane to crash into houses killing at least three. When I lived in Darwin where there is a large military airfield bang smack in the centre of town I can remember at least two instances where Oz pilots refused to eject preferring to stay with their fighter so as to ensure it crashed out at see away from other humans. The pilots died - no time to eject if you want to save civilians).
The reality which has evaded many empire's elites is simple. We the people only ever fight hard when it is our own nation in danger. A few gung ho fools whose bicep measurement beats their IQ is all they ever muster keen for these nasty crimes.
Posted by b on December 12, 2008 at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (54)
From Cooperation To World Threat - Iran And Eritrea Rumors
Two weeks ago an Eritrean opposition site published a rumor about cooperation between Iran and Eritrea to revamp an old refinery in Assab, Eritrea.
That rumor developed into a story on U.S. blogs, news sites and Israeli TV about imminent deployment of Iranian ballistic missiles, troops, submarines, helicopters and UAVs to the city of Assab to control the Red Sea.
Iranian ships and submarines have deployed an undisclosed number of Iranian troops and weapons at the Eritrean port town of Assab at the Horn of Africa in the Arabian Sea just below the Strait of Hormuz. As such, the port town is in a unique postion its location allows it to control and monitor one of the world's most strategic shipping routes.
Now right-wing sites like Blackfive are concerned :
This is exceptionally bad news as a quick look at the map will show.
One might see this as bad news if it would be true. But the report is totally false.
Below I document how this story developed, grew and proliferated throughout the Internets within a quite short time-frame.
Some background:
Eritrea is a dirt poor country with some 5.5 million inhabitants at the Red Sea. It is a dictatorship and has border conflicts with Ethiopia and Djibouti. It has a somewhat strategic position at the Bab-el-Mandeb street which connects the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
The harbor city of Assab has some 100,000 inhabitants. In the early 1960s the Soviets built a small refinery there with a capacity (pdf) of 18,000 barrels per day. The refinery was shut down in 1997 for lack of spare parts and money.
Eritrea, a former Italian colony, had good relations with the U.S.until the Bush administration through Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer took sides with Ethiopia in a UN moderated border resolution and even supported Ethiopia in buying arms from North Korea. Israel uses a former Soviet navy base on the Eritrean Dahlak Archipelago to refuel its sub-marines that patrol in the Arabian sea.
In May the Eritrean president visited Tehran and in the following months several Memoranda of Understanding were signed between the two countries on cultural and economic cooperation. Iran is now also mediating between Djibouti and Eritrea.
Now back to the scare story.
The very first source and the one and only all following reports have been build upon is the Eritrean opposition site selfi-democracy.com of the Eritrean Democratic Party. On November 25 it published this (pdf):
Top Secret Deal?
IRAN TO CONTROL THE ERITREAN PORT OF ASSAB: (source : from inside Eritrea) According to news received from Eritrea, Iran is to revamp the Russian built Assab refinery. Iran will refine its crude in Assab to cover the shortages it faces at home and of course Eritrea benfits from not having to import expensive refined products.
But, the motive behind this deal is believed to be more political and strategic than economic. Iran, due to its conflict with the West and in particular with the US, is under embargo which may be further extended and tightened if it continues with its nuclear programs. Thus, Iran may be trying to find some renegade states to help her break the embargo and who could be a better partner for this than Eritrea's President Isayas.
Isayas' personal blind hate of the US administration and everything it stands for is boundless and he will spare no effort to upset the Americans. Strategically Iran and Isayas, with the cooperation of some rebel Somali Islamist groups, are also colliding to control the Bab El Mandeb Straights in case of any escalation of conflict with the United States and Israel. According to our source some high ranking members of the Eritrean regime are saying that the President is playing with fire and that the consequences for Eritrea could be grave.
There is a lot of innuendo in there but not one word about Iranian soldiers, ships or submarines. Iran refines some 2.1 million barrels of oil per day in its own country and is expanding that capacity to 3+ million bl/day. To revamp a small and old 18,000 bl/d refinery in Eritrea would do nothing to help Iran "to cover the shortages it faces at home". There is also no other public record of any cooperation between Iran and Eritrea with regards to the defunct refinery. Iran is usually very eager to publish such cooperation. All that's left is rumor and speculation.
Another Eritrean site, asena-online , picked up the selfi-democracy story on November 26. Its item is in a language I can not read (Tigrinya) but it is less than 80 words long and at the end links back to the selfi-democracy item. I therefore doubt that it adds any additional information.
On November 29 the Sudan Tribune takes the original report and adds some rather fantastic points:
November 29, 2008 (ADDIS ABABA) -- An Eritrean opposition website, selfi-democracy.com, said that Iran's submarines have deployed an undisclosed number of armed Iranian troops and weapons in the Eritrean port town of Assab.
The unconfirmed report claims that Iran recently sent soldiers and also a number of long-range missiles after Iran signed an accord with Eritrea to revamp the Russian-built Assab Oil refinery. ... The Eritrean opposition website now reports that Iran will refine its crude oil in Assab to cover shortages it faces at home, which will benefit Eritrea by not having to import expensive refined products.
But the report argued, "The motivation behind this deal is believed to be more political and more strategic than economic."
The last cited sentence and some others in the full piece are word by word from the selfi-democracy report quoted above. It is the only source given in that article. But the original selfi-democracy report does not include a word about anything military like submarines.The Sudan Tribune writer simply invented those "Iranian submarines" but attributed them to selfi-democracy .
The last sentence of the Sudan Tribune piece adds something unrelated:
Meanwhile, four NATO unmanned surveillance planes were reported to have flown for about half an hour earlier this week in Eritrea's Red Sea region.
The Sudan Tribune piece was composed by one Tesfa-alem Tekle. Tesfa-alem
is an Ethiopian journalist based in Mekelle, northern Ethiopia. He holds a degree in English from Addis Ababa University and an advanced diploma in Journalism. He has worked as public relation officer for various international organizations in Ethiopia. He has been writing for both local and international media since 2001. He is the currently the Reuters correspondent for northern Ethiopiais
An Ethiopian, arch enemies of Eritreans, picked an Eritrean opposition report about a refinery repair in Abbad, added lots of Iranian weapon nonsense and published that in the Sudan Tribune .
The same day another Eritrean opposition site, Eritrea Daily , mixes the above three versions and some fantasy into its own report:
29 November 2008-- An Eritrean website in Tigrigna, asena-online.com, reported on Wednesday that Iran has stationed its troops in Eritrea.
Citing sources from inside Eritrea, same website said that using submarine ships heavily armed units of the Iranian army have landed in the Eritrean sea port of Assab. The Iranian troops are slated to be stationed in the city of Assab reportedly under the pretext of protecting the Russian-built Eritrean Assab Oil Refinary. Earlier, on Tuesday, yet another Eritrean website, selfi-democracy.com, had, quoting also sources from inside Eritrea, reported that Eritrea tyrant Afewerki had granted Iran complete and exclusive control over the Eritrean Oil Refinary with the mandate to revamp, manage, and exercise complete authority over production and maintenance of the facility. ... Asena-online further reported that the Iranian troops were loaded with a good number of ballistic and long-range missiles.
Moreover, this same website also submitted that according to reports coming from inside Eritrea, Iran flew surveillance missions over the skies of the Eritrea part of the Redsea using 2 UAV(NATO) accompanied by 4 helicopters for 30 minutes around 4 pm on Tuesday.
This is the first piece that mentions missiles.The last sentence seems to be a garbled and extended version of the last sentence in the Sudan Tribune piece while adding Iranian UAVs from thin air. It is also very doubtful that Iranian submarines would be able to operate at that distance from their home and be able to carry land troops.
The McClatchy Tribune Information Service distributed the Sudan Tribune report via Comtex .
The Israeli 'selective translation' propaganda service MEMRI picked up on December 1:
Eritrean opposition websites reported that Eritrea has granted Iran total control of the Red Sea port of Assab, which overlooks the Bab Al-Mandeb straits. ... According to the report, Iranian submarines deployed troops, weapons, and long range missiles in the port of Assab, under the pretext of defending the local oil refinery.
MEMRI names selfi-democracy , the Sudan Tribune and Eritrea Daily as its sources.
On December 3 the Corner at the National Review has 'Top News' that points to some Persian site's report :
Eritrean opposition claims Eritrea has provided the Assab base on the Red Sea to Iranian submarines
On December 8 a right-wing zionist (James Woolsey, Abraham H. Foxman, ..) site, The Cutting Edge News , carries a longer piece mixing various parts of the above:
Iranian ships and submarines have deployed an undisclosed number of Iranian troops and weapons at the Eritrean port town of Assab, according to opposition groups, foreign diplomats, and NGOs in the area. ... Using protection of the Eritrean refinery as a pretext, Iran has set up its military operation there, and has been patrolling with unmanned surveillance drones. ... President Isayas has granted Iran complete and exclusive control over the Eritrean Oil Refinary with the mandate to revamp, manage, and exercise complete authority over production and maintenance of the facility. Iran will refine its crude oil in Assab to cover shortages it faces at home, which will benefit Eritrea by not having to import expensive refined products.
The Eritrean Democratic Party, an opposition party, pointed to trepidation within the Eritrean regime, indicating that some high-ranking members are saying that the president is playing with fire with Iran and that the consequences for Eritrea could be grave.
The piece is written by one Joseph Grieboski who is the Cutting Edge Foreign Editor, President of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy , which he founded himself and which was "twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (by whom?), and Secretary General, Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom. In 2007 that conference got a $250,000 earmark through the State Department. One recent conference was in Grieboski's hometown Scranton :
Scranton will enter into a sister-city relationship between Scranton and Mekele, Ethiopia, a city of 169,000. Doherty said he first met officials from Ethiopia during the institute's diplomatic dinner at the Scranton Cultural Center in July.
Grieboski also lobbied Congress against the 2007 "Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act". He is obviously pro-Ethiopia and anti-Eritrea.
During the last few days a lot of blogs and news sites reproduced and discussed the Cutting Edge report.
An Israeli TV station's report on December 9 also seems to be based on the Cutting Edge piece:
According to local reports Iranian troops and a large number of long range ballistic missiles have also been deployed at a military base at the port and Iranian unmanned drones daily patrol the area.
Closing the circle a day later, the Eritrea Daily , one of the original rumor spreaders and the one which added the Iranian UAVs, repeats the Israeli TV report.
Starting from a rumor over some Iranian-Eritrean cooperation on an old refinery, several interested sites add military aspects, submarines, missiles and UAVs, to build a world-threatening scenario. MEMRI, NRO, an Ethiopian lobbyist and Israeli TV spread the rumors. Bloggers take it from there.
This is a bit like the game of telephone or Chinese Whisper played out on the Internets. But here everyone adds a bit of disinformation until a cooperation rumor builds into threat to the world within just 12 days.
Next: The UN Security Council plans to sanction Eritrea for stationing Iranian strategic missiles.
Posted by b on December 12, 2008 at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)
S.&.P. Companies' Divestment
If anyone who wondered why many U.S. companies fell behind in international competition in recent years these S&P numbers via Floyd Norris tell part of the story (last line added):
Over the last four years, since the buyback boom began, from the fourth quarter of 2004 through the third quarter of 2008, companies in the S.&P. 500 showed:
Reported earnings: $2.42 trillion - Stock buybacks: $1.73 trillion - Dividends: $0.91 trillion ---------------------------------- De-capitalization: $0.22 trillion
Over the last four years the S&P 500 companies did not invest one dime of their earnings into additional or new business or increased productivity. Instead they divested and gave $220 billion of their basic equity back to their shareholders.
This was an extremely shortsighted behavior. Sure, these companies used part of their revenue to replace depreciated capital expenditures (machinery and the like). But if anything was spend for additional research or new opportunities at all, it must have been financed by taking on additional debt. This debt will turn out to be poisonous in the downturn.
Most of this can likely be laid on the idiotic practice of paying short term bonuses to CEOs for rising stock prices. A stock buyback will lead to a rising stock price as it increases demand and lowers supply of that stock. Buybacks were just a simple way for greedy CEOs to increase their personal income at the cost of the long term validity of the business.
Posted by b on December 11, 2008 at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Behind 'Fighting Piracy'
The guy who probably knows best about piracy around Somali is Andrew Mwangura. He has been involved in many negotiations of ransom payments for captured ships. His view (h/t b real who does a great job in keeping MoA readers informed of the issue):
" Piracy can't be solved by a military solution ," Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan branch of the East African Seafarers' Association, told journalists in Nairobi. "We need to go back to the origin. Don't call them criminals ... let's have dialogue, sit down and talk." ... "If you are not going to invite the local community, it is not going to work," he said. "We need to come up with a regional piracy information centre, security in Somalia and a regional action plan on illegal fishing and toxic dumping. "
Fishermen began targeting ships in the early 90s, saying they were defending their coastline from illegal fishing and boats dumping toxic waste in Somali waters.
The Somali informal coast guard, aka the pirates , seem to be somewhat successful with regards to illegal fishing. David Axe is currently in Mombasa, Kenya. He writes :
Mombasa itself is safe from pirates: the distance is too great, and the Kenyan navy is out in force. But Mombasa-based shippers, mariners, shipping agents and myriad others who depend on regional sea trade have suffered greatly from the steady rise in Somali piracy in the last decade. Habib Hakem operates a deep-sea fishing company whose boats can range as far as the Somali border. But piracy has put a dent in his trade. Last year he had 60 clients. This year, just 15. He pins the decline on fishermen's fear of kidnapping.
Habib Hakem may "suffer greatly" now that his illegal fishing business is down. But this is a great success for Somalia's informal coast guard. Others have helped. The Indian navy sunk a Thai trawler which was illegally fishing in Somali waters. They thought it was a pirate mother-ship. It was not, but from the Somali point of view, the Indians hit the right target and created a good deterrence effect .
Fighting the pirates does not make sense from an economic standpoint. Of some 20,000 ships going through the area only some 100 have been attacked this year and only some 40 were actually captured. Nobody was killed. Ransom was payed and the ships went back to the oceans.
Galrahn calculates the cost and benefit for the European Union fleet just sent to 'fight the pirates':
[T]he starting point to estimate the cost of the whole operation should be around $129 million. Other costs associated with a heightened operational tempo could increase the cost by another $20 million or more.
As of the first part of October this year, pirates have collected an estimated $30 million in ransoms in 2008.
It is cheaper to pay the toll the pirates demand, than to fight them. But the EU does not care about the cost or about piracy at all. It is happy it finally managed to launch some military action, even if senseless, without a U.S. lead. The whole idea behind this action is to prepare its population for a more military interventionist and imperial EU attitude.
The U.S. would not have that for long. It now presses for a U.N. resolution to intervene on Somali grounds:
It proposes that for a year, nations "may take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia, including in its airspace, to interdict those who are using Somali territory to plan, facilitate or undertake acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea and to otherwise prevent those activities."
That is carte blache for anyone to kill Somalis. The AP is not shy about the U.S. motive:
Without committing more U.S. Navy ships, the Bush administration wants to tap into what officials see as a growing enthusiasm in Europe and elsewhere for more effective coordinated action against the Somali pirates.
Read: The U.S. wants to use the EU as a proxy force to press its own imperial designs on the Horn of Africa.
The pirates are a nuisance, not a danger to world commerce. They have a grievance that pushes them into the business. If one intends to solve the problem helping Somalis to keep foreign illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping away from their coast would be the best approach.
But no one but the pirates themselves seems to have that intention at all. World powers simply use the issue to press their various designs to snap up African resources.
Posted by b on December 11, 2008 at 03:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (114)
Fabricating A 'First Obama Scandal'
Writes the NYT on its front page:
The Obama team is dealing with its first scandal in an era when media scrutiny and partisan attacks can escalate any flap into a serious political problem.
"Its first scandal," according to the NYT, is that the Obama campaign and transition had hardly any contact with the corrupt governor of Illinois with regards to his selection of a new Senator.
With a new administration to build and a financial crisis worsening by the day, Mr. Obama and his advisers had bigger issues on their plate. Moreover, they wanted to keep their distance from Mr. Blagojevich, who was already known to be under federal investigation into possible corruption.
So the Obama team was not involved at all. But then the NYT goes on to quote two side figures from the Clinton aera:
"This is a huge distraction at the worst possible moment," said Lanny J. Davis, a former White House special counsel who did damage control for President Bill Clinton.
And it can grow if not handled properly. "It's like the whirlwind," said Chris Lehane, another veteran of the Clinton teams. "You get pulled into the vortex more and more."
The involvement of two Clinton figures pushing the story is ominous.
Yesterday the NYT had similar piece. It first described how Obama pushed, successfully, for an ethics law in Illinois which eventually was helpful to indict Governor Blagojevich. Then it went on:
Beyond the irony of its outcome, Mr. Obama's unusual decision to inject himself into a statewide issue during the height of his presidential campaign was a reminder that despite his historic ascendancy to the White House, he has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics.
Josh Marshall's summerized that NYT take:
By lobbying for ethics reform, Obama showed he could not escape the murky world of corrupt Chicago pols.
This is a transparent campaign to fabricate a scandal around Obama where none is.It seems to me the NYT is trying to instigate a new Whitewater witch hunt.
That is certainly a good distraction from the currently ongoing gang robbery of taxpayer money camouflaged as bailouts.
In next weekend's NYT edition: "Obama's non-involvement in child porn distribution ruins his education policy agenda."
Posted by b on December 11, 2008 at 01:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)
December 10, 2008
What started as student protests now seems to develop into a general revolution against the unloved conservative government. The unions joined today with a general strike. A $28 billion bailout for banks who do not seem to need it versus half a billion for anti-poverty measures when 20% of the population lives below the poverty line did not go down well with the people.
Talos at EuroTrib summarizes the real social reasons behind the protests:
ubiquitous police brutality against youth, immigrants, the weak - brutality that routinely goes unpunished as it is swept under the rug; deep systemic corruption and perception of corruption; increasing income gaps; entry level monthly wages in specialized jobs < 700 euro that don't visibly lead to something better; precarity for the under 35s; a life suppressing yet utterly ineffective educational system; the death of hope; the break-up of existing social patterns; the decay of public services; a justice system plagued with scandal itself; massive bailouts for the bankers - the same bankers who simply refuse to enact laws that they don't like (no, really). And on top of that the Crisis promising even more immiseration and discomfort... Now that I look at the list, the question really is: why didn't this explosion happen sooner?
There are rumors of a possible declaration of emergency rule. If that comes, this will explode into something bigger than street riots.
There some blogging from Greece at OccupiedLondon (h/t drunkasarule ). Please add reliable sources/news in the comments.
Posted by b on December 10, 2008 at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)
An Undeserved Peace Prize
Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president just got a Nobel Peace Prize. But what about this?
Mr. Ahtisaari found himself defending the U.S. invasion, the absence of a nuclear or biological weapons program notwithstanding. "Since I know that about a million people have been killed by the government of Iraq, I do not need much those weapons of mass destruction," he said. Nobel Finn
May be Saddam really killed so many people. If he did, it was over some 30 years. The 'western' sanctions nearly killed as many in a much shorter timeframe. The U.S. war on Iraq, supported by Martti Ahtisaari, killed as many in just five years.
As far as I know Martti Ahtisaari never retracted the above. He does not deserve a peace prize.
Posted by b on December 10, 2008 at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Posted by b on December 9, 2008 at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (92)
December 08, 2008
Another NYT Kremlin Slanders Story
The New York Times runs another of its Putin/Russia slander stories.
A Russian potash mining company, Uralkali, owned by oligarch Dmitri E. Rybolovlev, had some trouble two years ago when its main mine collapsed and opened up a big sinkhole. The damage on the surface is severe and it will cost hundreds of millions to reroute major train tracks and to resettle people. A first investigation found that the company was not to blame. But the government recently reopened the investigation.
The NYT describes this as a raid attempt by the Putin government to take over the company. It rumors of stock manipulation and attempts to crash the companies shares. It leaves out the information that would allow the reader to put this into the real context. Most importantly it leaves out recent news that refutes its whole story.
In late October, one of Vladimir V. Putin's top lieutenants abruptly summoned a billionaire mining oligarch to a private meeting. The official, Igor I. Sechin, had taken a sudden interest in a two-year-old accident at the oligarch's highly lucrative mining operations here in Russia's industrial heartland.
Mr. Sechin, who is a leader of a shadowy Kremlin faction tied to the state security services, said he was ordering a new inquiry into the mishap, according to minutes of the meeting. With a deputy interior minister who investigates financial crime at his side, Mr. Sechin threatened crippling fines against the company, Uralkali.
It seems to me the meeting was not private, but quite official. The mine owner received heads up that the investigation into the accident would be re-opened. The company disclosed as much on November 6.
Mr. Sechin, who the NYT reader might by now see as a shadowy KGB agent who 'abruptly summons' firendly billionaires is a Deputy Prime Minister responsible for: development and implementation of state policy in the field of industry development and energy state policy regarding nature management and environmental protection implementation of ecological, technological and nuclear supervision
That seems to me to be the legitimate position in Putin's government to look into that huge mining accident investigation. But reading the NYT piece, you will never learn that Mr. Sechin is indeed the top government guy for these issues, including mining, and that decisions about the investigation is certainly within his fields of responsibility. Instead you learn of him as a 'leader of a shadowy Kremlin faction tied to the state security services'.
[Mr. Rybolovlev] further sought to fend off the inquiry by saying he would pay for some of the damage to infrastructure from the accident, a mine collapse that injured no one but left a gaping sinkhole.
His offer was rebuffed, and it seemed clear why: the Kremlin was maneuvering to seize Uralkali outright.
The offer was indeed rebuffed. A commission is still assessing the total damage.Why should the state settle when the damage amount is yet unknown?
From there on the NYT writer produces a lot of innuendos, but no fact, that would let one come to the conclusion he presents, that "the Kremlin was maneuvering to seize Uralkali outright."
Here is a typical construct he uses:
Mr. Sechin's role in the Uralkali inquiry immediately caused analysts and investors to presume that the company was in peril. Uralkali's stock, once highly prized by fund managers, has plunged more than 60 percent since the inquiry began, far more than the broader Russian stock market.
Could it be possible that not Mr. Sechin's role was what caused a sell off in Uralkali shares, but the simple fact that investors learned from the company disclosure that it might have to pay for several hundred millions of damages its mine caused?
As for the stock quote drop: on the left the Russian RTS index , on the right the Uralkali stock price for the last six month. -
Did the stock really behave much different than the general stock market?
Continues the Times:
Around the time of the meeting called by Mr. Sechin on Oct. 29 in Moscow, there was a sharp spike in short selling in Uralkali's stock on the London Stock Exchange -- that is, bets that the stock would fall, according to Data Explorers, an analytical firm that studied the securities data at the request of The New York Times. The meeting itself was not made public until Nov. 7, at which point the stock plummeted.
Within the context of the Times story, the reader will assume that some Kremlin miscreant shorted the stock. But if Mr. Rybolovlev learned about the new investigation during his meeting with Mr. Sechin, might he not himself have shorted his companies stock?
Mr. Rybolovlev is well know to take advantage of sudden events. When that sinkhole (pictures) at his major mine widened last year, it broke the rail-lines which connected a competitors mine nearby to the world markets. With the competition disabled, Mr. Rybolovlev immediately stopped new sales by his own companies to further push up market prices for his product.
But now the biggest bummer by the NYT.
It published its story on Sunday with the dateline December 7. The whole story construct hangs on the premise that the Kremlin wants to take over Uralkali.
But on December 4 Reuters reported: Russian minister doesn't blame Uralkali for accident
A Russian minister has said that he believes that Uralkali should not be blamed for a mining accident in 2006, and shares in the firm have soared by 20% in London in response.
That little fact did not make it into the Times story that was published three days later.
It would not have fit the slander the NYT wanted to apply.
Posted by b on December 8, 2008 at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)
Pakistan Did Something - And Now?
According to AP Pakistan nabbed a few people thought by some to be related to the attacks in Mumbai:
Security forces overran a militant camp on the outskirts of Pakistani Kashmir's main city and seized an alleged mastermind of the attacks that shook India's financial capital last month, two officials said Monday. ... Backed by a helicopter, the troops grabbed Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi among at least 12 people taken Sunday in the raid on the riverbank camp run by the banned group Laskhar-e-Taiba in Pakistani Kashmir, the officials said.
AFP reports this a bit different :
The 15 arrested in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir were from an Islamic charity closely linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which India accuses of being behind the 60-hour siege, the intelligence official said.
"Security forces raided a relief camp set up by Jamaat-ud-Dawa," he said.
The U.S. put Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi on its Treasury terrorist list in May this year. An old post on a Punjabi message board has this bit on Zaki-ur-Rehman:
Writing for Associated Press (May 30, 1999) from Muzafarrabad Mr. Amir Mirza reported that "... in the mountains that divide Kashmir between India and Pakistan, militants are training at dozens of camps on Pakistani territory." He, along with other journalists, interviewed Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, chief of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, one of the most militant fighting groups. In this interview Mr. Lakhvi claimed that "there is no shortage of recruits."
The man is obviously not unknown. But is he guilty in this case, or just a convinient target?
There were rumors on Saturday, later denied, that Sec.State Rice had given an ultimatum to the Pakistani government do something within 48 hours. Now Pakistan has done something . Whether the people nabbed now are really related to the Mumbai attack is an open question.
And what will be the next step?
It is doubtful that the Pakistani government can and will simply send off the captured folks to India. There are legal reasons against this as no extradition treaty exists between the countries. The internal political situation will also not allow it, as Zaki-ur Rehman is to many Pakistani not a terrorist, but a hero who fought for the freedom of Muslims in Kashmir.
Pakistan could put the nabbed people on trial. But it may have no evidence against them except what Indian 'sources' leaked to Indian media. An then what?
Some Indian TV channel is speculating about military action against Pakistan.
B. Raman, hawk and former chief of India's foreign intelligence service Research and Analysis Wing, says that is the wrong stuff to do. Instead he is urging India to copy the U.S. and to not care about international law.
Why would India need to show evidence that Pakistan was behind the attack, he asks :
What evidence did they have before Bill Clinton ordered the Cruise missile attacks on jihadi training camps in Afghan territory in August,1998?
What evidence did they have against Al Qaeda and the Taliban before they bombed Afghanistan from October 7,2001?
What evidence did they have against the Saddam Hussain Government before they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003?
In every case affecting American nationals and interests, they bombed and then collected evidence. They did not wait till they had collected all the evidence possible before they bombed.
Raman wants the Indian government to reactivate the operational arm of its foreign intelligence service and to get active within Pakistan. Follow the U.S.: Just spread terror in the land of the alleged and perceived enemy.
The objective of the action should be to force Pakistan to act effectively against the LET and its terrorist infrastructure. It should also be to mount a no-holds barred covert operation against the LET through our own resources and methods. ... A divided Pakistan, a bleeding Pakistan, a Pakistan ever on the verge of collapse without actually collapsing----that should be our objective till it stops using terrorism against India.
A divided and bleeding Pakistan is of course what Pakistan is already today. Creating more strife in Pakistan would only create more terrorism spreading from Pakistan into India.
Raman knows this:
We should be realistic enough to anticipate that Pakistan will step up terrorism in Indian territory if we adopt such a policy. This should not deter us from embarking on this policy. The policy of active defence against Pakistan should be accompanied by time-bound action to strengthen our counter-terrorism capability at home.
So terrorism from Pakistan in India should not deter it from raising terrorism in Pakistan. Why then does Raman believe that such action by India can deterre Pakistan?
There is some very faulty and dangerous logic behind such thoughts.
That may not prevent their implentation.
Posted by b on December 8, 2008 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
December 07, 2008
I hope and expect to see more like this. Such activism is not only morally right, it is needed to change the direction of a capitalist system run wild back to a more social(ist) one.
Obama's stimulus plan includes some good ideas, mostly domestic investment in infrastructure and education.
But more will be needed.
Taxes for rich people need need to go up dramatically. Minimum wages and social spending have to go up too to create more basic demand. (Marc Thoma has a good overview over the various theories behind this .) Demand based on credit has to be replaced with demand based on income.
To reach these steps a movement will have to grow that pressures Washington to take such steps. Such pressure can only come from the streets. As FDR told a reformer group of his own party:
I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
Unless there is pressure on Congress and Obama, little will be done to change the dynamics that ruled the economic-political fields over the last 30 years. It is good to see the above stepsand we should support them. Even if they are yet small ones, they build the pressure that pushes the politicians into the right direction.
Posted by b on December 7, 2008 at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)
The Road War Moves to Pakistan
Today :
Suspected militants attacked a Pakistan transport terminal used to supply NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, killing a guard and burning 106 vehicles on Sunday. ... About 30 assailants armed with guns and rockets attacked the Portward Logistic Terminal near the city of Peshawar before dawn Sunday, police official Kashif Alam said.
A week ago something similar happened , as it did in mid November .
It seems that the winter campaign of the resistance in Pashtunistan, the area on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan boarder, will be against U.S./NATO supply convoys. The road war within Afghanistan has been going on for quite a while. The road war now moves into Pakistan.
(Map base via National Geographic )
At least 75% of all NATO/U.S. supply in Afghanistan comes through the Pakistani port of Karachi (1). Most of it goes up to Peshawar (2) and then through the Khyber pass to Kabul (3). A second route is from Karachi (1) through Quetta (5) to Kandahar (4). A part of the Afghan ring road connects Kabul (3) and Kandahar (4).It is constantly under attack.
Karachi is multi-ethnic and a week ago there were deadly gun fights between Pashtun and Punjabi people there. It is not at all a secure place for unloading supplies. Peshawar is the administrative centre for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Three days ago a bomb exploded there killing over 30 people. Quetta is said to be the place where Taliban leader Mullah Omar hides. We can conclude that these supply routes are endangered at nearly any point.
The Soviet learned some lessons about this. It was the road war that eventually killed their attempts in Afghanistan.
U.S./NATO supplies are even more endangered because: They need much more general supply per man than the Soviets did; They do not have a boarder to Afghanistan but have to route the supply through Pakistan; Alternative routes are too long and odious.
The additional U.S. troops that will help to occupy Afghanistan next year will, as I estimated , need some 50 additional truck deliveries per day for fuel alone.
With the continued U.S. hostilities against the Pakistani and Pashtun people, one wonders how those are supposed to get through.
Posted by b on December 7, 2008 at 05:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)
December 06, 2008
Some Oddities in Road Construction in Nuristan
According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress the Defense Department awarded a contract for road construction in Afghanistan's Nuristan province back in 2004:
Table 1: USAID and Defense's Afghan Road Reconstruction Awards: ... Year: 2004; Project name--instrument used: CERP-funded road projects--Contracts; Implementer: USACE or local contractors; Project description: Provincial and rural roads, including Nangarej- Mandol and Gulum Khan.
Source: GAO analysis of USAID and Defense data.
(CERP is a Commander's Emergency Response Program under which a local U.S. commander spends money on urgent issues. USACE is the US Army Corps of Engineers.)
Still two years later, little seemed to have happened.
In 2006 a 'partnership agreement' was reached over the road project between Nangarej and Mandol. The army reported :
KABUL, Afghanistan - A partnership agreement was reached June 10 on the Nuristan Commander's Emergency Response Program's road projects at the district's headquarters here.
Attending the signing ceremony were Nuristan Governor Tamim Nuristani, Dr. Sayed Noorullah Jalili, chief executive of AMERIFA Construction Company and Col. Christopher J. Toomey, commander of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Afghanistan Engineer District/director of engineering for the Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan.
According to the partnership document, the three leaders agreed to "promote a climate of mutual respect, honest and open communication." The document also noted that the Coalition, contractor and government would be committed to proactive problem resolution in order to execute safe and timely construction in support of the infrastructure development of Nuristan on the Nangarej to Mandol and the Chapa Dara to Titan Dara CERP Road Projects.
Why did it take two years from a 'emergency fund' contract award to some actual agreement over building the road? We do not know. Maybe the the 'partnership document' was needed to clear away some stumbling blocks for the prospective road between Nangarej and Mandol.
According to FedSpending.org Amerifa, the Afghan company mentioned above, got contracts for road-building for $17 million in 2006 and $6.8 million in 2007. Wages there are $3-$5 per day, so that's a lot of dough. In November 2007, in an effort to "promote a climate of mutual respect, honest and open communication," the U.S. bombed a worker-camp of Amerifa in Nuristan. At least 14 were killed.
However, despite all these efforts the road-building that was awarded through an 'emergency response program' in 2004 is now back to its start.
A fresh solicitation for the Nangarej to Mandol road in Nuristan province was posted today on FedBizOpps.gov:
The U.S. Army corps of engineers, Afghanistan Engineer District intends to issue a Request fro Proposal (RFP) to award Firm Fixed Price contract to design and construct approximately 60 km of 6 m wide gravel road with 1.5 m gravel shoulder. The project is from Nangarej (70.33266E 35.05905N) to Mandal (70.101976E 35.165549N) in the Nuristan Province of Afghanistan.
Google Earth clip with those coordinates: (the gray line is a province boarder, not the road)
So according to GAO a contract was awarded in 2004. In 2006 the road was not yet build but some agreement was found. Today the Army Corps of Engineer asks for a proposal on how to build the very same road (Mandal and Mandol are used interchangeably in various sources so it is very likely the same place).
With that speed of action the road will never be build.
That may well be because that road does not make any sense. Professor David Katz, an anthropologist who worked for the State Department and has been in Nuristan in a reconstruction project team, opines in a private lecture ( video - start at 9:00min, helpful map (pdf)) that some of the plans for roads in Nuristan are crazy. These do not run along the natural river lines but try to connect independent areas (with quite different tribes and languages ) over very rough mountains. Some of these roads are supposed to go over 15,000 feet high passes that are not accessible at all most of the year and there is "not a penny" to do maintenance on these roads once they are build.
Google Earth shows the coordinates given for Nangarej at 4,000 feet elevation, the coordinates for Mandal at some 10,000 feet. The distance as the crow flies is 25 kilometers. The recent solicitation is for 60 kilometers total road length. With that difference in elevation and the rough terrain, I find it unlikely that the project is doable as imagined.
Nuristanis will assess the speed of progress on such 'emergency' projects on their land. They will know that the crazy high-pass roads will immediately fall apart if they ever get build at all.
Why should they support the foreign people who are responsible for this? Indeed why should they tolerate their presence at all?
Posted by b on December 6, 2008 at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
I was wrong in my prediction made on November 12:
As the first tranche of the $700 billion is nearly gone, the Treasury will tell Congress that help to Detroit through the TARP program can only be given if Congress immediately and unconditionally hands over the full second tranche. Of those $350 billion maybe $50 billion will then be handed to Detroit and on January 21 a new administration will discover that Paulson has given the rest down to the last dollar to his friends.
That was clearly wrong, especially in the second sentence, and needs to be corrected. I underestimated Congress' spinelessness and its willingness to hand over taxpayer money to Wall Street.
In the deal now in the making the taxpayer funds for Detroit will be in addition to the TARP funds. Wall Street will get the full $700 billion TARP money without the reduction I anticipated:
Seeking to end a weeks-long stalemate between the Bush administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, senior Congressional aides said that the money would most likely come from $25 billion in federally subsidized loans intended for developing fuel-efficient cars.
By breaking that impasse, the lawmakers could also clear the way for the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to request the remaining $350 billion of the financial industry bailout fund knowing he will not get bogged down in a fight over aiding Detroit.
Democrats are hoping Mr. Paulson will use some of that money to help individual homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Democrats are 'hoping' that Paulson will use 'some' of that money for distressed homeowners?
No way. Paulson will laugh at them while he shovels those billions over to his Wall Street friends.
Posted by b on December 6, 2008 at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (46)
December 05, 2008
The Real Danger Of A Big Three Default
In light of the possible bankruptcy of one or more of the big three U.S. automakers, we need to again demand to Declare All Credit Default Swaps Null And Void .
Those $65 trillion reasons for the credit market freeze will never go away without a huge crash that then will have worth consequences than the 1929 stock market crash. The only way to eliminate these reasons is internationally concerted action to declare the legal obligations of all CDS' null and void.
What has this to do with automakers? As the folks at Institutional Risk Advisor wrote :
As Bloomberg News reported in August: "A default by one of the automakers would trigger writedowns and losses in the $1.2 trillion market for collateralized debt obligations that pool derivatives linked to corporate debt... Credit-default swaps on GM and Ford were included in more than 80 percent of CDOs created before they lost their investment-grade debt rankings in 2005, according to data compiled by Standard & Poor's." ... Any bank with a large derivatives trading book is likely to be mortally wounded as the CDS markets finally collapse. We don't see problems with interest rate or currency contracts, by the way, only the great CDS Ponzi scheme is at issue - hopefully, if authorities around the world act with purpose on rendering extinct CDS contracts as they exist today. Call it a Christmas present to the entire world.
In another piece they report :
We hear from a very well placed Buy Side investor with extensive business interests in the US and EU that three primary banking institutions in Europe, two French and one German, have such significant CDS exposure and other problems that they cannot even begin to fund the payouts anticipated over the next quarter. ... Unlike the approach taken by Paulson and Geithner to bailout AIG and JPM (via the Bear Stearns rescue), however, the investor claims that EU officials are considering a moratorium on CDS payments by the three Euroland banks in question. The banks would be given ten years to write down their CDS and hedge fund exposures and would receive additional infusions of capital by their respective governments. The source claims that French banks have such huge exposure to both hedge funds and CDS, sometimes linked together, that the positions are beyond the ability of the EU governments to bail them out without a cessation of CDS payments.
Even a ten years write down will not help. The numbers are just too big. Still, calls to eliminate CDS and other derivatives by IRS or me are regarded as fringe or lunatic.
But now a really big investor joins the small chorus. Gao Xiqing is president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages $200 billion of the country's foreign assets. James Fellows recently interviewed him for The Atlantic. Gao Xiqing opinion on derivatives (which includes CDS'):
If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people. ... I think we should do an overhaul and say, "Let's get rid of 90 percent of the derivatives." Of course, that's going to be very unpopular, because many people will lose jobs.
Gao Xiqing has some additional good advice for the U.S. and I recommend that you read it.
But back to the CDS problems. If Congress fails to bailout those three gargantuan hedge funds with the attached car manufacturing and sales departments we will see an unprecedented rout in the financial markets.
There are at least 13,602 CDS contracts with a total dollar value of $100,6 billion written on GMAC LLC, General Motor's finance arm. There are more than 9,683 contracts on GM itself. A GM bankruptcy would trigger a payout demand of the insurance bought with CDS' against such a GM/GMAC default. It is unlikely that those liabilities could be matched by the original writers of these insurances. A chain reaction of huge defaults would follow.
Senator Dodd touched the issue in yesterdays automaker hearing in Congress:
"The domestic auto companies already comprise more than 10 percent of the high-yield bond market and one of the largest sectors in leverage finance for banks," Dodd said at the first of two days of congressional hearings on whether Congress should return next week to provide automakers immediate aid. " A partial or complete failure of the domestic automobile industry would have ramifications far beyond manufacturing and pensions. It would affect virtually every sector of the economy ."
A default by one of the big threes would be directly bad for the real economy. But the consequences in financial markets and the indirect damage in the real economy triggered by that financial turmoil are the really grave threat.
A solution to that would be to eliminate the crazy Ponzi scheme that was build with CDS and related derivatives by simply voiding them. But the economic pain seems not yet big enough to make that happen.
Posted by b on December 5, 2008 at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (42)
December 04, 2008
The Pentagon's Irregular Wars
The U.S. will Raise 'Irregular War' Capabilities :
The Pentagon this week approved a major policy directive that elevates the military's mission of "irregular warfare" -- the increasingly prevalent campaigns to battle insurgents and terrorists, often with foreign partners and sometimes clandestinely -- to an equal footing with traditional combat.
Of course the U.S. had such capabilities before. The importance of this move is the institutional change that is happening here. During the Cold War the CIA was tasked with such 'irregular warfare':
The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support others. The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 and Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954 .
After a string of abuses in the 70s, the Church Committee ended some of the illegal CIA policies. But the CIA continued to instigate guerrilla operations like in Afghanistan :
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
But now the Pentagon takes over and creates the instruments to do the same. The new Department of Defense directive 3000.07 (pdf) says:
It is DoD policy to: ... c. Conduct IW independently of, or in combination with, traditional warfare.
(1) IW can include a variety of steady-state and surge DoD activities and operations: counterterrorism; unconventional warfare; foreign internal defense; counterinsurgency; and stability operations that, in the context of IW, involve establishing or re-establishing order in a fragile state.
The directive defines unconventional warfare as:
A broad spectrum of military and paramilitary operations, normally of long duration, predominantly conducted through, with, or by indigenous or surrogate forces who are organized, trained, equipped, supported, and directed in varying degrees by an external source. It includes, but is not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery.
Said shorter:
It is DoD policy to conduct independently guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage and intelligence activities to establish or re-establish order in a fragile state.
A fragile state is of course whatever the Pentagon defines as such.
While there is now a institutional shift from the CIA to the Pentagon, the personal line is one of continuity. Pentagon chief Gates is a CIA operative who rose through the ranks to become Director of Central Intelligence.
The principal writer of the new DoD directive is Michael G. Vickers , the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.
In the mid-1980s, Vicker's became involved with Operation Cyclone, the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm Islamic mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He was the head military strategist for the U.S., coordinating an effort that involved ten countries and providing direction to forces made up of over 500,000 Afghan fighters.
The move of such 'irregular warfare' policies away from the CIA and towards the Pentagon is dangerous in my view. The Pentagon has much more money, people and capabilities than the CIA. It also has less oversight.
This new policy, just like the similar CIA policies before, will end in huge scandals when the operations planed and executed under it run wild, as they consistently will, and create the inevitable backslashes.
But until then these new policies of 'irregular warfare' will kill a lot of people.
Posted by b on December 4, 2008 at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)
The Mumbai Attack Evidence
Jane Perlez and Somini Sengupta write for the NY Times:
Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan's new government, raising questions whether it can -- or wants to -- rein in militancy here.
Hmmm - evidence is defined as:
a: an outward sign : indication b: something that furnishes proof : testimony ; specifically : something legally submitted to a tribunal to ascertain the truth of a matter
So what mounting evidence is there? Perlez and Sengupta list three points:
- A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan's powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.
Someone who is no longer active in the game has heard that some people active within the game suspect something ...Who is this? Wolfowitz? Rumsfeld? Perle?
- According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told his interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Mohammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.
According to The Australian India uses 'truth serum' on Mumbai gunman (h/t Al):
The method was widely used by Western intelligence agencies during the Cold War, before it emerged that the drugs used - typically the barbiturate sodium pentothal - may induce hallucinations, delusions and psychotic manifestations.
May we then doubt what the alleged Kasab is alleged to have said?
- And according to a Western official familiar with the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil, whom the surviving gunman named as the plot's organizer, fielded phone calls in Lahore from the attackers.
'A Western official familiar' with Iraq's WMD program ... Oh sorry, strike that, that was just a mistake. The intelligence we are now told to believe is of course very reliable.
The New York Times again gives itself away to some powers in the U.S., who this time, want to incriminate Pakistan over the attacks in Mumbai.
I for one do not believe this evidence . Yes, the attacks might have originated in Pakistan. But there are other possible sources .
There are lots of interests involved in the current rumoring that want to blame Pakistan for this or that purpose. To jump to conclusions on such thin sourced disinformation is irresponsible.
But it is of course not the first time that the NY Times is pitching a war to its readers. That sells well.
Posted by b on December 4, 2008 at 04:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (64)
Open threat: If you don't comment, the WMD terrorists will win!
News & views ...
Posted by b on December 3, 2008 at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (101)
The WMD Terror Report Is Crap
The Congress Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism published a report titled The World At Risk .
Google News has some 770 links to news item referring it.
The scaremongering headlines say WMD strike 'likely' in five years and Nuclear, biological terror attack 'likely': US commission .
Indeed the very first graph of the executive summary reads:
The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.
"More likely than not" is a chance bigger than 50%.
But nowhere in the report is there any assessment of likelihood.
The 132 pages include not one paragraph or line which makes a calculation, quantitative or qualitative, that would allow one to come to the conclusion that the executive summary asserts.
The assessment of the commission is that some terrorists would rather try to use biological weapons than nuclear stuff. It also assesses that the capacity to make WMD would require a terrorist group to hire, or win over, specialists in that field.
But there is no assessment at all on how big the chance is that some terrorist would try that or why this would be more likely than not to happen.
Essentially the first line of the report is simply crap that is not supported by anything that follows. It makes for scaremongering headlines as the media, like usual, do not care to really look into these issues.
Decent security experts like Bruce Schneider disagree that the WMD likelihood is big. As he remarks on the Mumbai attacks:
Low-tech is very effective. Movie-plot threats -- terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists with biological agents, terrorists targeting our water supplies -- might be what people worry about, but a bunch of trained (...) men with guns and grenades is all they needed.
If the simple and cheap stuff works well to terrorize, why then would anyone who wants to terrorize a bunch of people put a huge effort into some WMD stuff?
And how then can anyone come to the conclusion that the likelihood of such a WMD terrorist attack is above 50%?
It is simply irresponsible scaremongering to assert such. But obviously, scaremongering sells.
Posted by b on December 3, 2008 at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)
War Over Mumbai?
World War I began over a minor assassination in Sarajevo. A big war in Asia may begin over the recent terror act in Mumbai.
There are several plausible culprits for these acts.
Radicalized Indian Muslims are a possible group. Some Pakistani group could be responsible, with or without unofficial support from some shady secret agency. I speculated about a false flag operation by the Indian right.
Now the Indian government demands that Pakistan hands over some 20 people which are sought in India:
"Now, we have in our demarche asked (for) the arrest and handover of those persons who are settled in Pakistan and who are fugitives of Indian law," External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on the sidelines of a function to inaugurate the India-Arab Forum. ... Islamabad has been in a denial mode but India says it has hard evidence to show Pakistani link.
New Delhi's outrage was voiced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who said India will not tolerate use of territories by its neighbours for launching attacks in this country and that there will be a "cost" to it.
The centrist Indian government is under pressure. The rightwing BJP is threatening to win the ongoing (they take several month) elections over the issue.
The demand for those 20 people, which the Pakistani government is unlikely able to fulfill, is an escalation step. More will follow.
The Indians allege that the captured terrorist is one Ajmal Amir Kamal from Faridkot in Pakistan. But a man of that name is unknown there:
Shown a picture of the alleged militant, Daha said: "That's a smart-looking boy. We don't have that sort around here."
So far we have no public evidence of any Pakistani involvement. Only Indian 'senior intelligence officials' leaking this or that factoid which may be correct or not. That is certainly not the case yet to start a war over, but these things get out of control fast.
The Bush administration is stocking the fire by demanding 'complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation' from Pakistan and leaking to the NYT about some interdicted phone-calls:
According to senior American government officials, satellite intercepts of telephone calls made during the siege directly linked the attackers in Mumbai to operatives in Pakistan working for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere.
What does 'directly linked' mean? And who called whom?
Even while Obama cautioned against immediate action, some people in India read his words as 'tacit endorsement' of possible Indian bombing in Pakistan.
The neocon Washington Post editors certainly give their tacid endorsement :
India, which has the ability to strike terrorist targets in Pakistan, is rightly demanding an end to the threat -- and it's getting harder and harder for Washington to counsel patience.
Maybe it is getting harder for Washington because the WaPo editors have Robert Kagan rejecting Pakistan's sovereignty on just the same page:
Rather than simply begging the Indians to show restraint, a better option could be to internationalize the response. Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. ... Would such an action violate Pakistan's sovereignty? Yes, but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched.
Then why wasn't Germany bombed when Mohamed Atta came from there?
Such a great idea: Have some international force (from where?) pick a fight with 160 million nationalists in nuclear armed Pakistan. And make no mistake, all Pakistani would fight back.
Local Taliban groups in western Pakistan offered a truce in case the Pakistani army needs to defend against India:
Spokesman of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Swat, Haji Muslim Khan, in a statement, said that in case of Indian aggression against Pakistan all the components of the Tehrik including Tehrik-e-Taliban Swat, will follow the decision of Tehrik-e-Taliban. He said if the ongoing operation against Taliban is stopped they will fight the enemy along with the Pakistan army.
Throughout the weekend and yesterday there was fighting with over 30 dead between ethnic groups (mafia clans?) in Karachi, the Pakistani harbor city through which most of the supply for the 'western' troops in Afghanistan runs. That traffic from Karachi was blocked. Additionally 22 NATO supply trucks were burned in an attack in Peshawar.
What does Kagan believe will happen to the supply of the troops in Afghanistan when some foreigners start all out war in Pakistan?
To increase the temperature on Pakistan is the worst thing that can be done right now.
Unfortunately, lots of people seem to want to do just that.
Posted by b on December 2, 2008 at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (53)
December 01, 2008
Two month ago I wrote about the Coup Attempt in Thailand :
A 'People's Alliance for Democracy' (PAD) is demonstrating against the government that was elected last December and is ruling within a six party coalition with two-third of the seats in parliament. ... Leader of PAD is the right-wing media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul who's newspapers, websites and TV stations drive the protests. He has support from largely middle class urbanites including a union for well payed government employees and part of the army establishment. ... Sondhi's aim is to destroy Thailand's democracy so that policies can be implemented that help him and his mostly well-off supporters instead of the more poor majority.
A few days ago the PAD's (paid?) supporters with their yellow scarfs occupied the airport in Bangkok and they are preventing all air-traffic.
But I suspect that the PAD has overreached. There are now over 240,000 tourists stranded in Thailand. The airport occupation now hurts PAD's constituency:
The tourism industry across the country has been dealt a massive blow with the shutdown of Suvarnabhumi, the country's main commercial gateway to the world, as well as Don Mueang airport, which mainly handles domestic flights.
Hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related business owners in key tourist destinations from Satun to Chiang Rai have reported cancellations.
They believe the shutdown of the airports has not only caused difficulties for tourists but has also undermined tourists' confidence in Thailand. ... About 50 per cent of the bookings during the Christmas and New Year festivities, mainly by foreign tourists, have been cancelled.
If the democratic forces play this right, they will be able to chop away the support from the PAD.
Color revolutions from the right are to make money for the right, not to prevent business. By hurting big parts of its support base, PAD has neglected that law.
Posted by b on December 1, 2008 at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
The Wrong Decline In Credit Availability
Lots of people and small businesses is the U.S. depend on credit cards for short term finance.
That ability is to end says Meredith Whitney, one of the analysts that saw the crisis coming:
The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.
The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.
"In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent."
A possible solution is re-localizing credit. Whitney writes in the Financial Times:
First, re-regionalise lending. Since the early 1990s, key bank products, mortgages and credit card lending were rapidly consolidated nationally. Banking went from "knowing your customer" or local lending, to relying on what have proven to be unreliable FICO credit scores and centralised underwriting. The government should now motivate local lenders (many of which have clean balance sheets) to re-widen their product offering to include credit cards and encourage the mega banks to provide servicing and processing facilities to banks that sold off these capabilities years ago.
The Fed is pours lots of money into the big bank bucket in the hope that the bucket will overflow and liquidity will trickle down to where it needs to be. But the big bucket turns out to be bottomless as the big banks use all that money to repair their balance sheets. The Fed should instead help the smaller banks directly. Together with the treasury it could also guarantee small business loans. Instead of buying bonds backed by credit card debt, it could guarantee revolving consumer debt directly.
Why push the money through the fictional economy of the big bank system when it is clearly broken. Instead route the money around to keep the real economy going. There are still local banks that could implement programs that go directly to small businesses and consumers.
One might say people should depend less on credit. That is a fine goal and I agree with it.
But there is a difference between getting there in one big slump or through a gradual decline in credit availability. The big slump will inevitably overshoot and the economy will reach a too low credit level. This will hurt people and businesses who are creditworthy and will unnecessarily lead to a further decline in the real economy.
Posted by b on December 1, 2008 at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
"If the only tool you have is a hammer ..."
"... you will see every problem as a nail."
The foreign policy persons Obama selected for his cabinet are hawks.
Clinton as Sec State, Gates at Defense, a General as national security advisor and an Admiral as director of national intelligence. (Is there any other democracy that puts so many (ex-)military people into political positions?).
Susan S. Rice at the U.N., the worst choice possible after John R. Bolton. She will argue to bomb this or that country whenever something complicate might happen there. Africom will get a lot of stuff to do.
Obama promised to increase the U.S. troop strength by some 90,000. 20,000 active military will be dedicated to homeland security within the U.S. The hammer will get bigger and the urge to use it even stronger.
What country will he bomb first? We already know of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But where else does he want to kill? Somalia? Sudan? Kenia?
As for Change - why not use some nukes?
Posted by b on December 1, 2008 at 03:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (47) |
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Kathryn Moody : Investors, Are You Ready for the Next Global Crisis?
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Janet Bond Brill, Ph.D., R.D.N., F.A.N.D : How to prevent a second (and first) heart attack thru diet
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Mark Steyn : You Want Nazis?
Jonathan Tobin : Care about the Jewish state's future? Obama, in interview, reveals even more reasons to worry
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Once ideology overrules a sense of common destiny, the writing is on the wall
E pluribus unum -- Out of many, one.
Such a glorious sentiment, 240 years old this week, destined for the dustbin of history.
With the general election now reduced to a choice between the two most unpopular candidates in American history, the undeniable takeaway is that our population has splintered into four intractable camps, each unwillingly come to terms with any other. Here is a snapshot of who we now are.
Left-wing ideologues.
