Last Empire Standing: Pyrrhic Victories on a Smoldering Planet

And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth

by Tom Engelhardt  - Tom Dispatch

It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.

And then there was one. 

 

There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight. There wasn’t even a name for such a state (or state of mind). “Superpower” had already been used when there were two of them. 

 

 “Hyperpower” was tried briefly but didn’t stick. “Sole superpower” stood in for a while but didn’t satisfy. “Great Power,” once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires. Some started speaking about a “unipolar” world in which all roads led... well, to Washington.

To this day, we’ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly -- above all, to Washington -- became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the Cold War's victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun. It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot. It seemed like the end of the line.

 

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Last Empire?
 

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For those of you in the mood to donate to this website, keep in mind that you can still get signed, personalized copies of Nick Turse’s surprise bestseller Kill Anything That Moves, or his TomDispatch book The Changing Face of Empire, not to speak of my books, The End of Victory Culture and The United States of Fear, or even Terminator Planet, the drone war book Nick and I did together. Check out our donation page for the specifics and know in advance that your contributions really do keep TD alive and kicking. Tom]

 

And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism 

and the Decline of Planet Earth

by Tom Engelhardt

The Last Empire?

After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over. The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way -- except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world.

As a start, the U.S. was an empire of global capital. With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian “capitalist roaders”), there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking. There was Washington’s way -- and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) -- or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin.

In addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power. By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America's leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using “the arms race” to spend its opponent into an early grave. And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one.

In the years that followed, it would outpace all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts. It housed the world’s most powerful weapons makers, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop future weaponry for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a near monopoly on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn’t).

It had an empire of bases abroad, more than 1,000 of them spanning the globe, also an unprecedented phenomenon. And it was culturally dominant, again in a way that made comparisons with other moments ludicrous. Like American weapons makers producing things that went boom in the night for an international audience, Hollywood's action and fantasy films took the world by storm. From those movies to the golden arches, the swoosh, and the personal computer, there was no other culture that could come close to claiming such a global cachet.

The key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment -- Europe and Japan -- maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington’s “nuclear umbrella.” No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon proclaimed “the end of history,” and the victory of “liberal democracy” or “freedom” was celebrated as if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to offer.

No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and supporting pundits would begin to claim that the British and Roman empires had been second-raters by comparison. No wonder that key figures in and around the George W. Bush administration dreamed of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and possibly over the globe itself (as well as a Pax Republicana at home). They imagined that they might actually prevent another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to challenge American power. Ever.

No wonder they had remarkably few hesitations about launching their incomparably powerful military on wars of choice in the Greater Middle East. What could possibly go wrong? What could stand in the way of the greatest power history had ever seen?

Assessing the Imperial Moment, Twenty-First-Century-Style

Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s remarkable is how much -- and how little -- has changed.

On the how-much front: Washington’s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet. It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe’s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly -- so everyone said -- plunged into a “multipolar world.”

Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax Americana in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing. The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the hemorrhaging of national treasure into losing trillion-dollar wars, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.

And yet, in the how-little category: the Europeans and Japanese remained nestled under that American “umbrella,” their territories still filled with U.S. bases. In the Euro Zone, governments continued to cut back on their investments in both NATO and their own militaries. Russia remained a country with a sizeable nuclear arsenal and a reduced but still large military. Yet it showed no signs of “superpower” pretensions. Other regional powers challenged unipolarity economically -- Turkey and Brazil, to name two -- but not militarily, and none showed an urge either singly or in blocs to compete in an imperial sense with the U.S.

Washington’s enemies in the world remained remarkably modest-sized (though blown to enormous proportions in the American media echo-chamber). They included a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a minority insurgency or two, and relatively small groups of Islamist “terrorists.” Otherwise, as one gauge of power on the planet, no more than a handful of other countries had even a handful of military bases outside their territory.

Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas. Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward the national security state. Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.

And then, of course, there was China. On the planet that humanity has inhabited these last several thousand years, can there be any question that China would have been the obvious pick to challenge, sooner or later, the dominion of the reigning great power of the moment? Estimates are that it will surpass the U.S. as the globe’s number one economy by perhaps 2030.