Reactionaries. Everyone understands that the popularity of Donald Trump has little to do with Donald Trump. It is a reaction to the Obama administration, to the Clinton dynasty, to the blatant partisanship of Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, to the fecklessness of John Boehner, to unchecked illegal immigration, to ISIS and the Taliban, to Putin and Assad, to the Iran deal, to Obamacare, to Ferguson, to Obergefell, and to bathroom legislation.
Pragmatists. I have omitted conservative ideologues by design, because there are so few of them left in existence. Indeed, Ted Cruz would certainly have fared better with more hardliners to rally around him. But thinking moderates rejected Cruz for his irascible reputation, preferring the lackluster John Kasich for the same reason they supported Mitt Romney: they want a leader able and willing to build consensus from a position of integrity.
So where does that leave America? The most obvious solution is to carve up the country up as was done with the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, demographic realities make such a plan unfeasible: Liberals occupy the big cities, Utopians live around college campuses, Reactionaries dwell in the rural precincts, while Pragmatists are scattered hither and yon. The necessary gerrymandering would make the partition of India a walk in the park.
And, as such, we will not stand much longer.
Comment by clicking here.
Rabbi Yonason Goldson , a talmudic scholar and former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, and newspaper columnist, lives with his wife in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches, writes, and lectures. His new book Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages is available on Amazon. |
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Revolution #518 November 20, 2017
November 18 Protests Around the Country: Breaking the Silence and Bringing the Noise to Say: "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!"
November 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Saturday, November 18, people in cities across the country answered the call from Refuse Fascism to "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise!" With rallies and marches, they brought out the message: This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
As the call for the day said:
RefuseFascism.org is calling on everyone who can be united to sound the alarm and break the silence. What is the silence we are breaking? The silence of normalization and accommodation, of people going along with their lives as Trump escalates war threats, as immigrants are detained and deported, as everyday fascism is advanced.
What is the noise we are bringing? We'll be waking up and calling forward all those who burn with outrage at this regime but don't yet know of this movement. We will march to a beat with a determination that this regime will not destroy humanity and the planet. Pots and pans, drums and buckets, whistles and our voices.
On this page are photos and video clips from November 18, giving a picture of some of what happened that day. Stay tuned this week for more in-depth coverage of November 18 actions.
Boston, MA
Counter-protest against white supremacists at the Boston Commons, Boston, Nov 18, 2017
"Nazi scum you can't hide, you support genocide" #BostonProtest pic.twitter.com/1bGfYohWQH -- Bay State Herald (@BayStateHerald) November 18, 2017
"Nazi scum you can't hide, you support genocide"
New York City
"Trump is coming for everyone... group after group." #TrumpPenceMustGo pic.twitter.com/giGlsCM6nf -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Washington Square Park, New York City-- "Trump is coming for everyone... group after group."
NYC: Get in the streets with us! March with us. Bring pots, pans, drums, whistles anything noisey! #TrumpPenceMustGo pic.twitter.com/rqzy4SKzMd -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Marching through the streets of New York City-- "NYC: Get in the streets with us! March with us. Bring pots, pans, drums, whistles anything noisey!"
Out in front of the New York Times "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity." https://t.co/y8URUbAVLi pic.twitter.com/w3Di1g5oOS -- #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
Out in front of the New York Times-- "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity."
Chicago, IL
The weather won't stop us from bringing the noise #TrumpPenceMustGo #Chicago pic.twitter.com/J4lNnQwP6Q -- RefuseFascismCh (@RefuseFascismCH) November 18, 2017
"The weather won't stop us from bringing the noise." The crowd defiantly jumped and danced in the deep puddles on the plaza of the State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago.
Los Angeles, CA
In the streets of Downtown Los Angeles. People came with their own noisemakers--pots, pans, drums, kazoos, a trumpet, and more. (Above and below)
San Francisco, CA
We got a drum Corps with a xylophone and were starting the rally at SF Civic Center. #BreaktheSilence #BringTheNoise #trumppencemustgo pic.twitter.com/bfH301iFzN -- RefuseFascismSF (@SFRefuseFascism) November 18, 2017
In San Francisco, people rallied in front of City Hall and then marched through the Castro and Mission districts to Dolores Park. (Above and below)
Austin, TX
Among the chants in Austin: "If you hate Trump, if you hate Pence, get your ass up off the fence! Join us, join us, join us, NOW!"
No Ban No Wall The Trump Regime has got to go! #TrumpPenceMustGo #IndivisibleResistance @eyes2future pic.twitter.com/bHvE6kh9ud -- TheGrandDaddyPurple (@The_GDP_) November 19, 2017
A new chant that developed on the spot: "Wake Up America/Get Out of Bed/Dump Donald Trump/Before We're All Dead!"
Tucson, AZ
Cleveland, OH
In the cold and heavy rain, people broke the silence and brought out the noise with bucket drums and amplifier that was heard for blocks!
Honolulu, HI
Boston: A Day of Bringing the Noise Against Fascism and White Supremacy
From a reader:
On November 18, 30 activists rallied at Copley Square as part of actions taking place around the country to "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise! This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!" They heard speakers from Refuse Fascism; Academics Against Fascism; and others, including Carl Dix, an initiator of Refuse Fascism and a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party; Joel Feingold from Refuse Fascism; and a statement from the Reverend Rob Mark of the Church of the Covenant. Dozens of passersby stopped and a number signed up with Refuse Fascism on the spot. Afterwards the rally was led in a boisterous march through downtown Boston by a contingent of the Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians accompanied by homemade drums, cowbells, and whistles.
Chanting "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA," the march joined with a rally at the Boston Commons called by Fight Supremacy 2.0. This rally of 1,000 people was countering a white supremacist, neo-fascist "Rally for the Republic" called by Resist Marxism that drew 40-50 people with massive protection by hundreds of police. The fascists have tried various tactics after Charlottesville to re-brand themselves--as a free speech movement, as against Marxism, and claiming that they are not white supremacists--but fascist groups that are openly so came in from around the country to make a showing, as they have in liberal cities like Berkeley and Boston. People were not bamboozled and came out in strength to expose and firmly oppose them.
A very diverse turnout of mostly young people, including students from area colleges, made up the bulk of the very defiant crowd at this counter-protest. MCs from the Black Lives Matter movement led people to chant and bring on the motherfucking noise that drowned out the fascists' sound system. People heard from speakers who urged them to come out in opposition to white supremacist attacks in Boston and elsewhere. Bands of white supremacists roamed through the crowd of protesters looking to provoke, and the scene was marked by the revulsion and defiance of those who came out to overwhelm them, and disciplined monitoring by Veterans for Peace, anti-fa and others.
Carl Dix was invited by Fight Supremacy 2.0 onto the makeshift stage, a park bench, and he drew a rousing response when he called out those at the Rally for the Republic as shock troops being unleashed by the Trump/Pence regime to hammer fascist rule into place in this country. And again when he called on the young people at the counter-protest to bring their spirit of defiance into the movement to drive the Trump/Pence regime from power, before it's too late. People at the rally grabbed up flyers being distributed by those who marched in the Refuse Fascism contingent and got connected with the movement to drive the Trump/Pence regime from office.
The day as a whole met a test that Boston will not tire and will not allow these fascists to take hold of the public square--and of people broadly uniting and putting petty sectarian agendas aside to accomplish this.
New York City
Refuse Fascism started the day in Washington Square Park. The entire time people were chanting and banging on pots and pans creating a ruckus that broke the silence. About half the crowd was young people. People from different parts of the country that happened to be in NYC were attracted by the energy of the march and the message of breaking the silence of normalization. Two high school students from Las Vegas that we met in the park, and their family, joined the march and carried the banner for most of the march. They were inspired by the high school student walkout in LA and were excited about organizing some things in their school. A student from Albany came all the way just to join the march. He came despite the fact that his friends didn't.
Among those who joined in were a young Australian dancer who was VERY energized and a young college student from out of town, who marched with us all the way to the New York Times . Throughout the march, we chanted, "March with us, march with us, march with us, cuz Trump and Pence must go!" The Times Square area along 42nd Street was very congested with tourists and Black people from NYC. Many gave a thumbs up or the fist and took copies of the Refuse Fascism call, "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!"
A high point of the march was at the end. We marched to the New York Times offices to deliver a letter requesting that they cover the Refuse Fascism protests that they have consistently whited out. Instead of taking the letter, they called the police that had been with the march the entire time to come inside. Afterwards, JW Walker of the Steering Committee of Refuse Fascism-NYC spoke to the crowd outside about why we were there to request they cover the Refuse Fascism protests: "We are living in a time where Trump threatens the future of humanity."
People gathered making lots of raucous and wonderful noise with drums, buckets, pots and pans, bells, and a variety of handheld instruments. "Break the Silence! Bring the Noise!" rang out in a cacophony of sound, all this in the midst of a wind, rain, and temperatures dipping into the 30s. The crowd seemed unfazed by the weather as they defiantly jumped and danced in the deep puddles on the plaza of the State of Illinois Building (the Thompson Center) in downtown Chicago.
Among them were a high school student, a young woman in her 20s, a Native American LGBTQ activist, blues harmonica player Matthew Skoller, another Refuse Fascism activist, and a member of the Revolution Club. As we marched through the Loop, our numbers began to grow. People who came late joined us, as did many people from the downtown streets, especially young people. Bystanders clapped and cheered and filmed as we passed. At intersections the march would stop and people were called to join in.
A suburban high school teacher came with several students. Three young Latinos who had been at the march on November 11 returned this week. One had gotten a copy of Revolution newspaper last week and asked if she could volunteer with the paper and is now doing that. Three Latino high school students, with joyous looks on their faces, joined as we approached Trump Tower. When someone asked if one of them wanted a sign, she responded YES!, took it, and started jumping up and down with it. When asked why they joined one responded, "Because we feel like Trump should be gone." Another said, "I joined because we need to protest for our rights."
A Columbia College student said, "I am tired of the way things are going and this is the best way to do it now. You know we can't let fascism take over America. I had been normalized, you know what I mean, but now I am waking up." Students from suburban Elmhurst College joined the march--several belonged to the Queer Straight Alliance. A young woman scientist said she got involved with Refuse Fascism through social media and the internet. She said she had gone to the Women's March and Science March and, "I just felt like I had to make a presence and Refuse Fascism is one of the most consistent and persistent of these organizations."
We wound up at the entrance to the Trump hotel. A short final rally was held there. At that rally jazz drummer and composer Ted Sirota said, "Everybody, you have an assignment. You joined the march, you gotta take a task, whether it is getting out flyers, mobilizing at your school, spreading on social media, we have a specific role for you to play. Everybody and their little brother and sister and their grandmother and cousins, when you go home for Thanksgiving, talk to your family, speak the truth to them, don't back down. We know what the truth is and they are attacking it every day. We are going to stand with objective truth and we are going to fight for the future of humanity."
Los Angeles
People rallied and then marched through the streets, bringing the noise that the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! People came with their own noisemakers--pots, pans, drums, kazoos, a trumpet, and more. Speakers at the rally included Luna and Erica from the Refuse Fascism Student Network who gave a shout-out to the Mendez High School students who have walked out twice in their attempt to get rid of the Trump/Pence regime.
Brooke from Indivisible spoke about going on a road trip to Washington, DC, with Refuse Fascism and fighting to end this fascist regime. Magician Mueller and Madame Metoo took to the stage saying, "No more misogyny," and telling people that the way to make Trump disappear was to "hit the streets." Bo, an Iraq war vet, spoke for Refuse Fascism. Powerful music was provided by the band Hero Injection. People on the sidewalk were called on to join the march, which several UCLA students did as they were making their way to the LA Coliseum for their rivalry football game against USC. After the march, people took over the street at Pershing Square, where the rally was held for a block party with music and dancing.
San Francisco
People rallied in front of City Hall and then marched through the Castro and Mission districts to Dolores Park. The crowd included students from Cal State, San Luis Obispo, an SF high school drum group, families with their kids in strollers, educators, activists, and revolutionaries. The mood was serious about the urgent need to drive out the regime and enthusiastic about making noise and music. A large, loud sound system helped unleash the spirited rally and march.
Refuse Fascism speakers at the start challenged everyone to step forward to build this movement, and led the crowd to chant, whistle and break the silence! This regime must be driven from power, and we have to bring forward the millions to do it. One RF speaker drew a powerful parallel between the movement that's needed today and the civil rights movement and movement to end the war in Vietnam. People put their lives on hold and on the line to change the world. And that is what we must do now.
In addition to speakers from Refuse Fascism, an immigrant from the Mission organization La Colectiva de Mujeres spoke, along with another activist from the Mission. A representative from SF Indivisible said, "We have a moral imperative to stand up now and say that this man must be impeached. We can't just stand by and let him trample the Constitution and the rule of law." He also read a poem about impeachment. A San Francisco State student who also works with Human Rights Campaign in the Castro told of how the LGBTQ community is fearful: "I can't express how important this is for our community in particular, to get the Trump administration out of the White House so we don't have to fear any more or as much."
And an older man with his homemade sign describing fascism passionately put his thinking this way: "We can't let the people in Washington do to the Muslims what the Germans did to my people 85 years ago. If we don't get the word out there, it's going to be too late."
The group of students from San Luis Obispo came with their own banner--"No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA." One of them said he was there because "we're at over 12 months since Trump was elected and there's a sense of complicity arising among some people and a community of resistance is growing among others.... The media is the ultimate in complicity. The people's complicity is regulated by the media. The Democrats are not the solution. They are just as quiet on so many things. And before Trump they were just as quiet on so many things. We need to be strategic to use the Democratic Party to create the world we want to see but really recognizing the limitations of it. We're here to resist the Trump/Pence regime, to refuse fascism, standing up to the Trump/Pence regime, against fascism." He spoke of how important Refuse Fascism is and how it must grow.
The march took off from City Hall and made its way through the streets to the Mission District. Along the way, many people took up flyers, some joined the march and signed up with Refuse Fascism. Some contributed money on the spot. In the Mission District, the march made it to Dolores Park, packed with people picnicking and socializing. The march went inside the park, chanting and bringing the message of Refuse Fascism to many hundreds of new people right there. The march ended with a short rally in the middle of the park, where a Pence pinata was destroyed by kids.
Austin, Texas
People rallied in front of the Texas state capitol, banging pots and pans, demanding that the Trump/Pence regime must go. Several people who had come out on November 4 came, as well as a couple of students from the University of Texas, Austin. One of them said that she came because she saw the posters up on campus. A number of flyers got out to passersby and tourists. At the capitol, seven zombie reactionaries from Infowars disrupted the rally and provoked confrontations with protesters and one protester was unjustly arrested. Refuse Fascism regrouped, focused on our message and marched towards UT Austin. Infowars seemed to give up trying to provoke us and left. As we marched up the streets, people were mainly positive--cars honking in support, and a few people joining in on the call and response. Outside UT Austin, among our chants was, "If you hate Trump, if you hate Pence, get your ass up off the fence! Join us, join us, join us, NOW!"
People gathered in Thomas Paine Plaza with a banner reading "Drive out the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime--RefuseFascism.org," and with bucket drums, a cowbell, corrugated metal trashcan lids, whistles, dozens of helium balloons with NO! written on them, and other little noisemakers.
Folks spoke from the megaphone. Two spoke very poignantly about the threat of nuclear war and the wars that are being waged, and one spoke mainly to the need for people to start taking action. After initially planning to march on the sidewalk, we took the streets and partially circled City Hall, then went up 15th street and turned onto Walnut, one of the busiest and poshest shopping areas in Philadelphia. Drumming and chanting and stopping to agitate the crowds outside the Apple store, outside a Taylor Girlz concert, and at busy intersections, inviting people to join us in the streets and leading people in taking the pledge. A lot of people joined us in the pledge--we did it three times and each time we had bystanders put their hands in the air and say it with us, while many more stopped and mumbled along under their breath or were silently supportive.
People broke the silence and brought the noise, meeting for a rally at City Hall and marching through the downtown shopping core. One speaker was an elementary school teacher who found Refuse Fascism and felt compelled to speak out because five of her ESL students have fathers who were detained or deported in the last year. She said she felt helpless to stop it as an individual and led everyone in a primal scream of NO! at the end of her words. Another speaker, a Refuse Fascism organizer who is a longtime activist in many important causes and who is now dedicating time and resources to the overarching RF mission, ran down Umberto Eco's 14 features of fascism and examples of each under this regime. Weldon Nisly, retired Mennonite minister and member of a Christian Peacemaker Team to Iraq and Palestine, spoke about how wars are truly a war on children and the power of nonviolent movements to effect change.
Marchers wore rainbow capes, wigs, and umbrella hats and created a cacophony of sound with pots and pans, wooden spoons, native drums, decorated buckets, sound horns, tambourines, and more. Four protesters carried a giant inflated Earth globe while a couple of others traded off wearing a big bobble-head Trump. We stopped at intersections to agitate, get out flyers and collect donations--and make as much noise as possible! New chants that developed on the spot or were brought by new organizers were: "Wake Up America/Get Out of Bed/Dump Donald Trump/Before We're All Dead!" and "This is NOT Normal/Trump Must Go! This is NOT Normal/Pence Must Go!" The marchers took up the orientation and fought to grow the march as we went, but although there were people along the route who clapped, said thank you, and took photos and video, not one person stepped off the curb into the street. This beginning core of people who HAVE decided to actively oppose the Trump regime and the consolidation of fascism are trying to understand what is holding others back from taking that step.
There was a short speak-out after the march. A young man brought to the protest by his stepfather said that after the elections, his and other high schools were at first shocked and silent but then started walking out in protest. He said this needs to be happening every day now and that it's a disgrace that things have gone on this long. A woman from Australia said the people of the world are depending on us, that even though there aren't as many people as we need, we're doing the right thing and need to continue.
In the cold and heavy rain, people broke the silence and brought out the noise with bucket drums and amplifier that was heard for blocks! We were active members of Refuse Fascism, a youth who got involved on November 4, a gay activist and college student, a woman who had first-hand experience with fascism in Germany.
A young Black man watching said to his two friends and us that he voted for Trump. He then said he was joking to try to get a rise out of us! They spoke with deep feeling on what Trump means for Black people and signed up. They took flyers and passed them out, and started chanting, "Fuck Trump, Fuck Trump!" then brought their chant and dance into the rally, uniting it with the rhythm on drum and buckets. With everyone dancing to the beats. Then we took the march into a downtown mall--drumming and shouting to let the shoppers know we will, and they must, break the silence of normalization and conciliation. We went in with a banner and lots of noise. Though we got kicked out by the police, the point was made that "This Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!" and some people took note. A youth who signed up many people for Refuse Fascism today in the rain said, "I am excited about finally standing up. Other groups sit around and talk. Refuse Fascism is doing something."
People in restaurants put down their forks; people in hotels came to their lanais, and people on the sidewalks stopped to take photos and leaflets. We were so loud that our chants and drumming echoed back to us from the walls of high-rises. All because some of us stepped into the streets to make some noise! The energy was contagious and a few onlookers even started their own chants. On Saturday night we proved that even a small number can make a real difference! Thousands heard us; many thanked us.
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Revolution #518 November 20, 2017
Michael Slate Interviews History Professor Bruce Cumings
What "Everybody Knows" about North Korea--and the Real History of U.S. Aggression
July 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Friday, June 30, after meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Donald Trump once again threatened North Korea with military aggression: "The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed and frankly, that patience is over."
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is an oppressive regime--not a revolutionary socialist state--a reactionary force in the world. For months now, t he fascist Trump/Pence regime has threatened it, saying "all options" are on the table if Kim Jong-un does not end the country's nuclear weapons program. Trump says he wants North Korea to be "dealt with rapidly" and his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says that every option being prepared involves a U.S. military attack. So now there is a real danger of a U.S. military attack, possibly including nuclear weapons, which could lead to the deaths of millions in the region.
The following is from a June 9, 2017 interview with author and professor Bruce Cumings on The Michael Slate Show on KPFK Pacifica radio. The U.S. rulers and media paint North Korea as the aggressor. But as Bruce Cumings reveals, there is a long history of U.S. war, threats and intervention against North Korea.
Revolution /revcom.us features interviews from The Michael Slate Show to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports, and politics. The views expressed by those interviewed are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere by Revolution /revcom.us.
Michael Slate: In your book, Inventing the Axis of Evil, the truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria, you make a point I thought was important for people to understand, which is that the United States terrorized North Korea with nuclear weapons during and after the Korean War, and was the only power to introduce nuclear weapons to Korean soil. So there's a lot that's just unknown by people even as the U.S. puts out all this stuff about how the North Koreans are crazy and they're playing with nukes.
Bruce Cumings: It's a little bit like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where most people, including a lot of liberals, accepted the fact that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator who had WMDs, and there was no real background given; for example, our support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s in the war with Iran.
Then we have a war, and the war goes very badly. It's still a complete catastrophe. And all this history comes out. And if we were to go to war with North Korea, which has seemed closer under the Trump administration than it has been in some time, all of this would come out about the U.S. running an operation called Hudson Harbor in 1951, where B29s dropped dummy atomic bombs on North Korea to see whether they might be useful against troop concentrations and cities. President Eisenhower, toward the end of the war in May 1953, tested one of the largest atomic bombs ever tested, and also shot the first atomic cannon. And this was all put on the front pages of newspapers, and was intended to bring an end to the war and intimidate North Korea and China. And then as you said, in 1958, we installed hundreds of nuclear weapons, battlefield tactical weapons and short-range warheads on missiles, into South Korea. So we're the first ones to introduce nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, and kept them there until 1991, when they were withdrawn on a world scale because the Pentagon felt that precision-guided high explosives, but non-nuclear weapons, would cause fewer problems. You wouldn't have radiation and collateral damage [as you would] from nuclear weapons. So we drew them back.
We drew them back. But you can leave it to Donald Trump to tell you what the North Koreans still face, which is, for example, a Trident submarine, sometimes called Armageddon in one sausage tube. He mentioned that two of our nuclear submarines were off of North Korea last week. This is of course classified information. He's not supposed to say that. He doesn't know that. But the fact is that one of our nuclear submarines, or all of them, could run right up to the North Korean coast and obliterate North Korea in a matter of hours.
Colin Powell back in 1995, which should give your listeners an idea of how long this problem has been going on--it's really 25 years we've been dealing with the North Korean nuclear problem--Colin Powell said if they ever used a nuclear weapon in anger, the U.S. would turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette.
I just want to say one more thing about that. If you imagine North Korea as the Green Team against the Blue Team, rather than the Evil Kim Jong-un with his crazy haircut against the always-perfect United States, you can see what they're up against. It's a small country, and the largest power in the world is constantly threatening it with nuclear annihilation. President Obama did this too. He routinely sent nuclear-capable B1 and B2 bombers over South Korea for exercises. So it's a very dangerous situation, and I think it's incumbent on Americans to put themselves in the shoes of the North Koreans and look at the world that they face, quite apart from all of our media stereotypes about how crazy they are, and how dangerous they are.
Michael Slate: When you want to talk about crazy and dangerous, you say that North Korea would not have had nukes if the U.S. had actually kept its word in the past.
Bruce Cumings: People who follow the situation closely, and high officials in the Clinton administration like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Wendy Sherman, her very close aide on North Korea, have written about this--Bill Clinton nearly struck North Korea with a preemptive attack against their nuclear facility in June 1994. It was only later that people realized, or came to understand, how close we were to a war with North Korea at that time. But Jimmy Carter intervened when he heard about all of this. He flew to Pyongyang and talked directly with Kim Il-sung and got a freeze on all of North Korea's plutonium.
It's very important to underline that that freeze was completely monitored and checked for eight years, 24/7. You had UN inspectors on the ground, closed-circuit cameras watching it at all times. The reactors were sealed. And of course we know with our intelligence when a reactor starts up. So there's no question. The North Koreans didn't have an ounce of plutonium from 1994 to 2002. However, George W. Bush had already put North Korea in his Axis of Evil in 2002. Then in September he announced his preemptive doctrine, for which the euphemism was "anticipatory self defense." And North Korea, along with Iran and especially Iraq, were listed as the countries for which this policy was developed. He then went ahead, of course, to invade Iraq in March of 2003, which was really a preventive war rather than anticipatory self-defense. We don't need to get into this, but Saddam Hussein was actually writing a novel at the time and trying to do everything he could not to provoke the U.S.
After that happened, North Korea just said as openly and loudly as it could, Saddam Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons. If he had had them, he wouldn't have been overthrown. That's not going to happen to us. They got back their plutonium, kicked out the inspectors, and systematically began building atomic weapons, and tested the first one just three years later, in 2006.
I don't think it's a partisan judgment, but a factual statement to say that George W. Bush had two enormous catastrophes on his hands. One is the invasion of Iraq, which basically wrecked the Middle East since 2003. And second, he is the primary person responsible for North Korea getting nuclear weapons. And I think many experts believe that. Madeleine Albright has written about that. But it doesn't get out in the media at all, in part because so many of our people want to say, well, that's six of one, half a dozen of the other. We're not to sound partisan.
Michael Slate: One of the things you talk about is that most recently, the use of agreements, etc., have been kicked to the curb, that there's an assumption that no one has been able to rein in the nuts in North Korea and their nuke program, and it's time to fight or topple. Let's talk about that.
Bruce Cumings: People routinely say that North Korea has always cheated and never has kept to its agreements. And I don't know where they're coming from because it's simply not true. In addition to the plutonium agreement, the freeze and the missile deal, North Korea in 2000 also opened relations with many of our allies. So they have diplomatic relations with Canada and Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy. We're one of the last countries not to have relations with North Korea, still trying to isolate it. But the fact is, North Korea was really reaching out, and then they faced the wall of hostility from Bush.
It is true, that if we continue to intimidate North Korea with nuclear weapons, and bring them into the theater by submarines and air power, anybody in North Korea would get a deterrent. In that sense, the critics of North Korea are right that North Korea, when it felt intimidated over many, many years, eventually developed nuclear weapons. It might have happened anyway. But the fact is we did have agreements with them that kept them from moving to nuclear weapons.
Finally, I would say in response to your question, that the discourse about North Korea under Trump has just been absurd, in that Trump, as I said, talked about our nuclear submarines off the coast. He has threatened North Korea. He's also said he'd like to talk to Kim Jung-un over a hamburger. That might be the better way to go. But he's so erratic, and the one thing the North Koreans notice is the submarines, the two aircraft carrier task forces that are in Northeast Asian waters right now. What Trump has done privately or secretly, or what the Pentagon has done, is just jam a bunch of hardware up against North Korea.
Meanwhile, our press, and that includes not just Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC, are constantly running scare stories about North Korea. I saw on CNN that Ana Navarro, one of their frequent commentators, even referred to Kim by his first name, saying, "Little boy Un is a maniac." She probably thought that was his last name. But that's the level of discourse that we've had about North Korea under Trump.
Michael Slate: You've also made a point, and I think this is really important, that there's a whole different perception of the problem, the source of danger, in relation to nukes in Korea. There's an epistemology that is always bad no matter when it's used, which is based on "everybody knows." And that is a very dangerous thing in relation to this. In reality there's a long history, as you've been saying, of nuclear threats against North Korea itself. In fact, the U.S. has recently installed the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea. Let's talk about those two things.
Bruce Cumings: Well, that was one of the more cynical ploys on the part of the United States in recent years. This Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system was jammed into South Korea while the current president, at the time President Park Geun-hye was being impeached, and before the election that was held earlier this month, which brought a progressive to power.
The U.S. fears that Moon Jae-in, the new president, will be an engager of North Korea like his mentor, Roh Moo-hyun, who was president from 2002 to 2007. So they wanted to get that system in and installed before the new president came into office. And he just complained last week that four launchers were brought in without his permission, or without his office being notified about that. In other words, we are continuing to add to the system even after he's president without telling him.
There's just an outrageous situation in our relationship with South Korea. We never have problems with the ruling party that goes back to the dictators, but we always have problems with liberals and progressives who want to try a different approach toward North Korea. The only time that has not been true was when Bill Clinton and William Perry brought American policy around to engagement for two years, 1998-2000. That's the only time we've had direct talks with the North Koreans that have really yielded so much.
But I would expect that President Trump is not going to like President Moon very well, and we'll see a lot of tension in their relationship, just as there was between George W. Bush and Roh Moo-hyun in the early 2000s.
I want to say one more thing about the THAAD system. It's really designed not to knock down North Korean missiles. North Korea has short- to medium-range missiles that it can launch by the dozens, and there's no way this THAAD system can knock them down. It's really there to monitor North Korean long-range missiles and Chinese missile tests and long-range missiles. The Chinese have complained mightily about this.
I think the THAAD system's installation in South Korea was primarily political, in that it was trying to get it in there before a progressive president was elected, and to do what the U.S. has been trying to do for many, many years, which is to weld South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. together in an alignment, or an alliance, to contain China. It doesn't really have much to do at all with the so-called North Korean threat. But it has a lot to do with pissing off China and making sure the system's in there before a president comes to power who might not like it.
Michael Slate: Just how dangerous is this situation, both in terms of war and even the impact of war on human survival?
Bruce Cumings: I'm in touch with 30 or 40 people who work on North Korea, former government officials, scholars. Somehow North Korea's become the big deal. We have 15 or 20 websites dealing with it now that we never had 10 or 15 years ago. But in the last couple of months, I've seen time and again, very well-informed experts worrying about the U.S. and North Korea coming to blows. It could come from an incident that ratchets up into a war, or it could come from a preemptive attack. There was a great deal of talk back in March and April about Trump people favoring a preemptive attack on North Korea, on its missiles. You can't really attack their nuclear facilities preemptively without letting loose a whole lot of radiation around the region.
There was almost a consensus inside the Beltway in the fall and winter that if North Korea keeps moving toward an ability to hit the United States with a long-range missile and a nuclear weapon, well we just have to think about preempting that. And it's very, very dangerous, because along the DMZ, there have been cycles of preemption and counter-preemption both happening and envisioned by the respective militaries, North Korea, South Korea and the U.S., going back decades, going back to the Korean War. So to add the threat of a preemptive attack on North Korea's missiles is to just come close to bringing forth the general war in the region that we talked about.
Dr. Bruce Cumings is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago, and author of many books, including The Korean War, and Inventing the Axis of Evil, the Truth about North Korea, Iran and Syria (contributor).
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Saturday 8:05 am: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken to Beth Israel Medical Center and is listed in "serious" condition.
He is said to have head and neck injuries, as well as some abdominal injuries.
Saturday 7:13 am: BizPac Review has the latest.
Friday 8:48 pm: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Suspect 2 in Monday's Boston Marathon bombing is in police custody after a massive manhunt Friday, April 19, 2013.
Friday 8:46 pm: Boston Police CONFIRM SUSPECT 2 IS IN CUSTODY.
Friday 8:44 pm : Ambulance leaving the scene, applause heard from law enforcement, Fox BOSTON confirming SUSPECT 2 is IN CUSTODY.
Friday 8:43pm: Fox Boston SUSPECT IN CUSTODY
Friday 8:40 pm: Via Weasel Zippers:
Friday 8:34 pm : The Boston Globe reported earlier:
Police have seen the suspect sit up and are using "flash bang" stun grenades to disorient and distract him. Officers are acting with caution because they remain concerned that the suspect might be wearing a suicide bomb vest, the source said.
The source said police had seen the suspect moving from a State Police helicopter.
Friday 8:32 pm: Guest to Bill O'Reilly: Mother of suspects arrested for shoplifting at the Lord and Taylor in 2012.
Friday 8:30 pm: press conference soon with Gov. and Mayor.
Friday 8:28 pm : Fox Boston report:
Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston Friday 8:24 pm: Three people in custody being questioned by authorities. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:16pm: Geraldo Rivera reported the older brother was questioned by the FBI in 2010 at the "request of a foreign government." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:11 pm: Bill O'Reilly talking about the older brother Tamerlan: "Hell probably has a new resident tonight." ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:08 pm: shots fired in Watertown, Mass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3UT5lEQvh8 _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 8:00 pm: Fox News is reporting the suspect is believed to be injured from the shootout Thursday evening. It is unclear if the suspect is refusing to come out of the boat, or if his injuries are preventing it. Friday 7:53 pm : The suspect is surrounded. He is believed to be under the boat tarp.
Photo Credit: Fox News via FBI
___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:52 pm: 8 to 10 explosions heard possibly in the backyard where the boat is. Possibly flash bangs used by law enforcement. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:46 pm: More shots fired. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:42 pm: Fox News reported the FBI had questioned the older brother about ties to terrorism approximately two years ago. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:32 pm: The suspect IS IN THE BOAT REFUSING TO COME OUT ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:30 pm: Bomb squad is en route to the scene. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:19 pm: Minutes after the press conference was finished, law enforcement rushed to the home where the supect may have been hiding in a boat in a backyard. 30-40 gunshots were fired. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:17 pm : Police responding to shots fired on Franklin St, in Watertown, Mass. Belief by law enforcement is that suspect 2 is down. The city is back on lockdown. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:14 pm: Woman called police around 7pm to report that though her boat had been checked earlier by police, the door to the boat shed was now open and she saw blood. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:13 pm: A robotic device is being brought in to search a boat on a trailer in a backyard for explosives. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:12 pm: Police responding to Franklin Street in Watertown. Shelter in place is back in effect. _________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:11 pm : 30-40 shots fired in Watertown. "A" suspect is reported DOWN by Fox News _________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 7:10 pm: A SUSPECT IS DOWN __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:24 pm: BizPac Review: " Mom's interview: My sons were setup, FBI followed them for years. " "Boston bomber could have been deported after 2009 conviction." "Boston bomber an Obama supporter!" ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:21 pm : No more press conferences scheduled for Friday, April 19, 2013. __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:19 pm: Police Col. Alden: Suspect escaped the shootout on "foot." __________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:18pm : Col. Alden: Suspect is "violent and dangerous." People must be vigilent. "We did everything we could to ensure he was not in this neighborhood." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:14 pm: Police: Suspects were not involved in an armed robbery at the 7-Eleven Thursday evening. There had been a robbery earlier, but the suspects were in the store afterwards. Police Col. Timothy Alben: I believe suspect to still be in Massachusetts. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 6:11 pm: Police: "We searched a 20-block radius" to ensure public safety. "Shelter-in-place" orders are lifted. People are allowed back out, authorities ask they stay "vigilent." ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:40pm: Girl "Jess" who filmed the shootout on the phone with Fox News. Was about 4 homes away from where the gunshots were. She said it lasted about 30 minutes. "I was terrified, I wanted to go run and hide." "Someone was wrapped in a white sheet on a gunnery carried out after the shootout." Jess's YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Cqo1Ad6spkY Friday 5:31 pm: Tweets on the bombing from the suspect via The Daily Caller. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:28 pm: Upcoming news conference. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:27 pm : Two tweets from #bostonbombing: __________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:17 pm: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a marine biology student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 5:01 pm: Wolf Blitzer will be speaking very shortly to the father of the suspects. Press conference scheduled for 5:30pm. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:54 pm: Mother of suspects spoke to Russia Today . "I am 100 percent sure this is a setup." https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ARE9rclZCqw
Mother of bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. Photo Credit: Business Insider
____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:52: 15 police officers injured in the shootout. Police recovered a "pressure cooker bomb" like the one used in the marathon bombing, CNN reported. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:48 pm: Press conference with authorities scheduled for 5:30pm. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:45pm: Mother of suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told reporters she does not believe the charges against her sons: "If anyone would know, it would be me. He never told me he would be controlled by Islamic jihad." We didn't talk about terrorism in this house." "My youngest son was raised in America." "Dzhokhar got involved in religion about years ago." _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:38 pm: BizPac Review: Victim in iconic wheelchair photo helped FBI zero in on suspects Boston Bomber Could Have Been Deported After 2009 Conviction GOP lawmaker: 'How many Boston libs spent the night cowering...wishing they had AR-15' ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:17 pm : Friday 4:10 pm: Dzhokhar' former high school wrestling coach told CNN Dzhokhar was a regular "American kid." ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:09 pm: The "door-to-door, street-by-street" sweep by law enforcement continues in the Boston area. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:06 pm : Some background information on the life of Tamerlan Tsarnaev from CBS Boston. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 4:02 : Sources told CNN explosives and an explosive trigger were on the body of Tamerlan when recovered by police. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Friday 3:50 pm: Some tweets from #manhunt: Friday 3:40 pm: CBS Boston audio-video of interview with suspects' father from Russia:
Friday 3:25 pm: Police in an armored vehicle pulled up to a Boylston Street intersection near the Arlington T-station. Police have been issued armor and weapons, Fox News reported. People have been told to get off the street.
Friday 3:03 pm: CNN posted a timeline and map of the events leading to the massive manhunt for Suspect 2 in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Photo Credit: CNN
Friday 2:42 pm: High school acquaintance of Dzhokhar told reporters Dzhokhar seemed to be "a good, normal guy."
Friday 2:39 pm: Dzhokhar came to the U.S. in 2002 on a tourist visa seeking asylum. He received citizenship on Sept. 11, 2012. The older brother Tamerlan came in 2006 and had not received U.S. citizenship.
Authorities are looking at how Dzhokhar "became radicalized" while living in the U.S., Fox News' Bret Baier reported.
Friday 2:36 pm: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth was evacuated Friday after police received reports Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on the campus this past week, after the marathon bombing Monday.
Friday 2:22 pm: The suspect's aunt, Maret Tsarnaev of Toronto, does not believe her nephews committed this act of terrorism. She told reporters she wants proof from the FBI they did this.
Sun News Network posted the video interview with the aunt:
Friday 2:14 pm: Authorities have just removed a computer from the home of Dzhokhar's sister in New York (the name of the city), New Jersey.
Friday 2:00 pm: Police have 70 percent of their search perimeter completed. SWAT, FBI, bomb squads, helicopters, K-9 Units, etc are searching a 20-block area looking for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Manhunt continues for Boston Marathon Suspect 2 - in the white hat, 19-year old, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released Thursday evening, the suspects were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape inside a gas station and authorities were contacted.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists were heavily armed and threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Tamerlan died in the hospital after a shootout with police. Doctors reported he had "too many gunshot wounds to count," as well as shrapnel from explosives in his torso. Some reports said Tamerlan also had a "trigger device" on his body.
Dzhokhar escaped police and is on the run.
MIT police officer Sean Collier, 26, was killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus Thursday night. A 33-year old Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents under "shelter-in-place" orders to stay indoors. Police are calling the massive manhunt an extremely "grave and dangerous" situation.
Friday 1:55 pm: Connecticut police are searching for a 1999 Green Honda Civic, Massachusetts license plate number: 116 GC7 in connection with the manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing Suspect 2, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Fox News reported.
Friday 1:51 pm: BizPac Review related stories:
Friday 1:36 pm : Steve Emerson, terrorist expert, told Fox News authorities are pouring through the English and Russian YouTube accounts of both brothers. Tamerlan supposedly had 22 videos posted and Dzhokhar had four.
Friday 1:31 pm: Mass. Emergency Services asking people in the Boston area to leave "places of business." Asking people to "shelter in place" at home, not at work.
Friday 1:09 pm: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who was killed by the bombing suspects while he sat in his car on the MIT campus late Thursday night was identified as Sean Collier, 26.
MIT officer Sean Collier was killed late Thursday night by the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Friday 12:35 pm: Col. Timothy Alben Superintendent of Mass. State Police: "going door-to-door, street-by-street." No apprehension at this point. "There will be a controlled explosion later this afternoon near Cambridge, out of an abundance of caution."
Friday 12:08 pm: Awaiting Boston Police news conference.
Friday 11:43 am: Uncle Ruslan Tsarni: "Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in, ask forgiveness from these people. You brought shame on our family, the entire Chechnya people. You put this shame on our entire ethnicity."
Friday 11:42 am : "If I had the slightest idea they were involved, I would have been the first one to turn them on." The brothers were NOT born in Chechnya. "Chechens are peaceful." "This has nothing to do with Chechnya."
Friday 11:41 am : Uncle: "my family had nothing to do with them for a long, long time. "We respect this country, we love this country. This country gives chance to everyone." "We are ashamed they are my brother's children."
Friday 11:40 am: Ruslan Tsarni: "they are LOSERS."
Friday 11:38 am : Uncle Ruslan Tsarni: "we are Muslims, we are ethnic Chechens." "My brother spent his life bringing bread to the table." Very angry and disgusted at his nephews. "My family has nothing to do with THAT." "We are ashamed."
Friday 11:37 am : He is "shocked." Very angry. Says he didn't know those kids until 2005. Calls bombings an "atrocity."
Friday 11:36 am : Uncle of suspects, Ruslan Tsarni, speaking live to reporters on behalf of his family. Condolences to all those "murdered" "injured," names all three who died.
Friday 11:31 am: Fox News' Bret Baier reported the suspects threw "pipe bombs, homemade grenades and pressure cooker bombs" at police during the car chase.
Friday 11:29 am : University Massachusetts Dartmouth campus is being evacuated.
Friday 11:26 am: Upcoming Mass. State Police press conference.
Friday 11:25 am: Video sounds of the shootout with the bombing suspects early Friday morning:
Friday 11:15 am: Manhunt continues for Boston Marathon Suspect 2 - in the white hat, 19-year old, Chechen Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
The older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died from his injuries after a shootout with police early Friday morning. Doctors said they lost count of how many gun shots riddled Tamerlan's body.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, the suspects were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape inside a gas station and authorities were contacted.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists were heavily armed and threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Tamerlan died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso. Some reports said Tamerlan also had a "trigger device" on his body.
Dzhokhar escaped police and is on the run.
A MIT police officer was killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus. A 33-year old Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents under "shelter-in-place" orders to stay indoors. Police are calling the massive manhunt an extremely "grave and dangerous" situation.
Friday 11:12 am: Anzor Tsarnaev, father of the suspected bombers, spoke to the Associated Press from Makhachkala, Russia.
Friday 11:01 am: CNN reported a source said police have asked for a "Russian interpreter."
Friday 10:51 am: Motorcycle police and fire trucks just raced down the street in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 10:49 am: The police perimeter has been extended to now include the coffee shop location.
Friday 10:48 am: Police cars are leaving the scene after shots were heard from a location farther away.
Friday 10:47 am : Shots fired at the coffee shop location. Police are yelling for residents to get back inside their homes.
Friday 10:46 am: Police are moving in on a Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks coffee shop in Watertown, Mass. Police are seen donning bullet proof vests
Friday 10:41 am : Police preparing for a press conference.
Friday 10:36 am: The "shelter-in-place" order issued by police to area residents to stay inside their homes has been extended.
Friday 10:25 am: Police perimeter in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 10:01 am : The Associated Press spoke to the father of the 2 suspected terrorists. He called his son, Dzhokhar "an intelligent boy and a true angel."
Friday 10:00 am:
Friday 9:53 am : Fox reported deceased Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had an explosive trigger on his body.
Friday 9:50 am: Police are moving reporters and people farther away from the home they have surrounded.
Friday 9:48 am: Police say Suspect 2 may have bombs or other explosives with him.
Friday 9:42 am: BizPac Review:
Friday 9:40 am: The Boston Police live scanner so many people were listening to has apparently been taken offline.
Friday 9:31 am:
The FBI released this picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Suspect 2 in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Map of area police have surrounded in Watertown, Mass. Photo Credit: Google Maps
Friday 9:27 am: The FAA has shut down airspace over Watertown, Mass. Logan International Airport is still open.
Friday 9:06 am: Boston Police live scanner: Police are watching a man on a back porch of a home on Boylston Street wearing a gray hoodie sweatshirt and holding a laptop.
Friday 9:02 am: BizPac Review: "Self ID'd Muslim: Terrorist reveals hatred on Facebook page"
Friday 8:59 am: Several vehicles are being taken away by tow truck from the area police have surrounded in Watertown, Mass.
Friday 8:52 am: Fox reporter on the scene said the stolen Mercedes SUV was just taken out of the area by a tow truck. She said it was heavily damaged by bullets.
Friday 8:42 am: Fox reported authorities have a list of names, possibly relatives of the suspects, living in the area where police have converged. A helicopter is overhead in the area. SWAT and K-9 units, 3-4 bomb trucks on the scene, reports of 9 city buses of cops have converged on this particular area of Watertown, Mass.
Friday 8:41 am: CNN reported a "heavy smell of smoke" from the area where police have converged.
Friday 8:38 am : Police just brought a woman out of a home in the area where police are standing with weapons drawn.
Friday 8:36 am: Police are telling reporters to "back up, back up" Guns drawn, rifles out. Definite explosion or gunfire sounds.
Friday 8:35 am: explosive sounds heard, gun fire perhaps...the FBI has the area surrounded.
Friday 8:33am Police are running into a building. All police officers are converging on a building with guns drawn in Watertown, Mass..
Friday 8:29 am : Homeland Security is keeping President Obama up to date, minute by minute, Fox reported.
Friday 8:17 am : CNN reported the suspects are Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.
Friday 8:16 am: Bunker Hill Community College, where the older brother attended, is the college seen in the movie, "Good Will Hunting."
Friday 8:14 am:
Fox News report:
Friday 7:58 am : Governor Deval Patrick to address Boston area residents any moment
Friday, April 19, 2013: Law enforcement said the dead terrorist Suspect 1 had explosives on his body.
Friday 7:53 am: One minute from press conference. Governor said it will be very brief, mostly a message to area residents.
Friday 7:51 am: Press conference with police coming soon.
Friday 7:45 am: Chechen brothers, aged 26 (dead) and 19 (with the white hat, called Suspect 2, is on the loose). The older brother reportedly attended Bunker Hill Community college pursuing engineering. The Associated Press reported the 19-year old is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11, possibly there to rob the store.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape, possibly at a gas station.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso.
Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 7:39 am: CNN reported the terrorists are originally from Chechnya, fled to Kazakhstan during the conflict, and then moved to the Boston area of the United States.
Friday 7:36: CNN reported the dead suspect, black hat, aged 20 attended Bunker Hill Community college to become an engineer. Took a year off school to become a boxer. He supposedly posted on his Facebook that he had not a "single American friend." He said "I do not understand them [Americans]."
Friday 7:355 am: The National Guard is patrolling the streets of Watertown, Mass. A press conference with police is scheduled for later this morning.
Friday 7:12 am: Some reports say the brothers are from Chechnya, now some reports say they are possibly from Turkey. Fox News is reporting the brothers have been in the US for "several years."
Friday 7:28 am: brothers aged 20 and 19
Photo Credit: Twitter
Friday 7:19 am: Boston area is locked down.
AP report: Men are brothers from the Russian Chechnya region who have legally been in the US for about a year.
"We believe these are the same individuals that were responsible for the bombing Monday at the Marathon,'' State Police Colonel Timothy Alben said today. "We believe that they are responsible for the death of an MIT police officer and the shooting of an MBTA police officer. This is a very serious situation that we are dealing with.''
Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis this morning said the man now known as Marathon bombing Suspect #2 -- seen in photos released Thursday wearing a white baseball cap -- is the person being sought by a massive collection of federal, state, and municipal police. He is believed to be the suspect who actually dropped the bombs at the race finish line.
"We believe this to be a terrorist,'' Davis told reporters about 4:30 a.m. today. "We believe this to be a man here to kill people."
Friday 7:15 am: A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer was shot and killed while sitting in his car on the MIT campus. A Transit Police officer is said to be in critical condition after the shootout with the terrorists.
Friday 7:04 am : SWAT officers are tightening the perimeter where they say Suspect terrorist 2 is holed up. Police are going door to door Friday in the Watertown, Mass. area.
The Associated Press is reporting the suspects/terrorists are brothers from Chechnya.
Friday 7:03 am: Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown, Mass. 7-11.
The men carjacked a vehicle, some reports say a Mercedes SUV, keeping the driver as a hostage for about 30 minutes. A few reports say the suspects had explosives strapped to their chests.
Somehow, the owner of the vehicle was able to escape, possibly at a gas station.
A car chase with police ensued. The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. He had numerous gunshot wounds and shrapnel from explosives in his torso.
Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 6:56 am: Brothers are said to be Chechens who have been in the United States for a little over one year, legally, the Associated Press reported.
Friday 6:54 am: Brothers are Russian from Chechnya. Possibly students at a Boston area university.
Friday April 19, 2013 6:52 am: The suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing are reported to be brothers from Chechnya.
Friday 6:50 am:
Friday 6:41 am:
Friday 6:33 am: SWAT officers, police, FBI have established a perimeter of about 20-blocks in Watertown, Mass. where they must believe terrorist Suspect 2 is hiding.
Friday 6:26 am : All photos from Breitbart.com
Suspect 1 (Black hat) is dead after a shootout with police early Friday morning. Suspect 2 (White hat)is on the run and considered armed, dangerous and a terrorist sent to the US to kill Americans.
Suspect 2 still on the run. Video footage from a Boston area 7-11
Friday 6:22 am: Doctor Wolf from Beth Israel Medical Center said Dr. David Shoenfield, who lives in the Watertown area, heard gunshots last night after about 12:45 am. He notified his ER, who prepared for an event.
The suspect was in traumatic arrest with CPR ongoing as he was brought in. Terrorist Suspect 2 was pronounced dead shortly after 1 am.
Friday 6:12 am: Fox News' Jennifer Griffin reported the dead terrorist Suspect 1 not only had gunshots as part of his injuries, he had explosive residue on his clothing and pieces of shrapnel in his torso, doctors said.
Friday 6:08 am: Police say Suspect 2 is "determined to kill."
Friday 6:03 am: Five hours after photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were released, they were spotted in a Watertown 7-11.
Suspect number 1 with the black died in the hospital after a shootout with police. Suspect number 2 with the white hat escaped police and is on the run. A MIT police officer was killed. A Transit Police officer is in critical condition at a Boston area hospital.
The terrorists threw military grade explosives out the window at police during the car chase. All Watertown - Boston area residents are told to stay indoors. The situation is extremely "grave and dangerous."
Friday 6:00 am:
Friday 5:57 am: Mass. Governor: "We believe this to be a terrorist," Patrick said in a press conference. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."
The city has been shut down as a massive manhunt continues Friday morning.
Friday 5:54 am: 5 hours after the photos of the men were released to the public, the suspects were spotted at a 7-11.
An MIT police officer was shot and killed in his car.
The suspects hijacked a Mercedes SUV and while at a gas station, the driver was able to escape.
A car chase with police ensued. Explosives were thrown out the window by the supsects.
One of the suspects died in the hospital after a shootout with police.
Somehow, Suspect 2 in the white hat is still on the loose.
Friday 5:52 am: The suspects are now being called "terrorists," Mass. Governor Patrick said the men were sent from another country to kill Americans.
Friday 5:50 am : "Military grade" explosives are still on the street, Fox reported. Residents in the Watertown area are told the situation is "grave and dangerous" and to stay indoors.
Friday 5:46 am : In an overnight, breaking news story out of Watertown, Mass., one suspect in the Boston Marathon is dead after a shootout with police and Suspect 2 (with the white hat) is on the run.
The men killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who was sitting in his car. A car chase ensued with the suspects throwing explosives out the window at police.
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"And though she be but little, she is fierce." And fun! This conservative-minded political junkie, mom of three, dancer and one-time NFL cheerleader holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science. [email protected] Twitter: @JaneenBPR
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Let's look at the other side now. In 2013 alone, 49,851 officers were assaulted with firearms, knives and other weapons. Over the past 10 years, on average, 150 police officers have been killed in the line of duty every year. Fifty-seven of these were shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten. Of the 509 officers feloniously killed in the past 10 years, 46 percent of the perpetrators were black, despite their representing only 13 percent of the population. Do we call this a black war against the police?
Black Crime & Incarceration
Critics also argue that blacks' 40 percent share among U.S. prison populations is direct evidence of institutional racism (see table). In a color-blind society, they charge, incarcerated black populations would reflect their 13 percent share of the general population.
However, if black crime rates were the guide, it would seem that blacks are, if anything, underrepresented in prison populations. The table below presents FBI data on homicide offenders. Blacks exceed all other groups in murders committed in 2013. In prior years it was actually worse.
In 2007, the CDC broke out total homicide numbers and rates by age and race. The murder rate among blacks is similar to the rates in some of the most violent third-world nations (see below). No other racial or ethnic group comes close.
The table below shows murder rates among males by age. Note that for 20 to 24-year-olds, the murder rate among blacks (109.4/100,000) is 17 times higher than the rate for whites (6.4/100,000). Among 15 to 19-year-olds, it is over 20 times higher. The average for all ages is 13 times higher.
Finally, black-on-white crime is substantially greater than the reverse. The table below shows murders by race of offender and victim in 2013. Note that overall, blacks kill as often as whites, although blacks represent only 13 percent of the population. Note also that black-on-white murder is more than double the rate of white-on-black murder (409 to 189). Similar results were found for 2012 , 2011 , 2010 and prior years.
If these rates were to hold, and the roles were reversed--i.e., if blacks represented 64 percent of the population while whites comprised only 13 percent--black-on-white murder would have exceeded 2,000 killings in 2013, while white-on-black murder would have resulted in only 39 deaths. The table also shows that for all races, most murders were committed by members of the same race. This is because criminal violence usually occurs within one's own community . Finally, in the other categories of violent crime--rape, robbery and aggravated assault--blacks consistently committed about 40 percent of the total in 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , and 2010 .
So the disproportionate arrests, incarcerations and shootings of blacks should come as no surprise. Their 40 percent representation among the prison population fairly reflects the proportion of crimes committed by blacks in the U.S. This is not evidence of institutional racism, but rather a social pathology evident within the black community. They have been committing crimes at the highest rate by far of any racial/ethnic group for decades.
In recent years, blacks have committed unspeakably heinous acts against whites and other racial/ethnic groups. Probably most notorious was the brutal 2007 murder of a young Tennessee couple, Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian, who were on a date when carjacked by four men and one woman. Newsom was repeatedly raped while Christian was forced to watch. He was then taken out, shot, and lit on fire. They repeatedly raped Christian, then poured bleach down her throat, stuffed her in a plastic bag and threw her in a kitchen trash bin to die.
There was no national news reporting of this double murder, despite its singularly vicious nature. More recently, a 19-year-old Mississippi girl, Jessica Chambers , was burned alive by suspected black perpetrators, who poured lighter fluid down her throat, ignited it and left her to die. No arrests have been made although Chambers supposedly identified her attackers before she died.
Each year in cities across the country, officials brace for widespread violence associated with black events . Author and journalist Colin Flaherty has documented over 500 cases of black-on-white violence in 100 American cities in his 2013 book, White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It .
Flaherty will be publishing a second book, " Don't Make The Black Kids Angry: How white liberals and black media ignore, deny and encourage racial violence ." A pre-publication copy reviewed by this author adds further evidence to how this problem continues to be systematically suppressed by police, politicians and national news media.
Flaherty has reported extensively on the "knockout game," where the goal is to knock a person out with a single, surprise blow to the head. Variants include "point 'em out, knock 'em out," "knockout king," "one hitter quitter," "happy slapping" and Polar Bear Hunting . The perpetrators in all cases are black.
The knockout game is not a new phenomenon--the first reported case occurred in 1992--but in the past few years it has become much more widespread. At least seven people have been killed and hundreds, if not more, injured. Another new term is "flash mob," where a group coordinates through social media to meet in large numbers, often to go on looting and vandalism sprees. Again, the perpetrators are almost always black.
Flaherty reports on mass mob violence that has been going on for decades. In 1989, 50,000 blacks descended on Virginia Beach, Virginia on Labor Day weekend to celebrate "Greek Week." It degenerated into days of widespread violence and looting. Over 100 stores were damaged, 50 people were injured and 650 arrested. The National Guard had to be called in. Similar violence became associated with "Greek Week" for years afterward and has since spread to many other holiday weekends in Virginia Beach.
The Indiana Black Expo attracts 200,000 people annually and has been associated with widespread violence for over 10 years. After years of silence, the Indianapolis Star reported " a sense of dread " as the 2014 Expo date approached. They weren't disappointed. Among other acts of violence, 10 people were wounded by gunfire in street violence. The 2011 Urban Beach Weekend in Miami Beach was characterized as a "rolling race riot." Hip Hop performer Luther Campbell, a co-founder of the event, no longer goes, saying it is too dangerous. Many such events have been canceled because the local community demanded it, including Freak Nik in Atlanta, the Greekfest in Philadelphia, Black Family Reunion in Daytona Beach and others.
Fanning the Flames
It doesn't help when President Obama mocks America by enlisting race-hustler Al Sharpton as an " advisor ." In the Tawana Brawley case, Sharpton falsely accused white police officers of raping a black woman.
Acting on Obama's orders, Attorney General Eric Holder has made reverse racism official administration policy. For example, in hearings regarding a new "hate crimes" bill in 2009, Holder stressed that "only historically oppressed minorities" would benefit. After dropping the infamous 2008 voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, Holder made it clear that the Obama administration will not prosecute any voting rights cases against blacks. Former Civil Rights Division lawyer J. Christian Adams adds that Holder treats cases of racial bias against whites with "open contempt."
Grade school kids, especially in inner city neighborhoods, are subjected to anti-white racist indoctrination. Students from Booker T. Washington Middle School in Baltimore, Maryland recently attended an event titled "Re-Claim, Re-Pair, Re-Form, Re-Produce--REPARATIONS Now!" at the historically black Morgan State University. Louis Farrakhan was the keynote speaker. He called whites "crackers" and told the audience :
As long as they kill us and go to Wendy's and have a burger and go to sleep, they'll keep killing us. But when we die and they die, then soon we're going to sit at a table and talk about it! We're tired! We want some of this earth or we'll tear this goddamn country up!
There is even a college curriculum that focuses on "White Privilege," and annual " White Privilege Conferences " are widely attended by teachers and students alike.
We are seeing the result of this indoctrination by academia and the media. In a Detroit courtroom recently, black thugs Fredrick Young and Felando Hunter were sentenced to life for the 2012 robbery, torture and execution of white teenagers Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla. When given the opportunity to apologize to the victims' families in court, Young said :
I'd like to say sorry to the families of Aiyanna Jones, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and I want to apologize to them for not being able to get justice for their loved ones who was murdered in cold blood--and in respect for the peaceful protest, I want to say hands up don't shoot. Black lives matter--that's it, your honor.
Black author and political commentator Mychal Massie says black lives don't matter, to blacks . In his video " Just How Much Do Black Lives Matter ?" he states:
From 1882 to 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched. But from 1973 until the present time, a period of 42 years, 17.3 million black babies were aborted . Why don't we hear about that? Did white policemen do that? That 17.3 million is equivalent to 45 percent of the black population today. So do black lives really matter?
Massie has a unique take on U.S. race relations. He objects strenuously to being singled out by race. "Words like 'black community' and being called a 'minority' are insults to me," he told AIM in an interview. "I am an American . How can I be a minority if there are 300 million of me? That is segregation speech. It identifies black people as 'different.' People don't think about these things until you mention them."
Massie called Ferguson "an undeniable exhibition of the depravity of a people." He makes the point that civilized people do not burn down their own homes and businesses, adding that Michael Brown was a thug terrorizing his neighborhood, who was going to get shot sooner or later by police or another gangster.
Massie was interviewed for this report. Read the full interview, here .
Famed civil rights icon Dr. Alveda King has a slightly different take. She says that Ferguson protesters did have a point, but that violence is never necessary. "To fix these problems," she says, "we need to work together on conflict resolution, guided by God's love, not war."
Daughter of A.C. King and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr, Dr. Alveda King was also interviewed for this report. Read her full interview, here .
The Communist Roots of Black Racism
Black racism has been encouraged by outside communist agitators, many of them white. Since the turn of the last century, communists have manipulated the civil rights movement, and have been stoking the fires of discontent deliberately. Massie credits lifelong communist and Stalin admirer W.E.B. Du Bois with initiating the international communist movement's effort to capitalize on black discontent early on. After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1927, Du Bois called it , "the most hopeful vehicle for the world." Du Bois helped found the NAACP in 1909.
Bayard Rustin, who acknowledged that " blacks were ripe for [manipulation by] Communists ," helped found Martin Luther King, Jr's Southern Christian Leadership Conference , said that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s movement was corrupted after he was assassinated. Massie states, "Out of that group came Joseph Lowery and others who mouth complaints designed to stir the caldron of anger, victimology and rabid hatred for anyone who dares attempt to share the message of truth and life." ( Ed. Note : Lowery made news in 2012 when campaigning for Obama by saying "all white people would go to Hell." He said it was a joke.)
The " White Privilege " concept was created by Noel Ignatiev , a hardcore Communist Party member and former Harvard University professor who founded the journal, Race Traitor .
White guilt has allowed the Left to dramatically expand the welfare state. Trillions of dollars have been spent on welfare. Yet, as Mitt Romney recently noted, under Obama "there are more people in poverty in America than ever before." Many people are unaware, however, that the modern welfare system was designed by radical leftists to suck minorities into permanent poverty , providing a reliable voting bloc for Democrats and sowing the seeds of discontent within the black community. It was inspired by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two die-hard socialists, who advocated packing the welfare rolls in order to bankrupt and crash the system. They wanted it to fail . The Cloward Piven Crisis Strategy was formulated to create an army of militant, angry blacks that would serve as foot soldiers in the coming socialist revolution. Piven described the rationale as recently as 2011:
efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant... So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.
Cloward and Piven sought to rig the welfare system for failure to provoke that anger. Their apprentice was Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN. ACORN's proud protege was Barack Hussein Obama. Please SHARE this story as the only way for CFP to beat Facebook anti-Conservative Suppression. |
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VT Patriot : Saul, I read your comment and was ready to applaud it until the last part. Those that are rioting... Graystone : Now If FLIR is interested in marketing - and good will - they should "donate" a unit to the ECPD. tomcat : @ Wild Bill this liberal POS xander13 fits the profile you described in one post you made on this... VT Patriot : Amen Mrs. Hodges. I believe we are all here to help you and your heroic son. Please keep us... JP : Dumber in the head than a hog is in the a$$... Just say'n.... JP ... |
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A Planned Parenthood abortion business where a woman died after apparently being left, bleeding, for five hours or more had been told on a separate issue to call 911 for help in an emergency the same day Tonya Reaves died, according to a new report.
The result is a renewed call for an criminal investigation of Reaves' death, according to officials with Operation Rescue.
The organization's officials said they obtained a copy of a telephone call placed at 12:43 p.m. on July 20 from the Loop Health Center Planned Parenthood in Chicago regarding a fracas that developed with a mother and daughter who were at the abortion business.
That situation was unrelated to that of Reaves, who had her fatal abortion at about 11 a.m. at that location on that day, Operation Rescue said.
But the 911 dispatcher in the call is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, a number used primarily to provide information regarding city events and programs, during an emergency.
The mother-and-daughter issue developed when a 16-year-old patient was "physically assaulted" by her mother, and Operation Rescue said the caller indicated abortion business staff members pulled the two apart after they saw the mother kick and hair-pull her daughter.
Part of the conversation, which can be heard at the Operation Rescue website, is as followed:
Dispatcher: Okay, and once you called - you see, next time you need a police car to come out for any reason whatsoever, you need to call 911.
Caller: Right. Okay. I just -
Dispatcher: That way you don't waste time with 311.
Caller: I know, I know, I just (laugh) I just hate to use services to make, you know -
Dispatcher: I know. Well, they don't dispatch police cars. All they do is transfer you to 911.
Caller: Gotcha.
Dispatcher: So you're waiting in that queue and then they flip you over to our office.
Caller: Right.
Dispatcher: Now I don't have any of your information. So, what is your telephone number?
OR reported the dispatcher "is heard admonishing the Planned Parenthood worker for calling 311, which caused a delay in dispatching aid to the scene." That means the facility "ignored instructions from an emergency dispatcher to directly call 911 in the event of an emergency in order to prevent wasting precious time," OR said.
OR said it got the transcript through a Freedom of Information Act request with the Chicago office of Emergency Management and Communications.
"This new information confirms that Planned Parenthood intentionally ignored instructions given to them earlier in the day by an emergency dispatcher and refused to employ the fastest means of getting help for their dying patient," said Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue. "In addition to waiting five and a half hours to get Reaves to the hospital, the further delay caused by refusing to call 911 as instructed could have been the difference between life and death."
She continued, "This information shows gross negligence in the way Planned Parenthood managed Reaves' medical emergency. Delays in getting her the care she needed were intentional. It crosses the line into what is likely criminal conduct.
"We renew our call for a criminal investigation into Reaves death. If those responsible are not brought to justice, it is only a matter of time before another woman suffers Tonya's tragic fate," Sullenger said.
WND reported earlier when pro-life leader Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics called on State's Attorney Anita Alvarez of Cook County, Ill., for an immediate investigation of Planned Parenthood for what he alleged was the murder of Reaves, 24.
Crutcher cites the Illinois "depraved indifference murder" statute as being more than enough to warrant a thorough inspection of the death of the African American woman - to determine if criminal charges can be pressed against Planned Parenthood.
"If it can be shown that this young woman might have survived if emergency treatment had not been withheld from her for more than five hours, then this was not an accident and it was not medical malpractice," Crutcher contends. "It was a homicide, and those responsible should be on the evening news wearing handcuffs and leg irons."
On July 20, Reaves was left for several hours at the abortion giant's Chicago facility after a staff abortionist ripped a hole in her uterus. An ambulance eventually was summoned, but she died from extensive hemorrhaging.
She left behind a 1-year-old son.
"It is clear that Tonya's life was less important to these people than the public relations hit they might take from her being hauled out of their facility on a stretcher," Crutcher said. "And so they just watched her bleed out."
The National Black Pro-life Coalition also is seeking to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for Reave's death.
"At a minimum, Planned Parenthood was criminally negligent when they left Tonya bleeding in their facility for more than five hours," said Walter B. Hoye, who serves as president and founder of the Issues4Life Foundation. " Planned Parenthood's lack of action demonstrates a depraved indifference for the life of this young woman. Planned Parenthood must be held accountable for the death of Tonya Reaves."
And NBPC members also recognize that the unnecessary death of Reaves represents not only an attack on women and their unborn children, but on African Americans in general, who account for 37 percent of abortion deaths each year, even though they represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population, pro-life advocates said.
"Surely the African-American community will wake up and stop giving Planned Parenthood a pass," said Rev. Arnold Culbreath, the director of Urban Outreach for Protecting Black Life. "Too many of our women and children have been butchered at their hands."
The organization notes that the No. 1 cause of death for black Americans in the U.S. is abortion.
King for America founder Alveda King. "We demand the unjust targeting of the black community by abortionists be investigated and immediately ended."
"The tragedy in Chicago should never have happened," said Restoration Project founder and President Catherine Davis. "That facility was not medically equipped to handle a surgical late term abortion. This is about the failure of an organization that holds itself out as a champion of women, and women's issues to champion reasonable medical standards." |
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Hurricane Irma, "Rent is theft", voting, AI and more.
The federal debt ceiling has been raised about 100 times. Obviously, the ceiling was never real, but the debt certainly is. Chatter of the debt...
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Andrew Torba, creator of the free-speech social media platform Gab, joins me to discuss fighting back against the big companies' ideological jihad against people and...
Florida -- Two nuclear sites in Florida are in the path of Hurricane Irma. Though the plants' owners are confident they can withstand the storm and...
As so often happens in the wake of a natural disaster, government officials in Texas are currently investigating claims of "price gouging," which the office of the...
We often hear it said: if only government could be run like a business, we'd be getting somewhere. The problem isn't that it's difficult to...
tating in a tweet this week that artificial intelligence would be the most likely cause of World War 3, entrepreneur and tech mogul Elon Musk added a...
After urging its supporters in the west to turn cars into weapons, guidance that inspired terror attacks in the UK, Spain and France, ISIS is...
As Hurricane Harvey, now tropical storm Harvey, makes its way across the southern US, estimates have already come in as to the cost of the...
Texans affected by Hurricane Harvey, including my family and me, appreciate the outpouring of support from across the country. President Donald Trump has even pledged...
Robert Nisbet is one of a handful of conservatives to have seen the major problems with American conservatism as we know it. In this episode,...
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Houston, TX -- It is time to strike while the iron is hot. Media coverage of the devastation in Texas is at a peak right...
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NBA star Draymond Green visited Israel last week and that's a problem for Shuan King.
"You got played," the black lives matter activist wrote. "Flashing a toothy grin with a sniper rifle in Israel on a trip sponsored by Friends of the IDF is so horribly offensive":
Dear Draymond Green ( @Money23Green ),
You got played.
Flashing a toothy grin w/ a sniper rifle in Israel on a trip sponsored by Friends of the IDF is so horribly offensive.
They've recently slaughtered 100s of unarmed Palestinians w/ those rifles. https://t.co/v1k0aYXoNS
-- Shaun King (@ShaunKing) July 11, 2018
Others jumped on the superstar for the Golden State Warriors as well:
It's also important not to demonize Draymond Green for this. I disagree with his choice, but it's our job to give him the necessary info. I'm confident that if he had been briefed, he would not have gone.
-- Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) July 11, 2018
The Israeli government is pimpin you bro. Go see what's on the other side of that wall. @Money23Green
-- Ferrari Sheppard (@stopbeingfamous) July 11, 2018
[?]Disgraceful. @Money23Green [?] being used to support #Israeli Defense Forces ; posing as sniper on visit to Israel. C'mon #DraymondGreen ! You said "you have to stand for something". Is this what you meant? Shooting #Palestinian kids? [?] @warriors [?] https://t.co/zlW8LRw4s8
-- James J. Zogby (@jjz1600) July 11, 2018
All these folks think Green "got played," which is a problem:
Draymond Green wouldn't have been hanging out with the Jews if he knew what I know, says the definitely not crazy or hateful Marc Lamont Hill https://t.co/3SONl0Eo5J
-- Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) July 11, 2018
It does seem that Green knew what the trip was all about:
And as the J erusalem Post notes , Green "is a former teammate of Israeli NBA player Omri Casspi."
Draymond Green( @Money23Green ) was a guest today of the Israeli SWAT Dep. pic.twitter.com/ze9Ubztv22
-- Or Shkedy (@Orshkedy) July 4, 2018
And here's a video from the Israel Police of Green firing weapons and autographing swag:
. @NBA star @Money23Green , who recently won the championship with the @warriors , came to visit Israel & demonstrated his sniping skills during a tour he conducted with SWAT fighters - @il_police Special Counter-Terrorism Unit pic.twitter.com/LRRNNZOSa8
-- Israel Police (@israelpolice) July 4, 2018
Green also met with President Reuven Rivlin on the trip:
Tremendous pleasure today to welcome Draymond @Money23Green of the Golden State @Warriors . It's not everyday you get to meet an #Allstar ! I hope this will be only your first visit to Israel, come back and visit us soon. pic.twitter.com/kaDwq5i4C8
-- Reuven Rivlin (@PresidentRuvi) July 4, 2018
SHAME! Shaun King targets the WRONG reporter with bully mob, has YET to apologize https://t.co/BGGdMLZA1k
-- Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 24, 2018
21,000 retweets, and counting: GUESS which debunked story Shaun King STILL has on his timeline https://t.co/uy7UsqPF2n
-- Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 1, 2018
WHOA: Debra Messing goes after Shaun King for trying to define anti-Semitism (no, seriously) https://t.co/K2tXgJrmeU
-- Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) May 31, 2018 |
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Despite a surge in optimism after the election, nominal GDP growth in 2016 was just 2.95%. This makes 2016 the second-worst year on record since 1959.
And with key economic indicators flashing warnings signs, it looks like the US economy is heading toward big trouble rather than revival .
Here are four signs that paint the picture best.
Credit Demand Is Contracting
Across all the sectors of bank lending (business, consumer, and real estate), credit demand is falling. The chart below shows a sharp decline in consumer loan growth over the past three quarters.
Source: Haver Analytics, Gluskin Sheff
The pent up demand seems to be exhausted. Given that this economic expansion is now in its ninth year, it's no surprise.
With consumption accounting for 70% of US economic activity, this will weigh heavily on growth.
Tax Receipts Turn Negative
Another indicator that signals the US economy is on a slippery slope is falling corporate tax receipts.
The chart below shows corporate receipts in April contracted most since 2009, when the economy was in midst of the Great Recession.
As Dr. Lacy Hunt, EVP of Hosington Investment Management and former senior economist for the Dallas Fed stated during his SIC 2017 presentation : "This indicator has turned down prior to every post-WWII recession. It suggests that America's corporations are experiencing a deterioration in earnings."
The Fed Walks a Tightrope
While consumer demand and economic activity are trending downward, the Fed is tightening monetary policy, which exacerbates the negative effect.
Ten out of the last 13 tightening cycles have ended in recession. In fact, of the 18 recessions since 1913, all but one have been preceded by a tightening cycle.
And here's why.
Higher interest rates increase the cost of credit, which reduces demand and weighs on economic growth. Dr. Lacy Hunt also made another good point regarding the Fed's move: "When the Fed tightens, they are saying the economy is doing too well by our standards... we want the economy to have less money and credit growth and we want less economic activity. They are saying this at a time when the best economic indicators are in a downturn.''
And the bond market seems to agree with Dr. Hunt that the Fed has got it wrong.
A Flattening Yield Curve
The Fed started this tightening cycle in December 2015. But three rate hikes later, the 30-year Treasury--the most economically sensitive Treasury bond--is down by 15 basis points.
As such, the yield curve has flattened considerably.
Source: Haver Analytics, Gluskin Sheff
Interestingly, if the Fed raises rates four more times, the yield curve would likely invert, which means long-term rates drop below short-term rates. It's worth noting that the yield curve inverted prior to every recession since 1981.
With all that being said, how should investors position their portfolios today?
How to Invest Around Late-Cycle Themes
At the 2017 Strategic Investment Conference, chief economist and strategist for wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff David Rosenberg said investors should be investing around "late-cycle themes" given the current setup in the markets:
"Investors should be de-risking their portfolios and reducing their exposure to cyclical sectors today. Late-cycle investing means you want to step-up the quality of your portfolio: the ratings and the balance sheets you own."
Download a Bundle of Exclusive Content from the Sold-Out 2017 Strategic Investment Conference
Get access to exclusive interviews with John Mauldin, Neil Howe and Pippa Malmgren from SIC, an ebook from renowned geopolitical expert George Friedman and bonus SIC 2017 content... |
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June 2013 was not a particularly great month for the U.S. intelligence community.
After former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information revealing the extent of U.S. surveillance programs in early June, President Barack Obama and his administration scrambled to justify and downplay the significance of such programs.
On Sunday, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the U.S. had spied on European Union offices in New York and Washington.
The German news magazine alleged that the NSA installed listening devices in those offices and tapped into computer networks in order to obtain information, according to The New York Times.
Der Spiegel said its information came from documents that Snowden had obtained.
Not surprisingly, allegations of surveillance inflamed many in the European Union community.
"We cannot accept this kind of behavior between partners and allies," French President Francois Hollande said. "We ask that this immediately stop."
Taking a chapter from our European counterparts, we at the Daily 49er believe that the NSA should be ashamed of its actions, if these allegations prove true.
Spying on an enemy combatant or warring nation is one thing.
Spying on allies, who have not shown any formal ties to terrorist organizations, is another.
In the wake of this new scandal, it appears that the NSA is involved in more shady practices than many had previously thought.
Spying, it seems, is omnipresent.
While we acknowledge there is a need for spying and sophisticated intelligence gathering, especially concerning issues of global terrorism, NSA's most recent alleged actions seem both improper and unfounded.
As more and more information about the NSA's intelligence gathering is made public, we are concerned about what the future holds.
What if more incriminating information about the NSA is released, and what if this information threatens our national security?
There may come a time in the near future when Snowden's leaks directly impact the safety and security of the U.S.
If Snowden has more, potentially dangerous information that he plans to release, the U.S. should mitigate its concerns by offering him something in return.
No matter what, at some point Obama must intervene in the intelligence crisis and explain not only to the American public but also to U.S. allies in Europe why the culture of spying is so popular within our government.
Call it Big Brother or the NSA, but someone's always watching. |
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MYTH of the LOST CAUSE bu Edward H. Bonekemper III. Book Review 150 years of Fake History. 150 years of Fake History, Seems the Civil War WAS About Keeping Slaves Major Van Harl USAF Ret
Wisconsin - -( Ammoland.com )- The first years of my life were spent living out west in New Mexico, California, Idaho and Alaska. I sort of knew about the Civil War from watching limited TV as a small child.
At the age of eight, in the middle of my third grade school year, I was transported to the heart of the confederacy when my father, the US Navy Master Chief, received orders to Norfolk Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia.
I was already an outsider since I did not enter this third grade classroom until half way through the school year. More importantly I was an outsider because I was not a southerner. Virginia was in the middle of the 100th year anniversary of the Civil War and there was a heightened awareness of this issue everywhere in the south. Boys came up to me on the playground and asked me if I was an Yankee or a Rebel. When I told them I did not understand the question, they wanted to know where I was from. "I am from Iowa" I would say and then I would get punched for being a Yankee.
I saw the town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada on a map and started telling anyone who asked me the Rebel or Yankee question I was from Canada. Poor little Southern boys who could not comprehend anything beyond the border of Virginia, were confused and left me alone. I still smile when I see a Canadian map with Moose Jaw on it.
This was my first introduction to what I call fake confederate history.
I learned to keep my mouth shut and figured out that gray was the color of choice over blue or black and blue.
I share with Robert E. Lee, Meriwether Lewis and George Washington the same 1610-1674 Virginia planter and politician grandfather's DNA. Augustine Warner was our ancestor, but unlike all of them I am not from Virginia and I am not a southerner. I have lived about a quarter of my life in the south due to military assignments, to include Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
On both my paternal and maternal sides of my family I had family members who fought for both sides of the Civil War. The two most decimated (shot-up) units in the Civil War when it came to casualties was the Iron Brigade on the Union side and the 24th North Carolina on the side of the Confederacy. I had family in both units and lost family in both units to combat deaths.
I can also document that some of my family owned slaves. My 1776 era grandfather John Harle owned slaves in Fairfax County, Virginia and I have seen his will. He did business with George Washington's plantation and his first cousin Sarah Harle was George and Martha Washington's housekeeper. Sarah managed the Washington slaves who worked in the Mount Vernon home.
Unless you can absolutely document that your family came to the US after 1865 and that none of the descendants in your family ever married into some " old " American family you might be uncomfortably surprised to discover slave holders in your family tree.
For over 150 years our nation has been living a deception of generated, newly minted history that has been labelled revisionist history by some and fake history by me. The confederacy was formed by southern states of the US that seceded from the Union for the sole purpose to continue the practice of owning black humans as slaves. The paperwork trail of these seceding states and why they left the Union are documented in bold writing. It was to continue slavery and all the money that slavery could continue to generate.
The problem for the south, was after Robert E. Lee lost the civil war, his failed actions forced the confederacy to capitulate and return to the Union. There was the matter of over 750,000 dead soldiers between the two conflicting armies, along with the loss of 4 billion dollars of wealth when the enslaved black human flesh was released from southern bondage. The south's economy was shattered and it took over 100 years to turn it around.
This, was all because the south wanted to keep humans in irons and build future wealth on the backs of an underclass of people. When that entire practice was destroyed and the old confederacy was a smoking ruin there had to arise a new tale, a new story, a revision of the history, a generation of fake history to save southern face. An invented cause to help create a new narrative that would turn the vision of the south from the vicious and violent antagonism in slavery and war and make the old confederate cause a misunderstood symbol of goodness and righteousness.
The south reinvented itself into the victim and fake southern history was born-the North went along with it.
MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Edward H. Bonekemper III. MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Edward H. Bonekemper III.
The book The MYTH of the LOST CAUSE is the work and effort of Edward H. Bonekemper III.
I heard Commander Bonekemper speak at the September meeting of the Civil War Round Table of Milwaukee and in six years of being a member of that organization his book was the first one I ever bought. I came home and could not put it down.
What he was espousing I already understood and concurred with the historical facts of his book. What Commander Bonekemper's book did was lay out the specific facts, separated from the fake history and tells the reader where these true facts could be obtained that refuted the "states rights" bravo sierra (BS) of what the south alleged was the reason for secession, followed by civil war.
Commander Bonekemper makes the point that the secession of southern states and the establishment of the new Confederate States of America was accomplished for two reason. Secession was for the continuing of the practice of keeping black people in bondage for profit and the perhaps even the more important issue of maintaining white supremacy.
One of the first challenges you hear against the above two points is, only a small percent of southerners even owned slaves. If slave owner Mr. Jones, his wife and eight children, parents, in-laws and other white family members lived on a plantation that had slaves to do all the work, it did not matter that technically all the slaves were legally owned by one person, Mr. Jones. The entire Jones family benefited from the captive labors of the slaves.
The second point about white supremacy was the worst because it was carried into southern life long after the end of the Civil War. If you were a poor white trash southern man who could barely feed your family, most of the upper class whites looked down on you. Under slavery you were still always one step above the pecking order of society because southern culture perpetually sided with the white man over a black man no matter the white man's station in life.
The internationally known and easily recognizable symbol of the 150 year old fake history of the southern cause is the confederate battle flag. The flag is the cross of St. Andrew (Scottish flag) with stars to represent the southern states that left the Union to keep their slaves. The KKK, the white supremacist groups, the neo-Nazis and other racially motivated organizations have borrowed this Hollywood endorsed flag of hate and the world can easily spot a rebel flag in a crowd of protesters.
I cannot tell you how many times when I expressed my opinion about the rebel flag I am politely advised that it represents someone's heritage and I need to understand that motivation to support the 150 years of fake history that has shaped our nation. After the riots at Charlottesville, Virginia in August about the removal of confederate statues, pro-southern cause people appeared shocked that neo-Nazis and white supremacists would co-op the beloved rebel flag and use it as a banner of hate. Always remember that the revisionists of fake history have placed the blame for the Civil War at the door step of state's rights to deflect the true issue of white supremacy.
If you watch the news about North Korea you find yourself wondering aloud how a nation can blindly buy into the fake news, fake history and almost god like worship the North Korean people have for three generations of the Kim family. The Kim family lead that country to ruin. North Korea has its own version of master and slave. Do some side by side comparisons of the antebellum south with their masters and humans in bondage and North Korea with its modern day version of human bondage. Not a lot of difference.
Yes, Virginia, your rebel flag, your stars & bars, your battle flag or whatever it is called today is the primary symbol of white supremacy and all that that implies. The international community sees it that way, why can't the perpetuators of fake history not understand this?
Commander Bonekemper's The MYTH of the LOST CAUSE is going into re-print yet again. The public wants the facts not the mythical retelling of fake history that has allowed Robert E. Lee to rise to an almost "Christ-like" position in the southern Civil War revisionist manipulation of the truth.
It is time for the statues to come down. Even grandson's of Stonewall Jackson have come out in open letters to the press and public to endorse the removal of these statues. One side says the confederate flag represents their heritage and one side says it represents hate. As a field grade commission officer in the US military who swore to defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic I see the rebel flag as the symbol of the worst attack on our Constitution this nation has endured and championed over.
If you are tired of the over 150 years of fake history and you want to be able to articulate your point in a conversation that is usually driven by emotions designed to shut your opinion down, read The MYTH of the LOST CAUSE. Edward H. Bonekember III will provide you with the facts that will help you understand the real history of the Civil War and how to prepare to navigate not around fake history of the lost cause, but steer right through it.
Major Van Harl USAF Ret. / [email protected]
About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.: Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret., a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Infantry School. A retired Colorado Ranger and currently is an Auxiliary Police Officer with the Cudahy PD in Milwaukee County, WI. His efforts now are directed at church campus safely and security training. He believes "evil hates organization." [email protected] |
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"What a pleasure it is to award the 2017 Amazon First Novel Award to such an arresting and important piece of writing! The jury noted that The Break is a book in which the author funnels an epic vision--including the varied and sometimes difficult histories of a city, a people, and a family--through the lens of violence. The women of the Charles/Traverse family are fierce and tender; the ways that they care for each other will stay with you long after you finish reading the book. Katherena Vermette has combined lyricism with the suspense of narrative action to make a compulsively readable novel about conflict and the resilient Metis women who move through it and forward into the world."
--Tanis MacDonald, Head Judge, Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer from Treaty One territory in Winnipeg. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her NFB short documentary, this river , won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Peoples' Festival, and a Canadian Screen Award. The Break was shortlisted for both a Governor General's Literary Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and was a finalist in the CBC's 2017 Canada Reads competition.
The Amazon.ca First Novel Award is excited to be a part of Canada's sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017. Over the last four decades, the First Novel Award has recognized outstanding literary achievements by first-time Canadian authors and launched the careers of some of Canada's most beloved novelists, including Mona Awad ( 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl ), Alix Hawley ( All True Not a Lie in It ), Wayne Grady ( Emancipation Day ), Anakana Schofield ( Malarky ), David Bezmozgis ( The Free World ), and Eleanor Catton ( The Rehearsal ). This year's winner will receive $40,000 and the shortlisted finalists will each receive over $6,000.
Head judge Tanis MacDonald selected the finalists. The author of three books of poetry, Tanis was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism in 2013 for her study of elegies, The Daughter's Way . She is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing. She has also served on the juries for the Edna Staebler Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program. The winner will be chosen by a panel composed of MacDonald; Casey Plett, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction; and Gurjinder Basran, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
The finalists for the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, listed alphabetically by the author's last name, are: White Elephant , Catherine Cooper (Freehand Books) Accordeon , Kaie Kellough (ARP Books) So Much Love , Rebecca Rosenblum (McClelland & Stewart) Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains , Yasuko Thanh (Hamish Hamilton Canada) The Break , Katherena Vermette (House of Anansi)
"It was a distinct pleasure to be introduced to the dozens of great books that were entered into this year's competition," says head judge Tanis MacDonald. "The writing and publishing of a first novel is a huge accomplishment in itself. If I had it my way, the shortlist would not have been short at all. While all five books show a great range of styles, perspectives, and subject matters, they have in common a remarkable reach. Each book stretches towards the telling of a big story--sometimes via intimate connections--in which people puzzle over history as it has happened (or is happening) to them and how they will live in the face of change. I feel very lucky to have read these books early on in their long shelf lives. I encourage everyone to read them all."
Q&A: Katherena Vermette, The Break
A one-on-one conversation about trauma, violence, and restorative justice with the Winnipeg-based winner of the 2017 Amazon First Novel Prize.
I read that the plot of the novel came to you as a vision of sorts. When did you realize you had to channel the idea into a book?
I don't know where books come from; I've never found a satisfactory answer from any writer. They're kind of like dreams. The concept for the book came about two years ago now. There was a lot of news about girls perpetuating violence, particularly gang violence. The idea was super heinous and everyone was super surprised. My response was "Why are we surprised?" Females are not simply the victims of violence--one of the responses to the abuse we receive is to go on and abuse other people. I thought, What would propel someone to do something like that? What has to happen in someone's life to hurt another person? It scared me to talk about violence, and I didn't want to do it in an isolated, exploitative way. People have such amazing resilience and strength. If I talk about someone who commits violence, I also want to talk about the dozen other people who don't.
The book is situated in Winnipeg's North End, your old neighbourhood. What compelled you to start the book where you, too, started?
I think there are many places in Canada that are not written about enough. The North End is one of those unwritten areas--unless its notoriety is written about, its [reputation as] a racism-and-murder-capital. But that's an outside vision. There's a lot more to the community than the stats that people pull out. It's a neighbourhood that's incredibly rich culturally, with an incredibly rich history. It was comforting to be home as I was writing about this stuff. But I'm across the river now.
The story has ten Indigenous narrators. Did you do that to send a message about the community's complex experiences beyond tragedy?
Any group of people, whether they share demographic information or not, has its own characters, and everyone has their own history and ways of coping with the past. The women in The Break all have different reactions to tragedy, and they're not perfect, but they're incredibly strong, for the most part. That's the danger of writing from the perspective of any minority group: as soon as you write one character, they become a stereotype. It's only one voice.
You have compared the structure of the book to a restorative-justice circle. Why?
The story centered on Phoenix: what she did and how everyone was coming to terms with that. Then I started writing about Lou, a social worker, who is involved, but not directly. Then came a mom and a grandma. As I was writing, I inadvertently came to this circle idea--that everyone was affected by this one event, especially within a family. And a restorative-justice circle [exists when] everyone comes together from a family or community to talk about how that one thing has affected them. The perpetrator of that event--violence or theft or whatever--has to understand how their actions affect everyone.
The idea of bearing witness seems central to the book. Do you see yourself as a witness, even if you're writing fiction?
As much as I am representing my nation and community in talking about my truth, it's still my truth. Stories tell us more about the teller than they do about the story itself.
Not all the authors nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award situated their novels on home terrain. The books feature a Quebecois conspiracy and a crime in rural Winnipeg, but also war-torn Sierra Leone and the teeming marketplaces of colonial Vietnam. Still, Canadian literature has left an indelible impression on the finalists, despite their vividly imagined travels. Here, in their own words, the five shortlisted authors reveal the first Canadian works of fiction they loved.
Prochain episode by Hubert Aquin
"I first read this novel nineteen years ago. It gave me insight into the anguish and energy at the heart of Quebec and inspired some reflection on our collective struggle toward self-definition. In Lausanne, an imprisoned revolutionary writes a novel that parallels his experience. Separated from his country and his lover, he struggles to escape the conventions of the detective genre. Double agents multiply and cryptic messages are exchanged. Still, conventions encroach, as does a realization that although he chooses violence he cannot overcome his personal or national history. The story emphasizes that as we reckon with our material conditions we remain vulnerable to our doubts and defeats." --Kaie Kellough, Accordeon
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
"I think I was thirteen when I first read it, and it had a big impact on my teenage ideas about romance--for better or worse. I suspect that if I read it for the first time now, I would appreciate it in different ways and certainly find it less romantic. Seeing the movie somewhat obscured my memory of the book. The only details I remember that aren't in the movie are the parts about Laszlo drinking Hana's menstrual blood and her sticking a fork into him." --Catherine Cooper, White Elephant
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
"This might be a slim novel, but it's anything but meagre. [It features] a town under water, a Vietnam vet father, and an unnamed narrator trying to uncover the mystery of her father's past. I love that Skibsrud eschews plot for a lyrical interiority, and her metaphors are startling and tone-perfect. I'm reminded of Sartre. Skibsrud's slow-paced revelations achieve an intellectual intimacy that's rare. This book attracts me as a writer who has, often unsuccessfully, veered away from traditional storytelling. Skibsrud's philosophical musings cut to the marrow of loss." --Yasuko Thanh, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
"I was fourteen when I bought Generation X at Barnes and Noble in New York. I loved the idea of a long story full of little stories. That generic confusion is the definition of what life is, so it made sense to me. It was funny and weird and about a world so completely foreign to me: the idea that people weren't religious but spiritual was strange for someone from a heavily Christian town. The characters were isolated from their families, and when you're fourteen, you're right in the middle of your family all the time. And it [contained] so much pop culture that I didn't get: marginalia and footnotes and definitions and cartoons and all these ideas that were new. I didn't understand that you could tell stories and write yourself into them--that was an exciting thought for me then." --Rebecca Rosenblum, So Much Love
In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier
"This was the first novel I fell in love with, and I still love everything about it. When I first read it as a young teenager, it changed and healed things inside of me. I saw my people and my city in a story for the first time. There is truth and beauty on every page, and April is a literary hero of the highest calibre. [Mosionier's novel is] the definition of courage and a lesson in the power of story. This was the book that made me want to write, and this is also the book that told me I could." --Katherena Vermette, The Break
White Elephant
Dr. Richard Berringer, his wife, Ann, and their thirteen-year-old son, Torquil, have abandoned their dream home in Nova Scotia and moved to Sierra Leone, despite warnings that the West African country is embroiled in a civil war. Two months on, things are not going well. Tensions are rising between Richard and his boss; Torquil--who hates Sierra Leone almost as much as he hates his father--has launched a hunger strike in an effort to convince his mother to take him back to Canada; and Ann is bedridden, stricken with illnesses that Richard believes are all in her head. While the Berringers battle with themselves, each other, and the worlds they inhabit, the narrative repeatedly returns to their past, shedding light on what brought them together, what keeps them together, why they have come to Sierra Leone, and why they might not be able to go home again.
Catherine Cooper is a Nova Scotian writer with a master's degree in English literature and creative writing from Concordia University. Most recently, she has had works published in Brick and Guernica . Her first book, The Western Home: Stories for Home on the Range , was a collection of short stories published by Pedlar Press in 2014. White Elephant is her first novel. She currently lives in New Zealand.
Accordeon
Accordeon is an experimental novel, an unsparing deconstruction of Quebecois culture, an ode to Montreal--a city where everything happens all at once and all realities exist simultaneously. Seeking to control every detail of daily life, the Ministry institutes a vast surveillance program, planting agents in offices, cafes, and daycares. When Accordeon's itinerant narrator is arrested on a street corner, their testimony reveals the existence of a conspiracy that would involve using a flying canoe to thwart the Ministry and decolonize Quebec society. Through his depiction of a Ministry of Culture devoted to quotas and a repressive cultural code, and his representation of voices and images from the margins, Kaie Kellough interrogates our collective sense of Quebec's identity.
Kaie Kellough is a word-sound systemizer. The author of two collections of poetry, Lettricity (Cumulus Press) and Maple Leaf Rag (ARP Books), he has issued two sound-recordings, Vox:Versus (WOW) and Creole Continuum (HOWL!), and given hundreds of sound poetry performances in Canada and abroad. His writing fuses formal experiment and social engagement, and has appeared in journals in Africa, Japan, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Accordeon (ARP) is his debut novel.
So Much Love
When Catherine Reindeer vanishes from the parking lot outside the restaurant where she works, an entire community is shattered. Moving back and forth between her outer circle of acquaintances and her closest intimates, So Much Love reveals how an unexpected disappearance disrupts the lives of those left behind: Catherine's fellow waitress now sees danger all around her. Catherine's mother seeks comfort in saying her name over and over again. The missing woman's professor finds himself thinking of her constantly. Her husband refuses to give up hope that she will one day return. But at the heart of the novel is Catherine's own surprising story of resilience and recovery. This riveting work deftly examines the complexity of love and the power of stories to shape our lives.
Rebecca Rosenblum 's first collection of short stories, Once , won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was named one of Quill & Quire's "15 Books That Mattered in 2008." Her second collection, The Big Dream , was published in 2011. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Awards, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She lives in Toronto. So Much Love is her first novel.
Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
How can you stand up to tyranny when your own identity is in turmoil? Vietnam is a haunted country, and Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh is a haunted man. In 1908, the French rule Saigon, but uneasily; dissent whispers through the corridors of the city. Each day, more Vietnamese rebels are paraded through the streets toward the gleaming blade of the guillotine, now a permanent fixture in the main square and a gruesome warning to those who would attempt to challenge colonial rule. Journey Prize winner Yasuko Thanh transports us into a vivid, historical Vietnam, one that is filled with chaotic streets, teeming marketplaces, squalid opium dens, and angry ghosts that exist side by side with the living.
Yasuko Thanh 's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Fire , Descant , PRISM international , and Vancouver Review . Her story collection Floating Like the Dead was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The title story won the prestigious Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2009. She was a finalist for the Future Generations Millennium Prize, the Hudson Prize, and the David Adams Richards Prize, which recognizes unpublished manuscripts. She recently received her MFA from the University of Victoria. She has lived in Mexico, Germany, and Latin America, and now lives in Victoria. Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains , inspired by the history of her father's family in French Indochina, is her debut novel.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of three books of poetry. She was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism in 2013 for her study of elegies, The Daughter's Way . She is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing, and has served on the juries for the Edna Staebler Award in Creative Non-Fiction and for the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program.
SHORTLIST JUDGES
Casey Plett wrote the short-story collection A Safe Girl to Love , winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction. She was also awarded the Honour of Distinction for the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging LGBT Writers and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers . She grew up between the Prairies and the Pacific Northwest and is currently the publicity and marketing coordinator at Biblioasis in Windsor, Ontario.
Gurjinder Basran 's debut novel, Everything Was Good-bye , won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award in 2011 and was featured as a Chatelaine Magazine Book Club pick in 2012. The CBC named her as one of the "Ten Canadian Women Writers You Need to Read in 2012." She lives in Delta, British Columbia, with her family.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews .
About the Walrus Foundation
The Walrus Foundation is a registered charitable non-profit (No. 861851624-RR0001) with an educational mandate to create forums for matters vital to Canadians. The foundation is dedicated to supporting writers, artists, ideas, and thought-provoking conversation. We achieve these goals across multiple platforms, publishing The Walrus magazine--which focuses on Canada and its place in the world--ten times a year in print, tablet, and mobile editions; curating and producing the national series of public Walrus Talks; convening annual sector-based leadership dinners; posting original, high-quality content daily at thewalrus.ca; and designing such digital projects as Walrus Ebooks and Walrus TV. The foundation also trains young professionals in media, publishing, and non-profit development.
For additional information about the finalists and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and to purchase the books, visit www.amazon.ca/firstnovelaward .
For more information, or to book an interview, please contact amirah.el-safty@thewalrus.ca or (416) 971-5004, ext. 253. |
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Quantity Theory Revisited The price of gold fell another ten bucks and that of silver another 28 cents last week. Perspective: if you are waiting for the right moment to buy, the market is offering you a better deal than it did last week (literally, the market price of gold is at a 7.2% discount to the fundamental price vs. 4.6% last week). If you wanted to sell, this wasn't a good week to wait. Which is your intention, and why? Gold vs. TMS excl. memorandum items (the... What Have You Done For Me Lately? Precious Metals Supply and Demand
Aragorn's Law or the Mysterious Absence of the Mad Rush Last week the price of gold dropped $8, and that of silver 4 cents. There is an interesting feature of our very marvel of a modern monetary system. We have written about this before. It sets up a conflict, between the perverse incentive it administers, and the desire to protect yourself in the long term. Answer: usually when it is too late... [PT] Consider gold. Many people know they should own it. They... An Inquiry into Austrian Investing: Profits, Protection and Pitfalls
Incrementum Advisory Board Discussion Q3 2018 with Special Guest Kevin Duffy "From a marketing perspective it pays to be overconfident, especially in the short term. The higher your conviction the easier it will be to market your investment ideas. I think the Austrian School is at a disadvantage here because it's more difficult to be confident about your qualitative predictions and even in terms of investment advice it is particularly difficult to be confident in these times because we... Climbing the Milligram Ladder - Precious Metals Supply and Demand
FRN Muscle Flexing Shh, don't tell the dollar-paradigm folks that the dollar went up 0.2mg gold this week. Or if that hasn't blown your mind, the dollar went up 0.01 grams of silver. It's less uncomfortable to say that gold went down $10, and silver fell $0.08. It doesn't force anyone to confront their deeply-held beliefs about money. But it does have its own Medieval retrograde motion to explain. Even the freaking leprechaun is now offering government scrip... this really... Introducing the Seasonax Web App
Economists expected the Producer Price Index would jump in July. Instead, the PPI was flat and bond yields tumbled. [...] |
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"I think anyone who was proclaiming victory a couple of months ago was premature," said Michigan Representative Daniel Kildee of Michigan , a member of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee leadership team. The President's standing will impact heavily what happens in November largely because the Democrat Party's entire platform in this year's mid-term elections is "we are anti-Trump" and "we plan to impeach Trump."
The Democrats have overplayed their hand with not only their anti-Trump narrative, but in California and with their more radical members in the U.S. Congress, where the real nature of who Democrats are is being revealed. Voters are responding. The calls for impeachment has the conservative voters bound and determined to use their voting power to stop such ridiculousness. The "hate Trump" narrative of the Democrat Party leadership has non-GOP voters sick and tired of the insanity, and planning on staying home on Election Day.
The liberal left Democrats have been revealing their Marxist nature. Americans are beginning to realize the truth, and as a result the liberal lefties are losing grip on their power, their money, and their authoritarian anti-American schemes. The plantation is being dismantled. Their Marxism is out in the open. The success of GOP policies, and the Trump administration, has the Democrats and their minions nervous that the game might finally be up. Exposure can be devastating. The attempts to cover-up the truth are simply bringing more attention to their lies and corruption. The Democrat Crime Machine is no longer a well-oiled mechanism. They have run out of lies to cover up their lies. Too many tidbits of truth are making their way to the surface. The reality is, everything the Democrat leadership claims about their opposition are projections. In other words, everything the Democrats claim their enemy is, as it turns out, is actually a sin of the Democrat Party.
As a result, even the media is realizing that the Blue Wave may not happen, after all . In fact, not only are the Democrats in trouble, so is the mainstream media. CNN is currently experiencing a ratings plunge of incredible significance, at 20%. |
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Silvina met Nelson at a boliche (nightclub) in Miramar. It was 1986, and Silvina was nineteen years old. Nelson was two years younger but hot, a jitterbug from Mar del Plata, an hour away, who would cruise over every weekend with his buddies to dance and get laid. " Le gustaba la milonga a ese ," says Silvina . " Todavia le gusta la joda. [He liked to party. He still likes to party.]" But so did Silvina: " Era un tiro al aire yo. [I was a loose cannon. I liked Nelson, I liked his friend, I liked the neighbor, I liked them all.]" Three months after their eyes first locked, Silvina was pregnant. Yet they didn't marry until Mathew -- their oldest boy -- turned eleven months.
Having a child out of wedlock and being older than your groom-to-be are distinctions frowned upon in Argentine society. As in most Latin-American countries, "respectable" women in Argentina are still expected to remain virgins until marriage, and they usually marry much older men. "Usually there are two categories into which women fall," says Andrew, Silvina's gray-haired, 32-year-old confidante, who also is from Miramar. "There are women for the kitchen, the kind you want to have a relationship with, the type you want to have children with. And there are women who are only good for fucking." Silvina has blurred the lines. "She likes men," acknowledges Andrew. "But she's also a struggling mother trying to make it. La flaca es una buena mujer . Silvina [who's called la flaca -- the skinny one] is a good woman," he concludes.
"The first year of my marriage with Nelson was great," Silvina relates. "We got along very well. We had fun together and went out often. We led very social lives, and at first it was exciting." But by the second year, he began making his rounds with the ladies once again. "He had an affair with a girl from Buenos Aires. Even when my boys were sick in the hospital with respiratory problems, he had affairs. He had affairs through my pregnancies. It didn't matter. He fucked every woman he could.... My mother said to me: He's never going to change.' She was right. Here it only got worse. There's more variety. Already he's been through Colombia and Brazil," Silvina laughs.
In Miami Beach, Silvina says, Nelson's white painter's pickup truck became his roving bachelor pad: "He had it equipped with everything he needed. I just got sick of it. I couldn't stand him touching a single hair on my head. I was disgusted by him."
Last December, soon after the last time Silvina caught Nelson in bed with yet another woman, she met a young guy named Alex through Andrew and George. Alex is also from Miramar. The skinny, black-haired 26-year-old, who's into motorcycles and has tattoos of an eagle and a unicorn, is the father of a five-year-old boy in Argentina. Silvina began a relationship with him and kicked Nelson out.
"George told me one day: Guess who's got his eye on you?'
"Who?' I asked, surprised. He said, Alex.' I said, QUEEEE! -- what!' I never looked at him in that way." Then one day Alex expressed his feelings. "He said, ?No sabes las ganas que tengo de comerte a besos? [Don't you know I want to eat you with kisses?]'" Silvina recounts. "I melted. From then on we've been inseparable. He even keeps the cigarette butts of the first ones we smoked together."
But Alex put up with a lot, Silvina admits. During his weekend stays at her place, Nelson would burst into the house and hurl insults at the lovers. In their absence he'd break into Silvina's apartment and search through all of her and Alex's belongings. He'd follow the couple like a shadow, and on several occasions spied on them through the windows while they had sex. "Twice I caught him looking at us while we made love," Silvina says with her hands on her waist. Her eyes are smiling, and she's biting her bottom lip.
One day Nelson slipped into the back seat of Silvina's black Honda Civic just as she was parallel parking, with Alex in the passenger seat. "Keep driving," Nelson told her. When she refused, Silvina recounts, Nelson pulled her out of the car, threw her on the sidewalk, and began kicking her in the ribs. Alex leaped out of the passenger seat, and Nelson ran away. On the beach one day he grabbed Silvina by the stomach and twisted her skin. Alex was sunbathing nearby. "There were times I really struggled to contain myself," Alex says. Silvina's husband even threatened to run her over with his truck.
One night he came close to following through on his threats. According to Silvina and her neighbor George, Nelson once again broke into her apartment through the living-room window and then began screaming he would kill himself with a kitchen knife if Silvina didn't leave Alex. "But first he tried to stab me," she says. Somehow Silvina managed to wrestle the knife away from Nelson. She chased him out of the apartment and her lanky husband made it to his white truck. But Silvina followed and they wrestled like WWF stars inside the pickup. "He kept saying he was going to kill himself," Silvina now laughs hysterically. "So I called 911. I thought he was going to do it." But then he drove away. " Es un hincha pelotas mi marido . Un boludo -- He's a nuisance, an idiot. He got lucky that night," she boasts, still laughing. "I was holding back because I really thought he'd do it." George, from upstairs, witnessed the scene. So did Silvina's three-year-old daughter, Jessica. "The only thing I could do was hold on to the girl," George says. "She's a rare woman, Silvina."
Eventually Alex went back to Argentina, and Silvina sometimes thinks of joining him.
When they first arrived in North Beach, Silvina, Nelson and the two boys rented an efficiency with the help of a family friend they knew from Argentina who had been living there for several months.
North Beach, an area that stretches from 63rd to 87th street between Collins Avenue and Indian Creek Drive (which becomes Dickens Avenue north of 71st Street), is a magnet for Argentines. "It's easier to adapt to North Beach," says Graciela Mitchelli, who co-owns a newspaper in Miami called El Argentino Mercosur with her husband, Alberto. "There are other Argentines living there, the rent is lower, there is greater access to public transportation, and the language barrier is minimal." Of course the main attraction in this neighborhood of Miami Modern apartment buildings, single-family homes, Jewish learning centers, and Argentine delis and restaurants, is the beach. "Argentines love the beach and the heat," says Mercedes Garcia, a 28-year-old economic reporter from Buenos Aires, recently in Miami looking for freelance work. Alberto Mitchelli agrees: "It's a dream most Argentines have to live in a tropical place." (He has been in Miami since 1981.)
But there are other reasons why Miami in general, as opposed to other cities in the country, is on Argentine immigrants' radar. "Argentines, especially portenos [natives of Buenos Aires], are all about living the good life," explains Garcia. And Miami has that image. "In Argentina it's considered cool, or chic, to live in Miami. The city represents a mix of prosperity and the good life. New York is for people who want to break their backs working. Miami is for people looking for a more laid-back approach."
But soon Argentines face reality. They find that even for those just trying to survive, Miami is not much different from New York, Graciela Mitchelli says.
Shortly after they arrived from Argentina, Nelson painted buildings and Silvina cleaned hotel rooms in South Beach at night for minimum wage. During the day she also cleaned apartments in Miami Lakes for about $30 each. After two months she got a job at a pasta factory, for a meager salary as well, and the family was able to move to her present address. The one-bedroom apartment was at least bigger, if not less dingy. In January 1998 Silvina had a third child by Nelson, a daughter, Jessica. Suddenly the family had to make do with one paycheck and more demands on it. " Me sentia para la mierda -- I felt like shit," Silvina says about having another child. By then finances were intruding on her dreams of America, and of marriage.