Right now, the Obama administration seems to be working on just that assumption. With its well-publicized “pivot” (or “rebalancing”) to Asia, it has been moving to “contain” what it fears might be the next great power. However, while the Chinese are indeed expanding their military and challenging their neighbors in the waters of the Pacific, there is no sign that the country’s leadership is ready to embark on anything like a global challenge to the U.S., nor that it could do so in any conceivable future. Its domestic problems, from pollution to unrest, remain staggering enough that it’s hard to imagine a China not absorbed with domestic issues through 2030 and beyond.

And Then There Was One (Planet)

Militarily, culturally, and even to some extent economically, the U.S. remains surprisingly alone on planet Earth in imperial terms, even if little has worked out as planned in Washington. The story of the years since the Soviet Union fell may prove to be a tale of how American domination and decline went hand-in-hand, with the decline part of the equation being strikingly self-generated.

And yet here’s a genuine, even confounding, possibility: that moment of “unipolarity” in the 1990s may really have been the end point of history as human beings had known it for millennia -- the history, that is, of the rise and fall of empires. Could the United States actually be the last empire? Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building? One thing is increasingly clear: whatever the state of imperial America, something significantly more crucial to the fate of humanity (and of empires) is in decline. I’m talking, of course, about the planet itself.

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature. The very definition of success -- more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere -- is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure. The greater the “success,” the more intense the droughts, the stronger the storms, the more extreme the weather, the higher the rise in sea levels, the hotter the temperatures, the greater the chaos in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure. The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire? On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?

Every factor that would normally lead toward “greatness” now also leads toward global decline. This process -- which couldn’t be more unfair to countries having their industrial and consumer revolutions late -- gives a new meaning to the phrase “disaster capitalism.”

Take the Chinese, whose leaders, on leaving the Maoist model behind, did the most natural thing in the world at the time: they patterned their future economy on the United States -- on, that is, success as it was then defined. Despite both traditional and revolutionary communal traditions, for instance, they decided that to be a power in the world, you needed to make the car (which meant the individual driver) a pillar of any future state-capitalist China. If it worked for the U.S., it would work for them, and in the short run, it worked like a dream, a capitalist miracle -- and China rose.

It was, however, also a formula for massive pollution, environmental degradation, and the pouring of ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere in record amounts. And it's not just China. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about that country's ravenous energy use, including its possible future “carbon bombs,” or the potential for American decline to be halted by new extreme methods of producing energy (fracking, tar-sands extraction, deep-water drilling). Such methods, however much they hurt local environments, might indeed turn the U.S. into a “new Saudi Arabia.” Yet that, in turn, would only contribute further to the degradation of the planet, to decline on an ever-larger scale.

What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining? What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events -- the rise and fall of empires -- fuse into a single disastrous system?

What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

Media Takes Spring Break on Kent State Killings "Conspiracy Theorists" Proved Right

The lethal media silence on Kent State's smoking guns

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman - www.freepress.org

The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder. But the definitive proof of this monumental historic reality is not, apparently, worthy of significant analysis or comment in today's mainstream media.

After 37 years of official denial and cover-up, tape-recorded evidence, that has existed for decades and has been in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has finally been made public.

It proves what "conspiracy theorists" have argued since 1970---that there was a direct military order leading to the unprovoked assassination of unarmed students. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents show collusion between Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes and the FBI that aimed to terrorize anti-war demonstrators and their protests that were raging throughout the nation.

It is difficult to overstate the political and cultural impact of the killing of the four Kent State students and wounding of nine more on May 4, 1970. The nation's campuses were on fire over Richard Nixon's illegal invasion of Cambodia. Scores of universities were ripped apart by mass demonstrations and student strikes. The ROTC building at Kent burned down. The vast majority of American college campuses were closed in the aftermath, either by student strikes or official edicts.

Nixon was elected president in 1968 claiming to have a "secret plan" to end the war in Southeast Asia. But the revelation that he was in fact escalating it with the illegal bombing of what had been a peaceful non-combatant nation was more than Americans could bear.