Every day Silvina struggles to make ends meet. Often the most basic necessities, such as food, are not easy to get. There are days when she goes "hunting" to feed her children. Hunting, in Silvina's world, is asking for enough money for food for the day. She'll corner her husband until she's finally able to scrape $40 from him. "That's on a good day," she gripes.
If Nelson turns out dry, Silvina resorts to neighbors. She owes Andrew ten dollars. And recently she borrowed $60 from Elsa the Paraguayan, who also lends Silvina her old Mercedes-Benz to run errands with. "Silvina is alone," Elsa says. "From the time I've known her she's always depended on the kindness of others." Then there's the Cuban girl who lives on 77th Street. When Silvina needs to use the phone because hers has been disconnected, she calls on the Cuban girl from her kitchen doorstep and voila -- she's telephonic again. And when Silvina's electricity is cut off every now and then because she hasn't paid the bill, she'll cook over there, too. The Cuban girl saves for her everything from rice to toilet paper to leftover pizza, so Silvina's children won't have only a school lunch in their stomachs.
Silvina's last job was cleaning the Key Biscayne home of a rich Buenos Airean family who owns an air cargo company with offices in Miami, Chile, and Argentina. They paid her $250 per week to clean, do the laundry, iron clothes, and bathe the dogs. Silvina says that aside from exploiting her, the family was also verbally abusive, though not intentionally. "It's just the way they are," she asserts. "Although la mujer es un asco [the missus is disgusting], and she screams at me for nothing, she likes me. She's just very domineering." (Like Silvina's mother.) "The other day she called me every name in the book because I mixed colored towels with white ones in the dryer. You should see their house. They buy rare, exotic objects from places like Russia and Greece. I'm afraid to even go near them. Can you imagine if I broke some high-priced vase? I'd probably be working for a year to pay for it."
Silvina's way of overcoming humiliating experiences is by laughing. The smelly sneakers she wears to work became a big joke between her and Ronaldo, a Nicaraguan man who worked with her in Key Biscayne. "The other day I was cleaning the dining room when Ronaldo said, Silvina, the smell coming from your feet es impresionante -- impressive.' So I grabbed a can of country-scent Raid and sprayed out the room." Silvina laughs at the thought of using roach spray as an air freshener.
But she doesn't take everything lightly. "When it gets to be too much, I lose it," she says. "I have a very short temper. Me rayo. " Recently she told Estela, the rich Key Biscayne Argentine, to basically "fuck off." She got fired but the next day was hired back, with an apology. "She told me: Voz sos una barbara Silvina, eres unica. ' [You're a barbarian, Silvina, you're unique.]" But eventually Silvina quit that job. Currently she's out of work.
In the past, when there was no other way, Silvina lap-danced at Porky's II in Miami. For three months beginning in March, she worked steadily at the nude bar and made about $500 every weekend. One night at my house she proudly showed off her routine.
Silvina leaped up from a rocking chair, admitting she enjoys lap dancing, and sashayed across the living room and into the dining room, where she mounted a chair. "If you saw me you wouldn't recognize me," she said, while slowly grinding an invisible man. " Me transformo -- I transform myself." The vertical blinds of my dining-room window were open. Silvina's friends from above her apartment have an inside view of my home. That night los chicos del siete were also at Andrew and George's place playing video games. They became her audience. I warned Silvina about peeping Toms, but she didn't care. "Three or four girls do the lap dance together in a room," she explained. "There's one man for each girl. Then we rotate. You should see how those old men wet themselves. It really turns me on," she said, lifting up her shirt, her nipples erect. The following day, whispering excitedly, she confided like a teenager: "The guys from upstairs told me they were dying last night."
Though Silvina may escape most problems via comic relief, when it comes to her children, she's stern and often gets physical. Indeed dealing with her adolescent boys has become more of a challenge since her separation from Nelson, she admits. To each other the boys speak English, a language their mother doesn't understand. And of course Silvina receives no moral support from her husband. "The other day one of the boys asked his father for money. Nelson said, Go tell your mother to turn tricks so she can give you a few bucks.' Do you think after hearing that my boys will respect me? That's why they act they way they do."
Thirteen-year-old Mathew and twelve-year-old Anthony began getting into trouble in the neighborhood. One day in June the brothers were shooting rockets out on the street. Night had fallen when Anthony threw one and it landed inside a Brazilian woman's apartment, setting her curtains on fire. Amid the fire-rescue sirens the woman ran to Silvina's home. Clutching her cordless phone, she began lecturing Silvina on how to raise her children. But in the broken Spanish with a Portuguese twang, the lesson fell on deaf ears. After the incoherent sermon, Silvina called Anthony to her and smacked his face. The boy ran away crying.
Trying to make ends meet and raising three children on her own is just part of Silvina's struggle in a foreign land. Staying healthy is another. Because she has no medical insurance, Silvina hasn't been treating a kidney infection. On a recent night she drove herself to Jackson Memorial Hospital when the pains became unbearable. "It was like I was going through labor," she says, horrified. The doctor gave her a prescription, but Silvina hasn't filled it. Recently she suffered from a strong headache, and her physical therapist referred her to a neurologist who, according to Silvina, said she had suffered a brain convulsion. "He said I could have died," she shrugs.
Silvina was the twelfth child born to a poor family from Mar del Plata, 60 miles from Miramar. When she was two months old, her biological mother abandoned her in a stroller in the middle of a road. "I don't understand why she left me," Silvina recounts. "She already had so many children. What difference would one more make?" According to Silvina, a driver came upon the baby and took her to a hospital in Mar del Plata. There a well-off but childless Italian couple living in Miramar adopted her.
Though her family treated her as if she were their biological daughter, Silvina says she grew up feeling discriminated against by extended family members. When she was eight or nine, she began asking questions. "I first began noticing through photos. I always thought I looked so different. It was a strong feeling I had of not really belonging," says Silvina, a curvaceous woman whose full lips naturally pout when she complains, which is often.
On its official Website, Miramar is described as " la ciudad de los ninos -- los chicos nunca se olvidan [the city of children -- children never forget]." The coastal town, population 20,000, faces the Atlantic and is about 500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. It is heavily dependent on tourism in the summer; its beaches are good for surfing. In the winter "we die of hunger," say the Miramarans living in Little Buenos Aires. The winters are harsh, jobs are few, only the butcher and the baker have work, attests Allen, a witty, curly-haired 24-year-old who arrived from Miramar about five months ago and who lives in apartment seven, behind Silvina's place. But, he cautions, Argentines, as part of their national character, tend to exaggerate a lot.
Indeed says Mark Szuchman, professor of Latin-American history at Florida International University, anguish is an Argentine way of life. In fact, he says, there are more psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires per capita than in any other place in the world. "If Woody Allen knew this, he would move from New York," Szuchman assures.
Mercedes Garcia, the Argentine economic reporter, agrees. "We're a pessimistic people," Garcia concedes. "We're tragic, melancholic, and we like to complain a lot. Individually, we're overconfident and arrogant -- in Argentine slang we call it being chanta . But we lack those qualities as a nation. Argentines have no faith in Argentina."
According to last year's census, there were nearly 23,000 Argentines concentrated in South Florida. But according to the General Consul of Argentina in Miami, Deputy Maximo Gowland, there are more than twice that number -- about 60,000 -- residing in Miami-Dade alone, a growth of 61 percent since 1992. He warns the figure is only approximate. "More or less," Gowland says. "Though I would venture to say it's more." (By some accounts at least 100,000 Argentines have reached South Florida.)
Three years ago the number of Argentines coming to Miami-Dade increased sharply, as South America's second largest economy entered a demoralizing slump. To date Argentina remains mired in a muck of economic and political turmoil. "Things have gotten worse," says Szuchman. "There's been a considerable and growing amount of unemployment."
Mercedes Garcia, who works for El Cronista , says her country's economic woes are deeply entrenched in the nation's idiosyncrasies. "During the years of President Carlos Menem, between 1990 and 1999, there was a lack of economic reform," she explains. "The economy was growing, there was a lot of privatization going on, but instead of embracing needed changes, the government went all out. Argentina's foreign debt was enormous. Yet despite the country's growing deficit, the public sector continued to spend money left and right and nothing was really getting done. The mentality was mientras pueda safo ' --get away with it while you can. It's the Argentine way."
Currently, Garcia explains, international markets have no faith in Argentina. The South American country was pounded into a recession three years ago when Brazil, Argentina's biggest trading partner, devalued the real, Brazil's currency. As a result Argentina, which depended heavily on Brazil to purchase its exports, lost one of its biggest customers.
In Argentina salaries have been slashed, workers have been laid off, hundreds of small businesses have closed, and consumers have stopped spending. "It's a cycle that seems to never end," Garcia says. Argentine political scandals have aggravated the situation. (Last year former Vice President Carlos Alvarez resigned in the aftermath of a vote-buying debacle in the Senate. Menem is under house arrest for his alleged role in arms sales to Croatia, while an international arms-sales embargo was in place during the Balkan wars, and to Ecuador during its border war with Peru; ironically Argentina was a peace guarantor for a cease-fire.) "Just one of 20,000 cases of corruption," Garcia contends. Like most of her countrymen, she is cynical about her government. The disillusion is strongest among young people attempting to come into their places in Argentine society. They feel shut out by age and corruption.
Raul Costa, a political analyst from Cordoba, Argentina, paints a dismal picture affecting not just Argentine youth. "No matter what the government does in reaction to the economic crises, common Argentines, the ones sitting out in the bleachers, will have no victories to celebrate, no matter what the result of the game," writes Costa via e-mail. "For ordinary Argentines the suffering won't end when the referee blows his whistle.
"Here there is not a single day that goes by without protests or bad news," Costa writes. "The economic slump has translated into a national psychological depression. The situation is worse for young adults. You can't find work without a profession. But even for young pros, it's hard. In Argentina there are no social programs for people without jobs. Being without work can easily translate into homelessness. To have to live in a country where you can't plan beyond a few days is truly difficult."
Indeed the middle class has been pulling up roots and settling in places like Italy and Spain, where many Argentines not only have strong cultural ties, but citizenship as well, and for the more adventurous there's Miami. Professor Szuchman, an Argentine specialist, explains Miami is a natural attraction for business types and professionals. "I hear that every other Argentine waiter in South Beach is an architect."
But Deputy Maximo Gowland describes the exodus as being heterogeneous. "There are all kinds," he says. "From investors to blue-collar workers to the sons and daughters of the comfortable middle class." This group of young people, in their midtwenties to early thirties, comes as tourists and then sticks around to "see what happens." Some are students, others are typical middle-class slackers, often partly subsidized from home by Mom and Dad.
In the North Beach enclave known as Little Buenos Aires, working-class Argentine families with little or no educational background mix with the sons and daughters of the privileged middle class. "Their parents were European immigrants who saw Argentina rise. Ironically just as their parents emigrated to Argentina from Europe, this new generation have themselves become immigrants, however temporary it may be," professor Szuchman says.
Argentines can travel as tourists to the United States without American visas and stay in the country for up to 90 days, thanks to something called the Visa Waiver Permit Program. Owing to hard times back home, many Argentines are taking advantage of their traveling perks. But they're overstaying their visits in Miami-Dade. According to Gowland, there about six flights daily arriving at Miami International Airport from Argentina. More and more are beginning to drink their mate in public.
In Miami there are at least ten publications for Argentines, according to Gowland. Three civic organizations in the area -- the Association of Argentines in Miami, the Lions Club, and Association San Martiniana (named after Argentine independence hero San Martin) -- are among the dozen groups throughout Florida. On the beach soccer fans wear their favorite team jerseys everywhere -- red and white River Plate fans; yellow and blue for Boca Juniors . ( Futbol is Argentina's passion, and the game played in North Shore Park often sparks into flame.) One guy I met had Diego Maradona's face -- an Argentine soccer legend-turned-coke addict -- tattooed on his arm. Neighborhood cars are adorned with Argentine flags and nationalistic paraphernalia. Argentine delis, cafes, and restaurants are lined along Collins Avenue between 65th and 75th streets and along the 71st Street commercial corridor. "They stand out from other Latin Americans," says one non-Argentine neighbor. "They come, they stay, and they're loud about it."
"The question is how long are they here for," Szuchman says. "Argentines have had a history of migrating and then returning. They don't leave Argentina happily."
Silvina is an exception. She was thrilled to leave Miramar, the cold weather, and her domineering mom. "I was one of the first to arrive here," she claims. "In 1995, when I came, there were very few Argentines. Now they're everywhere."
"I tried to get away from [ los Argentinos ], and they followed me," Silvina contends sarcastically. "They should all go back to Argentina. Que se vayan ," she says loudly, one day walking back from the beach. A young Argentine couple is walking hand in hand just a few steps in front of her. Silvina breaks out into frenzied laughter. " Que se vayan todos los Argentinos. Son una porqueria -- they're trash."
Apartment seven, behind Silvina's place, is the nightly gathering spot for the clan of Miramarans inhabiting this slice of Miami Beach, Silvina's fan club, los chicos del siete, of which Allen is the newest member. Jokingly he calls his place el boliche -- the nightclub. "People are constantly coming and going," he says "We can even identify everyone's particular knock. So we don't bother opening the door anymore, we just shout, Come in,' or else we leave the door open. Though lately the mosquitoes and palmetto bugs have been forcing us to close up." Los chicos used to throw asados [barbecues] every Friday, just outside their apartment. The Argentine tradition is perhaps the closest thing to a meat-eater's nirvana on Earth: "If I go a day without meat, I feel something is not right," Allen affirms. "We're carnivores," he adds with a mischievous smile. "Vampires!" Birra -- beer -- is usually the chicos' drink of choice. And cigarettes ( puchos ) are chain-smoked. "Oh ... I can tell you some anecdotes about our gatherings," John says one night, while sitting near the sidewalk.
Now that Alex is gone, Silvina has started frequenting apartment seven again, once her children are tucked into bed. There she is the center of attention. The "boys" from Miramar see her as both a mother figure and sexually tempting. "When I hang out with them, se cagan de la risa -- they die of laughter. Que tengo, payasos en la cara. What is it with me? Do I have clowns coming out of my face? No la verdad es que son unos buitres . No, really, they're vultures. You see their faces, and you think they're angels. They're not," Silvina warns. " Mujer que ven, mujer que quieren montar . Any woman they see they want to ride. In fact," she adds, "there's so much jerking off going on in apartment seven they could open a ricotta factory.
"But I have no problems," Silvina continues. "I'm into menores [minors]." Silvana, however, is mostly all talk. Lately her mind has been on Alex, who's back in Miramar. "Alex used to say to me: Silvina, you're so liberal. I love that in a woman. You have no problems with sex.'"
"Do you consider yourself a feminist?" I ask.
" Yo lo que soy es una desgenerada -- I'm more of a degenerate," Silvina answers with a smirk, biting her bottom lip. A sexual predator in the most pure and innocent way, Silvina loves sex, men, and flirting. Riding in the car with her one night, on our way back from Normandy Supermarket, she flirts with every man walking on Dickens Avenue: "Here all you have to do is smile and wave and before you know it you'll have a handsome bachelor sitting in the passenger seat of your car."
Most of the things Silvina says are expressed with sexual undertones. She loves to pose in front of the camera. Before Alex left he shot photos of her dressed in black Victoria's Secret lingerie. He left her one photo and took the rest to Argentina. Silvina showed most of her young male neighbors and even displayed the pic on her refrigerator. Back in Argentina Alex showed the ones he took with him to his father and friends. "They told him he was crazy for leaving behind such a woman," Silvina says.
One night in apartment seven, John and his roommates were playing a soccer video game. (Losers wash the dishes.) AC/DC was playing on the stereo, and the slackers from Miramar were passing around a faso (a joint). The walls are adorned with a Bob Marley poster, a magazine cut-out of a marijuana plant, and a giant Indian dream catcher. A bookcase is filled with empty liquor, beer, and wine bottles. "The bottles are an offering to La Virgen de las montanas ," Allen says. But, I remark, there's no statue of a Virgin to place an offering to. "I don't think she'll be coming here," Allen laughs. "We just want to be ready."
Once the weed kicks in, John answers my questions about why he came to Miami. "Our parents are comfortable in Miramar," he says. "But they have only enough for themselves. There's nothing for us there. In South America Miami is the golden dream." A friend who is visiting argues that leaving Argentina for Miami, Spain, or Italy has become fashionable among young Argentines. "Okay, so it's appealing, but people are leaving because they are prompted by a reality," John counters. "The reality is that there's no room for us. But now that I've lived the dream, I think I'd rather go back."
Economics wasn't the motive for Silvina's move, she contends. She was upper middle class, her family traveled frequently to Europe. Her father, who passed away in Silvina's arms when she was sixteen, was in the military for ten years, then became a contractor on profitable construction projects. Silvina hardly ever worked. In fact, confirms her mother in Argentina, she owns two homes, five apartments, and two retail spaces in her native country. But none of the rental property is occupied. "I attended the best private schools," Silvina says. "The only thing missing was knowing where I came from."
When Silvina married Nelson, the couple depended partly on the family's riches and partly on Nelson's job working at a Pepsi factory. "My mother gave us anything we needed," Silvina revealed one night while hanging wet clothes on a line outside her place. "I wanted Nelson to start playing a more dominant role as the family's breadwinner. That's why I decided we should relocate. But look at me. Here in Norte America I'm poor, working as a housecleaner, de cabaretera [lap-dancing] on the side." Recently Nelson was fired from his job painting buildings. "He would show up to work whenever he felt like it," Silvina says. For her part she couldn't take any more of the cleaning life. So tonight, in a different part of town, Silvina is looking for work as an exotic dancer. By the end of the month she'll have to pay rent.
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"I'm probably going to end up moving in with my husband," Silvina pouts. "Where else am I going to go? Me, the kids, and the big-screen TV....
"I suppose I could sell the TV ... but no, what am I crazy? I can't sell that TV -- it's a great TV....
"I mostly just glance at it when I can. My kids have it mostly tuned to music videos. But I don't care what's on. Che, the few seconds I get sucked into it is like being at the movies. It's one of my few escapes, sabes? Alex is another escape for me ... even though he's gone."
Names in this article have been altered in some cases. All incidents are true. |
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About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
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The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
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The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.
About The Walrus
The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca ; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.
The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada's place in the world.
Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here .
Ownership, Funding, and Grants
The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation's revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.
Ethics Policy
The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.
Fact-Checking Standards Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.
The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism--no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven--is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.
Corrections As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article--and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date. If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line "Correction."
Veiled Sources The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source's credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.
Editorial Independence Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest--and, where applicable, credit funding sources--on the same page as the relevant work.
Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.
Editorial Standards The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.
For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at web@thewalrus.ca .
Diversity Statement
Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists--and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.
The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity. |
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By Amanda Robbins
Recently, my conservative student organization at the George Washington University spoke out against mandatory LGBT sensitivity training, requesting exemptions for our religious members. Our classmates our now demanding that the organization be defunded, classifying us as a hate group, and calling our request "an act of violence."
The same classmates who have ceaselessly berated us for years are calling us a hate group and claiming that we're intolerant of their lifestyles? The same classmates who anonymously vandalized our quiet pro-life memorial last April, screamed down our speaker at an event, and are now comparing us to ISIS
But we're the intolerant ones? Maybe our liberal peers need sensitivity training for getting along with conservatives.
According to The GW Hatchet , the LGBT training would "teach student leaders about gender identities and sexualities." The training would also reportedly teach student leaders about "using proper gender pronouns." After the students complete the training, according to the bill, their organizations would be labeled "safe zones" for LGBT students.
After the student newspaper approached our group, my co-President gave an interview where she assured the reporter that we were not upset by the decision to hold these training sessions. We were simply requesting an exemption for us as an organization based on Christian principles. GW YAF never objected to the training, we only asked that we wouldn't be forced to attend.
Almost immediately after the article in The GW Hatchet was posted, we were subjected to a flurry of attacks from our peers. They called us a "hate group," "bigots," "disgusting," "gross," "ignorant," "intolerant," a "cesspit" and a "cancer." One commenter said, "These people are ISIS." All this unfolded because we calmly asked the university to respect our organization's religious principles. Principles that much of the country still upholds.
GW Allied in Pride submitted a statement via Facebook saying that we should be revoked of all university funding because the Student Association should consider us a "hate group." They continued their statement by calling GW YAF's exemption request as "an act of violence" for our refusal to use "preferred gender pronouns."
Our nation's campuses are spiraling out of control. George Washington University is currently a hostile environment for conservative students. We do not feel comfortable at the university we pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend- A place where we thought we would be able to exercise our freedom of speech in order to engage with our classmates in rational debates about our differing opinions.
Sadly, that was nothing more than a fantasy. Real debate no longer occurs in the university setting. Any whiff of moderate dissent is automatically shut down by being labeled "hate speech."
When will the university ask our liberal classmates to be tolerant of our opinions? When will it show an interest in fostering a healthy sense of ideological diversity on campus?
We didn't even speak out against LGBT sensitivity training. We simply requested a religious exemption from it. And were called bigots for doing so. One commenter even referred to us as a cancer.
What's the real cancer on our nation's campuses? The few remaining conservative students who respectfully voice their opinions? Or the liberal students and administrators who create an environment that makes fair minded debate impossible?
If universities across the nation truly hope to create an environment where all views and backgrounds are valued, they will fix the underlying issue of intolerance against those who hold conservative views. Starting with GW.
Amanda Robbins is the Co-Chair of GW-YAF |
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We were simply requesting an exemption for us as an organization based on Christian principles. |
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Friday that if the United States backs out of the Iran nuclear agreement, the entire accord will "fall apart". 2018-01-20 20:16
TERHAN- On the threshold of the 14th meeting of Iran-Belarus Joint Economic Committee, Belarusian Industry Minister Vitali Vouk told IRNA on Friday that his country is determined to boost economic ties with Iran. 2018-01-20 20:14
TEHRAN- According to OPEC's latest monthly report published on January 18, Iran's oil production, based on secondary sources, stood at 4.405 million barrels per day (bpd) in December, up 8,000 bpd from that of November. 2018-01-20 20:13
TEHRAN - Hossein Jaberi Ansari, Iran's top negotiator at the Astana peace talks, held talks on Saturday with Sergei Lavrentyev, the Russian President's special envoy for Syria. 2018-01-20 20:09
Germany is lobbying among European allies to agree new sanctions against Iran in an attempt to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from terminating an international deal curbing Tehran's nuclear program, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday. 2018-01-20 20:07
TEHRAN - President Hassan Rouhani received credentials of new ambassadors of Cuba, Ghana, Chile and Cyprus in separate meetings on Saturday. 2018-01-20 19:00
Iran, Europe have held talks to remove banking obstacles
TEHRAN - Majid Takht-Ravanchi, deputy director of the presidential chief of staff for political affairs, has said that Iran and Europe have held talks to remove obstacles to banking relations. 2018-01-20 18:46
Zlatko Kranjcar has parted company with Iranian top-flight football club Sepahan. 2018-01-20 18:34
TEHRAN - The German music producer Marco Rhauderwiek will organize a sound performance in Tehran on February 1. 2018-01-20 18:33
TEHRAN - Actress Baran Kowsari has been appointed the ambassador of the Yari Foundation, an Uppsala-based charity organization founded by Iranian expatriates living in Sweden, the organization has announced. 2018-01-20 18:32
TEHRAN - An Iranian troupe directed by Arman Hossein-nejad is performing a stage adaptation of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in Tehran. 2018-01-20 18:30
TEHRAN - The veteran theater experts Ahmad Damud, Hushang Azadivar and Jamshid Khanian will be honored with lifetime achievement awards at the 36th Fajr International Theater Festival. 2018-01-20 18:29
TEHRAN - A retrospective of the veteran Iranian painter, illustrator, animator and sculptor Ali-Akbar Sadeqi will open at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) on January 28. 2018-01-20 18:26
TEHRAN - A play that spotlights transsexuals in Iran was staged during the 36th Fajr International Theater Festival in Tehran on Friday night. 2018-01-20 17:51
Koroush Gilani is an Iranian man who migrated to Japan in the 1990s. Over the years he has managed to fully integrate and adjust himself in to a completely different Asian culture, however, as is in such cases, assimilating to the culture of Japan has not been an easy task. 2018-01-20 15:51
Iranian football club Esteghlal are going to sign Yazalde Gomes Pinto, known simply as Yazalde, in the January transfer window. 2018-01-20 14:20
Iran defeated Japan in the 18th Asian Men's Handball Championship to occupy the top spot of Group A. 2018-01-20 12:20
The Tehran Symphony Orchestra gives a performance under the baton of Shahrdad Rohani (R) during the 33rd Fajr Music Festival at Tehran's Vahdat Hall on January 18, 2018. 2018-01-20 11:17
TEHRAN - The Islamic Azad University (IAU) is planning on expanding overseas branches through setting up units in Iraq and Syria, Khabaronline reported on Tuesday. 2018-01-20 11:17
TEHRAN -- The Ministry of Health is planning schemes to encourage consumption of traditional foods and is seriously reconsidering issuance of license for fast food restaurants, Mehr reported on Thursday. 2018/01/20
By Samira Mohebali*
In this series of articles you can trace cookery art in Iran during history up to present. The survey sheds light on different aspects of Iranian life, culture and civilization. 2018-01-20 11:16
TEHRAN - Commenting on recent turbulences in Iran Anthony Cartalucci says the U.S. still believes investing in the protests can create some sort of positive geopolitical return for their policy of undermining and coercing Iran domestically, regionally and internationally. 2018-01-20 11:13
Richard Nephew, program director at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told CNBC on Friday that "the simple reality is that Trump hates the JCPOA even as he doesn't understand it." 2018-01-20 10:08
TEHRAN -- Michael Klor-Berchtold, German ambassador to Tehran, posted a photo on his Twitter account on Thursday depicting him stirring Ab Gusht (Iranian stew made with lamb, chickpeas, white beans, onion, potatoes, and tomatoes, and dried lime) in a big pot. 2018-01-20 09:53
You wake up in the morning and set for another working day. You may take a quick shower, have a breakfast, get dressed and head out. 2018-01-20 09:48
Nearly 3 years have passed since the Saudi invasions of the defenseless people of Yemen. This is while the war crimes committed in this country are barely seen elsewhere throughout history. |
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Jonathan Schell's Comments about the Watergate scandal, published in the magazine in 1973, shed light on the high stakes surrounding the firing of James Comey. May 11, 2017
(c) 2018 Conde Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Conde Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices
(c) 2018 Conde Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Conde Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices |
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Apparently, cartographers are really horny -- that or God is.
One Imgur user posted this photograph of a map hung in his or her firehouse. The person explained, This map has hung in my firehouse for years. I just looked at it for the first time.
If you don't see it right away, here is a hint: boobs. Look for the boobs.
This is why we have to do something about climate change! Think about what this hot land lady is going to look like covered in water. How sad would that be!?
A new study showed disastrous climate change problems could arise within decades, not centuries. Now, I know that's all really boring for most people, but think of the HOT LAND LADY! Also, think of the hundreds of thousands of people who will die from storms and floods, and the fact we all will likely have to abandon our coastal cities in the near future if things continue as they are.
BUT MOSTLY, HOT LAND LADY!!!
Donate here to help make a difference, assh*les.
Side note: Maybe God finally watched "Armageddon" and decided to make that creepy animal cracker scene into a reality with the hot land lady.
Geefux on YouTube
Oh, and by "creepy," I obviously mean romantic and super sad 'cause he's going to go save the Earth. I love this movie unabashedly.
Elite Daily on YouTube |
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In his wide-ranging sermon, the Imam-e-Kaaba said terrorism cannot be linked with a particular religion or nation, Islam is a religion of peace and has nothing to do with terrorism. Muslim rulers will have to address the collective problems realising their responsibilities. Terrorism is the biggest problem and Islam has no link with it. Terrorists have no religion , he said. It bothers me how many DUers believe the same thing - without acknowledging what it implies, namely, that only a non-believer could be a terrorist. |
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by Black Workers for Justice November 8, 2016
Last night, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas called in response to the killings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile, one or more snipers shot at least a dozen police officers. As of now, five are dead, as is at least one suspect in the shooting. Before his death in a standoff with police, the suspect indicated that he was upset with police shootings and with Black Lives Matter, and that he wanted to kill white people. He said he was working alone, and has no connection to Black Lives Matter or any other organized group. Our comrades in Dallas report that protesters were just as surprised and frightened as the police when the shooting started, and at least one protester was shot.
by Reginald Wilson May 7, 2016
I grew up in the Great Depression era and so I grew up with Joe Louis. That was my marker. If you walked down the street when he was having a fight, every radio in every house was tuned to that fight. You could hear the fight walking down the street, literally. So, of course, Blacks were very proud of him.
And certainly having Joe Louis as the heavyweight champion you felt thrilled on the one hand, but on the other hand you felt ashamed because he was a very humble man and didn't push against the barriers, which were much stronger then, of course. Still we thought that with his fame, he might have pushed harder against those barriers. |
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Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay revealed she's engaged to one of the show's contestants last night in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel .
The new season of The Bachelorette premiered last night on ABC, and the Bachelorette herself was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! just after the show aired.
Jimmy Kimmel Live on YouTube
According to the 31-year-old, this is the first time a Bachelor or Bachelorette has announced they are engaged to one of the show's contestants before the show premiered.
In the video, Kimmel asks, "Has anyone ever announced this before the show started?" Lindsay responded, No, no, but we joke and say this is a season of firsts. And I think they were like, 'You know what, you're so excited, you're glowing, just do it.'
According to Lindsay, the show finished filming 10 days ago, so she and her mystery fiance have been officially engaged for a little over a week.
They apparently had "a couple of days together" post-engagement, but then went their separate ways. And according to Bachelorette rules, they won't be reunited until the entirety of the season is finished airing.
Don't worry, I'm sure it's not this weird-ass doll that made an appearance on the premiere.
In case you missed it, Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell recently broke off their engagement , like most Bachelor couples do.
Knowing that, Kimmel said, "So you haven't had a chance to reconnect, and then break up, and then be on the cover of US Weekly?"
She laughed and responded with, "I don't plan on a breakup."
Let's hope this season really is a "season of firsts" like Lindsay says, and they'll actually end up getting married and not breaking up, like, two hours after they get engaged.
Lindsay, who is a civil defense attorney, has a large pool of guys to choose from this season. One of them says his profession is "Tickle Monster," so I hope to dear god above that guy is not her fiance.
ABC/Paul Hebert
RACHEL, YOU ARE A LEARN-ED LAWYER. DO NOT MARRY SOMEONE WHO SAYS HIS JOB IN LIFE IS "TICKLE MONSTER."
Especially when there are other lawyers on the show to choose from!!!
Kimmel grilled her a little about her ability to keep secrets, but since she's a civil defense attorney, she feels like she's "groomed" for keeping things confidential. "I feel like I was groomed for this," she said.
She added that her family knows who her fiance is, but she's only worried about her sister revealing the news, saying, "She's the weakest link. She'll kill me for saying that."
Lindsay's pupper, Copper, was on the show last night as well and will apparently be making lots of appearances throughout this season.
If I were in the Bachelor Mansion, that dog would literally be the only thing I'd hang out with cause ~I wouldn't be there to make friends~.
Unless that friend is a dog, in which case, that dog is going to be my best f*cking friend on the planet.
You can watch The Bachelorette every Monday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC. |
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We've heard virtually ad nauseam that Florida is shifting irrevocably toward the Democrats because of the increase in the Hispanic and foreign-born population. While the upward shifts in Democratic vote can be observed in some core urban areas (Miami-Dade County went from 52% Democratic in the two party vote to 65% between 2000 and 2016, Orange County going from 51% to 64% in the same period) we've seen an increasingly static performance in top-of-the-ticket statewide elections from Democrats. The 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections were eerily similar at the top-of-the-ticket for both parties, while down ballot the GOP dominated.
This would indicate despite all the talk of shifts in the electorate and clear changes we are seeing in other large states (including Georgia believe it or not) as Hispanic/Latino numbers grow and urban whites become more Democratic, Florida isn't really changing at the bottom-line level. Our state, with its decades-long propensity to attract anti-tax exiles from other parts of the country to planned bedroom communities is actually based on recent evidence seeing a shift in margins for either party in certain geographic locales rather than a complete statewide change.
We've dissected at length the troubles for Democrats in medium-sized counties in the state with largely white working-class populations and how Democrats have lost vote share in bedroom communities up and down I-95 and I-75 . We have looked at the increasing difficulty the party has had with catholic voters , particularly white Catholics who until recently favored Democratic candidates (this is no different than the Midwest but still something state party officials should be aware of and working to solve). What we haven't discussed at length is the decline of the party's vote share in areas that are growing rapidly, filling up with white transplants from the Northeast and Midwest.
Hillary Clinton's performance in both Pinellas and Palm Beach counties was the worst by a Democratic nominee for President since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Palm Beach has to be of particular concern as Al Gore ran almost seven points better in the county than Hillary Clinton did. At a time when urban areas across the country are shifting left, Palm Beach is doing the opposite. In fact, in 2016 Cobb and Gwinnett County Georgia voted Democratic for the first time since native son Jimmy Carter was the party's nominee in 1976 and Dallas County, Texas which Bill Clinton lost in both 1992 and 1996 gave his wife a 27-point victory. Similar stories can be told across the country, including Orange County here in Florida which voted for the Republican nominees in both 1992 and 1996 against Bill Clinton but gave his wife a nearly 30-point win this past year.
Urban areas are shifting heavily to the left with local white voters joining minorities in rejecting the GOP - for example, DeKalb County, Georgia which was the first part of that state to elect Republicans in the 1960's and continued to do so into the 1990's gave Hillary Clinton over 80% of its votes last November. Palm Beach County has seen large Hispanic growth since 2000 but also has enjoyed major development in the northern part of the county which is attracting the type of GOP-leaning anti-tax whites that have long moved to the west coast of Florida. Therefore at a time when urban areas across the country are shifting left, Palm Beach is moving to the right, something that appears to have been unnoticed by the leadership of the Florida Democratic Party.
Speaking of the west coast of Florida, Democrats have made little to no progress in gaining any sort of foothold south of Sarasota. An area with well over a million people is hardly being touched by the Democratic Party. For years, Midwestern migrants have made Southwest Florida a Republican bastion, but as the area continues to grow, the GOP is enjoying larger and larger margins that help offset the increasingly gaudy numbers Democrats take out of Miami-Dade, Broward and Orange counties.
As far as Pinellas is concerned, the Democrats non-emphasis on localized type environmental issues at a macro level might have played a role in the demise or simply put the party has become too identified with identity politics. Pinellas isn't growing anywhere near the rate of other urban or even medium-sized Florida county, but the success of Democrats statewide has since the early 1990's had a correlation to how the west side of Tampa Bay performs for the party, and based on 2016 the returns aren't encouraging. On the other side of the bay, concerns persist.
The areas of Hillsborough County with rapid growth, such as Riverview and Brandon are offsetting the vote gains Democrats are making in urban Tampa and the areas around the University of South Florida. The Jacksonville area has seen any gain the Democrats make in Duval County offset by increased GOP margins in St John's and Clay Counties as new residents move in. The shifts in places like Flagler and Putnam counties has been largely uncontested by the Democrats. Flagler, reliably Democratic in Presidential Elections from 1992 to 2008 gave Trump a twenty point win in 2016. As the county's population has grown, so has the GOP base thanks to the influx of out-of-state migrants.
As Brevard, Pasco, Marion, Sumter and Lake Counties have picked up more white migrants from other states, they've shifted further and further into the GOP column at all levels. Democrats have had virtually no answer for the increase in GOP margins out of each of these counties. Even in rock-ribbed Democratic Broward County, the 2016 election results showed some increasing and surprising GOP strengths in some western suburban areas - not anything substantial ,and if there is one place where the Democratic infrastructure can withstand a GOP push it is Broward - but this is certainly worth tracking in the coming cycles as it might indicate the types of new residents that Palm Beach has attracted.
What's been assumed by political insiders and Democrats for sometime - that a shift to the Democrats was inevitable in this state because of demographic changes isn't a forgone conclusion at all as we see based on recent evidence. Florida continues to use new housing development and planned communities to stimulate its economy, therefore attracting the type of voters from up north that shifted this state towards the GOP in the first place - perhaps leading to a long-term stalemate in numbers where the institutional advantages the GOP enjoy in this state will allow them to continue to eek out narrow win after narrow win at the top of the ticket. For national Democrats, turning Florida blue is essential as the party's path to winning the Presidency depends more heavily than ever on Florida now that the industrial Midwest is shifting away from the party.
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This is an important political point because the Clinton strategists and spinners are invested in a theory that electing a woman will be transformative. It will be like that scene in Excalibur where King Arthur , rejuvenated by the Holy Grail, revives the brown and wasted crops and forests simply by riding by. We already had one experiment in this kind of magical thinking. It worked for Barack Obama. I don't think it will work for Hillary. Obama was new and fresh. Hillary . . . isn't.
Responding to reports and comments from anonymous friends and advisers that she plans to run for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton told the Associated Press that "I don't know who those people are or where they're getting their information from because they've never had a conversation with me they can quote."
"Never had a conversation with me they can quote" is not the same as "these conversations never took place." In fairness, lots of politicians lie about their presidential ambitions. My point here is to illustrate the style of Clintonian lies, not the magnitude of them.
Vote Smod!
Smod is the nickname/acronym for the Sweet Meteor of Death, whose planet-killing arrival many sane people pray for whenever they contemplate a Hillary Clinton presidency or listen to Sally Kohn talk.
Burke, Hayek, & Smod
Meanwhile, Smod is beholden to the rule of law -- in this case, the law of physics. As an inanimate object -- "a chunk of space-rock," Kevin dismissively spits -- Smod could no more change his mind, or his schedule, than 4 could choose not to be the sum of 2+2. Sure, he lacks Cthulhu's experience, but he has knowable and reliable convictions. If experience is all that matters, then in the human presidential contest ("a feckless battle of impotent meat-sacks," in Cthulhu's colorful phrase) Kevin should be pulling for Rick Santorum, George Pataki, or Hillary Clinton. All I need to know about Smod is he is committed to Newton's First Law of Motion. And, to paraphrase another Old Whig, Margaret Thatcher, the meteor's not for turning.
Speaking of unwavering principle, I'm reminded of Frank Meyer's famous argument for using nuclear weapons if required to defend liberty . The first "conservatarian" wrote that:
And we have to keep in mind electoral realities as well. Conservatives have for a generation been effectively locked out of most of New England and much of the rest of the Northeast; given Cthulhu's long association with Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, we'd finally have a shot at opening up Dukakis country. What's Smod's natural constituency? The geology faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder?
Oh please. For starters, Cthulhu will never get the Evangelical vote. As a demonic beast who claims, if not sovereignty over, then at least co-equal status with the Almighty, Biblical conservatives will never pull a lever for some squid-faced Baal-wannabe. I can see Ralph Reed's attack ads now.
Zoe Update : The dingo's metamorphosis into a good dog continues apace. The one place where she's still lagging -- though still vastly improved -- is her desire to scrap with other dogs, particularly golden retrievers it seems. Oh, one last thing, lots of people seem to think I'm joking when I call her a dingo. But that is what she is (or mostly is). If you google " American Dingo " all of the results are for "Carolina Dogs" who not only strongly resemble Zoe , but, according to all of the breed descriptions, share many of her quirks (from snout-hole digging in our backyard, to strange vocalizations, to poop burying when in sandy locales). Though I've yet to read that other Carolina dogs bend their arm out the car window the way she does . We'll never know for sure what she is, of course. She may have some other bloodlines in her (Yay mongrel vigor!), but she was found near Spartanburg, South Carolina. And she is so, so dingo-y .
But this is all conventional wisdom for the most part.
I will also be hosting an event for Charles Murray's new book on Thursday. Details here .
I'll be on Special Report Monday night.
EDITOR'S NOTE : The following is this Friday's edition of Jonah Goldberg's weekly "news" letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox.
D ear Reader (unless you're an Evangelical Christian, devout Muslim, or Orthodox Jewish wedding photographer who has been forced by the state to take pictures at some same-sex nuptials against your will and conscience, in which case you are probably busy snapping pictures of the groom's shoes, the ceiling tiles, and the light-blue urinal cakes at the Indianapolis Ramada. What a victory for tolerance!),
#ad#Before we get started, you should know that today is Good Friday. I don't mean that like I'm informing you it's Good Friday. It's a declaration of fact, like "You should know that America is in the Northern Hemisphere," or "You should know that you shouldn't spend your first day in prison going around the yard asking your fellow inmates, 'Who wants to put on a production of Cats ? I call Bombalurina!'"
Anyway, since you should know that's it's Good Friday, you might also be interested to know that National Review 's offices are closed today. This is a classic National Review holiday, everyone has the day off -- but all deadlines remain unchanged. It's like telling the junior baker, "Oh sure you have tomorrow off, just make sure all the doughnuts get made before dawn."
Anyway, Poor Nat Brown (that's actually his name, "Nat" is his middle name) has trudged into the office to grease up the wheel of pain , retrieve this "news"letter from the pneumatic tube, pluck off the feathers, slap the tush, pull out the giblets, give the undercarriage a "how's-your-father?" and do all of the other highly technical things that Internet professionals do to make this thing arrive on your digital doorstep intact. And, in my gratitude, I told him I would make it snappy ( and happy, and peppy, and bursting with love ).
So let's get started.
Crush the Safe Harbors
So I guess we're done with the RFRA fight for now and a lot of people are done with Governor Mike Pence ( Here's is an aerial view of his cave-in , by the way). For those interested, my column today is my second attempt to explain why comparing religious freedom laws to Jim Crow is so inane. I don't have much hope that it will do any good.
Indeed, this whole ridiculous, insane, paranoid, sanctimonious, bullying, freak-out has me despairing for the country. I don't know that I can do another stem-winder on the liberal gleichschaltung or the fact that real, meaningful, diversity must be a diversity of customs, institutions, and communities. Civil society is where life happens ; we want it to be as rich an ecosystem as it can be. That means tolerating -- or even celebrating -- hippies and drag queens in San Francisco, but it also means tolerating -- or even celebrating -- religious and observant people, too. All RFRA was intended to do was to give millions of Americans a little space to be and do what their religion tells them they must. If that faith goes too far, than the common good trumps it. But short of that, let people be for God's sake.
No one would confuse me for a particularly pious or religious person. If properly compensated, I would happily bake a cake for a gay wedding -- or write a special "news"letter for some lesbian nuptials -- myself, though I don't expect there's a big market for that (but make me an offer!).
But I also believe that in a perfect world businesses should be able to decline service to anyone for almost any reason. I firmly believe in the right of people to exit systems and institutions they do not want to belong to. I'm much less committed to the idea that people must be able to join any institution or group they want to just because they want to. I could have sworn that even liberals believed that freedom means the freedom to create the rules you want to live by, individually and collectively. In a perfect world, campus Christian groups could have rules barring, you know, non-Christians from joining. Call me a utopian, but I think the producers of the "Vagina Monologues" should not be bullied into including performers with penises (giving a whole new meaning to "cast member").
Selma, Now and Forever
And before you flip out, let me acknowledge that we don't live in a perfect world (and I don't mean the Kevin Costner movie ). America made grave and profound moral errors with regard to race. Therefore it became a moral necessity to compel businesses offering public accommodation to serve black people.
Was there a better way? Maybe. Though I find such post-hoc arguments really tiresome after a while. First of all, some of the people who want to get in the WayBack machine and re-litigate the Civil Rights Act tend to be of a cranky disposition. (No really, it's true. Wait awhile and they'll show up in the comments section of the online version of this "news"letter.)
Second, there's virtually no political upside to such debates. (It's like Ron Paul explaining on Meet the Press there was a better way to end slavery than the Civil War -- that's news we can use!)
And third, substantively saying the Civil Rights acts were unnecessary is sort of like saying to someone who escaped a burning building: "You, know, you really didn't have to throw that chair through the plate-glass window to get out." In other words, it treats an extremely exigent moment in American history as if it were amenable to solutions spit-balled in an endless college seminar.
I'm Sorry Sir, You're Not Black
What I do think is far more relevant and timely is the fact that so many people want to glom onto the moral stature of the civil-rights movement and reenact it for every single American with a grievance (save for conservatives who, like the Civil War re-enactor who's always forced to play a Confederate, must always be cast as the bad guys). If you take all the people idiotically, reflexively, and sanctimoniously invoking Jim Crow at face value, it's hard not to conclude they're reflexive and sanctimonious idiots -- or simply dishonest. And while that's probably true of some, it's clearly not true of many. Instead, I think you need to see this tendency as a Freudian slip, a statement of yearning, a kind of self-branding or what you (well, probably not you) might call moral megalothymia.
Take Out Your Dictionaries
Megalothymia is a term coined by Francis Fukuyama. It's a common mistake to think Fukuyama simply took Plato's concept of "thumos" or "thymos" and put a "mega" in front of it because we all know from the Transformers and Toho Productions that "mega" makes everything more cool.
But that's not the case. Megalothymia is a neologism of megalomania (an obsession with power and the ability to dominate others) and thymos, which Plato defined as the part of the soul concerned with spiritedness, passion, and a desire for recognition and respect.
Fukuyama defined megalothymia as a compulsive need to feel superior to others.
And boy howdy, do we have a problem with megalothymia in America today. Everywhere you look there are moral bullies utterly uninterested in conversation, introspection, or persuasion who are instead hell-bent on grinding down people they don't like to make themselves feel good. If you took the megalothymia out of Twitter, millions of trolls would throw their smartphones into the ocean.
Make no mistake: This is a problem across the ideological spectrum, because it is a problem of human nature in general and modernity in particular. But in this context, it's a special malady of elite liberalism.
Moral Heroism without Morality
We teach young people they should be morally heroic, and that is good.
The problem is we lack the ability to think about morality seriously, never mind talk about it seriously. In a world where Harvard -- once a Christian seminary! -- is now a place where its "safe spaces" aren't safe enough because the poetry is too offensive , we should not expect a lot of serious conversation.
This is one of the reasons why our moral categories are so content-less. Tolerance and sympathy become moral imperatives without reference to what is being tolerated and sympathized with. All week people on Twitter have been telling me that all discrimination is bad, no matter what. That's awful news, because I really don't want to invite pedophiles, Nazis, or complete strangers from the 7-11 parking lot to my Passover seder. Now I'm told such discrimination is wrong, no matter what.
Indeed, for some, the more immoral or offensive something becomes, the more heroic it is to find a reason to defend it (Hence the old chestnut about how a liberal is someone so open-minded he won't even take his own side in an argument). Internationally, our own worst enemies have to be on to something because, gosh darn it, we must have something to apologize for. The whole world is covered in a steaming pile of sh*t and the the left-wing optimist is the guy who thinks he will find a pony -- to explain how it's really all America's fault.
And at home, rebellion against the traditional, the existing, the old-and-tried is its own reward. Everything is Chesterton's fence , and nobody cares or bothers to ask where the fences came from or what they're for. As I keep saying, America has an autoimmune disease .
So is it any wonder that today's liberals have " Selma envy "? Is it a surprise they see Jim Crow laws everywhere? If your only frame of reference for moral heroism is the struggle for civil rights half a century ago , it's no shock that you will do everything you can to bend the world today into your sepia-toned viewfinder of the past. Teach enough kids that they have to reenact Selma to be heroic, they'll start seeing Selma in the weirdest places. Worse, the real issue won't be the alleged injustice, the real issue will be their heroism -- like kids who dig latrines in the third world so they can explain what heroes they are to the admissions counselor at Vassar.
The problem is that to compare any other group's experience to the black experience in America must of necessity be a poetic or metaphorical enterprise. The facts don't line up for women and gays. The transgendered weren't carted over here in the galleys of ships. (You could look it up.) This isn't to say blacks are the only people to have suffered from historic injustices (or to say that constant dwelling on those injustices is necessarily constructive). It is to say that the constant unending desire to leach moral standing from their experience to give your own claims underserved grandeur is pathetic and shameful. And the know-nothing, often fundamentally anti-American, desire to constantly cast this country as an oppressive, evil-intentioned society, is an indication of how the Left's intellectual gas tank is empty, and is now running simply on the fumes of megalothymic passion.
I take real offense when people insist I am a bigot just to make themselves feel good. It's literally quixotic. Don Quixote was sure windmills were dragons because he was sure he was a chivalric knight. But Quixote's certainty didn't transmogrify the windmills into dragons -- his certainty proved he was crazy. I watch the preening jack wagons of MSNBC picking heroic fights with straw-men and I see the same lunatic alchemy at work. Scream loud enough at imaginary demons in America today, and someone will salute your courage as a demon slayer. But it won't be me.
For the Time Being
Sometimes I think W.H. Auden really was a prophet. From, the Herod section of For the Time Being :
Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions . . . Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old . . . Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish . . . The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.
Noah, Apres Flood
I don't think Trevor Noah, the newly designated host of The Daily Show , is an anti-Semite. Or, to put it another way, I don't think his incredibly lame and groan-inducing jokes about Jews are sufficient evidence to earn him that label. As Katherine Timpf noted , comedians should get a pass for such things, even when they bomb. Though sometimes they can bomb so spectacularly, it's difficult to see them the same way at the bottom of the smoky crater. ( See Richards, Michael. ) But I do think Katherine is a bit too broad in granting blanket immunity for such things. The French "comedian" Dieudonne M'bala M'bala is certainly an anti-Semite even if people -- mostly anti-Semites -- laugh at his jokes.
In other words, getting a laugh doesn't automatically exonerate you from the charge of bigotry. You may be surprised to learn I'm not a close student of the comedy circuit in neo-Nazi and Klan circles, but I can imagine that after a long week of cross-burnings and graveyard desecrations, even that crowd might like to unwind to the comedic stylings of, say, a Shecky Odinshield or Lynchy McBigNose the self-hating Jewish prop-comic (that's a stage name by the way).
Indeed, one needn't invoke Rule 43 (if you look hard enough you can find anything on the Internet) to be unsurprised that the Internet is full of websites that cater to people in search of racist jokes. Why, there's even a website called racist-jokes.info brimming with all of the hateful classics. And while it doesn't follow that everyone who laughs at the crap on display there is a bigot, it doesn't take feats of logic (not to be confused with "Feets of Logic," the University of Chicago Aristotelian dance troupe) to conclude that the heartiest guffaws and most frequent visitors will be drawn disproportionately from the ranks of racists, idiots, steak heads, and comment trolls of white-power websites. Nor does it strain credulity to imagine that the kind of person who wants to spend his or her days curating such fare might be more likely to be a bigot as well.
Imagine you're on a blind date or conducting a job interview. You ask, "Do you have any hobbies?"
"Well, in my spare time I like to collect hummels, stage Civil War reenactments with toy soldiers and, oh yeah -- how could I forget? -- I run a website that collects the best jokes about blacks and Jews. Let me tell you a few . . ."
Call me Mr. Judgmental, I'm going to draw some conclusions about that guy. But, hey, that's me.
Still, I find the whole topic kind of fascinating. I listen to a lot of comedy on satellite radio when I'm driving in my car. There's an amazing amount of incredibly raunchy and racist stuff on stations like Comedy Central and Rawdog. Some of it is really funny. Some of it really isn't ("I've heard the same said about this 'news'letter minus the 'really funny' part." -- The Couch). What the comedians themselves believe in their hearts isn't very interesting to me, though it's obvious to me that the racism is 99 percent fake and the hatred of religion is 98 percent real.
But it is remarkable that they get away with it given the culture we live in today. If you only listened to stand-up comedy, you'd have almost no idea that so much of elite America have become delicate little flowers terrified of mildly unpleasant ideas, never mind offensive ones. On college campuses professors would lose their job if they made light of rape or racism, but Amy Schumer (who I think is hilarious) ascends with nary a hitch to her career. And that's as it should be when it comes to Schumer, but it is outrageous and somewhat terrifying with respect to the professors.
#related#I have no doubt that the humorless ass-aches at Salon will read me as saying "Let's have more racists and rape apologists in the classroom!" But that's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that is that comedy, particularly stand-up comedy, is one of the last places in American life -- outside private conversations with friends -- where people get the benefit of the doubt. That's a remarkable fact, both in terms of the immunity of comedians but also of the soft-totalitarian politicized ethos of almost everywhere else.
As for Noah, I honestly think he will not do well. It's not because I think he's a bad comedian, but because I think he's a cosmopolitan. Jon Stewart is arguably the most pop-culture fluent performer in American life. That was the real secret to his success -- not his liberalism. Stewart's liberalism was really important, obviously. But it seems to me Comedy Central is focusing far too much on it. Which partly explains why they went with Noah, I think. Noah is the kind of comic you want when you want to take criticism of America to the next level. Having an outsider explain why Americans should be embarrassed by America is exhilarating -- why just look at how audiences gush at John Oliver. Anyway, I think I'll stop there because I think I can get a real column out of this and, besides, Nat Brown is waiting with the ball-peen hammer and the cargo net at the other end of the pneumatic tube.
Various & Sundry
So I had planned on writing about the Iran "deal" today but I got into rant mode and forgot until it was too late. My short take: 1) There is no deal. I understand why people refer to "this deal" but it's worth remembering that these talks failed to actually come up with a deal. They came up with an outline of how to continue to talk about a deal for months past the deadline. 2) I think if these parameters are implemented as discussed, it proves Netanyahu correct: It puts Iran on a glide path to a bomb and quite obviously so. 3) But I don't think Iran will ever adhere even to these terms for more than a year or two, and they will race for a bomb. More, alas, on this in the future. But I agree with this , this , and this .
I'll be on Neil Cavuto's show today around 4:30 E.T.
Here's me ranting about RFRA on Special Report on Monday . (And yes, the rivers are turning to blood, because I just linked to Media Matters , a clear sign of the apocalypse.)
Oh, and here's something interesting: I'm hiring a fulltime research assistant -- or rather the American Enterprise Institute is hiring one for me (thanks Arthur!). I'm working on a new book that I am very excited about (more on that later, of course), and between that, my column, the magazine, and my amateur chiropody and fusilli-art, I could use some help. Here's the listing over at AEI .
Zoe Update : The dingo is doing well. We still haven't committed to a shock collar, but have started working with a trainer and I've actually been doing clicker training with her. So far so good. And she maintains her royal carriage when I drive her around . But we can talk about all of that another day. I think we need to talk about Oakley, who for the moment is the cutest dog in the NR universe . How Charlie Cooke found a lab-cow mix is beyond me, but he definitely seems like a calf to me. Look at those eyes! Anyway, we'll see how Oakley compares aesthetically to Zoe when he's older (puppies always win everything), but right now he's one handsome boy. Welcome to the club Charlie. Note: Zoe was a pretty puppy too (can you tell I'm defensive?).
Oh hey, for those of you who don't know, this "news"letter is now posted on the homepage every Saturday. There seems to be a lot of confusion about that. There's also a lot of confusion in the comments section to the G-File. Every week at least one commenter gets all haughty about the childish, self-indulgent, or sophomoric tone of this "news"letter. I get it. I know about it. But as I've been saying all along: That's not a bug, it's a feature. If you don't like it, don't read it. Also: Pull my finger.
Oh speaking of Trevor Noah, I forgot to mention I like Patton Oswalt's response to the controversy.
What was it Jacques Cousteau said after he got his new video equipment? " Time-lapse coral, bitches! "
EDITOR'S NOTE : The following is Jonah Goldberg's weekly "news" letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
D ear Reader (including our new partners in peace in Tehran),
I'm writing this from sunny southern California. Though if I had my druthers, I wouldn't be writing it at all. It's just that I took last Friday off and if I skip two Fridays in a row, I'm afraid Jack Fowler ( National Review 's publisher) will start cutting himself again.
#ad#The great thing about my job -- save for the TV part of it -- is I can pretty much do it from anywhere. Conversely, the terrible thing about my job is I can do it from anywhere. So, it's both liberating and constricting -- which sounds a bit like the tagline for an S&M bondage retreat: "Set Yourself Free in Our All Leather Dungeon!"
Anyway, like the Senate under Harry Reid, I've been trying to keep my workload to a bear minimum. Or is it bare minimum? I can never keep those straight. A bear minimum seems like what they try to maintain around the picnic tables at Yellowstone, while a bare minimum sounds like the new FCC standard for Superbowl halftime shows in the wake of the Janet Jackson and Miley Cyrus fiascos.
The point of all this throat-clearing is that I haven't been following the news too closely because I've been on vacation. Unfortunately, the first half of my trip was a long-planned ski trip in Northern California, but given my grievous back injury I couldn't ski. This sounds a bit like a twist on the old vaudeville joke about the guy who goes to the doctor with a banged-up elbow and asks, "Will I be able to play the violin?" The doctor says "of course." The guy responds, "Funny, I couldn't play the violin before."
TODAY ON NATIONAL REVIEW
Speaking of old jokes, you ever hear the old Borscht Belt routine about the old Jewish man who gets hit by a car? The paramedic arrives on the scene, props his head up, and asks, "Are you comfortable?"
The elderly man replies, "I make a living."
Thanks, you've been a great audience. Try the veal.
Anatomy of an Obama Failure
I did catch the news that the Army is going to prosecute Bowe Bergdahl for desertion. Given what we already knew, it's no surprise that Bergdahl was up to no good. But given the politics, the fact that the Army is prosecuting him suggests that the evidence is pretty overwhelming.
What I find interesting about the Bergdahl story is that it is the quintessential Obama fiasco. If you were compiling a checklist of all the things that drive conservatives crazy -- and by conservatives I basically mean people who are (a) paying attention and (b) not enthralled in the Obama cult of personality -- the Bergdahl story would achieve a near-perfect score.
The Obama M.O. remains remarkably consistent. He announces some initiative, policy, or presidential action. The public rationale for the move is always rhetorically grounded in some deep, universally shared principle, even if the real agenda is something far more ideological or partisan. The facts driving the decision are never as the White House presents them. Indeed, the more confident the White House appears to be about the facts, the more likely it is they're playing games with them.
Sometimes the facts are simply made up. There are millions of "shovel ready jobs" right around the corner! "You can keep your doctor!" The Benghazi attack was "about a video!" "One in five women are raped!" "The Islamic State isn't Islamic!" "These exclamation points are totally necessary!" At other times, the facts are selectively deployed. "Something something tax breaks for corporate jets mumble mumble poor Warren Buffet's secretary's tax bill blah blah Spain is winning the future with solar panels" and, course, "core al-Qaeda has been decimated" (in which "core al-Qaeda" is defined as "the bits of al-Qaeda that have been decimated").
The Obama response to all opposition is to either attack the motives of his critics or to dismiss the objections as mere politics or ideology. When Obama met with congressional leaders back in 2009, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan made substantive critiques of Obamacare, and Obama responded by waving away their objections as mere "talking points" -- as if any facts written on a sheet of paper suddenly become untrue if you can call them "talking points."
Republican 1: "It is unsafe to smoke cigarettes around the propane tank."
Republican 2: "Mass collectivization of agriculture has not worked well in the past."
Republican 3: "You should not feed salmon to grizzly bears using your lap as a plate."
Obama: "Those are just talking points.....Ahhhhh! Get this bear off of me!"
When Senate Democrats, led by Bob Menendez (now conveniently under the Department of Justice's thumb), expressed concerns about Obama's overtures to Iran, Obama reportedly sympathized, saying he understood their plight, what with the pressure from "donors." The insinuation, obviously, is that Obama is doing the right thing, while those opposed were motivated by fear of nefarious unnamed "donors" cracking their whips (between servings of lox and bagels, no doubt). Only Obama's motivations are pure, noble, and fact-driven. Only his opponents are ideologues incapable of "putting politics aside for the good of the American people," as he likes to say.
There are other anatomical features of an Obama outrage. A few come to mind:
‐He has a tendency to frame issues in such a way that America is the villain and America's enemies have a point.
‐He has an outsized faith -- fueled equally by ego and the media's eagerness to take his side -- in his ability to persuade the public not to believe their lying eyes.
‐Since Obama sees himself as the People's Tribune and the sole champion of what is right and good, he has little to no use for Congress or legal or constitutional requirements to work with it.
‐And, of course, there's the incompetence factor -- amplified by groupthink in the White House bunker. They may think Obama is the smartest guy in the room, but they also all think they're geniuses who just happen to agree with each other. This creates a near total blindness to facts, data, and opinions that don't line up with their worldview.
Enter Bergdahl
Using the above criteria, the Bergdahl story is quintessential Obama.
Invoking high-minded principle? Check!
Really motivated by partisan and ideological agenda? Check!
Made-up facts? Check!
Critics denounced as partisan ideologues opposed to high-minded principle? Check!
Group-think-driven White House's failure to anticipate the political downsides? Check!
Flagrant contempt for Congress and its laws? Check !
Vaclav Havel? Czech !
The high-minded-principle part is obvious. We leave no one behind. Who can disagree with that?
But it was obvious long ago that Obama had other priorities in mind. "It could be a huge win if Obama could bring him home," a senior administration official told Rolling Stone in a 2012 piece on Bergdahl. "Especially in an election year, if it's handled properly."
The other major priority was to use the marching band and fireworks celebration of Bergdahl's return to hasten the shuttering of Gitmo . Dump the worst of the worst anywhere you can and the political rationale for keeping the place open evaporates. So trading five hardened Taliban commanders for one deserter was a win-win.
Then there's the thumbless grasp of political reality. Maybe the president didn't think going AWOL was that big a deal. Maybe he thought it was understandable. Maybe he assumed everyone shared his take on things. Maybe he thought he could just bluster through because the American people are idiots. Who knows?
The fact remains they knew Bergdahl had been AWOL and yet still thought this would be a clear-cut "huge win," particularly in the context of winding down the War in Afghanistan. They had no idea this fiasco would blow up in their faces, though I like to think some of the savvier political operatives on the Obama team had at least a moment of doubt when they saw Bergdahl's dad show up with his Johnny Taliban beard. When the elder Bergdahl started speaking Arabic and Pashto in the Rose Garden, I like to imagine that David Axelrod's bowels stewed just a little bit. (Every political pro I know who watched that announcement responded pretty much the same way you or I would if we saw a polar bear pooping a live hamster on a bus made of graham crackers; "What the Hell am I looking at?")
Caught off guard by their own incompetence and arrogance, they immediately responded by attacking the motives of the critics. This is a very human reaction. If you think you've thought through all of the legitimate responses to your actions, it's natural to assume the critical responses you didn't anticipate are illegitimate.
On background they started claiming that Bergdahl was being "swiftboated." This spin was a pas de deux of asininity since "swiftboating" itself is a b.s. term for telling embarrassing and inconvenient truths. Much like John Kerry's old comrades, it was members of Bergdahl's own unit who blew the whistle on him. Blindsided by this utterly predictable reaction, the White House doubled down by marrying arrogant invocation of principle to made-up facts, which is pretty much Susan Rice's metier . So they sent her out to the Sunday shows to insist that Bergdahl "served with honor and distinction" -- words that actually have quite a bit of meaning to people who, you know, served with honor and distinction.
On Twitter, Iowahawk had the pithiest summation of the Obama team's assault:
"What kind of scum would slander this fine brave patriotic US soldier!"
"His platoon mates."
"And you actually believe those baby killers?"
Hacky Psaki
Jen Psaki, bless her heart, is sticking with the party line. Asked by Megyn Kelly whether the trade was worth it, Psaki responded: "We have a commitment to our men and women serving overseas, or in our military, defending our national security every day, that we will do everything we can to bring them home, and that's what we did in this case."
I agree with that entirely, in principle. But the key phrase there is "everything we can ." It implies that there is a limiting principle to what we can do. It's a bit like the ten-guilty-men fallacy . What if the Taliban asked for ten, 20 or 100 Gitmo detainees in exchange for Bergdahl? Would Obama have agreed to that? What if the Taliban demanded all of the detainees, the state of Ohio, and the left thumbs of the starting line-up of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Without a limiting principle, our answer would have to be "Yes." But once sweet reason tags into the ring, we understand that such demands are ridiculous even if Bergdahl were the greatest and most patriotic soldier who ever lived.
Free Fall
I was just about to get all various and sundry on your ass when my friend Shannen Coffin -- recently catapulted by National Review and Megyn Kelly into the role of America's foremost expert on State Department paperwork -- forwarded me this spectacularly depressing piece by Politico 's Michael Crowley . The whole thing is worth reading, but I have a couple quick observations.
Crowley writes:
"If there's one lesson this administration has learned, from President Obama's 2009 Cairo speech through the Arab Spring, it's that when it comes to this region, nothing happens in a linear way -- and precious little is actually about us, which is a hard reality to accept," said a senior State Department official.
Not everyone is so forgiving. "We're in a goddamn free fall here," said James Jeffrey, who served as Obama's ambassador to Iraq and was a top national security aide in the George W. Bush White House.
First, free fall sounds like a perfect term for the mess we're in.
Second, it's hard to make out exactly what this senior State Department official is trying to say with his head so far past his sphincter. In the abstract, I'm fine with the notion that nothing happens in the region in a linear way. I'm also fine with the idea that not everything that happens in the Middle East is about us. But taken in the context of the last SIX years, the takeaway is that Obama simply never had any idea what he was doing, and as a result he rationalizes doing little to nothing as hard-won wisdom. It's not him , it's them .
Here's the thing to remember: Beyond ending the Iraq War by any means necessary and closing Gitmo, Obama's Cairo speech was Obama's Middle East foreign policy. He thought his middle name, a few apologies, and not being George W. Bush, combined with the awesome awesomeness of his awesomosity, would be enough to transform the region.
Then there's this:
For years, members of the Obama team have grappled with the chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring. But of late they have been repeatedly caught off-guard, raising new questions about America's ability to manage the dangerous region.
What the what? Again, I think the piece on the whole is good. But did you catch the sudden change in subject here? The Obama team has been grappling and was caught off guard, and this raises new questions about America's ability to manage the region? Why America's? These are Team Obama's foul-ups. Shouldn't they raise new questions about Team Obama's abilities? Maybe I'm still high on airplane glue, but I'm pretty sure that when the Bush team was grappling and getting caught off guard, it "raised questions" about Bush, not America.
This is a microscopic example of one of my longstanding beefs. Whenever things are going bad for liberalism, the blame falls on either America or conservatives, never on liberals. As I wrote in Liberal Fascism :
In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds -- say, McCarthyism -- are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.
Then there's this:
Obama officials were surprised earlier this month, for instance, when the Iraqi government joined with Iranian-backed militias to mount a sudden offensive aimed at freeing the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Nor did they foresee the swift rise of the Iranian-backed rebels who toppled Yemen's U.S.-friendly government and disrupted a crucial U.S. counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda there.
Wait a second. I was with you on the whole "the Middle East isn't linear" thing. But if this White House was caught off guard by Iran's backing of Houthi (and blowfish) militias and coziness with the Shiite government in Baghdad, that's not proof of the region's non-linear inscrutability, it's further proof that the Obama foreign-policy team drives to work in a clown car. It's like the s*** has been hitting the fan for so long over there, they think that's just the best way to paint the walls of the situation room an earthy brown.
All Is Dwell
Finally, there's the final paragraph, which is a quote from the same State Department official who wears his own ass like a hat:
"The truth is, you can dwell on Yemen, or you can recognize that we're one agreement away from a game-changing, legacy-setting nuclear accord on Iran that tackles what every one agrees is the biggest threat to the region," the official said.
Sigh. Where to begin?
Remember all that stuff earlier about groupthink and the inability to anticipate or even recognize inconvenient data and facts? Well, here's this guy saying: Don't dwell on Yemen's disintegration or on America's hasty withdrawal from it. Don't dwell on the fact this administration touted it -- and continues to tout it! -- as a model of a successful counter-terror strategy. Don't dwell on the fact that it is now the frontline of a regional sectarian war between Arab Sunnis and Iran and Iranian client Shiites. Don't dwell on the fact that Yemen is in fact just the latest piece of concrete evidence that the whole region is going tits-up, with total bloody chaos in Libya, Syria, and much of Iraq, thanks in large part to Iran's decades-long ambition to become a regional hegemon by any means necessary -- including terrorism.
No, don't dwell on any of that stuff, because we're going to get a piece of paper that will probably put Iran on a path to getting a bomb rather than prevent it. But even if the terms are exactly as the White House will spin them, the agreement will still depend entirely on the good faith and trustworthiness of Iran's rulers, who've been violating every international law you can think of and who chant, every week, "death to America." I mean, what could go wrong?
Various & Sundry
So, first of all, no Zoe update because she's back in D.C. with the dog-sitter.
However, one of my Twitter friends alerted me to the news that the late, great, Cosmo the Wonderdog had a cameo, or at least a relative, in Beastmaster .
Second, in case you missed it, here's my conversation with Bill Bennett on his new book, Going to Pot .
Third, also in case you missed it, here's the most recent GLoP podcast .
Fourth, here's a minor disagreement I had with Charlie Cooke over " McCarthyism ."
My first column of the week, written entirely on the drive from Tahoe to LA (By the way, never take I-5 when you can drive 395 and 14 -- so much prettier!), was on Obama the Superhero with the incredible power to ignore whatever he wants to ignore .
My second column this week is on liberal American Jews.
Oh, I'll be on Special Report on Monday and Thursday, which probably means Steve Hayes was arrested for mopery again.
I want to apologize for the excessive bawdiness of today's "news"letter. Sometimes, it's worth using colorful language when it carries the freight of mirth or substance. And sometimes, it's just a sign of laziness and low character. I leave it to you to decide which explanation is more at work in today's missive. I was writing this out of protest. Perhaps when I return home I can live up to the standards set by Jack Fowler who, I am told, is the East Coast's greatest expert on WeatherDong sleuthing.
2. Read true things from a teleprompter about news stuff
3. Be trustworthy
The Horse Equivocator
In my first column of the week I referred to Scott Walker as the "vanilla candidate." But nowhere in the column did I actually say that the term "vanilla" had anything to do with his personality. My point was all about how he's the most acceptable candidate to the most Republicans -- sort of like vanilla ice cream is the most popular ice cream even though it's not most people's favorite. I was a very pro-Walker column, but lots of his fans got tripped up over the word "vanilla." I guess that's on me. |
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Contact Us
Email us at AntiFascistNews@gmail.com Submissions should be relevant to anti-fascism/anti-racism and deal with contemporary or "evergreen" issues. Put "article submission" in the subject title, and ideally you will include the submission as a Rich Text or Word document. We publish a range of article lengths, and are open to diverse styles, so send it in! We should be able to respond to every article submission. Also email in questions, comments, or if you want to volunteer to work on the website or other technical tasks. |
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By Daniel J. Weiss , Arpita Bhattacharyya , Raj Salhotra | August 18, 2011
Washington, D.C.--As the White House completes its interagency review of the Environmental Protection Agency's updated ground-level ozone standard to protect public health, some of the companies required to reduce their pollution continue to make exaggerated claims that negative economic impacts will occur due to these updated protections. This will be the first improvement in the science-based standard to protect children, seniors and other sensitive people from ozone (smog) in the air since 1997.
Leading the charge against these safeguards are Big Oil, coal, and utility companies who assert the protections will wreak economic havoc. These groups made similar charges when the ozone standard was improved in 1997. The Center for American Progress analyzed the economic data from the metropolitan areas affected by the 1997 standards, and found that industries' predictions did not occur.
"Industries' predictions of economic armageddon following the adoption of the 1997 ozone standard did not occur. In fact, economic growth and unemployment in the metropolitan areas newly out of compliance generally followed the national economy. This means that Big Oil and other polluters' similar, current attacks on the pending ozone standard also lack credibility," said Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and coauthor of the analysis.
"Big Oil and its allies have launched a fact-free onslaught aimed at the pending ozone standard, while this analysis shows that a stricter ozone standard will likely have little impact on the economy of the affected areas, while the air in these communitites will be safer for children, seniors, and other sensitive populations," he added.
CAP evaluated the economic growth and employment rates metropolitan areas experienced after they were put into "nonattainment" (or violation) for the first time due to the 1997 standard. The analysis determined that contrary to industries' predictions, the areas with smog levels exceeding the health standards for the first time experienced very similar economic growth to the nation as a whole. Additionally, employment rates were very similar to the national rate.
The administration is expected to finalize the smog standard very soon. Industry and business groups will undoubtedly continue their strong opposition to protecting the health of millions of Americans on the grounds that it will hurt the economy. Installing new scrubbers and controls will cost money, but will also create jobs. After the establishment of previous safeguards, industry has found ways to meet them much more cheaply than their rhetoric predicted.
History shows that the new ozone health standard is unlikely to have much negative economic impact, but will save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in lower health care costs. "The Obama administration must ignore the tired, disproven pleadings of Big Oil and other special interests, and instead set an ozone health standard based on the science to provide additional protection to all Americans," concluded Weiss.
To read the full analysis, click here .
To speak to CAP experts on this issue, please contact Laura Pereyra at lpereyra@americanprogress.org or 202.203.8689. |
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But according to Politifact , the legislation to which she referred requires only that ICE have 34,000 beds available every day.
BIOGRAPHY CHICANERY
The far-left Democrat is the "future of the Democrat Party" according to DNC Chair Tom Perez.
Her biography, however, began with chicanery. She decided to straighten it out with sleight of hand.
In the original bio, she said she commuted from the Bronx [the reader must presume it is her home] to school in Yorktown -- she spent "much of her life" doing it.
Her bio states: "The state of Bronx public schools in the late 80s and early 90s sent her parents on a search for a solution. She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx."
She has corrected that with artifice. The sly Socialist now says she commutated to see her "extended family".
Her bio currently reads: "The state of Bronx public schools in the late 80s and early 90s sent her parents on a search for a solution. She ended up attending public school in Yorktown-40 minutes north of her birthplace. As a result, much of her early life was spent in transit between her tight-knit extended family in the Bronx and her daily student life." |
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1 Kragar Jan 14, 2016 * 11:49:58am down 9 up report
What kind of pin dick loser suggests he's going to kill someone because somebody else didn't get a "special snowflake gold star checkmark!" next to his name?
2 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 11:52:19am down 3 up report
Twitter has to recognise that this entire thing is enabled by them. If he had no Twitter to Tweet his hate on, he would have a smaller audience. WTF do you have to do to get banned again?
What kind of pin dick loser suggests he's going to kill someone because somebody else didn't get a "special snowflake gold star checkmark!" next to his name?
What's the usual 'plausible deniability' response? Something like, "Retweeting doesn't necessarily imply agreement"? That'll be Milo's fallback.
4 Csarneson Jan 14, 2016 * 11:55:50am down -11 up report
I despise Milo and his tantrum but I don't see this as a threat of violence.
5 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:00:58pm down 1 up report
It's kind of an implied threat veiled as a 'warning' of someone getting so mad about their little blue checkmark censorship a private owner of a public forum having a say about their product that they resort to revenge. Considering the sources, it's hard not to read into the unstated '... or else'.
Edit: Also, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and not just start slamming - on sight. It's just that a horribly awful man has horribly awful fans who at least are horribly awful enough to try and intimidate someone over Twitter verification.
6 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:03:47pm down 8 up report
I despise Milo and his tantrum but I don't see this as a threat of violence.
Oh please.
7 Csarneson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:04:09pm down -7 up report
re: #5 Black d20
Absolutely. I can agree with everything you said. Charles described it as "blatant" and I don't think it falls into that category though.
8 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:04:39pm down 6 up report
Given your commenting history here, let's just say this isn't surprising.
9 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:05:09pm down 1 up report
Speaking of victims...... Everything wrong with professional sports in a nutshell. Oh the humanity.....That's taxpayers money folks....
I despise Milo and his tantrum but I don't see this as a threat of violence.
He's essentially saying "Nice privately owned public forum you got here. Be a shame if something was to happen to it."
I mean, seriously, he's saying 'Keep pissing people off by not giving Milo back his blue checkmark, and someone may get mad enough to kill you." And you don't think this constitutes a threat?
11 Kragar Jan 14, 2016 * 12:05:49pm down 9 up report
Yeah, the whole "any violence is on you" and "are you trying to incite a twitter killer?" is really ambiguous. //
12 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:05:55pm down 0 up report
I still think it's some sort of notable-if-not-imminent threat, and I would not be shocked if Twitter just gave Milo the heave-ho he fucking deserves. Not only would be fair given the givens, the toothless rage afterwards would be extraordinary .
Yeah, the whole "any violence is on you" and "are you trying to incite a twitter killer?" is really ambiguous. //
"Look what you made me do!"
14 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:08:19pm down 9 up report
Absolutely. I can agree with everything you said. Charles described it as "blatant" and I don't think it falls into that category though.
By the way, I wrote that this is a blatant violation of Twitter's TOS, which it is. Nice try at distorting what I wrote.
15 scottslemmons Jan 14, 2016 * 12:10:03pm down 1 up report
Well, you know how it goes -- fascist fantasists gotta fantasize about fascism. Maybe ubermensch Trump will let them hang out in his bunker... :/
16 Csarneson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:11:11pm down -11 up report
re: #8 Charles Johnson
Charles I like your writing and I agree with you on most things but sometimes you language is a little over-the-top.
To say those tweets are "blatant" is not something I can agree with. I certainly think they could be viewed as "mennacing" or "veiled" though. I also a little shocked that Twitter hasn't just banned him outright. He certainly deserves that.
17 bratwurst Jan 14, 2016 * 12:11:26pm down 41 up report
Quick update: made it to the airport without any problem, 47 minutes from hanging up phone with taxi to clearing security, doesn't get easier than that! Made it here to lounge totally on my own steam, enjoying adult beverage!
18 Shimshon Jan 14, 2016 * 12:11:45pm down 0 up report
dudebro has a spiralling cocaine problem, pretty soon he's gonna Breitbart himself. And I'm okay with that.
19 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 12:12:37pm down 2 up report
I despise Milo and his tantrum but I don't see this as a threat of violence.
Does this one meet your criteria...whatever that may be? Or is this too circumspect for you?
20 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:12:46pm down 0 up report
re: #15 scottslemmons
Milo might be a bit too gay for the Trump, mind you. If allowed, he'd at least be a Useful [Insert Homosexual Male Stereotype Here]; all Milo cares about is attention and riling people up.
21 CuriousLurker Jan 14, 2016 * 12:13:03pm down 6 up report
Quick update: made it to the airport without any problem, 47 minutes from hanging up phone with taxi to clearing security, doesn't get easier than that! Made it here to lounge totally on my own steam, enjoying adult beverage!
Excellent news! Hope the rest of your trip goes smoothly. Have fun. ;-)
22 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 12:14:05pm down 12 up report
I agree with you on most things
People who say that to me always go on to prove it a lie.
23 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 12:15:28pm down 1 up report
re: #20 Black d20
Milo might be a bit too gay for the Trump, mind you. If allowed, he'd at least be a Useful [Insert Homosexual Male Stereotype Here]; all Milo cares about is attention and riling people up.
He's the stereotypical gay guy that we're supposed to hate...hates them icky wimmens and wants to inflict violence upon us (something not one gay person I know would ever think) so that there are no more wimmens. WIN! Or something.
24 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:15:36pm down 1 up report
People who say that to me always go on to prove it a lie.
Should I be filing that in the same folder with "But I have X friends, so..." and "I'm not an X, but..."?
25 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 12:17:09pm down 3 up report
Quick update: made it to the airport without any problem, 47 minutes from hanging up phone with taxi to clearing security, doesn't get easier than that! Made it here to lounge totally on my own steam, enjoying adult beverage!
Awesome! When you get to AZ, grab a box of Emergen-C and have a few packets. That always helps me not get sick from flying with everyone else (and their kids and their kids friends and everyone they know who has sniffles). Just a thought.
Enjoy your trip!!! Be well and healthy!
26 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 12:17:45pm down 2 up report
re: #24 Black d20
Should I be filing that in the same folder with "But I have X friends, so..." and "I'm not an X, but..."?
Evidence is pointing that way.
27 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:18:00pm down 1 up report
He unfortunately also falls into the Conniving and Craven Bastard stereotype considering his former strong disapproval of gamers up until Gamergate (ugh, that is probably the first time I've typed that out in 6+ months) happened and he saw a recruiting opportunity.
Quick update: made it to the airport without any problem, 47 minutes from hanging up phone with taxi to clearing security, doesn't get easier than that! Made it here to lounge totally on my own steam, enjoying adult beverage!
Hooray! I hope the flight is equally smooth and you're able to enjoy some sunny weather.
29 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse Jan 14, 2016 * 12:26:23pm down 2 up report
30 Ace-o-aces Jan 14, 2016 * 12:27:55pm down 4 up report
OFFS:
Do you think Iran would have acted so tough if they were Russian sailors? Our country was humiliated. -- Donald J. Trump ( @realDonaldTrump ) January 14, 2016
They where released in less than a day, unharmed. And notice Trump asks what would happen to Russian sailors, because he has a huge man-crush on Putin.
31 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:28:01pm down 1 up report
You really can just get a taste for how deep his ego is, and how badly his fee-fees are hurt.
32 lawhawk Jan 14, 2016 * 12:29:25pm down 3 up report
re: #30 Ace-o-aces
Considering our Navy entered secured Iranian waters w/o permission, Iran within right to stop/detain. @realDonaldTrump
They where released in less than a day, unharmed. And notice Trump asks what would happen to Russian sailors, because he has a huge man-crush on Putin.
Obama rescues Navy Iranian Hostage sailors in hours. Guinness updates record for rescuing hostages from Iran. pic.twitter.com/5yYYaAKkir -- Daniel Ballard ( @RW_Conspirator ) January 14, 2016
34 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:30:14pm down 3 up report
To say those tweets are "blatant" is not something I can agree with.
And you're still distorting what I wrote.
35 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 12:30:48pm down 7 up report
Confederate flag banner flying over SC GOP debate. Unclear who paid for it pic.twitter.com/04BohBne8n
36 D_Red Jan 14, 2016 * 12:30:54pm down -3 up report
Christ, that hair is a war crime.
The dude making these tweets is doing so in response to people sending violent tweets to Milo. He's saying that twitter not upholding it's anti-threat policy is going to result in violence...but violence towards Milo. That's why Milo is retweeting him. And probably also to bait people like you into condemning the call for violence, so that Milo can say "look, even Charles Johnson is demanding that twitter uphold it's harassment policy when it comes to my critics."
37 Kragar Jan 14, 2016 * 12:33:28pm down 4 up report
Zooming in on the banner:
39 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:35:34pm down 1 up report
re: #36 D_Red
Okay, upon looking at it that way you might have a point. As much as I despise Milo (yes, I remember the Shaun King debacle, even if it turned out that King is really not very trustworthy after all) I don't want to see the dude harmed -- humiliated, discredited, and thoroughly shamed, but not harmed. He still needs to get gone from Twitter, and if others have violated the TOS venting their spleens at him they can join him on having the door hit 'em on the way out.
40 gocart mozart Jan 14, 2016 * 12:36:17pm down 3 up report
re: #38 Backwoods_Sleuth
Who are the turncoats, the confederates who took up arms against the U.S. or the people who voted to remove the confederate flag? I'm guessing the latter.
41 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:36:26pm down 6 up report
re: #30 Ace-o-aces
They would have launched the New Improved Marvelous Putin Assault Attack Putin...
42 lawhawk Jan 14, 2016 * 12:36:28pm down 6 up report
re: #38 Backwoods_Sleuth
That's some serious cognitive dissonance there. Turncoats and flying the flag of secessionists who purposefully shed blood in furtherance of an insurrection against the Union?
re: #36 D_Red
Ok, pet peeve here, sorry. I'd let it slide if it only happened once, but it happened twice.
It's = it is.
Its = possessive.
I always read out the contraction in my head to help remind myself which goes where when.
44 Kragar Jan 14, 2016 * 12:39:17pm down 8 up report
For those of you who might need an alternative method for convincing your significant others to see the Deadpool movie:
Deadpool (2016) Romance/Drama Movie Trailer Deadpool (2016) Romance/Drama Movie Trailer
45 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 12:39:54pm down 1 up report
Quick update: made it to the airport without any problem, 47 minutes from hanging up phone with taxi to clearing security, doesn't get easier than that! Made it here to lounge totally on my own steam, enjoying adult beverage!
Good luck on the rest of the flight and trip.
46 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:39:58pm down 4 up report
re: #36 D_Red
Maybe. But I think it's more likely he's saying someone will take violent action against Twitter in retaliation.
Either way, it's deranged, because it's Milo's followers who frequently post threats of rape and violence against the women he harasses.
47 D_Red Jan 14, 2016 * 12:40:15pm down 0 up report
Me too. I also.
49 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:41:53pm down 5 up report
This post at Medium has quite a few examples of the kinds of threats Milo's followers often direct at the women he targets:
Republicans are so fucking weird.
51 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:44:10pm down 3 up report
re: #39 Black d20
Okay, upon looking at it that way you might have a point. As much as I despise Milo (yes, I remember the Shaun King debacle, even if it turned out that King is really not very trustworthy after all) I don't want to see the dude harmed -- humiliated, discredited, and thoroughly shamed, but not harmed. He still needs to get gone from Twitter, andf others have violated the TOS venting their spleens at him they can join him on having the door hit 'em on the way out.
I haven't seen anyone threaten to harm Milo. Not saying it hasn't happened, but I have seen many of Milo's followers threaten to harm women he targets.
52 SteveMcGaziBolaGate RN Jan 14, 2016 * 12:44:20pm down 1 up report
re: #30 Ace-o-aces
I remember what Turkey did to a Russian pilot who invaded their airspace. I guess Trump would prefer that.
53 451_Montag Jan 14, 2016 * 12:45:06pm down 21 up report
54 SteveMcGaziBolaGate RN Jan 14, 2016 * 12:46:06pm down 4 up report
Send sugar free gummi bears
55 D_Red Jan 14, 2016 * 12:47:27pm down -1 up report
re: #46 Charles Johnson
If you look at Arthur's timeline, the tweet that sets him off is a tweet someone sent to Milo telling Milo that he hoped he "burned to death, in an agonizing inferno, screaming in terror". Milo wants people to think he didn't lose his precious check because of his incredibly shitty behavior, but because twitter is biased against brave conservative truth tellers like him. And so he's claiming that twitter doesn't take action against people who threaten him. Which is probably true for the most part. The truth is that twitter doesn't have the money or the manpower to ban everyone who wishes someone else burns to death-they'd have to ban a good chunk of Milo's fanbase.
56 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse Jan 14, 2016 * 12:49:48pm down 2 up report
re: #35 Backwoods_Sleuth
False Flag! Although thare's nothing wrong with Confed flag it was Heritage and libtards are two politically correctness.
57 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 12:50:14pm down 1 up report
So, is TRUMP(r) going to allow that plane with the Star and Bars to continue to fly around? He always says he doesn't like losers.
Watch him get around that somehow and mention the plane and flag in some manner to kiss the ass of the South Carolina "civil war ain't over...the South will rise again" rednecks. His whole campaign is going after bottom feeders...so how will he cater to the rebels?
58 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 12:50:27pm down 5 up report
re: #38 Backwoods_Sleuth
Zooming in on the banner:
[Embedded content]
I couldn't make that out. But I'm pretty sure my first interpretation is wrong.
NO VOTES FOR TA NEHISI COATES
i could see they left the 'E' out of 'Coates'.
59 BeachDem Jan 14, 2016 * 12:51:15pm down 4 up report
No votes for turncoats? What is that even supposed to mean? (I live in South by dog Carolina and I don't get it.)
60 Joe Bacon Jan 14, 2016 * 12:51:16pm down 6 up report
OK looks like Daleidan and Ginger Snapped are gonna get smacked down real good!
Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress -- the anti-abortion group behind a series of "sting videos" targeting the reproductive health organization -- alleging that the group violated the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO Act) and engaged in wire fraud, mail fraud, invasion of privacy, illegal secret recording, and trespassing.
61 ausador Jan 14, 2016 * 12:51:30pm down 12 up report
Here is what Milo @nero is really doing by re-tweeting "warnings" about possible violence against Twitter personnel pic.twitter.com/OD0CmcW5Od
62 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 12:52:55pm down 4 up report
No votes for turncoats? What is that even supposed to mean? (I live in South by dog Carolina and I don't get it.)
Ms. Nikki done pissed off the good ol' Johnny Rebs. She ain't geeeeting re'lected ev'r 'gin!
63 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 12:52:56pm down 5 up report
re: #55 D_Red
That tweet is from a very obvious shitposting troll, by the way, with about 50 followers. When Milo directs his followers to harass someone, they get buried in hatred and threats.
(I know this from personal experience.)
64 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 12:54:12pm down 6 up report
If a Twitter Terrorist turns to violence, does he have to seal the deal with 140 rounds or less?
65 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 12:54:21pm down 21 up report
When you think they're listening, but then you realize they're just examining your forehead for lobotomy scars pic.twitter.com/8olIRiRj9i
67 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 12:56:06pm down 4 up report
re: #66 Not a Sparkly Vampire
68 BeachDem Jan 14, 2016 * 12:56:17pm down 4 up report
Ms. Nikki done pissed off the good ol' Johnny Rebs. She ain't geeeeting re'lected ev'r 'gin!
Well, she's term-limited as governor, so I guess they won't vote her when she runs for ???
69 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 12:56:41pm down 11 up report
Spotted in Charleston by a GOP campaign aide. (And no, the car does not have a handicapped placard.) pic.twitter.com/3Qe7eYUioF
70 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 12:57:04pm down 6 up report
Well, she's term-limited as governor, so I guess they won't vote her when she runs for ???
the border.
71 Kragar Jan 14, 2016 * 12:57:58pm down 5 up report
Head of Trump's veterans group visited Oregon militia & praised their effort against "thug-like, terroristic" feds: https://t.co/EtBjegxqZA
72 Kryptik Jan 14, 2016 * 12:58:10pm down 2 up report
[Embedded content]
That is one amazing, unintentional visual metaphor.
73 Kilroy01 Jan 14, 2016 * 12:58:15pm down 12 up report
And don't forget!
74 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 12:58:32pm down 7 up report
Fiorina e-mail: "Despite his $49 million in advertising we are leading Jeb Bush in NH. This nomination is still very much up for grabs."
Dear Ms. #Fiorina : If your only accomplishment is being ahead of #Jebya --who's in single digits-- you're in trouble. https://t.co/40WYtejEUv
75 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 1:00:08pm down 0 up report
Well, she's term-limited as governor, so I guess they won't vote her when she runs for ???
They probably think she is going to be someone's VP pick and so that person will get no votes.
I also think they are pissed off at anyone that wanted that flag taken down this past summer. Right now I can't remember which of the car clown candidates took a stand against the flag...but the Rebs are probably keeping count and no votes for them!
76 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 1:00:43pm down 18 up report
and....they're off and running!!!
Lawsuit says Rubio isn't "natural born" American because his parents weren't citizens: https://t.co/fyWzOD65iR pic.twitter.com/g3KKKOgmpo
[Embedded content]
And barking their shins on the shovels as they run.
78 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse Jan 14, 2016 * 1:02:44pm down 1 up report
Head of Trump's veterans group visited Oregon militia & praised their effort against "thug-like, terroristic" feds: t.co -- Catherine Thompson
Smart, rational take.
79 jaunte Jan 14, 2016 * 1:03:37pm down 6 up report
I encourage all confederate sympathizers to boycott the polling booth.
80 BeachDem Jan 14, 2016 * 1:04:23pm down 18 up report
So, the loons are in Charleston today for their big debate, then they head up here to Myrtle Beach for the Tea Party hootenanny this weekend.
The Dems head for Charleston for the weekend--several daytime events and the JJ Dinner and Clyburn Fish Fry Saturday night, then the Dem Debate Sunday night. I was going to go, but didn't get a debate ticket and figured I had better things to spend $500-$750 on than what the weekend in Charleston would probably cost.
Here's what I'm doing this weekend:
81 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 1:05:05pm down 5 up report
and....they're off and running!!!
[Embedded content]
Rabid birther's are some crazy shits, and the TPGOP tried to turn them into housepets. Scroo'm.
82 lawhawk Jan 14, 2016 * 1:05:40pm down 2 up report
re: #74 Backwoods_Sleuth
The only question is who'll burn more money before quitting the race - @CarlyFiorina or @JebBush . Jeb's got huge lead here. @downwithtyranny
83 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 1:06:49pm down 6 up report
Harry Reid Trolls GOP Colleagues by Pushing for a Vote on Trump's Policies https://t.co/hWIuVTrzoi pic.twitter.com/2zdCsOG6fC
84 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 1:07:44pm down 7 up report
Charleston Democrat Chair message to Republican prez debaters: "We welcome the Republican circus to Charleston, a Democratic County"
85 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:09:17pm down 0 up report
re: #51 Charles Johnson
I believe you, just the sort to say what's good for Peter's good for Paul as well (in terms of account whacking).
86 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 1:12:19pm down 3 up report
The GOP has Trump smeared all over them and they can't get it off.
87 Black d20 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:13:20pm down 1 up report
re: #86 wrenchwench
For a moment it almost seemed like they were gonna fight him. I wonder what dirt (and money) he has on the key players to make them so docile nowadays.
88 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:16:20pm down 0 up report
Man Milo is such a mental toddler.
89 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:17:43pm down 3 up report
I'll miss him. I don't think Schumer will be as good at trolling them as Reid was.
90 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 1:18:57pm down 2 up report
re: #87 Black d20
For a moment it almost seemed like they were gonna fight him. I wonder what dirt (and money) he has on the key players to make them so docile nowadays.
The 'Stabbies' (GOP establishment) have underestimated their right wing, and avoided responsibility for it, since the Tea Party came to town. Maybe way earlier than that, but while the Stabbies were ignoring their right wing, it was growing and feeling desperate from demographic changes happening around them.
91 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:18:57pm down 1 up report
re: #76 Backwoods_Sleuth
and....they're off and running!!!
[Embedded content]
Yeah but conservatives aren't racists or bigots. This is your ideology, Marco, don't you just feel welcome!
92 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 1:19:40pm down 5 up report
I keep getting confused. Who are the GOP candidates running against again? I didn't realize Barack Obama was one the GOP presidential contenders.
Oh that's right. The GOP decides who drums up the best hate for the current office holder is the best candidate for the actual presidential run. It never is about policy, direction of the country, helping the people be all they can be and all that good stuff.
Hate on GOP...hate on!
93 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 1:19:41pm down 7 up report
re: #85 Black d20
I believe you, just the sort to say what's good for Peter's good for Paul as well (in terms of account whacking).
Obviously, they can't police every one of their 320 million users; I think it makes more sense for Twitter to focus on abuse from high-profile users like Milo instead of anonymous trolls with a dozen followers, because when Milo calls out his army of ~150,000 followers the onslaught of threats and abuse is really terrifying to many people, especially newbies. This kind of mass targeted abuse is what really damages Twitter's reputation and ability to attract new users.
94 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 1:20:30pm down 5 up report
You knew this was inevitable:
PRESIDENT CAMACHO says: ALL Y'ALL NEED TO STOP TRIPPIN. CHILL THE F OUT, 'MERICA #CAMACHO2016 pic.twitter.com/qj7UgLU20V
[Embedded content]
96 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:21:36pm down 1 up report
97 Eventual Carrion Jan 14, 2016 * 1:23:38pm down 0 up report
[Embedded content]
Someone needs to take this sign
and put Cruz's face on the man and Rubio's face on the child.
98 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:24:38pm down 3 up report
re: #87 Black d20
For a moment it almost seemed like they were gonna fight him. I wonder what dirt (and money) he has on the key players to make them so docile nowadays.
He completely owns their party's base. They either play along, leave the party or watch it be destroyed while they're still in it. Most of them are still in denial, bargaining for time and praying that the primary elections don't turn out the way they will. Once the convention hits they'll be forced to accept reality and pick a side, until then it's just the seven stages of grief.
99 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 1:25:19pm down 13 up report
By the way, one of the pioneers of mass targeted abuse on Twitter was the founder of the site Milo writes for, Breitbart "News." Andrew was notorious for this, frequently retweeting his critics so his thousands of followers would heap abuse on them.
Andrew used to do this to me frequently; I actually developed some scripts to quickly block large numbers of right wing flying monkeys because of Breitbart's nasty little tactic. Now people like Milo and Adam Baldwin and other right wing hacks are carrying on the tradition.
100 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:26:59pm down 1 up report
re: #99 Charles Johnson
By the way, one of the pioneers of mass targeted abuse on Twitter was the founder of the site Milo writes for, Breitbart "News." Andrew was notorious for this, frequently retweeting his critics so his thousands of followers would heap abuse on them.
Andrew used to do this to me frequently; I actually developed some scripts to quickly block large numbers of right wing flying monkeys because of Breitbart's nasty little tactic. Now people like Milo and Adam Baldwin and other right wing hacks are carrying on the tradition.
That's exactly why I had to laugh when Breitbart was eulogized as this sort of playing off my username "Happy Warrior" type. No, he was a bitter, abusive, and angry drug addict. It's sad that he died but he was not a good person and political discusison is better off without him though his legacy of Ragegasms lives on in guys like Little Ben Shapiro, Nero, and Chucky.
101 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:27:05pm down 5 up report
. @terrycrews Everyone's shit's all emotional right now.
until then it's just the seven stages of grief.
They're already stuck on 'denial'.
103 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 1:28:00pm down 10 up report
Not to mention twitchy.com , whose entire reason for existing is to incite right wing pile-ons on Twitter.
This mass targeted abuse tactic seems to be almost exclusively a right wing thing - I don't know of any liberal Twitter user who does this.
104 TedStriker Jan 14, 2016 * 1:28:24pm down 5 up report
You knew this was inevitable:
105 SteveMcGaziBolaGate RN Jan 14, 2016 * 1:28:58pm down 0 up report
I do think it's funny when Trump is busting on somebody like Haley and reminds you when she was in his office asking for money.
106 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:30:28pm down 1 up report
They're already stuck on 'denial'.
Yes, for some reason anger against what the base supports didn't focus test well with the base.
107 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:30:38pm down 2 up report
The GOP knows the Convention will be brokered and it will not be pretty. If Democrats in states where primaries are open and are good with either HRC or Bernie vote for Trump in numbers.....Hoo boy. I just did a quick count. 19 states have open primaries.
108 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:32:52pm down 0 up report
re: #105 SteveMcGaziBolaGate RN
I do think it's funny when Trump is busting on somebody like Haley and reminds you when she was in his office asking for money.
A lot of them were which is why I don't have any sympathy for the GOP establishment. They were fine with Trump.
109 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:33:13pm down 4 up report
The GOP knows the Convention will be brokered and it will not be pretty. If Democrats in states where primaries are open and are good with either HRC or Bernie vote for Trump in numbers.....Hoo boy. I just did a quick count. 19 states have open primaries.
I'm not at all sure it will be brokered. I think Trump will take the nomination. Even if it is brokered the GOP leadership will destroy the party permanently if they give the nomination to someone other than the plurality delegate holder, which will definitely be Trump.
110 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 1:33:24pm down 0 up report
re: #76 Backwoods_Sleuth
and....they're off and running!!!
[Embedded content]
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
111 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:33:59pm down 4 up report
re: #103 Charles Johnson
Not to mention twitchy.com , whose entire reason for existing is to incite right wing pile-ons on Twitter.
This mass targeted abuse tactic seems to be almost exclusively a right wing thing - I don't know of any liberal Twitter user who does this.
Malkin herself organized harassment of a child because seh didn't like him testifying for health insurance for children. I don't care how you feel about an issue. Harassing a child over it is wrong and Malkin showed again what an ugly person she is in that chapter.
112 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 1:34:53pm down 3 up report
I'm not at all sure it will be brokered. I think Trump will take the nomination. Even if it is brokered the GOP leadership will destroy the party permanently if they give the nomination to someone other than the plurality delegate holder, which will definitely be Trump.
I find myself in denial about a Trump victory.
113 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:37:21pm down 2 up report
I'm not sure what will happen either, but they are preparing for it. Trump has a choke hold, they hate Cruz with a passion and everyone else is just burning money. It will be a joy to watch.
114 Patricia Kayden Jan 14, 2016 * 1:37:52pm down 0 up report
So why does Twitter allow Milo to promote violence while tweeting? Where is Twitter's responsibility to squelch all of this? Are they going to wait until someone is actually killed and the killing can be linked to a Milo-related tweet?
115 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:40:17pm down 1 up report
A lot of people myself included expected Trump would implode but I think ultimately he hasn't for a couple reasons- Resources, Trump doesn't have to worry about running out of money and secondly bite, he fights back, the guy is an asshole of course but he knows the GOP establishment fighting him are hypocrites and he's willing to tell the GOP electorate that while they try to cripple his candidacy.
116 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 1:40:51pm down 1 up report
re: #109 goddamnedfrank
I'm not at all sure it will be brokered. I think Trump will take the nomination. Even if it is brokered the GOP leadership will destroy the party permanently if they give the nomination to someone other than the plurality delegate holder, which will definitely be Trump.
I get the feeling it is going this way too. I think the GOP has come to grips all their other candidates have been trumped. They must be thinking if they can get Trump in as a Republican they can influence him some and it would all be better than another Democrat.
Problem is...I don't think Trump is clearly defined yet what he will really be like as a Republican president, what his real policies are and what his real plans for the country's future are. He is a risk for all.
And if anyone thinks they can control The Donald(tm)...well good luck with that.
117 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse Jan 14, 2016 * 1:41:52pm down 4 up report
the guy is an asshole
Ah, that right there. Yes, I believe we have identified the secret of Trump's success. Jeb has money, but not a big enough AHole.
118 FormerDirtDart Jan 14, 2016 * 1:43:37pm down 7 up report
Meanwhile, a communique from Moon Base Freedom has arrived
It is so disgusting to see the State Dept spokesman defend the Iranian abuse of our sailors that it would legitimize defunding his office. -- Newt Gingrich ( @newtgingrich ) January 14, 2016
119 Patricia Kayden Jan 14, 2016 * 1:43:43pm down 1 up report
I suppose Milo's threatening tweets can be reported to Twitter here. support.twitter.com
I don't tweet, however, and won't do so to avoid a-holes like Milo and his minions.
120 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:43:56pm down 0 up report
re: #117 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse
Ah, that right there. Yes, I believe we have identified the secret of Trump's success. Jeb has money, but not a big enough AHole.
Right, it pays to be a huge asshole with lots of money to GOP voters.
121 Patricia Kayden Jan 14, 2016 * 1:44:25pm down 1 up report
Meanwhile, a communique from Moon Base Freedom has arrived
[Embedded content]
122 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:44:49pm down 4 up report
Meanwhile, a communique from Moon Base Freedom has arrived
[Embedded content]
Kiss my ass, Newt, I wonder how long they would have stayed captive if your sorry ass were President. Somehow I think a lot longer than they were. But go ahead tell us more when the Obama State Dep't doll touched you.
123 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 1:45:15pm down 4 up report
Coffee, no French vanilla creamer.
124 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:46:54pm down 11 up report
Right now Trump is on every show, every news service, every radio. He's gotten billions of dollars in free adverts. He can play that "outsider" card because he never really held office. That's the lure. He's not inside the Beltway. He's rich (which in Wingnuttia means you are a Saint) and he's got the hard guy BS running. You just have to ignore reality, which the right wing base does every minute of every day. The GOP is absolutely besides themselves that Trump hijacked their sleek slick hate machine.
125 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:47:35pm down 6 up report
They must be thinking if they can get Trump in as a Republican they can influence him some and it would all be better than another Democrat.
Problem is...I don't think Trump is clearly defined yet what he will really be like as a Republican president, what his real policies are and what his real plans for the country's future are. He is a risk for all.
And if anyone thinks they can control The DonaldTM...well good luck with that.
They are fucking high if they think they can control or steer him in any direction. Trump is a narcissistic psychopath and only cares about the daily ego feedings provided by his cult of personality. He's already got a built in excuse for losing the general election, the "illegal" votes of "anchor babies." When that happens he will be the first presidential candidate to call for a violent overthrow of the government.
Dude has no brakes, no compunction, no sense of decency whatsoever. It's all been one long downhill slide and so far he's still nowhere near rock bottom.
126 Bubblehead II Jan 14, 2016 * 1:48:13pm down 13 up report
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
Lets not go overboard here. Marco was born in Miami, Fl. therefore he is by right of birth, a United States citizen.
127 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:48:36pm down 1 up report
Right now Trump is on every show, every news service, every radio. He's gotten billions of dollars in free adverts. He can play that "outsider" card because he never really held office. That's the lure. He's not inside the Beltway. He's rich (which in Wingnuttia means you are a Saint) and he's got the hard guy BS running. You just have to ignore reality, which the right wing base does every minute of every day. The GOP is absolutely besides themselves that Trump hijacked their sleek slick hate machine.
Good points.
128 FormerDirtDart Jan 14, 2016 * 1:49:07pm down 4 up report
@BuzzFeedAndrew I'm left to wonder, what are @AnnCoulter thought on 1/2 Governor @SarahPalinUSA ? -- FormerDirtDart ( @FormerDirtDart ) January 14, 2016
129 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:49:33pm down 0 up report
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
He would be a natural born citizen. I have to assume the Rubios were though by his birth since they came here pre-Castro and Marco was born in 1971. He's a prick but he's eligible.
130 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 1:50:23pm down 3 up report
re: #119 Patricia Kayden
I don't tweet, however, and won't do so to avoid a-holes like Milo and his minions.
Which is why it is in Twitter's interest to deal with him promptly. They're missing out by you times a million who think the same way.
131 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 1:50:38pm down 10 up report
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
Think your argument through for a moment. You just invalidated NBC status for every so called "anchor baby" born in the US.
132 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:51:21pm down 2 up report
[Embedded content]
That's a good question actually. Palin was a huge backer of Haley's in 2010 but she'like Coulter is in the Trump Camp though I don't think she's given a formal endorsement. I don't like Haley at all but she shows again what a self loathing and hateful person she is with her attacks on Haley. I don't like Haley either but the reasons aren't merited in sexism and bigotry like Ann's are.
133 ausador Jan 14, 2016 * 1:51:44pm down 2 up report
"Amazing," but not in a good way. :(
134 Belafon Jan 14, 2016 * 1:52:20pm down 1 up report
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
You might want to read the 14th amendment again.
135 nines09 Jan 14, 2016 * 1:52:36pm down 0 up report
You knew he had to fart eventually.
136 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:52:55pm down 1 up report
Think your argument through for a moment. You just invalidated NBC status for every so called "anchor baby" born in the US.
Correct. I have to imagine my mom's folks or at least my mom's older aunts and uncles were in the same situation Rubio was in since they were born not long after their parents emigrated. Rubio's a NBC, a jerk but I don't see anything not legitimate about his citizenship.
137 FormerDirtDart Jan 14, 2016 * 1:53:46pm down 1 up report
Well, I would guess in Commodore Newt's eyes, the being directed to kneel with hands on head, the requiring for the female to wear a hijab, making them take of their shoes, and generally being held in the custody of a foreign power because THEY'RE AMERICANS BY GOD
138 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 1:56:04pm down 3 up report
Well, I would guess in Commodore Newt's eyes, the being directed to kneel with hands on head, the requiring for the female to wear a hijab, making them take of their shoes, and generally being held in the custody of a foreign power because THEY'RE AMERICANS BY GOD
Honestly, I'd like to ask anyone bitching about the Iranians doing what they did to ask themselves how they'd feel if an Iranian vessel was in our waters. I'm sorry but this America fuck yeah double standard pisses me off and it's a good way of alienating allies and potential allies. It's a damn good thing that someone like Kerry is in charge of the State Department rather than a warmongreling hack like Bolton
139 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 1:56:26pm down 4 up report
re: #109 goddamnedfrank
I'm not at all sure it will be brokered. I think Trump will take the nomination. Even if it is brokered the GOP leadership will destroy the party permanently if they give the nomination to someone other than the plurality delegate holder, which will definitely be Trump.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
140 BeachDem Jan 14, 2016 * 1:58:23pm down 6 up report
re: #103 Charles Johnson
Not to mention twitchy.com , whose entire reason for existing is to incite right wing pile-ons on Twitter.
This mass targeted abuse tactic seems to be almost exclusively a right wing thing - I don't know of any liberal Twitter user who does this.
But, but remember, back in the early days of Twitter Gulag, Twitchy Michelle said,
The Left wants to wear down conservatives until they crawl away defeated, tails between their battered and bloody legs. Silencing the Right is not enough; they want conservatives to disappear from the public sphere. We hope these Twitter vigilantes aren't holding their breath--conservatives don't retreat, we reload.
Sorry to re-post this--I just think it is such a melodramatic piece o'shit, I laugh every time I see it.
141 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 1:58:50pm down 5 up report
142 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 1:59:41pm down 5 up report
Little juice boxes and tiny apples. TEH HORRORS!!11!!!
143 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:00:23pm down 2 up report
re: #126 Bubblehead II
Lets not go overboard here. Marco was born in Miami, Fl. therefore he is by right of birth, a United States citizen.
Not in Trump's eyes and therefore not in the eyes of all the Trump supporters. He has already convinced them "anchor babies" are wrong for this country and they are nothing but immigrants.
Legally you are right. But in this go-round this is a massive strike to Rubio.
144 Eventual Carrion Jan 14, 2016 * 2:01:39pm down 5 up report
re: #138 HappyWarrior
Honestly, I'd like to ask anyone bitching about the Iranians doing what they did to ask themselves how they'd feel if an Iranian vessel was in our waters. I'm sorry but this America fuck yeah double standard pisses me off and it's a good way of alienating allies and potential allies. It's a damn good thing that someone like Kerry is in charge of the State Department rather than a warmongreling hack like Bolton
That's what I keep asking them when they tweet stupid shit like that.
. @newtgingrich So you would give coffee, donuts and well wishes to a foreign military dispatch that come into our territorial waters? -- Raymond ( @EventualCarrion ) January 14, 2016
145 FormerDirtDart Jan 14, 2016 * 2:02:17pm down 2 up report
Rubio's parents weren't citizens when he was born here? Was one a citizen?
If this is the case, sorry, he is definitely not eligible in my eyes.
According to two heads of the Office of the Solicitor General, both Rubio and Cruz are eligible: Harvard Law Review Forum: On the Meaning of "Natural Born Citizen"
146 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:04:52pm down 1 up report
But, but remember, back in the early days of Twitter Gulag, Twitchy Michelle said,
The Left wants to wear down conservatives until they crawl away defeated, tails between their battered and bloody legs. Silencing the Right is not enough; they want conservatives to disappear from the public sphere. We hope these Twitter vigilantes aren't holding their breath--conservatives don't retreat, we reload.
Sorry to re-post this--I just think it is such a melodramatic piece o'shit, I laugh every time I see it.
They think we obsess over them like they do over us. I was reading an article the other day but conservatives and Republicans tend to project partisanship on to liberals and Democrats more than vice versa. I've even seen that here sometimes with some of our few dyed in the wool conservative Republicans.
147 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:04:53pm down 5 up report
Think your argument through for a moment. You just invalidated NBC status for every so called "anchor baby" born in the US.
As I just posted...anchor babies are a big no-no with the Trump supporters. He has already made that a big thing in his campaign. So in this election cycle, if Trump pounds on Rubio being an anchor baby, then legal or not, Rubio is not qualified to run. It has nothing to do with legality. It has everything to do with being coated with Trump slime.
148 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:05:01pm down 1 up report
According to two heads of the Office of the Solicitor General, both Rubio and Cruz are eligible: Harvard Law Review Forum: On the Meaning of "Natural Born Citizen"
"Office of the Solicitor General" That's a commie Fed .gov position, isn't it? It thus has no legitimacy.
149 Bubblehead II Jan 14, 2016 * 2:05:26pm down 1 up report
re: #143 ObserverArt
Not in Trump's eyes and therefore not in the eyes of all the Trump supporters. He has already convinced them "anchor babies" are wrong for this country and they are nothing but immigrants.
Legally you are right. But in this go-round this is a massive strike to Rubio.
Oh, I agree. I would lay odds that the yahoo who filed the lawsuit is a tRump supporter.
150 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:05:57pm down 2 up report
re: #144 Eventual Carrion
That's what I keep asking them when they tweet stupid shit like that.
[Embedded content]
Right, honestly given our two nations' histories, I thought the Iranians handled it quite well and I think the families and the sailors themselves would agree. Of course, Newt has never served in the military or been commander in chief of one.
151 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:06:25pm down 2 up report
Right, honestly given our two nations' histories, I thought the Iranians handled it quite well and I think the families and the sailors themselves would agree. Of course, Newt has never served in the military or been commander in chief of one.
Nor shall he ever be.
152 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:06:29pm down 1 up report
His loss. Iranian food is good.
153 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:06:54pm down 1 up report
Yep.
154 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:09:31pm down 0 up report
re: #149 Bubblehead II
Oh, I agree. I would lay odds that the yahoo who filed the lawsuit is a tRump supporter.
If not the Trump campaign itself. He does threaten to sue a lot of people that "attack"...he can tell you that!
re: #103 Charles Johnson
Not to mention twitchy.com , whose entire reason for existing is to incite right wing pile-ons on Twitter.
This mass targeted abuse tactic seems to be almost exclusively a right wing thing - I don't know of any liberal Twitter user who does this.
On a highly related note
...Tamara Fields, a Florida woman whose husband was killed in a lone wolf terrorist attack in Jordan, has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, accusing the company of supporting the spread of ISIS by enabling ISIS leaders to recruit and fundraise on its platform. She's suing for damages.
"Without Twitter," the suit alleges, "the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible."
As a company, Twitter strictly forbids users from threatening or promoting terrorism, but that change came only last year when Twitter expanded its definition of "violent threats." And the company depends on its user base to report such activity, a practice that Fields takes issue with in the suit.
Fields is not only seeking damages in the suit. She's also urging the court to enter an order declaring that Twitter has violated the Anti-Terrorism Act. If Fields wins, this could be a precedent-setting lawsuit, making Twitter accountable not only to governments looking to contain terrorist speech online, but also liable to families affected by that activity. It would also, no doubt, have implications far beyond Twitter, putting tech companies across Silicon Valley on warning.
156 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:10:58pm down 8 up report
re: #155 Great White Snark
Might as well sue the estate of Alexander Graham Bell.
157 Bubblehead II Jan 14, 2016 * 2:13:02pm down 0 up report
re: #154 ObserverArt
If not the Trump campaign itself. He does threaten to sue a lot of people that "attack"...he can tell you that!
Well he has been pushing Cruz to go to Court to get a preemptive declaration that he is a NBC so I guess it isn't too far of a leap to think his campaign might be behind this idiotic stunt.
158 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 2:13:50pm down 2 up report
re: #156 Decatur Deb
Might as well sue the estate of Alexander Graham Bell.
Let's re-extinct the passenger pigeon!
159 Eventual Carrion Jan 14, 2016 * 2:14:43pm down 1 up report
re: #156 Decatur Deb
Might as well sue the estate of Alexander Graham Bell.
Or Al Gore for inventing the internet.
160 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:15:18pm down 1 up report
Or Al Gore for inventing the internet.
He's protected by the Tort Claims Act.
161 FormerDirtDart Jan 14, 2016 * 2:15:43pm down 2 up report
re: #156 Decatur Deb
Might as well sue the estate of Alexander Graham Bell.
We should initiate a class action suit for harassment by telemarketers and campaign pollers
162 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:16:16pm down 5 up report
Right, honestly given our two nations' histories, I thought the Iranians handled it quite well and I think the families and the sailors themselves would agree. Of course, Newt has never served in the military or been commander in chief of one.
People like Newt and Joke Scarborough seem to forget that Iran has never come into the U.S., cause a coup of the democratically elected Prime Minister and then install an Iranian puppet monarch.
Let alone all the other stuff they gloss over.
Why should the Iranians trust us or England again?
Obama has done much to get things back in some sense of an order between our two nations. The Republican stooges like Joke and Newt would like to keep the hate going. In a way they are saying go on hate us Iran, and keep attacking us at every turn.
163 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:17:47pm down 3 up report
We should initiate a class action suit for harassment by telemarketers and campaign pollers
And college alumni associations.
164 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:17:52pm down 11 up report
. @OPB learned data breach into @Interior is more expansive then we first reported. Pay records, cred crds, SSN's compromised #bundymilitia
165 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:20:19pm down 7 up report
.@OPB learned data breach into @Interior is more expansive then we first reported. Pay records, cred crds, SSN's compromised #bundymilitia
5:09 PM - 14 Jan 2016
They sure are racking up the offenses against the government and private individuals.
166 Charles Johnson Jan 14, 2016 * 2:21:09pm down 9 up report
re: #164 Backwoods_Sleuth
These guys are going to end up in jail for a long time.
167 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:21:46pm down 3 up report
People like Newt and Joke Scarborough seem to forget that Iran has never come into the U.S., cause a coup of the democratically elected Prime Minister and then install an Iranian puppet monarch.
Let alone all the other stuff they gloss over.
Why should the Iranians trust us or England again?
Obama has done much to get things back in some sense of an order between our two nations. The Republican stooges like Joke and Newt would like to keep the hate going. In a way they are saying go on hate us Iran, and keep attacking us at every turn.
Right and the actions in 1953 caused a lot of damage to US-Iranian relations. if you're going to support a foreign policy that does shit like that, don't be surprised if that nation is hostile. Honestly, Obama's done wonders improving relations with Iran and Cuba. Of course, to some that's not a good thing but it is ultimately IMO since it's better to be on talking terms and thus engaged rather than isolated.
168 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 2:22:10pm down 21 up report
Whoever did this is my hero:
Some guy just sent the Oregon militia 55 gallons of lube to go with those dildos https://t.co/7zkpuFYoKW pic.twitter.com/9pW8G8GXau
169 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:26:05pm down 0 up report
re: #164 Backwoods_Sleuth
OPB learned data breach into @Interior is more expansive then we first reported. Pay records, cred crds, SSN's compromised
Quick, get them Barrett Brown's lawyer!!
170 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:28:18pm down 4 up report
And this is also happening:
license plate on a gov. car bent backwards on the refuge - one of many gov. cars the group is using #bundymilitia pic.twitter.com/dfb8ZEaI0d
171 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:30:05pm down 2 up report
And this is also happening:
[Embedded content]
Sovereigns have a mania about license plates. They make their own, or buy them from Cafe Press.
172 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:30:20pm down 2 up report
173 TedStriker Jan 14, 2016 * 2:33:24pm down 1 up report
They think we obsess over them like they do over us. I was reading an article the other day but conservatives and Republicans tend to project partisanship on to liberals and Democrats more than vice versa. I've even seen that here sometimes with some of our few dyed in the wool conservative Republicans.
It's "they're all alike" syndrome with them.
174 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:33:50pm down 2 up report
[Embedded content]
He really is a confused little man. One moment he wants to be a non-interventionist like Daddy Paul and the other he wants to sound like Dick Cheney. Rand's got no principles. It's no wonder why there's stories that his relationship's with his Dad is strained.
175 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 2:35:33pm down 5 up report
re: #172 Backwoods_Sleuth
This is one of those stopped clock moments. Rand is correct, in a sense. Terrorism is a tactic that's most often used by weak, stateless groups that are out-manned and out-gunned by the actual military of whatever country they're in.
176 Whack-A-Mole Jan 14, 2016 * 2:35:54pm down 0 up report
re: #44 Kragar
I've never really been a fan of the character, but I'm absolutely loving the marketing campaign for the movie. I think it's a perfect fit.
177 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:37:01pm down 21 up report
HBO has the new Mad Max movie at the same time as the debate. Do I want to see apeshit mutants running wild over a burnt-out hellscape, or do I want to watch Fury Road ?
178 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 2:38:59pm down 0 up report
Think your argument through for a moment. You just invalidated NBC status for every so called "anchor baby" born in the US.
Is that what the rulings are? If you were born her then you're good? It seems like all the discussion the last nine years were all about parents and their status. McCain was born outside of the US to two American citizens. Obama was born in HI. Both were challenged (yes, by crazy people, agreed).
What if Rubio's parents were here illegally (which I am not implying)? That is what's considered an "anchor baby" and wouldn't every Republican be throwing a fit? When you are from Cuba, all you have to do is touch sand and you're here.
Is the purpose of the NBC requirement a matter of allegiance?
Perhaps my blinders are on, because I don't feel a lot of people have allegiance to America or Americans...their allegiance is to unbridled capitalism.
If it makes me sound racist (or nationalist or whichever ist this fits) for having concerns about allegiance, I guess I am then, because I have concerns about allegiance - for anyone coming from anywhere if the parents aren't citizens and they are first generation born.
179 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:39:21pm down 4 up report
re: #177 Decatur Deb
HBO has the new Mad Max movie at the same time as the debate. Do I want to see apeshit mutants running wild over a burnt-out hellscape, or do I want to watch Fury Road?
Mad Trump vs. Mad Max.
Hmmm. Max is weak...no endurance...this I can tell you.
180 Whack-A-Mole Jan 14, 2016 * 2:40:27pm down 10 up report
It's really amazing that the same folks who are outraged at the Iranians briefly detaining our armed sailors crossing their border are the same people that want to drone strike 6-year old girls for crossing ours.
181 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:40:49pm down 8 up report
re: #178 WhatEVs
Is that what the rulings are? If you were born her then you're good? It seems like all the discussion the last nine years were all about parents and their status. McCain was born outside of the US to two American citizens. Obama was born in HI. Both were challenged (yes, by crazy people, agreed).
What if Rubio's parents were here illegally (which I am not implying)? That is what's considered an "anchor baby" and wouldn't every Republican be throwing a fit? When you are from Cuba, all you have to do is touch sand and you're here.
Is the purpose of the NBC requirement a matter of allegiance?
Perhaps my blinders are on, because I don't feel a lot of people have allegiance to America or Americans...their allegiance is to unbridled capitalism.
If it makes me sound racist (or nationalist or whichever ist this fits) for having concerns about allegiance, I guess I am then, because I have concerns about allegiance - for anyone coming from anywhere if the parents aren't citizens and they are first generation born .
ummm...you have described my mother's birthright.
just wow.
182 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 2:41:45pm down 2 up report
I don't know if this has been posted, but it's a fine read. A former staffer and speechwriter for Reagan and Bushes I and II tells why he will never vote for Trump for president .
Mr. Trump's presence in the 2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they're nothing compared with what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party's best traditions.
The Republican Party's best traditions, of course, have not always been evident. (The same is true of the Democratic Party, by the way.) Over the years we have seen antecedents of today's Trumpism both on issues and in style -- for example, in Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns in the 1990s, in Sarah Palin's rise in the party, in the reckless rhetoric of some on the right like Ann Coulter.
The sentiments animating these individuals have had influence in the party, and in recent years growing influence. But they have not been dominant and they have certainly never been in control. Mr. Trump's securing the Republican nomination would change all that. Whatever problems one might be tempted to lay at the feet of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is in a different and more destructive category.
183 Jebediah, RBG Jan 14, 2016 * 2:42:41pm down 1 up report
re: #165 ObserverArt
I'd bet that at least one of their lawyers will try "no one was stopping us so the obvious implication is that we had permission."
re: #181 Backwoods_Sleuth
ummm...you have described my mother's birthright.
just wow.
And here I thought we were a nation of immigrants and took pride in that.
185 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 2:44:26pm down 13 up report
I'll let this speak for me:
Yet, the fact that we give such citizenship is one of our strengths, not a weakness. Whether we give citizenship at birth or not, the fact remains that these people are born here. They grow up and have their own children. Do we want a permanent underclass -- the children or the children of the children of illegal immigrants -- who cannot be citizens because of what their parents or grandparents did?
186 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:44:43pm down 1 up report
re: #183 Jebediah, RBG
I'd bet that at least one of their lawyers will try "no one was stopping us so the obvious implication is that we had permission."
Being true patriots and shit.
You're probably right.
187 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 2:45:03pm down 3 up report
Is that what the rulings are? If you were born her then you're good? It seems like all the discussion the last nine years were all about parents and their status. McCain was born outside of the US to two American citizens. Obama was born in HI. Both were challenged (yes, by crazy people, agreed).
What if Rubio's parents were here illegally (which I am not implying)? That is what's considered an "anchor baby" and wouldn't every Republican be throwing a fit? When you are from Cuba, all you have to do is touch sand and you're here.
Is the purpose of the NBC requirement a matter of allegiance?
Perhaps my blinders are on, because I don't feel a lot of people have allegiance to America or Americans...their allegiance is to unbridled capitalism.
If it makes me sound racist (or nationalist or whichever ist this fits) for having concerns about allegiance, I guess I am then, because I have concerns about allegiance - for anyone coming from anywhere if the parents aren't citizens and they are first generation born.
Birthright Citzenship . As codified by the 14th Amendment, which you'll remember Republicans want to repeal.
188 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 2:46:32pm down 0 up report
According to two heads of the Office of the Solicitor General, both Rubio and Cruz are eligible: Harvard Law Review Forum: On the Meaning of "Natural Born Citizen"
I think this is fuzzy:
All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase "natural born Citizen" has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 expanded the class of citizens at birth to include children born abroad of citizen mothers as long as the father had at least been resident in the United States at some point. But Congress eliminated that differential treatment of citizen mothers and fathers before any of the potential candidates in the current presidential election were born. Thus, in the relevant time period, and subject to certain residency requirements, children born abroad of a citizen parent were citizens from the moment of birth, and thus are "natural born Citizens."
As recounted by Justice Joseph Story in his famous Commentaries on the Constitution, the purpose of the natural born Citizen clause was thus to "cut[] off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interpose[] a barrier against those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections." The Framers did not fear such machinations from those who were U.S. citizens from birth just because of the happenstance of a foreign birthplace. Indeed, John Jay's own children were born abroad while he served on diplomatic assignments, and it would be absurd to conclude that Jay proposed to exclude his own children, as foreigners of dubious loyalty, from presidential eligibility.
This doesn't address Rubio in any way. It refers, throughout, to citizen parents.
Did you see something in there that I missed?
189 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 2:47:49pm down 2 up report
Ew, I approvingly quoted a professor at Chapman University School of Law. I think that's a first.
190 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 2:47:57pm down 8 up report
Michele Bachmann: Giving LGBT People Legal Protection 'Takes It Away' From Straight People https://t.co/JkkChVkWka pic.twitter.com/4CKGZMMz7w
All of that refers to citizenship of someone born outside US territory.
192 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 2:48:23pm down 2 up report
This doesn't address Rubio in any way. It refers, throughout, to citizen parents.
Did you see something in there that I missed?
Se my comment, just above yours. Birthright citizenship is a Constitutional right.
193 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:48:23pm down 2 up report
re: #178 WhatEVs
Is that what the rulings are? If you were born her then you're good? It seems like all the discussion the last nine years were all about parents and their status. McCain was born outside of the US to two American citizens. Obama was born in HI. Both were challenged (yes, by crazy people, agreed).
What if Rubio's parents were here illegally (which I am not implying)? That is what's considered an "anchor baby" and wouldn't every Republican be throwing a fit? When you are from Cuba, all you have to do is touch sand and you're here.
Is the purpose of the NBC requirement a matter of allegiance?
Perhaps my blinders are on, because I don't feel a lot of people have allegiance to America or Americans...their allegiance is to unbridled capitalism.
If it makes me sound racist (or nationalist or whichever ist this fits) for having concerns about allegiance, I guess I am then, because I have concerns about allegiance - for anyone coming from anywhere if the parents aren't citizens and they are first generation born.
There's lots of people like Rubio who are born to foreign born parents who never went back to their homelands. As I got at, my own grandparents were in that situation given their parents' foreign birth and my grandfather along with three of his brothers and his brother in law ended up serving this country during WWII and in my grandpa's case, Korea because he was younger.. I really sincerely think you're letting your dislike of Rubio cloud your opinion here on this matter IMO. Rubio is by the letter of the law eligible for the presidency. Now if you want to say ideologically, I will strongly and 100% agree but i think he is eligible and honestly I have to take issue with questioning his loyalty. Sorry, it rubs me the wrong way when Obama's is. I think Rubio is an asshole of the highest order too but I don't see anything that makes me think he's not loyal to this nation.
194 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:48:31pm down 4 up report
I think this is fuzzy:
This doesn't address Rubio in any way. It refers, throughout, to citizen parents.
Did you see something in there that I missed?
Maybe the fact that all that stuff is referring to children born abroad?
195 scottslemmons Jan 14, 2016 * 2:48:42pm down 8 up report
The rule is you're a natural-born citizen if you were born here or if either of your parents was a citizen when you were born. That's it, nice and simple.
Cruz, Rubio, McCain, and Obama are very definitely natural-born citizens.
196 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 2:49:21pm down 1 up report
Whatever crazy eyes, you just keep on telling yourself that giving LGBT people rights makes you discriminated against. What a fucking drama queen.
197 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 2:49:49pm down 0 up report
re: #181 Backwoods_Sleuth
ummm...you have described my mother's birthright.
198 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 2:51:03pm down 0 up report
I'll let this speak for me:
But as Congress has recognized since the Founding, a person born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent is generally a U.S. citizen from birth with no need for naturalization. And the phrase "natural born Citizen" in the Constitution encompasses all such citizens from birth. Thus, an individual born to a U.S. citizen parent -- whether in California or Canada or the Canal Zone -- is a U.S. citizen from birth and is fully eligible to serve as President if the people so choose.
My point is that his parents did not get citizenship. That was stated in the thing that started this and that was my initial question.
199 SirMixALot Jan 14, 2016 * 2:51:08pm down 0 up report
re: #114 Patricia Kayden
So why does Twitter allow Milo to promote violence while tweeting? Where is Twitter's responsibility to squelch all of this? Are they going to wait until someone is actually killed and the killing can be linked to a Milo-related tweet?
Report him to Twitter. That will help speed up the process of his banning. I've already reported him.
200 The Ghost of a Flea Jan 14, 2016 * 2:51:33pm down 2 up report
re: #177 Decatur Deb
HBO has the new Mad Max movie at the same time as the debate. Do I want to see apeshit mutants running wild over a burnt-out hellscape, or do I want to watch Fury Road?
Mad Max has better cinematography and costumes, plus the villains articulate most of the same policy positions as the GOP frontrunners.
201 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 2:51:46pm down 4 up report
I think this is fuzzy:
This doesn't address Rubio in any way. It refers, throughout, to citizen parents.
Did you see something in there that I missed?
Yes, Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Any person born in the US, with some exceptions for the children of ambassadors and foreign consular staff on assignment in the US, are citizens because they and their parents are subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The reason that children of ambassadors and consular staff aren't included is because they have diplomatic immunity, which prevents them from being subject to US jurisdiction.
202 Backwoods_Sleuth Jan 14, 2016 * 2:52:14pm down 3 up report
My mother was born in Scranton PA to non-citizen parents. I really took exception to your suggestion that her allegiance to this country should be in question because she is "first generation".
203 WhatEVs Jan 14, 2016 * 2:52:56pm down 2 up report
Birthright Citzenship . As codified by the 14th Amendment, which you'll remember Republicans want to repeal.
Ok. I concede.
I have gazed into the eldritch maw of the abyss and it is this. https://t.co/wm7KgfDNCm
205 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:54:07pm down 0 up report
re: #200 The Ghost of a Flea
Mad Max has better cinematography and costumes, plus the villains articulate most of the same policy positions as the GOP frontrunners.
Yeah, but I've always been a fan of Priebus Productions.
I think this is fuzzy:
This doesn't address Rubio in any way. It refers, throughout, to citizen parents.
Did you see something in there that I missed?
Citizen parents matters when you are dealing with someone born outside of the US to US citizens. Because otherwise it would suck trying to bring your kid home because they were accidentally born in Japan or whatnot.
In the US, it's really clear: you're born here, you're a citizen. None of this "your parents have to be citizens too or you might have allegiance to another country." That is one reason why what happened to the Japanese-Americans in WWII is so fucking shitty: some of those were our citizens. (I don't have the numbers in front of me to say whether or not it was a majority, but let's be clear: it was not a small number. And it really wasn't cool to do that to non-citizens either.)
I'm late because my Internet sucked but I'm going to put this up anyway because those questions about "allegiance" are what let some people think that what happened with the internment camps was "okay."
207 wrenchwench Jan 14, 2016 * 2:55:36pm down 3 up report
re: #204 Stanley Sea Toujours
208 Slap Jan 14, 2016 * 2:55:44pm down 2 up report
Whoa. Time to throw in the towel -- trump has secured the ULTIMATE ENDORSEMENT (tm):
How can he lose now?????
209 goddamnedfrank Jan 14, 2016 * 2:56:01pm down 4 up report
My point is that his parents did not get citizenship. That was stated in the thing that started this and that was my initial question.
Yes, they did. They just didn't have it in hand at the time of his birth. Both of Rubio's parents naturalized in 1975.
210 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 2:56:02pm down 1 up report
re: #204 Stanley Sea Toujours
Needs moar Honey Boo Boo.
211 The alpuzzzzz from Wisconsin Jan 14, 2016 * 2:56:52pm down 3 up report
Didn't Krager post a link to a 55 gallon drum of lube the other day?
212 Jenner7 Jan 14, 2016 * 2:56:56pm down 2 up report
213 No Country For Old Haters Jan 14, 2016 * 2:57:53pm down 2 up report
@KT_thomps Horrifying, but unsurprising. The Republicans have pandered to idiots since the civil rights movement.
214 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 2:58:06pm down 3 up report
[Embedded content]
I said it downstairs on the dead thread - the little girl on the right looks like the girls in the 'Respect Authority' video.
The song (using the term loosely) has the same clumsy phrasing lyrically as 'Respect Authority,' too. I wouldn't be surprised if those wingnut parents are behind this little slice of horribleness.
ETA: Even the voices sound the same.
215 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 2:58:32pm down 1 up report
[Embedded content]
I almost wanted to stand up and salute someone.
Flippin' the bird is a salute is it not?
And, I hate fascist kids! /
216 SirMixALot Jan 14, 2016 * 2:58:39pm down 6 up report
Not in Trump's eyes and therefore not in the eyes of all the Trump supporters. He has already convinced them "anchor babies" are wrong for this country and they are nothing but immigrants.
Legally you are right. But in this go-round this is a massive strike to Rubio.
I knew it was only a matter of time before Rubio's citizenship was questioned like Cruz. Many Cuban-Americans are white, but never white enough for the racists in the GOP. I speak from personal experience as someone with a Cuban a father.
217 allegro Jan 14, 2016 * 2:58:44pm down 5 up report
re: #204 Stanley Sea Toujours
Oh fuck me... what the hell was that?!
218 ausador Jan 14, 2016 * 2:59:01pm down 1 up report
New NBC/WSJ national poll, among nat'l GOP primary voters: Trump 33%, Cruz 20%, Rubio 13%, Carson 12%, Jeb/Christie tied at 5% #nbc2016
Not looking good for the establishment.
220 gwangung Jan 14, 2016 * 3:00:19pm down 6 up report
re: #206 klys (maker of Silmarils)
In the US, it's really clear: you're born here, you're a citizen. None of this "your parents have to be citizens too or you might have allegiance to another country." That is one reason why what happened to the Japanese-Americans in WWII is so fucking shitty: some of those were our citizens. (I don't have the numbers in front of me to say whether or not it was a majority,
Two thirds were citizens.
221 The Ghost of a Flea Jan 14, 2016 * 3:01:00pm down 4 up report
re: #205 Decatur Deb
I want to say something clever, but my sheer joy from watching Fury Road in the theater is throwing up interference, even months later.
It is so, so pretty. Shiny and chrome.
Two thirds were citizens.
Thank you. I didn't want to say the wrong number, and my Internet died as I was writing the comment.
223 Pawn of the Oppressor Jan 14, 2016 * 3:02:14pm down 2 up report
re: #60 Joe Bacon
OK looks like Daleidan and Ginger Snapped are gonna get smacked down real good!
Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress -- the anti-abortion group behind a series of "sting videos" targeting the reproductive health organization -- alleging that the group violated the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO Act) and engaged in wire fraud, mail fraud, invasion of privacy, illegal secret recording, and trespassing.
Er oh. I know from Sons of Anarchy that RICO is bad news!!!
Is PP's new suit based on the subpoena information Daleiden/CMP was supposed to turn over last month? Did they get names?
224 makeitstop Jan 14, 2016 * 3:02:36pm down 2 up report
Flippin' the bird is a salute is it not.
Henceforth to be known as the 'Rand Paul media salute.'
225 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 3:02:54pm down 2 up report
Two thirds were citizens.
What's amazing to me regarding internment is how the en.wikipedia.org ended up being one of the most decorated units of the war. I mean I have to say if my group had been treated the same way Japanese-Americans were, I don't know if I would have been so eager to enlist and possibly die for that country.
226 Pawn of the Oppressor Jan 14, 2016 * 3:03:52pm down 4 up report
re: #204 Stanley Sea Toujours
[Embedded content]
Watched it with the audio off. Not quite as creepy as North Korean dance-prop, but close. I love that stilted, awkward white person flavor.
What's amazing to me regarding internment is how the en.wikipedia.org ended up being one of the most decorated units of the war. I mean I have to say if my group had been treated the same way Japanese-Americans were, I don't know if I would have been so eager to enlist and possibly die for that country.
Allegiance really talked about that, about the two schools of thought and how it divided families.
It was absolutely heartbreaking and one of the hardest musicals I have ever watched. It should absolutely be required viewing for every citizen.
228 Lidane Jan 14, 2016 * 3:04:46pm down 3 up report
re: #204 Stanley Sea Toujours
Kim Jong Il would be proud.
229 Decatur Deb Jan 14, 2016 * 3:04:46pm down 0 up report
Shouldn't the Terminal Three be debating now?
230 HappyWarrior Jan 14, 2016 * 3:07:11pm down 1 up report
re: #227 klys (maker of Silmarils)
Allegiance really talked about that, about the two schools of thought and how it divided families.
It was absolutely heartbreaking and one of the hardest musicals I have ever watched. It should absolutely be required viewing for every citizen.
Thanks, I'll have to see that. It really was one of nation's most dark hours.
231 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 3:07:31pm down 1 up report
Trump is German. Therefore he is a nazI!
///x2
He's Scottish therefore he's a drunk who wears a kilt!
233 gwangung Jan 14, 2016 * 3:09:19pm down 1 up report
re: #227 klys (maker of Silmarils)
Allegiance really talked about that, about the two schools of thought and how it divided families.
It was absolutely heartbreaking and one of the hardest musicals I have ever watched. It should absolutely be required viewing for every citizen.
For New York folks, it's unfortunately closing Feb. 14....but there will be a tour.
For New York folks, it's unfortunately closing Feb. 14....but there will be a tour.
George Takei is a national treasure.
235 ObserverArt Jan 14, 2016 * 3:10:56pm down 2 up report
re: #229 Decatur Deb
Shouldn't the Terminal Three be debating now?
Let us know how it is going...I'm going to lurk mode and do some work on This Old House. Back for as much of the Big Shoe as I can take.
[Embedded content]
I saw a poll the other day, I forget who posted it here. They asked likely Republican Primary Voters who they supported and all that, but for me the most interesting response was to whether they thought Donald Trump had the temperament to be President. Only 50% said yes, which seems awfully low for the guy leading the pack.
The others - Cruz, Rubio, etc. - all got at least 69% on that question. So even though he has more support than anyone else, only half the party thinks he would be acceptable as President.
237 No Country For Old Haters Jan 14, 2016 * 3:13:48pm down 1 up report
Meanwhile, a communique from Moon Base Freedom has arrived
[Embedded content]
@newtgingrich Stop inciting the propagandized Conservatives. America can't afford to let aggressive dumbasses get us into another war.
@Mediaite And Michele Bachmann speaking gives most of America a headache. -- jim ( @jlcoffeecup ) January 14, 2016
239 ausador Jan 14, 2016 * 3:15:52pm down 0 up report
[Embedded content]
Gotta give it to Trump he knows how to suck up all the air in the room, not to mention airtime. That little stunt will probably get him another dozen hours of free broadcast advertising.
240 Barefoot Grin Jan 14, 2016 * 3:42:59pm down 1 up report
re: #225 HappyWarrior
What's amazing to me regarding internment is how the en.wikipedia.org ended up being one of the most decorated units of the war. I mean I have to say if my group had been treated the same way Japanese-Americans were, I don't know if I would have been so eager to enlist and possibly die for that country.
I know no one will see this with the new thread, but there were the "no-no" boys who were offended by demands that they sign an oath of loyalty to the US and refused to fight. I think there is a split in the Japanese-American community between such families, though by this generation it may not be so pronounced.
241 Mike Lamb Jan 14, 2016 * 3:51:14pm down 0 up report
re: #166 Charles Johnson
These guys are going to end up in jail for a long time.
Unfortunately, they want to be true martyrs. I don't see this ending well.
242 unproven innocence Jan 14, 2016 * 5:10:14pm down 0 up report
Perhaps my blinders are on, because I don't feel a lot of people have allegiance to America or Americans...their allegiance is to unbridled capitalism.
[snip]
Ok. I concede.
The concerns of many about allegiance --that is right in some ways, and so dreadfully, catastrophically wrong in many other ways.
Because he was Catholic, JFK had a tough campaign. Many thought he might have allegiance to the Pope. I've only recently learned of a compelling reason why his presidency was cut short. It has everything to do with what the previous president offered warnings about in his farewell address.
Issues of allegiance are at the heart of some of my favorite tv series: Fringe, The Americans, Person of Interest, Orphan Black, and some others.
I'll close with a sincere Thank You to Khrushchev for doing the Right Thing(tm) when JFK phoned him for some serious help with the Cuban crisis, and for his subsequent efforts at reversing the global arms race. |
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It is of the nature of modern secular ideologies that they can't ignore the least deviation from their lengthening list of what counts as culturally unacceptable. In America, new racial and gender ideologies are now affecting even children's literature.
In an article in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal , Meghan Cox Gurdon, who writes a weekly column on children's literature, gives a litany of incidents just this year in which the cultural totalitarians who now control our institutions quelled any deviation from the Party orthodoxy on matters of creative literary thought.
The Thought Police at Scholastic Books earlier this year swung into action to deal a blow for the cause of narrow-mindedness everywhere when it pulled A Birthday Cake for George Washington , because (prepare yourself) Washington's chef, Hercules, a slave, was portrayed as excessively jolly. Never mind that the book glorified Hercules or that it was written by an Iranian-Trinidadian woman and was illustrated by two African American women.
[Illustration from A Birthday Cake for George Washington, Scholastic Books]
This was reminiscent, said Gurdon, of an earlier incident in which (strap yourself in) a book called A Fine Dessert created controversy by depicting "an enslaved mother and daughter in 1810 enjoying themselves as they make and taste" a dessert.
The young adult novel When We Was Fierce was recalled by book publisher Candlewick. What was it about this book that triggered the intervention of the Tolerance Police? It contained (sit down for this one) "invented" urban dialect that was "deeply insensitive."
In addition, Harlequin Teen Books delayed publication of Kiera Drake's The Continent for its portrayal of "'uncivilized' warring peoples."
Says Gurdon,
"That a mother and child, even in bondage, might enjoy a tasty dessert; that a father and daughter in the same historically cruel circumstances might experience happiness and pride--who will now dare depict such nuance? Yet it is a strange means of enforcing diversity, to prevent its real expression."
Fewer and fewer schools include books like George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm , or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , books that portray societies run by the same kind of cultural bullies that are now running ours. It's no wonder these books are dropping from school reading lists. Better that our students not be encouraged to ask too many questions about the real meaning of the "Tolerance and Diversity" our cultural elites are always talking about.
In fact, despite the fact that the chief theme of Fahrenheit 451 is censorship, it has been repeatedly censored. This is, of course, both ironic and laughable. The trouble is, the culturally illiterate ideologues now stalking the landscape on patrol for the slightest deviation from their PC dogmas have not only rendered themselves incapable of appreciating the irony of their own intolerance, but are unable even to laugh at themselves.
But it's okay. We'll do it for them. |
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There are many ingenious ways to raise awareness of how to check for early signs of cancer, but perhaps none quite so retro, as an ancient male fertility symbol getting made-over with a mustache for Movember. The Cerne Abbas Giant, in Dorset, England, a large feature carved into the chalky hillside, is imposing in a lot of ways, but it is fair to say that his most noteworthy feature, is his, er, how shall we say this, erect male member.
The 180 foot figure has been dated as 1694, and he stands there, proud and tall, to symbolize both fertility and spirituality, dominating the landscape with his awesome virility. He is now helping, 500 years on from his creation, to create awareness of a threat to male health. The twin deadly killers of prostrate and testicular cancer. By sporting his own handlebar moustache, made out of grass seed, the giant has added his facial hair support to an important campaign. Men who are participating in Movember will be hard pressed to emulate his awesome whiskers. They measure 36 feet by 9 feet.
Spokesman for the National Trust, Rob Rhodes, who looks after the land that the giant inhabits, said "It's all a bit of fun to highlight an important subject" and also "I am sure the giant would approve."
The Cerne Abbas giant, who wields a mighty club in one hand, became internationally renowned when he temporarily got a new buddy in 2007. This was when a chalk figure of Homer Simpson was carved adjacent to him as a promotional gimmick for The Simpsons movie. Now he has a new starring role as the poster boy for raising cancer awareness in his retro mammoth mustache which as makeovers go, could probably done wonders for his image as a fertility symbol if he had been wearing it all along. All he needs now is a gold medallion.
Movember has been a highly successful campaign to bring additional support to the understanding of prostrate and testicular cancer in men. The movement also shines a spotlight of attention over mental health problems. Men are notoriously reluctant to seek advice when they become unwell, or have problems that demand a greater level of review. Movember is a jovial way for all men to sprout some facial hair, give up shaving for a month and join in the brotherhood of braving up to these very real threats to their well being.
The MD from British Seed Houses, who provided the grass seed for the giant's handsome 'mo said "Movember is an important charity and with many men working in our industry, it's one we are keen to back." He also noted with no word of a lie "The giant is an iconic male symbol." He is indeed. There is no getting away from the fact that the Cerne Abbas giant is every inch of a male!
No one really knows the true history behind the original sculpting of this extraordinary male specimen into a quiet and rural corner of the Dorset countryside. Some say he was meant to be a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, although this is just a theory. If is is true, it is particularly apt, as Cromwell was also the bearer of an especially splendid mustache. Serious historians are more inclined to believe that he dates back a lot further than that - possibly to the Iron Age.
As male fertility symbols go you cannot really get more fertile looking than the Cerne Abbas giant with his enormous, er, club. Now that he also sports a healthy upper lip he is doing his bit to raise crucial awareness of cancers that attack the male body. He may be retro, but he is really quite in with the times, as he joins in with the Movember madness and wears his metropolitan makeover with an indisputable dash.
By Kate Henderson
Cancer Awareness Goes Retro as Male Fertility Symbol Gets Movember Makeover added by Kate Henderson on November 3, 2013 View all posts by Kate Henderson - |
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Many people have asked me for specific examples of my problems are with Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Here is my experience.
On 14 January 2016, Jeremy announced that he had appointed me as a shadow minister for arts and culture without my knowledge or consent while I was in the middle of cancer treatment.
He then sacked me the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else's role.
But didn't bother to tell me that either.
By the time I had sought and received confirmation from the Labour Whips' Office that I was indeed shadow arts and culture minister, to serve under shadow culture secretary Maria Eagle MP, my office had been besieged by the press and the story was out.
I decided to make the best of it and to serve. I worked on his arts policy while I was still having treatment but in Bristol. Bristol West constituents said they were delighted - a good fit for the constituency, and a good decision to ask someone who has an arts background, which I have.
Six weeks later, after being asked every week to do so by Maria Eagle when she met him at shadow cabinet meetings (I wasn't a member of the shadow cabinet, only the shadow secretaries of state sit in that meeting), Jeremy finally phoned me.
I discovered then that he had made a mistake back at the start and having given me part of someone else's role, gave it back the next day. I said that I was not happy about this, as I had spent six weeks working on his arts policy, getting in touch with arts organisations and so on. He invited me to come and have a chat with him the following week.
Contrary to what he frequently says, Jeremy is not easy to "have a chat with". My parliamentary assistant could not get an appointment with him until she went to his office and explained over and over again that I had been promised one.
When my assistant and I met him, I asked how I was supposed to explain the confusion to Bristol West members or constituents. I was faced with the choice of telling the truth that he had made a series of errors, or say I had changed my mind about accepting the role. Either way, I would inevitably face a pile of criticism from his supporters.
Corbyn supporters had already piled onto me for disloyalty when I had had to miss votes for cancer treatment. I had no confidence that he would explain the situation to his supporters, or ask them to trust him that it wasn't my fault. I knew he wouldn't do anything to stop the criticism - I had seen from my own experience that he didn't directly call on his own supporters to follow his slogan of "kinder, gentler politics".
At this meeting, despite the fact he had had six weeks to come up with some idea for how to deal with this, he had nothing to say. No idea what to do. It took my boss Maria Eagle to explain to him that, as he was leader, he could reappoint me if that was what he wanted.
I then worked hard for him on his arts policy, loyally didn't go to the press about the above, got stuck in and worked. And yes, I enjoyed the role; it is one of my dream jobs in parliament and I worked hard for Jeremy and the Labour party. Millions of people work in the arts and culture sectors and they valued being involved in policy-making. So it was never my intention to resign.
However, I kept hearing from other colleagues on the front bench just how difficult or impossible it was to get a decision out of him on important policy issues - the very thing Jeremy is supposed to be good on. I also noticed that the policy-making process through the National Policy Forum was being slowed down by lack of decisions from the Corbyn office.
But then he was missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week's holiday three weeks before the day of the vote. I found that unforgivable. I was doing all I could for the campaign, phone-canvassing to conserve my energy, and kept hearing Labour voters saying "but your leader wants out, doesn't he?" His team didn't send anyone to the EU campaign meetings in Westminster and his lack of enthusiasm showed.
On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit. My constituents want exactly the opposite and were telling me so in their hundreds, and voted strongly to remain.
That was the tipping point for me - you cannot remain on the front bench while taking an opposing view to the leader on something so important.
I therefore had to resign.
The reason I then voted "no confidence" in him as leader is because I have no confidence in him as leader. See above. Plus I had found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Jeremy is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.
Since then he has stated publicly that he isn't prioritising winning elections. How can I support a Labour leader who doesn't want to form a Labour government when working people, the old, the young, the poor, the country, need a Labour government above everything?
I want a Labour government more than anything, because that is how we change the world and how we help millions of people, just as the 1997-2010 Labour government helped millions of people - my own family included.
I profoundly wish I never had to say all this publicly, but people keep asking, and I believe they have a right to know the truth about what Corbyn's leadership is like.
We cannot win general elections with a leader who is unable and unwilling to learn how to communicate with, listen to and persuade people with whom he doesn't already agree - we need to convince swing voters who voted Tory last year in southern seats to vote Labour next time, and we need Labour voters in Wales and the North to continue to vote Labour. Without this we can't win a general election.
That is what's at stake. Not having a Labour government again is unbearable. I will do anything I can to help to ensure this. It's the constitutional duty of all Labour MPs, especially the leader, to try to secure a better life for working-class people through parliamentary means. And that's what I will continue to do.
I hope that's clear.
Thangam Debbonaire is the Labour MP for Bristol West. This article was originally posted on Thangam Debbonaire's Facebook page . It has since been published on her blog . It is republished here with her permission.
The Extroadinary Life and Momentous Times of J M W Turner by Frannky Moyle is published by Viking (508pp, PS25)
Young Mr Turner: the First 40 years (1775-1815) by Eric Shanes is published by Yale University Press (552pp, PS85) |
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Two vandals who destroyed advertisements for a conservative event at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are allegedly school employees.
As Campus Reform reported October 5, several vandals were caught on film throughout the course of the day tearing down flyers promoting an upcoming Charlie Kirk event, hosted by the UIUC chapter of his conservative student organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA).
"We were told they would identify and discipline everyone but we (TPUSA) cannot be told any of their names."
One TPUSA member confronted the vandals, politely asking for an explanation of their actions, to which one dumbfounded perpetrator responded simply by stating "um...ok," while another said she doesn't "give a f**k" and proceeded to walk away as she flashed her middle finger.
The TPUSA chapter now alleges that the latter is a student named Rubab Hyder, who also serves as a Multicultural Advocate for the university. Her school profile claims that she'll be "working to create a welcoming community that encourages inclusivity and empathy."
"I'm a sophomore studying Biology and Gender Studies, and I have a heart for social justice, education, and positive change," her bio states, while the Multicultural Advocates website says the position is filled by "talented student staff who focus on helping build and navigate our diverse residential communities."
Additionally, Jocelyne Robledo , student outreach and media coordinator for the Department of Latino/Latina Studies, was has been accused of being part of a group of vandals who laughed as they tore down all TPUSA's posters.
Andrew Minik, member of the TPUSA chapter, informed Campus Reform that club members "submitted a report to the conflict resolution office and explained the situation," after which they were assured that the school would take action.
"We were told they would identify and discipline everyone but we (TPUSA) cannot be told any of their names or specific results because they don't want retribution by us against the offenders," he explained.
Campus Reform reached out to multiple university officials for comment, as well as Hyder and Robledo, but did not receive any responses.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski |
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"It don't matter to me. What's gonna happen?" says officer Williams to assert his 'above the law' power. By Matt Agorist @ The Free Thought...
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The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous "suicide letter" from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter,...
On Halloween, a concerned citizen in Vancouver, WA called 911 to report the location of the car of a shooting suspect who was the object...
Last weekend, John Vibes appeared at the Alt-Expo in Austin, Texas. This was the first stand alone Alt-Expo event, which originated from the renegade stage...
In response to the back and forth arguing that took place on several Net Neutrality related posts yesterday, we've created a poll to find out...
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This week, an operation carried out by Interpol and the FBI shut down a number of popular online drug marketplaces which were spread out throughout...
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A police officer, responding to a call of armed robbery, sees a fellow officer lying on the ground, shot. He immediately runs into the line...
Illinois residents John Kraft and Kirk Allen, who run an anti-corruption non-profit called the Edgar County Watchdogs, have waged a campaign against crooked public officials...
In 2014, there were 22 states with Libertarian candidates on the ballot for U.S. Senate. Six candidates got at least 3%. The average Libertarian percentage...
According to a recently released federal audit, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed a known smuggler to bring thousands...
A recent viral video of a woman walking down the street in New York, posted by Hollaback, sets out to expose the evils of catcalling. The...
In Washington DC, the measure - known as District Initiative 71 - allows residents to grow up to six marijuana plants in their homes and...
Libertarians sure are a contentious group; they love to quarrel. Did you know that Murray Rothbard wrote a one-act play satirizing Ayn Rand called "Mozart...
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Surprised? You shouldn't be. At every level of 21st century political government, secrecy is the watchword and disclosure comes slowly, partially and begrudgingly if at...
According to Domain Name Wire, Michael Bloomberg just registered the following ridiculous domain names, presumably to prevent critics from grabbing them first: BloombergBlows.nyc MikeIsTooShort.nyc MikeBloombergisaDweeb.nyc...
I've long held that in this age of information the whistleblower is a true hero of the people. As such, I've begun to recognize an... |
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All across America, parents, teachers and local school districts have been having conversations about how best to accommodate the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of students who identify as transgender while also addressing the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of other students. Schools found win-win solutions, such as the creation of single-occupancy restrooms and changing facilities for students who identify as transgender while retaining girls' and boys' rooms for biological girls and boys, but activists attacked these commonsense compromise policies as "transphobic."
Then, in May 2016, the Obama Administration announced that Title IX, a 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded schools, requires schools to allow students access to bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitory rooms, and hotel rooms for overnight field trips based entirely on the self-declared gender identities of their students.
On August 21, 2016, Judge Reed O'Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that the Obama Administration's attempt to redefine sex under Title IX was unlawful and blocked the decree from going into effect. On February 22, 2017, the Trump Departments of Justice and Education formally rescinded the Obama-era "gender identity" guidance that had created the confusion. [REF]
The federal court and the Trump Administration got it right. Congress, the courts, and the Trump Administration should continue to make clear that sex means objective biological sex, not subjective gender identity. Title IX was designed to address invidious sex-based discrimination and at the same time explicitly allowed single-sex intimate facilities. More recently a new question of "gender identity" has arisen, and the result has been a variety of federal attempts to force gender identity policies on our nation's schools, including the creation of a "Shame List" for religious schools seeking protection from this government overreach.
These new gender identity policies are unlawful. When Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, no one thought that "sex" meant "gender identity." It did not mean it then, and it does not mean it now. Federal bureaucrats have unlawfully attempted to rewrite federal law. The term "sex" is not ambiguous and cannot be unilaterally redefined by executive branch agencies to mean "gender identity."
Redefining "sex" as "gender identity" is also bad policy. The Obama Administration turned the purpose of Title IX on its head and favored the concerns of students who identify as transgender while entirely ignoring the concerns of other students. Valid safety, privacy, and equality concerns exist, and the Obama Administration ignored them. States and local schools should take these concerns seriously and find solutions that respect all Americans.
The Trump Administration's Departments of Justice and Education should continue to reject the unlawful redefinition of "sex" from the Obama era; Congress should ratify this action by specifying that the word "sex" in our civil rights laws does not mean "gender identity" unless the people, through their elected representatives, explicitly say so; and the courts should respect the democratic process.
History of Title IX
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex "under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." [REF] At the time Title IX was passed, girls and women faced difficulties and discrimination in pursuing education, particularly higher education. The purpose of Title IX was to minimize or even eliminate sexism in both primary and higher education and to ensure equal opportunities in education for our nation's girls and women.
Introduced in Congress in 1972 by Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972, Title IX ensured that federal dollars would be as available to programs for women as they were for men's programs in colleges, universities, and elementary and secondary schools. Title IX also applies to any educational or training program operated by a recipient of federal financial assistance. Because most schools receive federal funds of some sort, Title IX's influence is widespread:
Virtually all school districts and colleges receive some form of federal money (the exceptions are private secondary schools and colleges that do not participate in federal student loan programs, such as Hillsdale College in Michigan). Thus, practically all scholastic and college sports are governed by Title IX. [REF]
Implementation of Title IX has always allowed exemptions for religious schools. In the years between the implementation of Title IX and the Arcadia Resolution Agreement in 2013, 190 religious schools were granted exemptions. Among the schools receiving such exemptions were seminaries that trained only men for the Catholic priesthood; educational institutions "controlled, conducted, and operated by the Orthodox Jewish religion"; and Brigham Young University, a Latter Day Saints institution that maintained different dress codes for men and women because "BYU believed that 'differences in dress and grooming of men and women are proper expressions of God-given differences in the sexes.'" [REF]
Because most religious schools did not treat students or staff differently on the basis of sex, most of them did not file for exemptions to Title IX. According to Professor Kif Augustine-Adams:
For years on end, [the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights] had no new work on religious exemptions to Title IX. By 2012, it may have been easy to conclude that educational institutions' demand for religious exemption to Title IX had evaporated or at least been fulfilled through the exemptions OCR had already recognized. [REF]
This would begin to change, however, in 2013 when the OCR used the government's redefinition of "sex" to threaten local school districts with funding revocations for having sex-specific facilities based on biology instead of gender identity.
Protecting Women Against Invidious Discrimination. In his remarks on the Senate floor during the debate on Title IX, Senator Bayh said that the intention behind the law was to create a "strong and comprehensive measure [that would] provide women with solid legal protection from the persistent, pernicious discrimination" that existed at the time. [REF] Bayh stated that:
[Title IX was] an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs--an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice. [REF]
Before passage of Title IX, sex discrimination in education was manifest in numerous ways. The editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review explain that Title IX was designed specifically to reduce explicit discrimination against women:
The practices most obviously covered by Title IX involve overtly different treatment of male and female students. Some elementary schools forbid girls to join the safety patrol. Colleges and universities often prescribe earlier curfews for women than for men. Vocational interest tests have been color coded pink and blue with different career choices for women and men. All of these are examples of explicit discrimination based on sex, prohibited by Title IX. [REF]
Title IX did more than protect students from this overt discrimination. It also ensured that female students, professors, and staff in schools receiving federal funding would be protected from discrimination in all aspects of the educational experience, but it is most often discussed because of its impact in allowing women to participate in athletic programs at all levels:
At American colleges, more than two hundred thousand women are on varsity sports teams, up from a handful in 1971. More than 2.8 million girls were on high school teams in 2002. There were roughly 490,000 college athletes and 6.7 million high school athletes, so women comprise about 40 percent of the total on both levels. [REF]
Affecting athletics, however, is only one portion of the scope of Title IX, which covers 10 areas: "access to higher education, career education, employment, math and science, standardized testing, athletics, education for pregnant and parenting students, learning environment, sexual harassment, and technology." [REF]
Preserving Commonsense Single-Sex Policies Based on Biology. During the debate on Title IX, there was concern that its enactment would mean the end of sex-specific educational programs and sex-specific intimate facilities like bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers. Because of this concern, Congress explicitly constructed Title IX to ensure that access to living facilities could take biology into account: Section 1686 states that "nothing contained herein shall be construed to prohibit any educational institution receiving funds under this Act, from maintaining separate living facilities for the different sexes." Three years later, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's implementing regulations made clear that Title IX "permits separate but comparable toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex," [REF] thereby preserving sex-specific facilities while ensuring that women's facilities would not be inferior to men's and vice versa.
Title IX was able to provide equal opportunities for women in education without violating their privacy. Its implementation over subsequent years shows that genuine differences between men and women could be acknowledged--in many sports, such as football and basketball, women do not compete on the same teams as men because of physical differences--while allowing women equivalent opportunities to participate in school and extracurricular activities.
This binary nature of sex is reflected explicitly in Title IX itself, which exempts "father-son" and "mother-daughter" school activities for students "of one sex" so long as the school provides "reasonably comparable activities for students of the other sex." Additionally, Title IX exempted scholarship awards from beauty pageants that took into account "personal appearance" and where participation was limited to "individuals of one sex only." In short, Congress protected women and men under the common, biologically based, binary understanding of a person's sex that prevailed when Title IX was passed and left no room for any other interpretation.
The Question of Gender Identity
Title IX was passed in 1972, and its implementing regulations were promulgated in 1975. They were meant to address sexism and promote the equality of girls and women. Many years later, a different question arose: How should schools accommodate students who identify as transgender? Schools created balanced solutions that were age-appropriate and nuanced given the type of institution: whether at the grade school level, the high school level, the university level, or the graduate school level. No one assumed that a one-size-fits-all rule would be appropriate for students of all ages in all types of educational institutions.
Parents, teachers, principals, and school administrators, in conjunction with students, tried to find win-win solutions for all of the parties involved and came up with appropriately nuanced proposals. These proposed solutions existed long before the recent surge in high-profile media attention on transgender issues, and details were being worked out at the local level without generating much controversy.
Schools facing this issue were sensitive to the feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that students who identify as transgender would face were they to be required to share bathrooms or locker rooms with persons of the same biological sex. At the same time, they recognized that students of the other biological sex also had dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of their own.
The solution that schools generally settled upon was to give the student who identified as transgender limited access to other facilities--such as faculty facilities, the teacher's lounge, or the faculty locker room--or to provide single-occupancy restrooms for any student that did not feel comfortable using a multiple-occupancy intimate facility. They found a way to accommodate both the student who identified as transgender and the rest of the students. These nuanced solutions addressed all involved and reflected their dignity, privacy, and safety concerns.
The Current Redefinition of Sex in Title IX
In recent years, however, the original purpose of Title IX and the prior, localized way of dealing with concerns of students who identify as transgender came under attack by the Obama Administration. Instead of being used to protect women from discrimination in education, Title IX was used by bureaucrats to force schools to create special privileges based on gender identity that could undermine the law's very purpose. This subversion of Title IX, largely pushed by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, began in 2010 and has been furthered by lawsuits and guidance documents.
December 2010 "Dear Colleague" Letter. A December 26, 2010, "Dear Colleague" letter from the Office for Civil Rights provides one of the first examples of the Department of Education's intention to extend Title IX to include gender identity protections. Detailing how schools should react to harassment and bullying to remain in accordance with federal regulations, the OCR deftly expanded the definition of "sex" under Title IX to include gender identity:
Title IX also prohibits sexual harassment and gender-based harassment of all students, regardless of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.
Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also, as this example illustrates, be subjected to forms of sex-discrimination prohibited under Title IX.... [REF]
While this applied only to bullying, it was the first step in redefining Title IX beyond its additional scope of protecting women and girls in education to include "LGBT status." This letter laid the groundwork for the later, more sweeping inclusion of gender identity under Title IX.
2013 Arcadia School District Resolution Agreement. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) extended Title IX to cover gender identity in single-sex facilities. The Obama Administration forced a school district in California to allow students unfettered access to bathrooms and locker rooms on the basis of gender identity, not sex.
A student in the Arcadia School District sought access to sex-specific facilities at school and cabins at a school-sponsored science camp based on gender identity. The school district had provided the student with use of a private single-occupancy bathroom but allegedly did not allow the student access to the restroom or cabin designated for students of the opposite sex on a school field trip. The DOE's Office for Civil Rights and the DOJ's Civil Rights Division intervened. The result was a resolution agreement that for the first time included gender identity and gender expression as protected under Title IX's ban on sex discrimination:
"Gender-based discrimination" is a form of sex discrimination, and refers to differential treatment or harassment of a student based on the student's sex, including gender identity, gender expression, and nonconformity with gender stereotypes, that result in the denial or limitation of education services, benefits, or opportunities. Conduct may constitute gender-based discrimination regardless of the actual or perceived sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation of the persons experiencing or engaging in the conduct. [REF]
Because of the Arcadia agreement, the school district was required to provide the student with access to sex-specific facilities and activities according to the student's self-declared gender identity. The school district was also required to keep the student's birth name and biological sex confidential and not disclose the information to any district employees or other students without consent from the student's parents or the student. [REF]
Beyond requiring the school district to modify its treatment of the student in question, the agreement also specified that:
[The school district must] revise all of its policies, procedures, regulations, and related documents and materials...related to discrimination to a) specifically include gender-based discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex, and b) state that gender-based discrimination includes discrimination based on a student's gender identity, gender expression, gender transition, transgender status, or gender nonconformity. [REF]
The school district had to provide training to all district and school administrators regarding their responsibilities to prevent gender-based harassment and "best practices for creating a nondiscriminatory school environment for transgender students." [REF]
Palatine District 211. In November 2015, Palatine School District 211 outside of Chicago, Illinois, received a report from the DOE's Office for Civil Rights threatening loss of funds under Title IX if it did not allow a male student who identified as female access to the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms. [REF] Previously, the school had come up with arrangements that would seek to accommodate the student who identified as transgender while also balancing the privacy and safety concerns of the female students.
The school district went to considerable lengths to make the student comfortable, treating the student as a female in every way (including access to bathrooms and sports teams) except allowing access to the girls' locker rooms. [REF] Even in this, the high school went to great lengths to accommodate the student, "at one point install[ing] a bank of lockers in a private bathroom and encourage[ing] the student to invite friends who were comfortable changing there to move their lockers. This was meant to avert Student A from being forced to change alone." [REF]
These accommodations were nevertheless deemed discriminatory by the OCR. With a threatened loss of federal funding looming, the school district buckled to the OCR's demands and agreed to allow the student access to the girls' locker rooms in the Palatine School District. The resolution also required the schools to install "sufficient privacy curtains (privacy changing stations) within the girls' locker rooms to accommodate Student A and any students who wish to be assured of privacy while changing." [REF]
But installing privacy curtains was not sufficient to address the concerns of high school girls who are now forced to share a locker room with an anatomical male. One 15-year-old girl spoke of her concerns:
[I]t just doesn't feel right knowing someone with male anatomy is in the bathroom with me. I have nothing against Student A and would be her friend if I knew her better, but when it comes down to it, I don't feel right changing in the same room as a transgender student. The locker room is already filled with so much judgment, and I barely feel OK changing in front of my naturally born girl peers. [REF]
Moreover, the agreement did not say what would happen if Student A, a biological male who "wanted to be a girl like every other girl," [REF] chose not to use the curtains when changing. On May 4, 2016, a group of 51 families sued the school district to attempt to reverse the policy brought about by the resolution agreement. [REF] In October 2016, an Illinois judge recommended denying an injunction in the case, which is still unresolved. [REF]
Gloucester County Public School Board v. G.G. On June 11, 2015, a female student who identifies as male, G.G., sued the Gloucester County, Virginia, School Board because it would not allow G.G. access to the boys' restroom. The district had allowed such access until complaints by several families prompted it to implement a policy by which only biological girls could use the girls' room, only biological boys could use the boys' room, and any student could use one of three single-occupancy bathrooms, which the school built specifically to accommodate students who identify as transgender. This arrangement, which accommodated students who identify as transgender while also protecting the privacy rights of other students, was not good enough for G.G., who sued the school district for alleged unlawful sex discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
A district court ruled in favor of the school district, but on April 19, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned that decision and ruled against the district. [REF] In determining the meaning of sex discrimination under Title IX, the court held that it was bound to defer to an unpublished guidance letter from the OCR'S acting assistant deputy director, which specified that "sex" for Title IX purposes included "gender identity."
The school district appealed the decision, and on August 3, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on the circuit court's opinion that halted implementation of the guidance for the upcoming school year. On October 28, 2016, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two of the questions being considered in the case: whether the DOE's guidance letter deserved controlling deference (known as Auer deference) and, regardless of deference, whether the word "sex" under Title IX and regulations allowing for sex-specific facilities actually encompass the DOE's "gender identity" theory. On February 22, 2017, the Trump Department of Education formally rescinded the Obama-era OCR's "gender identity" guidance, [REF] and on March 6, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the ruling by the circuit court and sent the case back to that court to be reconsidered in light of the recent Trump Administration action.
May 2016 "Dear Colleague" Letter. In May 2016, the Obama Departments of Justice and Education released a long joint guidance letter declaring that "both federal agencies treat a student's gender identity as the student's sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX." The letter directed schools to allow "students to participate in sex-segregated activities and access sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity." [REF] In other words, access to sports teams, bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitory rooms, and hotel rooms for field trips would have to be based on the self-declared gender identity of the students.
The Obama Administration explicitly rejected compromises such as single-occupancy facilities: "A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so." Similarly, with respect to campus housing or hotels for off-campus trips, "a school must allow transgender students to access housing consistent with their gender identity and may not require transgender students to stay in single-occupancy accommodations." [REF]
The "Dear Colleague" letter makes clear reference to the importance of privacy concerns, but the only privacy concerns it acknowledges are the concerns of students who identify as transgender: "protecting transgender students' privacy is critical to ensuring they are treated consistent with their gender identity." [REF] It gives short shrift to the privacy concerns of other students. The guidance states that "the desire to accommodate others' discomfort" is not a legitimate basis for schools' retaining sex-specific facilities even if they also provide private accommodations for transgender and other students. [REF] The guidance does not allow schools to inform students (or their parents) whether they will have to share a bedroom or locker room with a student of the opposite biological sex. At most, it says that a school "may" (not must) "make individual-user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy" so long as students are allowed full access to the intimate facility of their choice based on their subjective gender identity. [REF]
When it comes to athletics, the Obama directives are confusingly vague, telling schools that they may not "rely on overly broad generalizations or stereotypes about the differences between transgender students and other students of the same sex (i.e., the same gender identity) or others' discomfort with transgender students." [REF] Thus, both the specific teams on which a student athlete who identifies as transgender must be allowed to play and the sports in which the student must be allowed to participate are unclear, which would likely prompt many schools to make all of their athletic policies based on gender identity to avoid having to find out the boundaries through lawsuits.
In response to this letter, 24 states filed lawsuits against the Obama Administration. [REF] On August 21, 2016, federal District Judge Reed O'Connor issued a nationwide injunction blocking enforcement of this gender identity mandate, holding that "[i]t cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex as used...following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth." [REF] The Obama Department of Justice appealed this ruling on October 20, 2016, but on February 10, 2017, the new Trump Department of Justice withdrew that motion for a stay and cancelled the scheduled oral arguments. [REF] On February 22, 2017, the Trump Departments of Justice and Education formally rescinded the "Dear Colleague" letter. [REF]
Title IX "Shame List" and Religious Exemptions
In the past several years, another troubling development has arisen under Title IX: efforts to shame religious schools that have sought to preserve their religious identities through a waiver.
As they became aware of the major changes the Obama Administration was imposing through Title IX enforcement, numerous schools filed for religious exemptions. Religious exemptions from Title IX existed during the first implementation of Title IX in the 1970s, but in the years leading up to the Arcadia resolution agreement, the number of claims had slowed to a trickle because few religious schools engaged in actions that the government considered discriminatory. In the aftermath of Arcadia, however, many schools rightly feared that their reasonable policies concerning intimate facilities and student conduct would be deemed discriminatory by the government. As a result, many religious schools requested exemptions from Title IX:
After more than a decade with only two new exemption claims, OCR received 63 new claims in the two and a half years between July 2013 and January 2016, with additional new exemption claims likely. All but one of those 63 new claims--a claim Liberty University made formally at the OCR's request when a student complained regarding abortion--asserted the religious educational institutions' exemption from Title IX to allow it to discriminate based on gender where transgender, gender nonconforming, and in some cases gay individuals were involved. [REF]
Since many religions teach that sex is objectively determined by genetics and physiology, these additional schools sought exemptions from Title IX so that they could continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs in the wake of Title IX's redefinition to include gender identity.
In December 2015, LGBT activist groups started attacking these religious schools. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) published Hidden Discrimination: Title IX Religious Exemptions Putting LGBT Students at Risk , [REF] charging that colleges and universities seeking exemptions from Title IX are "taking advantage of legal loopholes to enshrine their ability to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity." [REF] The HRC called on the Department of Education to publish information about the schools requesting and receiving exemptions from Title IX because of religious beliefs. The department responded by posting the letters from schools requesting exemptions on the DOE website, bringing about a swift attack on religious schools that had requested exemptions. [REF]
An organization named Campus Pride promptly published what it called a "Shame List" with the names of the religious colleges and universities that sought exemption from Title IX. The organization claimed that it published the list "for the purpose of calling out the harmful and shameful acts of religion-based prejudice and bigotry." [REF] As part of this initiative against religious schools, Campus Pride, along with a long list of other LGBT organizations, wrote a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association encouraging the NCAA to disassociate from all religious campuses on the list. [REF]
Unlawful Agency Redefinition of "Sex" as "Gender Identity"
In 1972, when Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, no one thought that "sex" meant "gender identity." The phrase "gender identity" did not exist outside of some esoteric psychological publications, and the word "gender" had been coined only recently in contradistinction to sex. The Obama Administration simply attempted to rewrite federal law as it wished the law had been written originally. To this day, the term "sex" is not ambiguous and therefore cannot legitimately be redefined by executive branch agencies to mean "gender identity."
Moreover, neither the agency memo issued by an acting assistant deputy director in the G.G. case nor the 2016 Obama Administration DOE/DOJ "Dear Colleague" letter went through the appropriate rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires that regulations and binding agency guidance must be subject to public notice and comment before finalization. Because the Title IX memo and letter did not follow the APA rules, they should not be given any deference. They also should be rejected because they do not offer a plausible alternative interpretation of the unambiguous word "sex."
Federal courts agree that the meaning of the word "sex" is unambiguous. There was no ambiguity in the original text of Title IX, which was passed to prevent sex discrimination. At the time, the word "sex" was clearly used to refer to the biological and physiological differences between men and women. In his opinion on the "Dear Colleague" guidance, Judge O'Connor stated that the reinterpretation of sex as gender identity was directly contrary to the original intent of the law as applied in its implementing regulations (34 C.F.R. SS 106.33):
[I]t cannot reasonably be disputed that DOE complied with Congressional intent when drawing the distinctions in SS 106.33 based on the biological differences between men and women.... [T]his was the common understanding of the term when Title IX was enacted, and remained the understanding during the regulatory process that led to the promulgation of SS 106.33. [REF]
The fact that the implementing regulations allowed separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for the different sexes shows that Title IX was to be implemented on the basis of biological sex and that it acknowledged legitimate differences between the sexes with respect to privacy concerns.
Judge Kim R. Gibson of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania has similarly made clear that Title IX was never intended to include protections on the basis of gender identity: "Title IX does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of transgender itself because transgender is not a protected characteristic under the statute." [REF] In particular, his opinion in a case involving the University of Pittsburgh defends the right of schools that receive federal funding to establish bathroom and locker room policies on the basis of sex: "[T]he University's policy of requiring students to use sex-segregated bathroom and locker room facilities based on students' natal or birth sex, rather than their gender identity, does not violate Title IX's prohibition of sex discrimination." [REF]
Significantly, Judge Gibson's opinion also makes the case that only Congress, not the courts, can expand the scope of Title IX:
Title IX's language does not provide a basis for a transgender status claim. On a plain reading of the statute, the term "on the basis of sex" in Title IX means nothing more than male and female, under the traditional binary conception of sex consistent with one's birth or biological sex.... The exclusion of gender identity from the language of Title IX is not an issue for this Court to remedy. It is within the province of Congress--and not this Court--to identify those classifications which are statutorily prohibited. [REF]
Judge Gibson's reasoning is correct. Title IX was intended to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex, not on the basis of gender identity. Congress, not courts or federal agencies, has the ability to change the scope of Title IX, but until it does so, gender identity protections cannot be considered within the scope of Title IX.
Judge Paul Niemeyer points to these same legal realities in his dissenting opinion in the Fourth Circuit case of G.G. v. Gloucester County Public School Board . He notes that "the majority's opinion, for the first time ever, holds that a public high school may not provide separate restrooms and locker rooms on the basis of biological sex" [REF] and further explains that:
This holding completely tramples on all universally accepted protections of privacy and safety that are based on the anatomical differences between the sexes.... [S]chools would no longer be able to protect physiological privacy as between students of the opposite biological sex.
This unprecedented holding overrules custom, culture, and the very demands inherent in human nature for privacy and safety, which the separation of such facilities is designed to protect. More particularly, it also misconstrues the clear language of Title IX and its regulations. And finally, it reaches an unworkable and illogical result. [REF]
Judge Niemeyer points out that the majority opinion relies not on the actual text, history, or legal implementation of Title IX, but rather on a 2015 letter from the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights: "The recent Office for Civil Rights letter, moreover, which is not law but which is the only authority on which the majority relies, states more than the majority acknowledges." [REF] In fact, the OCR letter suggested that schools "offer the use of gender-neutral, individual-user facilities to any student who does not want to use shared sex-segregated facilities." [REF]
The history of the words "gender," "gender identity," and "transgender" shows that they are not the same as "sex." Each of these words was coined precisely in contradistinction to "sex." "Gender," as it began to be used in the 1960s, was meant to draw attention to the differences between men and women that were specifically not biological. According to Dr. Stephen L. Ristvedt:
[B]y the mid-1960s the word gender was adopted outside of sexual science by feminist writers to mean the "socially constructed" (vs. biologically determined) aspects of male-female differences, that is, the stereotypical psychological and behavioral characteristics presumably shaped by societal expectations. [REF]
When Title IX was passed, gender was still considered something distinct from sex that would not be included in the definition of sex. [REF]
In an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett calls attention to the fact that at the time Title IX was enacted, sex as included in every major dictionary referred to biological anatomical characteristics, not gender identity:
"Ordinarily, a word's usage accords with its dictionary definition,"...and the dictionaries recording the sense of the word "sex" around the time when Title IX was enacted uniformly indicate that the word was understood, then, the way it had always been understood: as referring to the anatomical or physiological characteristics that constitute a person's sex, not his or her internal identification with one gender or the other. [REF]
Bennett's brief makes the point that the term "transgender" did not gain general usage until the late 1980s, years after Title IX was passed. [REF] According to the Handbook of Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders , the term "gender identity" came into use in the 1960s: " Gender identity was introduced into the profession lexicon by Hooker and Stoller almost simultaneously in the early 1960s." [REF] None of these then-esoteric terms would have been included within the definition of sex at the time Title IX was enacted. In addition, Bennett argues, "if the Education Department's current revisionist understanding of the term 'sex' had been disclosed to Congress when Title IX was being debated in 1972, Congress would have taken care to expressly define the term in the statute to accord with the commonly understood anatomical meaning of the term." [REF]
Other legislative and executive branch actions show that "sex" does not mean "gender identity." Congress and the executive branch know how to make policy on the basis of "gender identity" when they want to do so. Congress has specifically included "gender identity"--as distinct from "sex" and listed alongside "sex"--in two bills: the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. [REF] The distinct inclusion of both gender identity and sex protections shows that gender identity was never intended to fall within the definition of sex. If Congress had intended to include gender identity protections within the scope of Title IX, it could have specified their inclusion, but it did no such thing.
President Barack Obama similarly showed that he understood "sex" and "gender identity" to be different categories. In his executive order barring federal contractors from "discrimination" on the basis of "sexual orientation and gender identity," he replaced existing protections on the basis of "sex" with protections on the basis of "sex, sexual orientation, gender identity." [REF] In implementing an executive order placing "gender identity" alongside and in addition to "sex," President Obama showed that, legally, he did not consider gender identity protections to be included in protections on the basis of sex. Thus, he added "gender identity" to "sex."
Congress also knows how to reject "gender identity" provisions and has done so dozens of times. For example: The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employment discrimination both on the basis of sexual orientation and on the basis of gender identity, has been introduced in almost every Congress since 1994 but has never been enacted. [REF] Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already bans discrimination on the basis of sex in employment, which begs the question as to why Members of Congress would attempt to pass a law for over two decades if such protection was there all along. The so-called Equality Act, which would go beyond ENDA and add "sexual orientation and gender identity" (SOGI) to more or less every federal law that protects on the basis of race, has likewise never been enacted by Congress. [REF] The Student Non-Discrimination Act, championed by the Human Rights Campaign, which would "prohibit public schools from discriminating against any student on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity," also has never become law. [REF]
All of these bills establishing legal protections on the basis of gender identity have been rejected by Congress. Agency redefinition of sex to include gender identity explicitly goes against congressional precedent, for Congress has been explicit as to when it does and does not intend to protect on the basis of gender identity. The burden is on transgender advocates to prove that statutory terms have always carried the meaning they prefer as opposed to its plain meaning, and they have failed.
Sex-Specific vs. Gender Identity Discrimination
Even if one were to grant that in prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, Title IX also prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity, that would not change the outcome for school policies. The bathroom, locker room, and housing policies in question do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity. They make reasonable--and explicitly lawful--distinctions based on sex. All biological males, regardless of their gender identity, may use the men's room, and all biological females, regardless of their gender identity, may use the women's room. These policies do not even consider "gender identity." They classify on the basis of "sex" in a way that Title IX and its implementing regulations explicitly permit.
If someone is discriminating on the basis of X, it means that he or she takes X into account in deciding how to treat you. If someone takes X into consideration when it is irrelevant and only to oppress you, however, that is invidious discrimination. [REF]
Racially segregated water fountains were one form of discrimination that took race into consideration--in a context in which it was completely irrelevant--and then treated blacks as second-class citizens precisely because they were black. The entire point was to classify on the basis of race in order to treat blacks as socially inferior. As a result, such actions were rightly described as invidious race-based discrimination and--given the entrenched, widespread, state-facilitated nature of the problem--were rightly made unlawful.
Similarly, throughout much of American history, girls and women were not afforded educational opportunities equal to those available to boys and men. This form of discrimination took sex into consideration and then treated girls and women poorly precisely because of their sex, barring them from education in certain subjects or at certain levels despite being otherwise qualified. As with invidious racial discrimination, such treatment took a feature (in this case, sex) into consideration precisely to treat women as less than men. As a result, such actions were rightly viewed as invidious sex-based discrimination, and--again, given the entrenched, widespread, and state-facilitated nature of the problem--Title IX of the Education Amendments was enacted to ensure that girls and women received equal educational opportunities.
In this vein, to discriminate on the basis of gender identity would be to say that students who identify with their biological sex can use the school water fountains, but students who identify as transgender cannot. That would be taking a student's transgender status into account where the factor has no relation to the issue at hand and would rightly be deemed discriminatory.
Nothing of the sort takes place when it comes to policies on bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams. The gender identity of a student is not taken into account at all. The policy simply says that with respect to certain intimate facilities, entrance should be determined on the basis of anatomy, physiology, and biology. Bathroom, locker room, shower, and athletic team policies are based on objective external expressions of sex--biology, physiology, anatomy--and not on a subjective internal sense of gender.
In other words, it is not because some people wear suits and ties and others wear dresses that there are separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women. The existence of sex-specific intimate facilities is explained not by our internal sense of gender, but by our external manifestations of biology. The Obama Administration's argument that this is gender identity discrimination is therefore misplaced.
Not only is it misplaced, but the Obama Administration's view would require gender identity discrimination by schools. Under the Obama view, gender identity overrules biology. Therefore, a school with students who are biologically male or female and who identify with their biological sex or with the opposite sex would have to grant and deny access to its showers and lockers according to Table 1:
The table illustrates that the only students who must be denied access are those who identify with their biological sex-- i.e. , non-transgender students--which is a clear example of irrational gender identity discrimination under the Administration's own logic.
Redefining "Sex" as "Gender Identity" for Sex-Specific Intimate Facilities
The Obama Administration's transgender directives are bad policy for several reasons.
The Obama gender identity guidelines ignore legitimate privacy concerns. Sex-specific intimate facilities exist in the first place to provide a sufficient level of bodily privacy. In her majority opinion for the Supreme Court forcing the Virginia Military Institute to become coeducational, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that it "would undoubtedly require alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex in living arrangements." [REF]
Some critics had argued that the Equal Rights Amendment, a predecessor of Title IX that never became law, would have required unisex intimate facilities. In 1975, when Justice Ginsburg was a law professor at Columbia University, she wrote an op-ed article for The Washington Post explaining that a ban on sex discrimination would not require such a ridiculous outcome:
Again, emphatically not so. Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy. Individual privacy, a right of constitutional dimension, is appropriately harmonized with the equality principle. [REF]
In other words, the Constitution required protection for the right of bodily privacy. Justice Ginsburg's colleague, Justice Anthony Kennedy, makes a related point that acknowledging biological differences is not the same as engaging in mere stereotyping:
To fail to acknowledge even our most basic biological differences...risks making the guarantee of equal protection superficial, and so disserving it. Mechanistic classification of all our differences as stereotypes would operate to obscure those misconceptions and prejudices that are real. [REF]
Yet the 2016 Obama Administration DOE/DOJ "Dear Colleague" letter instructs schools that they may not notify students (or their parents) about whether they will have to share a bedroom, shower, or locker room with a student of the opposite biological sex.
The Women's Liberation Front (an organization from the left) and the Family Policy Alliance (an organization from the right) point out the double standard when it comes to whose privacy is being protected: "It is truly mind-boggling that informing women as to which men have the 'right' to share a bedroom with them is an 'invasion of privacy,' but it is not an invasion of privacy to invite those men into women's bedrooms in the first place." [REF]
Many courts have defended the bodily privacy rights of people in a variety of settings. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, for example, has ruled that prisoners have a right to bodily privacy. With the exception of true emergencies, prisoners have a right not to be seen in a state of undress by guards of the opposite sex. The court based its ruling on "society's undisputed approval of separate public restrooms for men and women based on privacy concerns." [REF] As the State of North Carolina has explained, the DOJ's prison regulations follow this principle:
For instance, those regulations tightly restrict "cross-gender" strip searches, pat-down searches, and visual body cavity searches, 28 C.F.R. SS 115.15(c), and also require policies that generally "enable inmates to shower, perform bodily functions, and change clothing without nonmedical staff of the opposite gender viewing their breasts, buttocks, or genitalia." Id. SS 115.15(d). [REF]
It is entirely reasonable for people not to want to see the opposite sex in a state of undress, regardless of their gender identity. Likewise, it is entirely reasonable for people not to want to be seen in a state of undress by people of the opposite sex, regardless of their gender identity. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) explains this long-running American practice:
In the late 1800s, as women began entering the workforce, the law developed to protect privacy by mandating that work place restrooms and changing rooms be separated by sex. Massachusetts adopted the first such law in 1887. By 1920, 43 of the (then) 48 states had similar laws protecting privacy by mandating sex-separated facilities in the workplace. Because of our national commitment to protect our citizens, and especially children, from the risk of being exposed to the anatomy of the opposite sex, as well as the risk of being seen by the opposite sex while attending to private, intimate needs, sex-separated restrooms and locker rooms are ubiquitous in public places. [REF]
This concern is particularly heightened for minors, especially as children go through puberty and rightly desire bodily privacy. "Specifically," adds the ADF, "minors have a fundamental right to be free from State compelled risk of exposure of their bodies, or their intimate activities, such as occur within restrooms and locker rooms, to the opposite biological sex." [REF]
This is also of particular concern to women who have been victims of sexual abuse. Seeing a naked male body, particularly the genital area, can function as a traumatic trigger. Whether the naked male body they suddenly see in front of them belongs to a man who identifies as a woman (and has not had surgery) or a man who identifies as a man (and has not had surgery) is of no moment to survivors of sexual abuse who are caught in that situation.
Safe Spaces for Women, a group that "provides survivors of sexual assault with care, support, understanding and advice," recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court explaining how gender identity policies can negatively affect such women:
Safe Spaces for Women has a strong interest in ensuring that the voices of women who have suffered sexual abuse are heeded when policies are made that may directly affect their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. This includes policies that require educational institutions covered by Title IX to admit to female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms biological males who identify as female. While Safe Spaces for Women bears no animus toward the transgendered community, it is deeply concerned that...survivors of sexual assault are likely to suffer psychological trauma as a result of encountering biological males--even those with entirely innocent intentions--in the traditional safe spaces of women's showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms. [REF]
The brief goes on to note that the Obama Administration issued its guidance "without giving those affected a voice in the process...improperly circumvent[ing] the notice and comment process when that process was needed most." [REF] As the brief further notes:
Women who have suffered sexual assault are especially sensitized to the risks posed to their physical and emotional wellbeing by allowing biological males to enter the traditional safe spaces of women's showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. Moreover, these women are vulnerable to suffering emotional trauma as a result of encountering biological males in those spaces--including those with entirely innocent intentions. [REF]
Several families have expressed similar concerns to the Supreme Court. Consider the declaration of Y.K. the parent of several minor children including C.K.:
C.K. currently attends middle school within the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. She is required to change clothes at school for curricular activities, which includes undressing in front of other students within a large open single-sex locker room.
She is not aware of any private single-stall changing facilities. But even if those were available, she would feel ostracized from the rest of her peers by being required to change away from the rest of the girls in order to avoid undressing in front of a male or see a male undress in front of her.
She experiences anxiety, discomfort, and embarrassment at the thought of having to change in front of a boy or a man, and the fact that a male may profess a female gender identity does not reduce her anxiety. She also fears that some men may profess a female identity as a pretense to access the locker room where she is changing.
C.K. has been afraid and anxious about returning to school this year because of the school system's new policy regarding sex-specific restrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities. Her anxiety has been slightly allayed because the new policy is currently on hold as a result of a recent Supreme Court ruling, but nonetheless the thought that she will have to undress in the presence of males, and to be subject to males undressing in front of her, once that policy goes back into effect, is deeply distressing to her. [REF]
Consider also the declaration of S.H.:
I am 14 years of age.
My former public middle school feeds into a public high school which permits males into female restrooms, based upon whether they profess a female gender identity. The high school district adopted this policy a couple of years ago, without notifying the parents of this change. The school district also let one student have access to locker rooms formerly reserved for the opposite sex.
The idea of permitting a person with male anatomy--regardless of whether he identifies as a girl--in girls' locker rooms, showers and changing areas, and restrooms makes me extremely uncomfortable and makes me feel unsafe as well.
Even the idea that a boy or man is allowed in those areas makes me anxious and fearful, regardless of whether I ever encounter them in any of those places.
I feel unsafe because I am concerned that a boy or man can access the girls' facilities by just professing a female identity, and that would allow them to take advantage of the school's policies in order to see me and my friends as we have to undress for school. They could take pictures of us with their phones and then post them to the internet.
I would feel especially violated in the event that the school district's policy enabled a person with male genitalia, regardless of what gender that person professes, to see me partially or fully undressed. I also do not want to be exposed to male genitalia in any way while in facilities formerly designated for girls only. [REF]
Finally, consider the testimony of J.S., recounted in the Safe Spaces for Women amicus brief:
In Washington state the Human Rights Commission passed a Washington Administrative Code allowing men who gender identify as female to enter women's locker rooms, spas, and restrooms. As a survivor of childhood molestation and rape, the passage of this law left me feeling vulnerable and exposed in areas [in which] I should be protected. I worked for many years to heal from the emotional, physical, and spiritual effects of the trauma inflicted by my childhood attacker. Depression, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and physical phantom pains are a legacy of my past abuse.
I had been panic-attack free for over a decade when Washington's law went into effect. Now, using a public bathroom is very difficult and has led to many panic attacks. I have not entered a public women's locker room in over a year. Before Washington's law was passed, if I encountered a man in the woman's bathroom or locker room, management, staff, police and the general public would all have been there to protect my privacy and safety. This is no longer the case. To be in a position where I am left exposed, separate from others and no longer have a voice is the same position I was in as a child of eight. [REF]
America has recognized in law that there is an interest in bodily privacy--not just for workers or students, but for prisoners as well--particularly in a state of undress. If this is true in the case of prisoners, who do give up certain rights upon incarceration, why would it not also be true for minor students, almost all of whom are subject to a law mandating their attendance at school?
Even some members of the political left seem to understand this. Maya Dillard Smith, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, resigned from her position with the ACLU after it came out on the wrong side of this issue:
I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school aged daughters into a women's restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults over six feet with deep voices entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.... Despite additional learning I still have to do, I believe there are solutions that can provide accommodations for transgender people and balance the need to ensure women and girls are safe from those who might have malicious intent. [REF]
As Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, has written in The New Yorker , "[t]he discomfort that some people, some sexual-assault survivors, in particular, feel at the idea of being in rest rooms with people with male sex organs, whatever their gender, is not easy to brush aside as bigotry." [REF]
The Obama gender identity guidelines ignore legitimate safety concerns. Sex-specific intimate facilities also exist to protect girls and women from male predators. The concern is not that people who identify as transgender will engage in inappropriate acts. Rather, the concern is that predators will abuse these new gender identity policies to gain readier access to victims. Several experts have testified precisely about this problem, and recent history confirms their insights.
Kenneth V. Lanning, for example, is a veteran of 40 years in law enforcement who specializes in preventing and solving sex crimes. A former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, he was assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico for 20 years. Lanning has consulted on thousands of sex crimes and has published an essential book, Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis , now in its fifth edition. [REF]
Lanning identifies the problem that "gender-identity based access policies" (GIBAPs) create for sex-specific intimate facilities: "the problem with potential sex offenses is not crimes by transgendered persons. The problem...is offenses by males who are not really transgendered but who would exploit the entirely subjective provisions of a GIBAP...to facilitate their sexual behavior or offenses." [REF] As Lanning explains:
[A]llowing a man, based only on his claim to be [a] transgendered woman, to have unlimited access to women's rest rooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, showers, etc. will make it easier for the type of sex offense behavior previously described to happen to more women and children. Such access would create an additional risk for potential victims in a previously protected setting and a new defense for a wide variety of sexual victimization. [REF]
Tim Hutchison, the retired sheriff of Knox County (which includes the City of Knoxville and the University of Tennessee), agrees. Drawing on more than 33 years of experience in law enforcement, he testifies to what every local law enforcement official knows: "Public restrooms are crime attractors, and have long been well-known as areas in which offenders seek out victims in a planned and deliberate way." [REF] More specifically, "[a]ccess policies to restrooms based on 'gender identity' create real and significant public safety and privacy risks, especially in women's and children's restrooms/dressing rooms. These incidents are already occurring." [REF]
Part of the problem is that many sex crimes depend on intent, which will be harder to prove with gender identity policies. Lanning explains that predators "will use the cover of gender-identity-based rules or conventions to engage in peeping, indecent exposure, and other offenses and behaviors." [REF] Additionally, "[c]laims that existing laws are sufficient to address abuse of GIBAPs and similar social customs by male sex offenders are particularly weak, because the specific types of illegal conduct most likely to be encouraged by the policies are intent-based offenses." [REF] Hutchison notes that "[p]eople pushing for the adoption of GIBAPs are downplaying or dismissing serious and legitimate public safety concerns because they do not see (or maybe do not want to see) the problem." [REF]
Another problem with gender-identity policies is that they lack a clear and objective definition and standard of who belongs where. Lanning elaborates:
[O]bjective standards are also important to effective law enforcement. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors will be less likely to record, investigate, or charge indecent exposure or peeping offenses in a GIBAP environment, because there is no objective standard for determining whether someone born a male can lawfully be present in a women-only facility. It would be more difficult to prove lascivious intent when self-reported gender identity drives access rights, and easier to accuse law enforcement personnel of discrimination. This is made even more difficult when that self-reporting [gender identity] need not be corroborated in any way whatsoever. [REF]
And just as fear of being accused of bigotry or discrimination can make law enforcement personnel less likely to investigate or enforce sex crime statutes, it can make women less likely to report certain forms of sexual misconduct, such as peeping and indecent exposure:
Under such policies, the very real victims of such conduct--women deliberately exposed to the male genitals of an exhibitionist, for example--would be forced to consider whether the exposure was merely the innocent or inadvertent act of a transgendered individual. Moreover, because GIBAPs and similar social conventions link facility access to self-reported gender identity , a victim may be unwilling to report an exhibitionist appearing to be a male for fear of being accused of bigotry or gender identity discrimination. As a result, reporting of public-facility sex crimes is likely to decrease as a result of GIBAPs and similar social conventions, even as the actual number of offenses increases . [REF]
This is particularly the case with children, who are already more likely not to report abuse. "With a GIBAP in effect," explains Hutchison, "sex crimes would increase, but an even larger percentage of those crimes would go unreported. In fact, children often delay reporting of sexual abuse until adulthood." [REF] Many women are likewise afraid to make reports of sex crimes: "The decrease in reporting would not just be because victims and bystanders would be less certain that a violation had occurred. Most women are already afraid to report suspected crime or suspicious activity if they think that people will label them for making a report." [REF] Although "it is good that society is becoming more accepting of different people," Hutchison concludes, "the fear of being accused of bigotry creates a public safety risk." [REF]
Another disturbing question arises: "Is a biological male who displays his private parts to a woman while coming out of a women's restroom stall a flasher or transgendered? What about the biological male whose eyes wander while in a women's locker room?" [REF] Many women have already been victimized by men entering women's spaces: In Toronto, a man posed as a transgender woman ("Jessica") to sexually assault and criminally harass four women--including a deaf woman and a survivor of domestic violence--at two women's shelters. Previously, he had preyed on other women and girls whose ages ranged from as young as five to as old as 53. [REF] In Virginia, a man presented as a woman in a long wig and pink shirt to enter a women's restroom at a mall to take pictures of a five-year-old girl, her mother, and another woman. [REF] In Washington State, a man used a women's locker room at a public swimming pool to undress in front of young girls who were changing for swim practice. When staff asked him to leave, the man claimed that "the law has changed and I have a right to be here." [REF] In Toronto, two separate occurrences of voyeurism took place on campus after the University of Toronto implemented a policy of gender-neutral bathrooms. In both cases, male students were found using their cell phone cameras to film women showering. These incidents prompted the University of Toronto to revise its new policy. [REF] In Minnesota, a biologically male high school student who identifies as female was allowed access to the girls' locker rooms, where the student danced "in a sexually explicit manner--'twerking,' 'grinding,' and like he was on a 'stripper pole,'" flashed his underwear while dancing, asked about a girl's bra size, and asked her to "trade body parts." [REF] In Milwaukie, Oregon, Thomas Lee Benson was arrested for dressing as a woman to enter the women's locker room at an aquatic park. Benson had been convicted previously of sexual abuse, purchasing child pornography, and unlawful contact with a child. [REF] In Olympia, Washington, a man, Taylor Buehler, wearing a wig and a bra was arrested for entering the women's bathroom at Everett Community College. He admitted under police questioning that "he was the suspect in an earlier voyeurism incident." [REF]
Similar incidents have taken place in the United States at several Target stores since Target changed its policy in April 2016 to allow bathroom and fitting room access in accordance with gender identity, not biological sex. In July 2016, Sean Patrick Smith, a biological man who identifies as a woman and was wearing a wig and dress, was charged with secretly recording an 18-year-old girl changing into swimwear in a Target fitting room in Idaho. [REF] Although women undressing in the past for the "same reason men go online to look at pornography." [REF] In September 2016, customers saw a man taking pictures of women changing in the stall next to him at a unisex Target dressing room in Brick, New Jersey. [REF]
Some 130 examples of men charged with using bathroom, locker room, and shower access to target women for voyeurism and sexual assault are documented in the appendix to this paper.
The Obama gender identity guidelines provide no legal definition of "gender identity" or legal criteria for determining who is a "transgender" person. The Obama Administration's "Dear Colleague" letter states that a "school may not require transgender students to have a medical diagnosis, undergo any medical treatment, or produce a birth certificate or other identification document before treating them consistent with their gender identity." [REF] The Administration goes on to say that "[g]ender identity refers to an individual's internal sense of gender." [REF]
Other institutions, including the U.S. Department of State, the Olympics, and the NCAA, require actual evidence for determining gender identity and deciding who shall be treated as identifying as transgender. Lanning points out that "[t]he State Department requires a statement from an attending physician stating that he or she has a doctor/patient relationship with the subject, and stating that the subject has completed or is in process of appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition." He adds that this "is very different from the subjective standard in...the Department of Justice/Education guidelines, which allow people to use female-only facilities based solely on their subjective 'internal sense' of gender identity." [REF] The Olympics requires men who identify as women to "demonstrate that their testosterone level has been below a certain cutoff point for at least one year before their first competition." [REF] The NCAA requires that a man who identifies as a woman can compete on a women's team only "if the athlete obtains a doctor's certification of the subject's intention to transition to a woman, and that hormone therapy has actually begun." [REF]
Lanning concludes that "such objective standards are also important to effective law enforcement." [REF] Hutchison concurs:
If someone could enter a public facility based entirely upon their "internal sense of gender," then law enforcement personnel, bystanders, and potential victims would have to be able to read minds in order to determine whether a man entering a women's facility was really transgender or was instead there to commit a sex offense.... [T]he non-transgender male sex offender would simply have to claim that his "gender identity" was female to make successful prosecution difficult if not practically impossible. [REF]
In other words, objective definitions and standards are necessary for our laws to work.
The Obama gender identity guidelines undermine the equality purposes of Title IX for girls and women. Many women worry that the original purpose of Title IX--working toward women's equality--is in danger when "sex" is redefined to mean "gender identity." This leads to harms in educational opportunity and in legal equality for biological girls and women.
In an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) and the Family Policy Alliance (FPA), while generally disparate politically, jointly acknowledge the dangers of redefining sex for women:
[R]edefining "sex" to mean "gender identity" is a truly fundamental shift in American law and society. It also strips women of their privacy, threatens their physical safety, undercuts the means by which women can achieve educational equality, and ultimately works to erase women's very existence. [REF]
WoLF and the FPA argue that redefining Title IX would particularly affect women's educational access by allowing scholarships that were intended only for women to become available to biological men who identify as women. This undermines the original purpose of Title IX: "Congress enacted Title IX as a remedial statute for the benefit of women, and granting Title IX rights to men who claim they are women necessarily violates the rights Congress gave women in this law." [REF] In addition, allowing anyone who identifies as a woman to be considered a woman erases the very meaning of womanhood in law:
When the law requires that any man who wishes (for whatever reason) to be treated as a woman is a woman, then "woman" (and "female") lose all meaning. With the stroke of a pen, women's existence--shaped since time immemorial by their unique and immutable biology--has been eliminated by Orwellian fiat. [REF]
Another brief, filed on behalf of the Women's Liberation Front (WLF), highlights the strange development of Title IX protections. Originally intended to ensure educational rights for women, they are now being used to deny women privacy, safety, educational opportunity, and equality: "The idea that women and girls must surrender their rights and protections under Title IX--enacted specifically to secure women's access to education--in order to extend Title IX to cover men claiming to be women is a jaw-dropping act of administrative jujitsu." [REF] The WLF stresses that this redefinition of sex is a way to erase the legal standing of women:
Redefining "sex" to mean "gender identity" means that the sex-class comprising women and girls now includes men, with all the physiological and social characteristics that come with being male (and vice-versa). Likewise, the agencies make little effort to keep up the pretense that "transgender" is a coherent descriptor; under their policy a transgender person is simply any person who claims to be so, and that person's "sex" is whatever they say it is whenever they say it. By rendering men legally indistinguishable from women, the policy threatens to extinguish the very meaning (and independent legal existence) of women. [REF]
There are concerns about athletic fairness for women and girls as well. If biological males play on women's sports teams, they often have an advantage. In Alaska, high school girls have already lost medals in track competitions because of their inability to compete with a male who identifies as a girl. In a video put out by the Family Policy Alliance's Ask Me First campaign, one of the girls who raced against this athlete talks about the unfair aspects of allowing biological males to compete in races against girls:
There was obviously one girl in each of those races who did not get to compete because of this athlete. It's not fair scientifically--obviously male and female are made differently. There are certain races for males, and certain races for females, and I believe it should stay that way. [REF]
Girls are also on the losing end when students who identify as transgender taking hormones compete against them in sports. In February 2017, a biological girl taking testosterone as part of a "transition" process won the Texas state championship, completing an undefeated wrestling season against other girls (who were not taking testosterone supplements). [REF] Accommodations should be reached so that biological girls can compete on a level playing field instead of being forced to compete and lose against biological males or biological girls who are taking male hormones that can enhance their performance.
The words "girl" and "women" mean something, and in the words of rape survivor Kaeley Triller Haver, "When gender identity wins, women always lose." [REF]
What Needs to Be Done
Title IX was enacted to ensure that girls and women would have equal opportunities in education. It prohibited any school that receives government funding from discriminating on the basis of sex, and it did this while recognizing privacy concerns and stating that living spaces could remain separate for the different sexes. Once Title IX was implemented, individual schools were able to find nuanced solutions to the concerns raised by students who identify as transgender.
But beginning with the 2010 "Dear Colleague" letter and culminating with the 2016 "Dear Colleague" letter, federal bureaucrats have extended the scope of Title IX. Title IX has become a tool to force schools and programs receiving federal funding to allow biological boys in girls' restrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Religious schools have come under attack for filing for exemptions from Title IX so that they can continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs.
What can be done to return Title IX to its original, laudable purpose of granting women equal opportunity?
First, the Department of Education should explicitly return to the intended meaning of "sex" in Title IX. While the Trump Administration's Department of Education should be praised for rescinding the bad Obama-era guidance, repealing guidance without a clear replacement gives bureaucrats and judges too much room for mischief. The DOE should issue clear guidance to state that "sex" in Title IX means biological sex, not gender identity. By doing so, the department could ensure the continued protection of women and girls in school bathrooms and locker rooms and on sports teams. Through this guidance, it could emphasize that accommodations for students who identify as transgender are encouraged while retaining the privacy rights of women and girls in the school system.
Second, Congress should ensure that Title IX will continue to protect girls and women. There are three actions that Congress can take to preserve Title IX's original intent. Congress could specify that "sex" does not mean "gender identity" in Title IX and civil rights law. Language included in H.R. 5812, the Civil Rights Uniformity Act, for example, introduced by Representative Pete Olson (R-TX) in 2016, would do exactly that. [REF] The act clarifies that for the purpose of interpreting civil rights statutes, the term "sex" does not mean "gender identity." This would prevent current and future abuses of Title IX and other civil rights law and ensure that unelected bureaucrats and judges would not get to reshape policy affecting women and girls. Schools could continue to provide separate bathroom and locker room facilities and sports teams based on biological sex, not gender identity, and religious schools could continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs without having to fear agency action against them. At the same time, such legislation could leave the door open for reasonable accommodations of people who identify as transgender. Congress could include language in a statute offering the same clarification but targeted to the specific federal laws that have already been abused, such as (among others) Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. This would reiterate that when Congress referred to a person's "sex" in these laws, what the word referred to then is what it refers to now: biological reality, not "gender identity." It would achieve in piecemeal fashion what the Civil Rights Uniformity Act would achieve in wholesale fashion. Congress, based on its power of the purse, could specify that the Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, may not use any funds to implement or enforce any new administrative gender identity directives or regulations against persons, institutions, schools, businesses, and governments that allegedly do not comply. Additionally, Congress could specify that these agencies may not revoke federal funding for any purported noncompliance with the Administration's gender identity directives.
Finally, the courts should not interpret "sex" to mean "gender identity" and should not usurp the authority of the representative branches of government to make policy in this area.
In this way, the original purpose of Title IX and other laws banning sex discrimination can be restored. Instead of being used by unaccountable agencies and unelected judges to hold that schools cannot have separate restrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex, Title IX can function once more to protect women and girls and ensure that they have equal access to educational programs and opportunities.
Before the April 2015 prime-time interview with the celebrity then known as Bruce Jenner, few Americans had ever had a conversation about transgender issues. Instead of encouraging such a conversation, however, and allowing parents, teachers, and local schools the time, space, and flexibility to find solutions that work best for everyone, the Obama Administration attempted to force a one-size-fits-all policy on the entire nation.
The Trump Administration has taken the first steps to correct this. While the Obama Administration attempted to rewrite law to impose a nationwide federal "gender identity" policy, the Trump Administration is respecting federalism, local decision-making, and parental authority in education. Congress and the courts should do the same.
For most Americans, concerns related to students who identify as transgender are a new reality. Rather than follow the Obama Administration's rush to impose a top-down solution on the entire country, the Trump Administration is allowing the American people to consider all relevant concerns and help to devise policies that will best serve all Americans. Congress should support such efforts, and the courts should respect them.
-- Ryan T. Anderson, PhD, is William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation. Melody Wood is a Research Assistant in the DeVos Center.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-cops-killed-white-men-conservatives-silent-article-1.2632965 Would it shock you to learn that the number of police who've been shot and killed in 2016 is up an astounding 59% from where it was this same date last year? Seventeen police officers have already been shot and killed in 2016, by mid-May. Only 10 had suffered that fate by May 10th, 2015. The drastic increase shocked the hell out of me. While I primarily track, study and report the number of people killed by police, I still follow police fatalities closely. Contrary to popular belief, despising police brutality does not mean I despise police officers. I appreciate all public servants and have both a police officer and a longtime Secret Service member in my family. They are amazing, kind-hearted men who do great work. I also despise gun violence and loathe every single fatality suffered because of it. Something's afoot, though, on why we're not hearing much about this shocking increase in the number of officers who've been shot and killed so far in 2016. Sadly, I think I have the answer. So with that in mind lets get into Dallas shall we?
One of the gunmen who opened fire on police in Dallas said he wanted to kill white police officers and expressed anger at a recent spate of shootings by police before he was killed, it was revealed Friday morning. The suspect, who has not been named, was cornered for several hours by officers and was killed by an explosive device deployed by a police bomb robot after extensive negotiations failed, said Dallas police chief David Brown. Brown told reporters at an early morning news conference that The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter, during negotiations. He said he was upset about the recent shootings, he was upset at white people. The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/08/dallas-police-shooting-gunman-kill-white-officers So if you notice this was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Much like San Bernardino last year where the attack was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Or Orlando, where the the attack was planned several months in advance by a crazy guy who should not have had access to firearms. Hey Im not seeing a pattern here! So what else went down in Dallas? It was pretty much a gigantic cluster fuck that ended extremely poorly. So of course Dallas sent in the killer police robots:
For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded. We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was, Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters. Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes about the technology of warfare, said he believed this was a first. There may be some story that comes along, but Id think Id have heard of it, he said. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bomb-robot-explosive-killed-suspect-dallas So youve got police bombs, tear gas, and now a killer police robot. Which is probably the first time in history this has ever happened. And that is something that you never want to be first for. Much like you never want to be the first person to get arrested for public urination, or you never want to be the first person to win a Rocky Mountain Oyster eating contest. Thats disgusting, John, quit showing us that medal! Put it away! And of course Mike Huckabee immediately blames Obama for what went down in Dallas:
http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/07/08/mike-huckabee-goes-full-stupid-after-dallas-shooting-who-he-blames-will-make-you-angry-details/ Friday on Fox and Friends, Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas said that he feels President Barack Obama should have reacted to the attacks on police officers in Dallas the same way that former president Ronald Reagan did in 1986 after the Challenger disaster. This is after Thursday evenings sniper attacks that left five police officers dead and another seven injured. The former presidential candidate responded to the question of what he would do in Obamas place: I think this is a time when real leaders bring people together. he doesnt split them apart.... Oh, but the conservative Governor took issue with that statement and said: He doesnt need to inject the divisive arguments like gun control at a time of great grief for the nation. And he ought to do for us what Ronald Reagan did after the Challenger disaster. Thats remind us of what we have in common, not what separates us. And thats why Im always so frustrated. Barack Obama has such great potential to be a leader. And yes there is tape of this: [font size="8"]Dallas Pt. 2: The Memorial[/font] Spin it! Memorials. Folks we here at the Top 10 will never use our powers (or lack thereof) to speak ill of the dead, in any way shape or form. So this entry will discuss the memorial for the Dallas PD officers who lost their lives over the weekend, and we wont use any funny memes, graphics or videos as a sign of respect. But somebody who did not show any sign of respect toward the fallen officers? I give you former president George W. Bush:
http://news.groopspeak.com/george-w-bush-says-something-appalling-in-response-to-dallas-shooting/ George W. and Laura Bush live in Dallas and thus have a close, personal connection to the horrific attacks that occurred last night which left five law enforcement officers dead and seven others wounded. Bush released a statement this morning which, at first glance, looks pretty standard and innocuous. The former President and First Lady are heartbroken by the heinous acts of violence. They have seen firsthand the dedication, professionalism, and courage of the Dallas Police Department, and of course they pray for the wounded officers to recover fully and quickly. But heres the phrase that caught my eye: Murdering the innocent is always evil, never more so than when the lives taken belong to those who protect our families and communities. Wait a minute are you telling me the President and his wife witnessed the carnage first hand? Are you serious? But whats the aftermath of this? Weve seen shooting after shooting after shooting after shooting after shooting. And nothing has changed. Not a god damned thing. Or will it? Heres what one police department in Minneapolis said in response:
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) In the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where authorities were criticized for what some called heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators, many departments took a more restrained approach. Now, after the shooting deaths of five officers at a Dallas protest decrying last week's police killings of two more black men, some experts are suggesting it's possible the pendulum could swing from hugs back to flash-bang grenades and mass arrests. After days of peaceful protests in St. Paul, officers in riot gear met protesters who blocked Interstate 94 late Saturday in the biggest confrontation between police and demonstrators since an officer fatally shot a black man during a suburban Twin Cities traffic stop last week. About 100 people were arrested half during the highway standoff and the other half early Sunday in another part of St. Paul and 21 St. Paul police officers and six state troopers were hurt. Police Chief Todd Axtell called the pelting of officers with rocks, bottles, firecrackers and other objects "a disgrace." http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Police-may-change-tactics-at-protests-after-8350946.php And what else went down at Dallas and at the memorial?
Nixon explained that he had to regain his humanity after the bullets started flying. You start to think its me against the world. And with that type of mentality, well implode as a people, he said. Well implode not as ethnicity as a people, but as a people, period. Were all one race at the end of the day. If we get a me against the world mentality -- last night I was thinking, maybe its not black lives matter or all lives matter, maybe its just my life matters. Maybe its just my familys life matters. I had to recover from that spiritually. I had to be reminded that love conquers all, he added. If I let that mentality overwhelm me, then who can I help? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kellon-nixon-msnbc_us_577ff5a0e4b0344d514f3ae7?section=politics Well said. And heres what else conservatives had to say about Dallas. Bet you didnt think it was going to be him did you? :
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) Donald Trump said Monday he believes relations between police and the nation's African-American community are "far worse" than people think, predicting that protests against police violence that followed last week's slaying of five police officers in Dallas "might be just the beginning for this summer." In an interview with The Associated Press, the presumptive GOP nominee struck a balance between the law-and-order rhetoric he has espoused during his campaign and an appreciation for the concerns held by African-Americans nationwide about the conduct of police. Trump suggested that a lack of training for officers might be at least partially to blame for the two police shootings that led to last Thursday's protest in Dallas, where a lone gunman killed five in an act of vengeance against white officers. At the same time,Trump denounced the name of the Black Lives Matter movement as "a very divisive term." http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-black-lives-matter-divisive Really Trump? Says the guy who has no idea who David Duke is, besides the fact that the former KKK Grand Wizard has been head over heels in love with Trumpenfurors campaign? [font size="8"]Republican Empathy[/font] Spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy stop! And it lands on Inception Study. So you know with all the uptick in violence lately, naturally people are going to study it to determine the cause and effect of said violence. So first let's show the Harvard Study On Police Violence:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force officer-involved shootings we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 And then there's the New York Times critique of the Harvard Study On Police Violence:
A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police. But when it comes to the most lethal form of force police shootings the study finds no racial bias. It is the most surprising result of my career, said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=0 And then there's the critique of the critique of the New York Times Study On Police Violence:
Today, amid nationwide protests over state violence against black people, The New York Times chose to publish an article headlined: Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings. The articles authors, Quoctrung Bui and Amanda Cox, quote Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economics professor and the studys author, who says: It is the most surprising result of my career. But once you look at the context of data cited by the Times, its not so much the evidence (contested here) thats surprising, as the way the Times chooses to frame it. Heres why. Fryer is not afraid of controversial questions. It might be more accurate to say that he actively seeks out questions that could challenge conventional wisdom, given that his interests have included considering the possibility of genetically lower intelligence in black people than whites. http://theinfluence.org/three-problems-with-how-the-ny-times-highlights-a-non-peer-reviewed-study-allegedly-showing-no-racial-bias-in-police-shootings/ You know.... this is kind of like that movie Inception. It's a study within a study within a study within a study. Spin it again! Empathy. You know that thing that republicans are world renowned for. So you know with the Dallas shooting comes that good old fashioned republican empathy that they're famous for. You know a "compassionate conservative" point of view. Kind of like when Gordon Ramsey screams at a contestant on Hell's Kitchen because he didn't cook the meat the correct way. You should have turned the fire to 7, not 8 you dumbass!! That is not how you cook chicken rangoon!!!! (Ed. Note: BTW a good friend of mine was the one getting rejected on Hell's Kitchen in that clip... )
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called protesters who ran away from the hail of bullets that rained down on Downtown Dallas on Thursday night "hypocrites" during an interview Friday on Fox News. "All those protesters last night, they turned around and ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to protect them. What hypocrites!" an audibly emotional Patrick said. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-calls-dallas-protesters-hypocrites-article-1.2704730 Yeah because the first thing you want to do when protesting something is run *INTO* the gunfire. But no one knows empathy for a tragedy better than former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued Sunday, in addressing the two shootings in which police officers shot and killed two black men, that black families should teach their children to "be respectful to the police." Giuliani commented on the shootings in Dallas where five police officers were shot, and the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile during an appearance on CBS' "Face The Nation." He said his "deep sympathy" goes out to the families of the victims in those shootings. Then, he argued that there was "too much" violence in the black community and that there were some black men and boys who feared being confronted by the police given the recent shootings. "If you want to deal with this on the black side, you've got to teach your children to be respectful to the police and you've got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police, the real danger to them 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 1,000 times are other black kids who are going to kill them," Giuliani said. "That's the way they're going to die." Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/giuliani-black-families-respect-police So to trace Guiliani's "logic" (or lack thereof), African Americans need to be taught to support the police because of "too much violence" so therefore the way to avoid death or prison time is... supporting "the man"? What the fuck is he smoking? Or is he watching too much Reno 911? [font size="8"]Chik-Fil-A[/font] Entering the spin zone!! And it lands on................ come on VR Headset.... Daddy wants an HTC Vive... wait for it.... Farting. Yes probably the most disgusting item on the wheel so far. And really Bernie supporters? Really??? Is this what we really need at the DNC this year? And who is this benefiting? Um........ nobody.
PHILADELPHIA - Some Bernie Sanders supporters are planning a protest that could be described as silent but non-violent. A spokesperson for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign told U.S. News & World Report that her group is planning to stage a "fart-in" during Hillary Clinton's closing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this month. Cheri Honkala and other outspoken Sanders fans told the publication that despite Sanders's endorsement of Clinton earlier this week, they still plan to protest the presumptive nominee's big moment in Philly. So how exactly would a "fart-in" work? Honkala said her group has gathered a "stockpile" of various types of beans that will be cooked and fed to delegates, journalists and others who will be inside the Wells Fargo Center during Clinton's nomination acceptance speech at the DNC. They hope to stink up the arena in a move will act as a symbolic gesture of the group's displeasure over Clinton's nomination. http://www.wkbw.com/news/national/bernie-sanders-fans-stage-fart-in-protest-at-dnc Silent but non violent... excuse me a minute! Spin it again!! Food. And promotional items. With Dallas comes one of the more extremely poor taste and ill timed way of supporting the cops. See, Chik-Fil-A has had a long standing way of supporting pro-establishment policies. But this might be the weirdest promotion they have in their marketing arsenal:
ATLANTA, June 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chick-fil-A(r) is issuing a cattle call! Mark your calendar for the 12th annual Cow Appreciation Day on Tuesday, July 12, 2016. On that day, Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide will offer a free entree to any customer who visits a restaurant dressed as a cow. Adult customers who dress in any type of cow attire, whether it's head-to-hoof or sporting a cow-spotted accessory, will be rewarded with a free Chick-fil-A entree of their choice, such as an Original Chicken Sandwich, Grilled Chicken Cool Wrap or Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit. Children can receive a free Kid's Meal for dressing in a cow costume. The Cow Appreciation Day celebration will last from store opening through 7 p.m. local time (check local store listings for individual store opening hours). http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/save-the-date-chick-fil-a-offers-free-food-to-cow-clad-customers-on-cow-appreciation-day-july-12-300288795.html So this raises a lot of questions like what grown adult puts on a fucking cow costume just for a free sandwich? You know that cow suit you bought costs $50 or more, so congratulations you just purchased the most expensive chicken sandwich ever! Bravo well done! I mean for that kind of money you could buy 25 of these for $2 a piece, and just look, theyre guaranteed awesomeness!!! But you know who did show up to Chik-Fil-A in a cow costume? You might want to put a splash guard on your monitor because this is too fucking good!
Sierra is the Duggar familys party planner, and shes appeared in a few episodes of 19 Kids and Counting and Jill & Jessa: Counting On. Shes helped organize gender reveal parties, weddings, baby showers, and birthday parties. However, the Duggars arent partying at Chick-fil-A in the photo above. As Fox News reports, yesterday was Cow Appreciation Day at the fast food chain, meaning that customers who dressed up like cows could score free entrees. Josh and Anna Duggars cow costumes seemingly consist of nothing more than white T-shirts with black splotches painted on them. Its no secret that the Duggars are fans of Chick-fil-A. As E! News reports, Jill Duggar loves her Chick-fil-A so much that she believes that the restaurant will exist in heaven. However, chicken nuggets and Polynesian sauce werent enough to lure Josh Duggar out of hiding for last years Cow Appreciation Day fast food giveaway. As The Inquisitr reported, Josh was noticeably absent in a photo that showed a heavily pregnant Anna Duggar and their kids posing with a giant inflatable Chick-fil-A cow. Josh likely stayed home because he feared facing the publics wrath; he had recently confessed to sexually molesting four of his younger sisters, so was getting tons of negative press at the time. Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3303327/josh-duggar-resurfaces-at-chick-fil-a-dressed-like-a-cow-scores-free-food-with-other-family-members/#SdHb2OfI2LLdorUc.99 But getting back to Chik-Fil-A and their pro-establishment policies, heres how one franchise tried to support the Dallas PD but failed miserably because this isnt the first time that Chik-Fil-A employees spouted Back The Blue shirts.
The tension between the police and the Black Lives Matter movement is currently more intense than the line outside of a Chick-fil-A on opening day, but that isnt stopping one location of the chain in Texas from taking a stance. According to The Blaze, recent photos show staff members at Chick-fil-A in Conroe, Texas sporting t-shirts that say Back the Blue under the Chick-fil-A logo. Customers are also apparently sporting t-shirts with the phrase Go Blue or Go Home on it. First We Feast called the location where an employee, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that employees at the location were indeed wearing the shirts and have been for a little while. http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/11/chick-fil-a-police-lives-matter-back-the-blue-t-shirts Or was it really? So look at what happened when Snopes got a hold of this and a ton of similar articles:
WHAT'S TRUE: In 2015, high school employees at a single Chick-fil-A in Texas created their own "Back the Blue" shirts. WHAT'S FALSE: Chick-fil-A has not voiced support for either movement in question; "back the blue" is not tantamount to "a bomb on Black Lives Matters"; the shirts were not created or distributed by a franchise (much less the company); the shirts had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter protests in July 2016. http://www.snopes.com/chick-fil-a-just-dropped-a-bomb-on-black-lives-matter/ [font size="8"]Donald Trump[/font] Spin it to win it! Something random in the news!
Newmans computer, actually a megaprocessor, takes up a whole room in his house in Great Shelford. I spent around three hours a night working on it and Ive had to take all the books and shelves and sofas out of my lounge, he told SWNS. Im lucky because its quite a big lounge but Ive had to put everything else in my spare room. In total, it cost more than $51,000 over a five-year period. I didnt plan on spending [that much money] at the start. It grew as time went by and I got a bit more ambitious, he said. He admits, If I had a wife shed probably have left me by now. What did he get for efforts? Not much. Its a million times slower and has a million times less memory than a typical desktop, according to South West News Service. Oh, and you can only play Tetris on it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/supercomputer-only-plays-tetris_us_577febe8e4b01edea78dcaf1?ir=Weird+News SSion=us_weird-news&utm_hp_ref=weird-news But how many frames per second does it get on Counter Strike: Go? Or maybe hes preparing for Tetris: The Movie . Spin that shit again! Donald Trump. So Trumpenfuror provided what could quite possibly be the classiest response to the Dallas shooting yet:
During two separate discussions of Black Lives Matters protests on Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that people have called for moments of silence for Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas and injured nine others, without specifying who or where. On an OReilly Factor segment filmed earlier in the day, Trump expressed disgust with the actions of the officers who shot Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and said it could be that police treat African-Americans differently, but criticized the Black Lives Matter movement as dividing America. I saw what theyve said about police at various marches and rallies, said Trump. Ive seen moments of silence called for for this horrible human being who shot the policemen. http://gawker.com/donald-trump-claims-hes-seen-people-calling-for-moments-1783561092 But this isnt the only empathetic way Trumpenfuror has responded to the rally:
Republican Donald Trump presented himself as "the law-and-order candidate" with a compassionate heart on Monday, positioning himself as strong on security in response to a wave of anxiety among Americans after the Dallas police shootings. Trump's remarks in Virginia Beach, Virginia, showed how much the Dallas violence has shaken up the political conversation with both Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton devoting time to the topic. "We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country 100 percent," Trump said. "I am the law-and-order candidate." Trump's remarks about safety and security were added to a speech devoted to reforming the troubled Veterans Administration. He also presented himself as a compassionate candidate and mentioned the two episodes that preceded the Dallas shootings: the killing of two African-American men by police, one in Minnesota and the other in Louisiana. "But you can't have true compassion without providing safety to the citizens of our country," Trump said. "Every kid in American should be able to securely walk the streets of their own neighborhood without harm. http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-law-order-vice-president-479527 I am the law and order candidate! Nobody makes better laws than I do! I make the best laws, I bribe the best law enforcement officers, I hire the best judges nobody hires better judges than I do. Oh wait did I say bribe? I meant hire!. In fact even the New York Times called Trumpenfuror volatile and hostile in the wake of Dallas:
In the wake of Dallas, Donald Trump is getting pummeled by the press. In the wake of James Comey, Hillary Clinton is getting thumbs down from a majority of voters. And these dynamics are unfolding at a crucial stretch of the campaign: Trump must settle on a running mate in the next couple of days, while Clinton needs to pick a running mate by next week. Lets start with Trump. Its true, according to my sources, that his campaign had a daylong debate on how to respond to the murder of five police officers in Dallas, and took the cautious route. Trump gave no interviews and limited himself to a few comments on Twitter and a 90-second Instagram video. Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country, Trump tweeted. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/07/12/after-dallas-new-york-times-calls-trump-volatile-and-hotheaded.html But oh no! According to recent inquiries, Trumpenfuror warns that it may be just the beginning:
"We are in a divided nation" Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Monday warned that the U.S. is a divided nation where the relationship between police officers and African-American communities is far worse than many people believe. Trumps comments, made in an interview with the Associated Press, served as a direct contradiction to President Barack Obamas assessment of tension and division in the country. Speaking after the deadly shooting of police officers in Dallas, Obama said Saturday that the U.S. is not as divided as some have suggested, and he rejected the idea that history is repeating itself when it comes to racial tension. http://time.com/4402724/donald-trump-dallas-violence-warning/ Well fucking duh!!! Youre running for president! Tell us something we dont know already! [font size="8"]Donald Trump[/font] Spin it to win it! And it lands on Party Unity! You know folks in the tradition of Stephen Colberts Hungry For Power Games it is down to two. Bernie officially announced his support for Hillary Clintons campaign in the if you cant beat em, join em kind of way:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that, Sanders said. She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States. Sanders thanked those who voted for him during the Democratic primary -- especially the people of New Hampshire, where he got his first primary win, and his home state of Vermont. He also warned against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, arguing the business mogul would be bad for working families, calling Trumps economic policies reckless. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-endorses-hillary-clinton_us_56e98f60e4b0b25c91841bdd See folks thats how it should be done! Spin it again. And it lands on. Wait for it Donald Trump! While Bernie is showing people how it should be done, you know whos not showing you how it should be done? Donald Trump. So while I was a Bernie Sanders supporter as was most of my family for this campaign, well, I kind of feel sorry for Bernie Sanders supporters who are pledging to vote for Donald Trump. I love Jessica Williams on the Daily Show, and for her final outing before starting her new gig, she filed this report about this very subject: Now I say that, oh fellow Bernie enthusiasts, because this is what you get if you switch party affiliation and vote for Trumpenfuror. Wheres the whambulence? :
Donald Trump chided Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a Tuesday interview with The New York Times after she gave multiple comments that were highly critical of his campaign. I think its highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly, Trump told the Times by phone. I think its a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldnt believe it when I saw it. Ginsburg in recent days has ramped up her criticisms of Trump's campaign. She has said he's a "faker" who should release his tax returns, that she "can't imagine" a Trump presidency, and that "everything" would be up for grabs with him occupying the White House. Ginsburg's comments are unique in that a Supreme Court justice typically doesn't comment on presidential candidates during election season. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-slams-ruth-bader-ginsburg But what else is Trumpenfuror up to? Well his son may be just as full of shit as his father if not more so:
Last week, Eric Trump said that his own charitable foundation had received "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in personal donations from his father. But on Monday, Eric Trump said he could not name a single instance when Donald Trump had given such a gift. "Im sure there have been but without going back through 10 years, I wouldnt remember check for check off the top of my head," Eric Trump wrote in an email message to The Washington Post. Eric Trump made those comments in response to follow-up questions from The Post which has been seeking evidence for Donald Trump's assertion that he has given generously, but privately, to charities in recent years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/eric-trump-said-his-charity-received-hundreds-of-thousands-from-his-father-now-hes-not-sure/2016/07/12/b31458be-88c6-4c12-b154-8c0a1e536f92_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop_b [font size="8"]The Bathroom Police[/font] Lets give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And sweet! I win 15,000!!! Boom. Of what, we still dont know what that is. Lets spin it again. Buy A Vowel. OK Ill buy an O. All right I got two. So I get a letter? How about a C? OK got one there. Ill solve the puzzle. Top 10 Conservative Idiots. What? Thats wrong? What did I wager? 15,000? Nooooooooooo!!!! Spin it again. Bathrooms. So the GOP recently rolled out their party platform prior to the convention. And I hate to break to my LGBT friends, and especially the Ts, this platform *DOES NOT* favor you in any way, shape or form. Lets go through their platform line item by line item, shall we?
One of the most pressing issues for the party, according to a draft leaked to the New York Times, is the reversal of the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S. Previously, leaders called for a marriage amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now, however, the party is demanding a reversal whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. http://fusion.net/story/323943/the-gop-is-debating-its-official-2016-platform-and-things-are-getting-totally-insane/ Now theyve been chasing that one the way Wiley Coyote chases the Road Runner. Theyre never going to catch it because the GOP has been losing the argument on gay marriage every single time. But they do it in hopes they might someday catch that delicious, delicious road runner. Or how about education? Guess what the GOP is pushing for Bible-based education!
On the subject of religion, the delegates have reportedly included an amendment calling for the Bible to be taught in schools as part of American history. Maybe the Garden of Eden really is in Missouri, after all? But heres where the bathroom police come in, and theyre getting really scary out there.
Because the 1950s, the time when this battle was fought and lost already, were cool, so why not relive the glory? GOP leaders also lent their support to the idea of conversion therapy, the notorious practice that sends LGBTQ children to therapists who try to convert them back into being straight. Mental health experts and human rights groups are almost universally opposed to conversion therapy. Gee, what a surprise they would resort to conversion therapy? I mean remember that episode of South Park where Butters gets sent to a gay straight rehab camp? And heres where the trans bashing comes in:
Bathroom choice The Obama administration's rule advising schools to allow students to use the bathroom of their gender identity was condemned as "illegal and dangerous" and "alien to America's history and traditions." http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a46621/republican-party-platform-2016/ Never mind that a court rejected a schools request to force a female male trans student to use the girls bathroom:
A federal appeals court has denied a Virginia school board's request to allow it to prevent a transgender teen from using the boys' bathroom when he returns to school this September. The Gloucester County School Board wants to delay an order forcing it to let Gavin Grimm to use the restroom matching his gender identity while it appeals. . http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/court-rejects-schools-request-transgender-bathroom-case-40546011 But oh no, this might be the weirdest thing to come out of the GOP platform for the 2016 election:
Porn "The internet must not become a safe haven for predators. Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children's safety and well-being. We applaud the social networking sites that bar sex offenders from participation. We urge energetic prosecution of child pornography which closely linked to human trafficking." Yup! They really hate them some porno, dont they? And of course for every time the bathroom police feel they need to harass trans people, like I have shown, I will always respond to their insanity by posting an actual sex crime committed by the uber-religious, and they did not leave me a shortage of material this week. And yes this is the guy who founded Americas border patrol wannabe gun slingers:
Co-founder of Minuteman vigilante group gets 19-year prison sentence for child molestation The co-founder of the vigilante border patrol group known as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps was sentenced on Monday to 19 1/2 years in an Arizona prison for molesting a five-year-old girl who was the friend of his daughter, prosecutors said. Christopher Allen Simcox, 55, who helped form the Minuteman militia group in 2005, received the sentence following a hearing in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix stemming from his contact with the girl between April 2012 and May 2013. .... Authorities said he molested the girl during parental visits with one of his daughters and showed the victim pornographic movies. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/co-founder-of-minuteman-vigilante-group-gets-19-year-prison-sentence-for-child-molestation/ [font size="8"]Fox News[/font] Spin it to win it! What? Go directly to jail? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! And I dont have a Get Out Of Jali Free card either! So I have to give this entry from a jail cell. So Ill just show John Olivers rant about for profit prisons: Im out. Spin it again! Fox News. You know speaking of the Republicans and sex crimes, Fox News has been on Defcon 5 the last week in the wake of Gretchen Carlsons exit. In fact when she filed suit against Roger Ailes, the network that is the replacement for critical thought among the average republican has gone into overdrive. Lets recap first and then discuss in further detail:
Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the network's CEO Roger Ailes, alleging he fired her because she refused his sexual advances. The host of The Real Story was reportedly terminated on June 23, the final day of her contract, and she claims she was the victim of sexual harassment and retaliation for rebuffing his advances as well as questioning unequal treatment of women in the Fox News workplace. http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/07/06/fox-host-gretchen-carlson-sues-roger-ailes-for-sexual-harassment.html Holy shit! You know last week we discussed how Roger Ailes is the Zapp Branagin of TV News journalists. I seriously think he might be more Bill Cosby after reading this:
Attorneys for former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson were contacted by 10 women in the wake of their lawsuit against the networks CEO, Roger Ailes, CNNs Brian Stelter reported on Wednesday afternoon. I just spoke with one of the attorneys involved in Carlsons suit, Stelter said in video posted by Media Matters, adding that the women reached out because they say they also have stories to share about treatment by Roger Ailes. Stelter did point out that the women have not joined the lawsuit filed by Carlson on Wednesday. Carlson said in her lawsuit that she was fired in response to both denying Ailes sexual overtures and objecting to what she called severe and pervasive harassment during her 11-year career working for the conservative news network. Stelter pointed out that neither Fox nor Ailes have commented on the suit, and that the network has not covered Carlsons allegations. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/gretchen-carlsons-lawyers-contacted-by-10-women-after-roger-ailes-suit-cnn/ 10 different women! Is Roger Ailes a professional playboy who gets around or is he a creepy pervert? But now 6 more women have come forward against Ailes:
"You know if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys. Those were the words one woman, a former Republican National Committee field adviser, claims Fox News head Roger Ailes used on her one night in 1989 as she was attempting to land a contract with the RNC, reports New York magazine. Like the case of Bill Cosby, sexual harassment allegations are beginning to flood in after one victim former Fox host Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit this week against the powerful conservative news executive. According to Gabriel Sherman, who wrote a biography on Ailes in 2014, allegations of highly inappropriate sexual banter by Ailes come as no surprise, dating back to the 60s when he was a producer on The Mike Douglas Show. Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/6-more-women-accuse-fox-head-roger-ailes-of-sexual-harassment-including-one-who-was-16-at-the-time/ But now Carlson is accusing Fox News of continuous, verbal harassment! Holy shit! He really is Zapp Branagin!
I just wanted to stand up for myself, first and foremost, Carlson told The New York Times in a Tuesday interview at her lawyer Nancy Erika Smiths New Jersey home. And I wanted to stand up for other women who maybe faced similar circumstances. The former Real Story host stood by the allegations laid out in the lawsuit, claiming that Ailes made sexual advances towards her, oversaw a culture of sexual harassment at Fox News and fired her because she refused him and complained about her treatment at the network. She told the Times that she kept quiet about the continuous offensive language she heard from Ailes because of the hierarchical structure of the network. Everyone knew how powerful Roger Ailes was, she said. I certainly felt intimidated by that. Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gretchen-carlson-says-roger-ailes-harassment-continuous Are they taking cues from Family Guy? [font size="8"]Westboro Baptist Church[/font] Spin that shit!!! And it lands on. Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy stop!! Clip without context! Im still not tired of that! Spin it again! And it lands on Pokemon! Hit it! So by now youve heard of Nintendos insanely popular new app Pokemon Go. This thing is insanely popular. I kind of wish I was a stock holder for Nintendo because its made the company something like $7 BILLION in profit. BILLION!! And it still has yet to be released in a lot of markets, so Nintendo could be even richer by the time this thing is rolled out world wide. So this thing has attracted a lot of attention mostly positive, but also a lot negative. Like this:
Man's private home turned into Pokemon gym Involuntarily, some people have seen their homes overtaken by Pokemon trainers. Boon Sheridan, who lives with his family in an old church in Massachusetts, was surprised to find that his house has been marked as a Pokemon gym: A place where people can train their fictional creatures. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/11/tech/pokemon-go-crazy-events/ Or this:
Armed robbers used the game Pokemon Go to lure victims to an isolated trap in Missouri, police reported on Sunday. At about 2am in OFallon, Missouri, officers responded to a robbery report that led them to four people, all local residents aged 16 to 18, in a black BMW in a CVS parking lot. The occupants tried to discard a handgun out of the car when an officer approached, said Sgt Bill Stringer. The officer then identified the four people as suspects of similar armed robberies described in St Louis and St Charles counties. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/10/pokemon-go-armed-robbers-dead-body Thats right you can have your homed turned into a Pokemon gym or you can be lured into an armed robbery and possibly murder. But theres no one out there more butthurt over the new Pokemon game than the Westboro Baptist Church. So lets explain first before we crank up the whambulance:
If you havent noticed already, youre about to. Suddenly everyones playing, Pokemon Go. Soon youll notice masses of people gathered in one spot, say a public park, holding their phones in the air. Pokemon Go is an app that demands its users collect Pokemon (short for pocket monsters) that are hanging out in real spots around the globe (in augmented reality). In the game, certain locations are named as gyms where you can battle your Pokemon against another teams Pokemon. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas was designated as one such gym and a team has taken it over using a monster called a Clefairy. That Clefairy is named, appropriately, LOVEISLOVE. http://www.towleroad.com/2016/07/pokemon-go-westboro/ Thats right a pro LGBT group has trolled the Westboro Church. You know these people: Yup. So now we can turn up the whambulance because heres what they did this week in response to Pokemon Go:
The church responded to the stunt via Twitter, employing images from Pokemon to spread its anti-LGBTQ message. We recruited Jigglypuff to deal with the sodomite loveislove Clefairy for us, the WBC tweeted. Church elder Steve Drain told USA Today that the church uses whatever tools they can to get their message across even if that instrument may be a false idol. We try to speak whatever language is being spoken, Drain said. This little church, as despised and vilified as we are, the location of this church will be memorialised throughout eternity, he added. Were willing by Gods grace to say that homosexuality is wrong, and thats what weve been known for, even though we preach the whole counsel of God. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pokemon-go-westboro-baptist-church-lgbtq-claims-clefairy-loveislove-a7131706.html [font size="8"]Star Trek: The Search For Sulu's Sexual Orientation[/font] Lets spin the wheel one last time this week! And it lands on.. Star Trek! Hit it! So by now you know that the latest film in the series Star Trek Beyond beams into theaters on July 22nd. But with the new movie, news is coming fast and furious (ha!) after head screen writer & actor Simon Pegg, who portrays Montgomery Scott, revealed that U.S.S. Enterprise pilot Hikaru Sulu is actually gay, married, and has a daughter. So in order to juxatapose this argument I'm going to cross memes and clips from one of my favorite movies - Simon Pegg's amazing 2006 flick "Hot Fuzz" with some hilarious stuff from George Takei. Lets discuss this:
Its already been revealed that Hikaru Sulu will be shown as an out gay man in the upcoming Star Trek Beyond. But a new Korean trailer for the movie seems to give us a glimpse of the Enterprise helmsmans husband and daughter. As crowds of people run from an unknown threat, we see a quick shot of what reports are calling Sulus husband holding their young daughter. (The man is actually Beyond co-writer Doug Jung in a cameo role.) Sulus daughter, Demora, has appeared as an adult in the film Star Trek Generations, so the scene could be bringing the Star Trek mythos full-circle. George Takei, who played Sulu on the original TV series and subsequent films, said he was disappointed in the decision to have Sulu be gay because it wasnt in line with creator Gene Roddenberrys vision for the character. http://logoonline.mtvnimages.com/uri/mgid:file:http:shared:newnownext.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/sulufamily-1468416655.jpeg http://www.newnownext.com/sulus-husband-and-daughter-appear-in-new-star-trek-beyond-trailer/07/2016/ So that happened. But not everyone is pleased with that including Sulu himself the great George Takei. I actually went to a screening of Star Trek at the Hollywood Bowl last week with the LA Philharmonic playing the score, and Takei himself was in the audience. That was pretty cool. Oh my!!!
Simon Pegg has addressed speculation that he and original Star Trek actor George Takei have had a falling out, over the sexuality of character Hikaru Sulu. It was recently announced that in the upcoming film Star Trek Beyond, Sulu - played by George Takei in the original sci-fi series - would be coming out as gay. However, George, who came out as gay in an interview with Frontier magazine in 2005, had a surprisingly displeased reaction to the news, calling it unfortunate and a twist to the sci-fi series creators original vision. Simon - who was partly responsible for the decision, as one of the films co-writers - has now addressed Georges comments, telling BANG Showbiz: We were emailing the other day, you know its discussion. Were adults, were not catty fighters writing comments to each other on the Internet, were grown men. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/star-trek-simon-pegg-george-takei-sulu-gay_uk_578614e3e4b0f4bc594612a1 So George Takei himself has weighed in on the issue and it was more that he was upset about the ruining of Gene Roddenberrys creation, not that it has anything to do with his or his characters sexual orientation. Its kind of like the NBA D League its your favorite game, your favorite players, but the overall appeal is lacking some of the magic. But the rest of the cast including Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana are apparently fine with this:
While the original Mr. Sulu, George Takei, may disagree, this next generation of Star Trek actors is solidly in favor of going where no franchise screenplay has gone before by making the USS Enterprises helmsman an openly gay character, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in Star Trek Beyond and is openly gay, told the trade magazine Wednesday that its definitely high time for an LGBT character to be included in the Star Trek universe. Weve been really excited by the response, particularly from young people, who have been inspired and motivated by this turn toward progress, said Mr. Quinto, who was in London for the movies U.K. premiere. Last week, Mr. Takei told reporters that while he was delighted to see an openly gay Star Trek character, its a twisting of creator Gene Roddenberrys vision to make Sulu gay rather than come up with an original character who was openly gay all along. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/13/star-trek-beyond-actors-back-decision-make-sulu-ch/ But you know going with Mr. Takeis argument why did Simon Pegg go against Mr. Takeis argument and make an existing character gay rather than create a new one? Well Gene Roddenberrys son weighs in on that argument:
Star Trek Beyond co-writer Simon Pegg, who also plays Scotty in the series, released a statement last week saying that he respectfully disagrees with Takei, and at the London premiere of Beyond on Tuesday, the cast and crew told the BBC that theyre all in support of Sulu being gay. The LGBT community has long advocated for representation in the Star Trek universe, said Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in the movie series and is himself openly gay. Weve been really excited by the response, particularly from young people, who have been inspired and motivated by this turn toward progress. Multiple cast members said they were surprised by the debate around the Sulu news, and Chris Pine told the BBC, Im a little stunned theres been so much attention given to it. As for Cho himself, he admitted that he was a little nervous about the revelation, but hes extremely supportive of the news. I was worried because I knew [George] was a gay man who had played a straight character, Cho added. I know he felt a fair bit of ownership of that character, and legitimately so. I was also worried that it might be inferred that we were somehow suggesting that sexuality was a choice. But I dont think anyone has inferred that, and were certainly not saying that. http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/13/star-trek-beyond-cast-gene-roddenberry-son-sulu Cant wait for this movie. See you next week! |
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A Gaza-based j ournalist has started the "rubble bucket challenge" as a way to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza. Rather than dump ice water over his head as part of the wildly popular ice bucket challenge , Ayman al Aloul used a bucket of rubble, saying it is far more abundant than ice in the war-torn region, NBC News reported .
"If five famous people in the world like actors or presidents will do the challenge, that means I succeeded in sending the message about Gaza," he said. Ayman al Aloul, a Gaza-based journalist, started the "rubble bucket challenge." (Image via YouTube)
A Facebook page created in support of the rubble bucket challenge describes its purpose as "a campaign to raise awareness about the war on Gaza, where people are are bombed inside their homes."
"It came to my mind that it's good idea to show the whole picture -- how Gaza looks now, rubble, destruction, cement with sand, small rocks," Aloul said.
You can watch the rubble bucket challenge video, below:
(H/T: Mediaite ) |
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Early last year Jeremy Corbyn was roundly laughed at in the House of Commons for suggesting food poverty, inequality and climate change should also be included in the Government's national security review. The list of priorities had been reserved to armed military responses in the event of an attack and increasing spending on Britain's Trident nuclear detterent from PS25 billion to PS31 billion. The notion that a deepening crisis was happening right in front of our eyes was, in the eyes of our esteemed MPs, laughable.
But research today revealed that despite living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world almost eight million people are living in households which struggle to put food on the table. The study found up to five million of us regularly go without eating for a whole day because they can't afford to buy food, with some households in the country having just PS3 a day to spend on food for the family.
While we spend tens of billions of pounds combating terrorism the UK is in the midst of a domestic catastrophe. Over the last four winters, according to the latest official figures, nearly 120,000 people in England and Wales have died because, in many cases, they can't afford to put the heating on - that's one older person every seven minutes during the winter. Conversely, there were as many deaths caused by bees than terrorism, and yet we still find it of vital importance to pay 10,000 armed military personnel to be on standby at any given time while volunteers man food banks across the country.
Today's Knorr research shows that the Conservative's victory in Copeland may be the greatest trick they have ever pulled . After two terms of crippling austerity cuts, dismantling of the welfare state and a referendum that was used as bait to secure a second term the Tories made the first by-election gain by a governing party since 1982. Wake up Britain, wake up.
Commenting on the results of today's survey Adrian Curtis, Foodbank Network Director for The Trussell Trust, said: "Working on the frontline across a network of 428 foodbanks means we see the psychological impact of food poverty in the UK.
"It doesn't just lead to hunger - it can also lead to loneliness."
So here's some questions to our "thriving" government who, while facing threats overseas both in governance and defence, might want to take a moment to what is happening in Britain:
Why in 2017 is it acceptable for 4.7 million people to regularly go a day without eating?
Why are people dying each year because of fuel poverty?
And why, Britain, do we keep voting for a party who is so patently running this country in to the ground? |
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by Robert Quigley Feb 7th
by Robert Quigley Feb 7th
For the first time in human history, we can see what's going on on both sides of the Sun at once, thanks to NASA. In 2006, the space agency launched two probes into space, jointly called STEREO ( S olar TE rrestrial RE lations O bservatory), to monitor the Sun; now that both are in position, we can see the front and back of the Sun simultaneously, and will be able to do so for the next eight years. Unlike the Moon, which has a so-called "dark side" never visible from Earth, we see the Sun's entire surface over the course of a month. But being able to see front and back at the same time is a big help; not only does it mean we won't be surprised by a damaging solar flare, but it gives us more data for understanding how the big ol' ball of stellar nucleosynthesis works. Phil Plait explains : Events that happen anywhere on the Sun can have a ripple effect everywhere else... literally. A solar flare is a vast explosion on the Sun's surface, releasing as much energy in a few minutes as millions or even billions of nuclear bombs. This sends gigantic seismic waves, ripples, across the Sun's surface, affecting other regions. Gigantic coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are like hurricanes over the Sun, and the region causing one can extend onto the far side of the Sun where we can't see it. Solar prominences and other features can be huge, stretching across the face of the Sun, again hiding part from view. And, of course, in astronomy more is better. Having a better view, a better vantage point, just plain ol' more data, is a big help. Nifty video below: Read More
by Robert Quigley Feb 7th
Speaking with Popular Mechanics , educator and beloved childhood idol Bill Nye had some interesting thoughts on science education in the U.S., and particularly how the politicization of teaching evolution in classrooms hurts American students and hamstrings good teachers. Nye : [Teachers are] doing their job but they're under tremendous pressure. The 60 percent who are cautious--those are the people who are really up against it. They want to keep their job, and they love teaching science, and their children are really excited about it, and yet they've got some people insisting they can't teach the most fundamental idea in all of biology. There's the phrase "just a theory." Which shows you that I have failed. I'm a failure. When we have a theory in science, it's the greatest thing you can have. Relativity is a theory, and people test it every which way. They test it and test it and test it. Gravity is a theory. People have landed spacecraft on the moon within a few feet of accuracy because we understand gravity so well. People make flu vaccinations that stop people from getting sick. Farmers raise crops with science; they hybridize them and make them better with every generation. That's all evolution. Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact. ( Popular Mechanics via Boing Boing ) Read More |
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Unfit for Command: Presidential Historian's Horrifying Warning About Donald Trump (VIDEO)
Last week may have been the worst one so far for Donald Trump's floundering presidency. His new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, unleashed a profane rant against his White House colleagues. His Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, got the boot. The attempt to kill healthcare went down in flames as a Republican controlled Senate couldn't pass three different versions. He misfired with an illegal proposal to discriminate against transgender soldiers. And the Boy Scouts felt compelled to issue a public apology after Trump's politicized rant at their Jamboree. These failures cap a six month span of domestic dysfunction and international embarrassment.
[LATE BREAKING:] Scaramucci has been fired . Sources say that the new White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, wanted to select his own team. Translation: Get that vulgar piece af crap out of my White House.
Not surprisingly, Trump is living in a bubble of narcissistic grandiosity. He is convinced that everything is going tremendously and that he is the bestest president ever. He tweeted Monday morning:
Trump Tweets:
Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages raising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2017
Of course, the performance of the stock market, the economy, and employment, has to be credited to the Obama administration. All of those metrics were ascending throughout his term and were the result of his policies. There has not been a single Trump initiative implemented that would impact any of them. Nothing on taxes, trade, jobs, and no budget has been passed in Congress. Trump is running on Obama's fumes.
What's more, if wages are "raising" (sic), it's only because Democrats increased the minimum wage despite the opposition of Republicans. And if the border is secure, then we don't need that damn wall anymore, right? As for the Supreme Court, the Senate couldn't get Justice Gorsuch through without blowing up the rules to allow a 51-vote confirmation. Considering all of the above, Trump's assertion that there is "No WH chaos" is absurd in the extreme.
Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was asked about the state of the Trump administration. Host Brian Stelter noted that observers from across the political spectrum were stunned. They've been using words like "crisis" and "chaos" to describe the current White House. Brinkley responded with his view that "It's in utter disarray," and that "Donald Trump [is] unfit for command." Then he spelled out in detail where it has all gone so horribly wrong (video below):
Douglas Brinkley Speaks
"I think when you have a White House communications director that uses the kind of foul language that he does against fellow employees of the federal government, and makes threats the way that he did, and that's supposed to be your solution to the United States' way they are going to communicate to the world? It means Donald Trump picked the wrong person to be his communications director.
"He has a White House that's leaking like crazy. As just mentioned, there are people ready to whistle-blow. He thinks that you can govern by chaos and it's not working. It is true he has that 36 percent of the American public backing him, but that means over 60 percent of Americans think that he is doing a miserable job. And the rest of the world is laughing.
"We have a crisis in North Korea and we're playing these reality TV, big time wrestling games because Donald Trump was weaned and raised on television. And it's become like a TV episodic president where every day you've got to say something sensational to make sure that your name is in the headlines.
"We had a problem with Nixon. If there is any president this is like, it's Nixon. You listen to the Nixon Watergate tapes - the secret tapes - and you hear Nixon ramble and it sounds like Donald Trump's tweets. And it didn't turn out well for Nixon."
'Nuff Said
It's hard to add anything that. Except for what Brinkley himself added:
"The key to Donald Trump is just this kind of blind fierce loyalty, and that's what Franco expected in Spain. It's what Mussolini wanted in Italy. These are kind of ways in which you're asking people to march in lock-step with you."
In other words, Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator. He has demonstrated that he has never had the intelligence, experience, or character to be a legitimate president. He is a joke who parlayed his role as a TV game show host to the White House on the strength of his celebrity and ability to lie. But now the consequences of making such an incompetent, unethical fraud the head of state are becoming painfully clear. Hopefully he won't be in charge of anything for much longer.
Historian Douglas Brinkley: "Trump thinks you can govern by chaos -- and it's not working." https://t.co/9HvyJxk7I4
-- Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) July 30, 2017
Mark Howard is the artist/author responsible for News Corpse , a website dedicated to analysis of the media and the right-wing bias inherent in a corporate-dominated media marketplace. His work has been published by nationally known progressive outlets such as Alternet and Salon. Follow News Corpse on Twitter and Facebook .
Mark Howard is the artist/author responsible for News Corpse , a website dedicated to analysis of the media and the right-wing bias inherent in a corporate-dominated media marketplace. His work has been published by nationally known progressive outlets such as Alternet and Salon. Follow News Corpse on Twitter and Facebook . |
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Not surprisingly, Trump is living in a bubble of narcissistic grandiosity. He is convinced that everything is going tremendously and that he is the bestest president ever. |
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Daytona Beach, Fla. -- 'Bikers welcome here!" read the signs at almost every establishment, and given that over half a million of them arrive each March for the city's annual Bike Week, it is a sensible policy. They come from all 50 states -- even Alaska and Hawaii -- and have gathered almost every year since 1937. The Second World War caused a brief hiatus (in lieu, those not overseas held an informal rally), but when the fighting ended, the tradition was resumed, and it has now grown to be the joint biggest motorcycle convocation in the United States -- an honor it shares with South Dakota's more famous meeting in Sturgis.
For one kaleidoscopic fortnight, Daytona's warm air is filled with engine noise and rock music and its streets are marked out in fast-moving chrome and brightly colored lights. Bike Week's habitues more or less take over their host city, changing its character from slightly run down Floridian beach town to hot mess. Theirs is the America of Hotel California -- of dark desert highways, flickering neon signs, the wind in your hair, and the ineffable, perhaps apocryphal, "spirit of '69." America is deemed the Great Satan by the modern era's neo-puritans, primarily because it is the greatest tempter on earth; and its glittering charms are nowhere more plainly on offer than on its roads. It is a land of contradictions, in which churches stand next to strip clubs -- and in Daytona there are cars and bikes parked outside both.
Motorcycles have long been associated both with America's harder edge and with liberty itself. It is no accident that, in The Great Escape , Steve McQueen rides away from tyranny and toward freedom on the back of a Triumph two-wheeler, but one also gets the impression that if Satan were to use earthly forms of transport to deliver his seductions, he, too, would be carried along the highways and byways on the back of a chopper. (Indeed, hellfire -- and the underworld more generally -- is a favorite decorative theme among those who ride, and bats, skulls, and the Grim Reaper are among the most popular decals.) Bikers thus inspire mixed reactions in the public's imagination, and it is maybe inevitable that even those who feel positive toward them tend also to perceive their culture as being emblematic of an unfortunate American tendency to metamorphose liberty into license and make fiends of the free.
In a seminal 1965 essay for The Nation , a young Hunter S. Thompson noted that the bad reputation bikers enjoyed was largely undeserved, but that there was no smoke without fire. Cataloguing both the true and the false accusations, Thompson argued that, while a few on the fringe exhibited dangerous -- even criminal -- tendencies, most were in fact just "harmless weekend types . . . no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers." This has most likely been true from the outset, but truth does not always reign in the court of public opinion, and the bad-boy image has stuck, tarnishing all with the transgressions of a few. This stubborn perception does a disservice to what is actually a remarkably conservative and deeply patriotic group.
They're religious, too. Daytona Beach is filled with churches, and on weekends during the rally the churches are filled with bikers. Here too -- giant signs make it abundantly clear -- they are "welcome." The city's Catholic Church of the Basilica of St. Paul does not just invite riders to attend services but also holds a "Blessing of the Bikes" on the festival's opening Sunday. Farther down, opposite the beach itself, there is a rudimentary "Drive-In Christian Church," which offers space to thousands of motorcycles in front of a bare wooden stage. Despite their menacing appearances, bikers are a surprisingly pious bunch, and Christian clubs proliferate among them. There are the Bikers for Jesus, the Bikers for Christ, the Bikers for Life, Christ's Cruisers, and a whole host more, all operating under the aegis of a prominent Evangelical group, the Christian Motorcyclists Association. The CMA's 1,116 American chapters comprise 125,000 members, and their organization is thriving: In 2010, CMA affiliates were active in over 30 countries, donated $806,841.65 to partner ministries, and preached to over 170,000 people -- most of them motorcyclists -- around the United States. In Daytona Beach, they have come to the right place -- there are 246 churches in a city of only 60,000 people, and while the festival is on, attendance rises dramatically.
#page#In a local Five Guys burger joint at lunchtime, I stop and talk with three big and burly men, each with a shaved head, a de rigueur salt-and-pepper horseshoe mustache, and a vaguely mean image. They are all members of the Chariots of Light club, and have come down from Pennsylvania for the festival, stopping on the way to preach the Gospel and to pray against abortion. I ask what they are about, and the biggest man in the group points to his expansive right bicep, on which a faded tattoo of a cross with a motorcycle leaning against it is sandwiched between the words, "I ride for Him because He died for me." The word "LOVE" is inked in capital letters across the knuckles of his left hand. All three wear identical leather jackets, identifying them as members of their club and advertising quotations from Philippians and the Gospel of John.
N ot all the bikers at the rally carry slogans on their clothes and motorcycles, but those who do promote overwhelmingly conservative sentiments. Many fly American flags and exhibit slogans about freedom and the open road. Others are more directly political. The Rolling Thunder group -- which boasts more than 90 chapters nationwide, is overwhelmingly populated by veterans, and endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004 -- advertises its POW-MIA and veterans'-rights causes. (Its 2011 ride on Washington, D.C., attracted 400,000 participants.) There are bumper stickers that simply read "God and Country," or "It's Time for Another Tea Party," or "Helmet Laws Suck: Let Those Who Ride, Decide." About the only arguably liberal cause I see endorsed in my three days among them is the legalization of marijuana, which National Review has also long supported.
With the notable exception of the Ron Paul contingent -- which is well represented and typically vocal -- bikers tend to take positions rather than endorse candidates and, more than anything, seem fed up with the little things: with mandatory-helmet laws, interference with gun rights, and incessant nannying about food and drink and light bulbs. They are weary of being lectured about the environment and burdened with endless mandates and taxes. One festival-goer describes the current climate as being like "having your mother constantly calling you to check whether you've eaten your f***ing vegetables."
I ask a leather-clad woman how she feels about the contraception mandate. "It has got nothing to do with the government," she scoffs. "I don't want it banned and I don't want it forced. I run my own business and nobody's sex life ain't no one's but their own." Then she pauses and looks me up and down, perhaps mistaking me for someone who might wish to force or ban contraception. "What am I, twelve years old?" she asks. (It is abundantly clear from the way she is dressed that she is not.) Her attitude is typical. Bikers exhibit much that is consonant with individual liberty and with its most enduring icons. They mistrust rules and reject the supposedly superior wisdom of others. Ruggedly individual, they are the new cowboys -- the tattooed pastors of America's iron horses in an era in which trains have lost their romance and cars all look the same, and theirs is a simple refrain: Leave Me Alone.
That bikers lean rightward, with their knees close to the floor, is unsurprising. Personal transport has always been a redoubt of freedom -- for good and for ill -- but biking is particularly so. Although theirs is an inherently solo enterprise, bikers look out for one another; but they do not need to be instructed to do so, and some I speak to wonder out loud "what the hell is wrong with people" who need to be commanded to help out.
That bikers tend to be conservative is also demographically predictable. The first question I ask myself as I leave the airport and the bikes swarm around my car is, Where are all the young people and women? I am not helped by the local classic-rock radio station, which offers only the lazy platitudes by which our superficial age is marked, repeatedly pretending that motorcycle riders are a diverse crowd: "There is no such thing as an ' average biker,'" one such advert claims, before casually relating that black hip-hop producers and female first-grade teachers own Harley-Davidsons too.
#page#That is probably true, but the sentiment is disingenuous: There demonstrably is such a thing as an average biker. The gathering overwhelmingly consists of white, middle-aged men with the same facial hair and clothes -- who enjoy both sufficient income and sufficient free time to sustain an expensive and time-consuming hobby. The few under-forties who attend Bike Week appear on the non-American bikes -- "Jap bikes," they are called by the Harley-Davidson crowd -- and largely keep themselves to themselves. (They better resemble the cast of Jersey Shore than the Hells Angels and stick out like sore thumbs in the sea of leather and tattoos.) If women are riding they're riding pillion. No motorcycle with a man on it is ever driven by a woman, for that would upset the natural order; but then women tend not to be involved in the subculture, period. Nearly 600,000 people have descended on Daytona Beach for the rally, but only 130 take part in the Women's Ride, and this is a record turnout.
The ranks are disproportionately filled with professionals, ex-military types, and retirees. The average age of a Harley owner is 47, and his median household income is $83,000 -- well above the national median. Moreover, the income and age brackets are both rising: A recent study commissioned by Harley-Davidson showed that in 1987 half of all Harley riders were under age 35 and that their average household income was $38,000. If the trend continues, by 2035 the average biker will be receiving Social Security checks. In fact, many attendees already do. I meet a group of retirees from Wisconsin -- all Vietnam vets -- who have ridden down to Florida together. They plan to attend the entire festival. All in all, their time commitment is the best part of a month.
A nd what of the bad guys? Well, where there are cowboys, there will always be outlaws, and the "one percenters" -- a term coined by an exasperated American Motorcycle Association to describe those few whose income is derived from illegal sources such as crystal-meth production and whose involvement in the subculture is not desired -- still occasionally color the sport for all. Indeed, as recently as 1999, Taco Bowman, the "world leader" of the American Outlaws Association -- perhaps the largest and most dangerous "one percenter" group of its time -- was sentenced to two life terms in prison for carrying out multiple murders and bombings. So serious were the charges against him that Bowman, who boasts a swastika tattoo and has ties to various white-supremacist groups, made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1998.
Sipping giant beers, my retired friends from Wisconsin tell me that, in some parts of the country, they are still very much treated with suspicion. "You have to stay in a lot of hotels when you cross the country," one explains, "and if the weather is bad, you don't always get to choose where you stop. A few places are not happy when nine guys in leather jackets turn up on bikes. They can freak. You have to judge it carefully." While the outlaw tradition may still be honored in some circles, it is not honored by those I meet in Daytona. Biking is still ceremonially communal, but its edge has largely been blunted and the most its participants are guilty of is a wholesome enthusiasm for their hobby. Like Las Vegas, motorcycling has become a pastiche on itself.
By and large, bikers such as the Wisconsin nine are more likely to take part in groups such as the Patriot Guard Riders, which was formed in 2005 in response to the execrable Westboro Baptist Church's picketing of the funerals of fallen soldiers. The Patriot Guard comprises various existing clubs, including military groups such as the In Country Vets Motorcycle Club, the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, the American Legion Riders, and Rolling Thunder, in addition to a 20,000-strong law-enforcement group called the Blue Knights, and the stalwart Christian Motorcycle Association. Its stated mission is to "show . . . sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families, and their communities" and to "shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors," and the group's members, its website notes, have "one thing in common besides motorcycles," that being "an unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America's freedom and security."
Indeed, if there is one unifying sentiment among the people I have come across, it is love of country. It is profoundly important to most that Harley-Davidson is an American brand, and rare to see a biker without at least one American flag on his clothes or his bikes -- often on both. They constitute a legion of volunteers on wheels, representing -- in sundry ways, and in the pursuit of various good ends -- the "vast number of voluntary associations" of which Tocqueville spoke so warmly. They make their cases in rough language, and they go about their business ostentatiously; but their unifying cause is freedom and their sworn allegiance is to America -- and, with this in mind, we might well agree with the ubiquitous signs around Daytona Beach: Bikers Welcome Here.
Charles C. W. Cooke -- Charles C. W. Cooke is the editor of National Review Online . @charlescwcooke |
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