As the ferocity of the opposition spread deep into the grassroots, Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, shot back in a series of speeches. He referred to student demonstrators as Nazi “brownshirts” and suggested that college administrators and law enforcement should "act accordingly."

On May 3, 1970---the day before National Guardsmen under his purview opened fire at Kent State--Rhodes echoed Agnew’s remarks by referring to student demonstrators as "the strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America … They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America….”

Rhodes told a reporter that the Ohio National Guard would remain at Kent State “until we get rid of them” referring to a demographic group that was overwhelmingly white, middle class and in college.

The next day, Rhodes, the administration and the FBI sent those students a lethal message.

Rhodes was the perfect messenger. Bumbling and mediocre, with a long history of underworld involvement, Rhodes was a devoted admirer of Nixon, and of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Public records reveal that Rhodes was a virtual stooge for the FBI because of the agency's files tying Rhodes directly to organized crime.

When Kent's ROTC building was torched on May 2 under suspicious circumstances (student protestors couldn't get it to light until a mysterious "biker" showed up with a canister of gasoline) it provided the perfect cover for Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard.

But contrary to law, they were supplied with live ammunition. On May 4, in the presence of a peaceful, unthreatening rally, the Guard was strung along a ridge 100 yards from the bulk of the protestors. Earlier, rocks and insults had been hurled at the Guard. But not one of the numerous investigations and court proceedings involving what happened next has ever contended any of the students were armed, or that the Guard was under threat of physical harm at the time of the shooting.

For 37 years the official cover story has been that a mysterious shot rang out and the young Guardsmen panicked, firing directly into the "mob" of students.

This week, that cover story was definitively proven to be a lie.

Prior to the shooting, a student named Terry Strubbe put a microphone at the window of his dorm, which overlooked the rally. According to the Associated Press, the 20-second tape is filled with "screaming anti-war protectors followed by the sound of gunfire."

But in an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is also heard shouting "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"

The sound of gunshots follow the word "Point." Four students soon lay dead. Two days later, two more would die at Jackson State University, as police fired without provocation into a dorm.

Strubbe gave a copy of the Kent tape to the FBI soon after the shooting (he has kept the original in a safe deposit box). Eight Guardsmen were later tried for civil rights violations, and acquitted. Neither their officers, nor Nixon, nor Agnew, nor Rhodes, nor the FBI, were ever brought to trial. But massive volumes of research---including an epic study by James A. Michener and William Gordon’s Four Dead in Ohio---strongly imply an explicit conspiracy to intimidate the national anti-war movement.

After 37 years, Strubbe's tape got its first widespread public perusal last week. Six months ago, Alan Canfora, 58, one of the nine wounded Kent students, learned it had been given to Yale University's archives. Last week he played it to a group of students and reporters at a small university theater.

The fact that the Guard got direct orders to set, aim and shoot flies directly in the face of the official cover story that they were responding in panic to a random shot fired at them, or that they were defending themselves from some kind of student attack.

In fact, it seems highly likely no shot ever rang out prior to the order to fire. Nor could the Guard, who killed a student as much as 900 feet away from the rally, say they were under any serious attack from the students.

The Kent State killings are now prominently featured in virtually every history book of the United States used in American schools. The accounts often include the famous photo of an anguished Mary Ann Vecchio crying for help next to the dead body of student protestor Jeffrey Miller. (They were 265 feet away from where the shot that killed Miller was fired.) Rendered into song by Neil Young's classic "Ohio," there are few more definitive moments in the history of this nation.

But meaningful analysis of the implications of this tape has been mysteriously missing from the American media. The Associated Press did carry a widely-runstory about the surfacing of this evidence, as did National Public Radio. But the Columbus Dispatch, in Ohio's capital, buried the report on page A-5 under the innocuous headline "Victim shares audio tape of Kent State shootings." Virtually absent from the major US media has been a concerted examination of the fact that the keystone in this monumental American saga has been re-set.

For we now know that a premeditated, unprovoked order was indeed given to National Guardsmen to fire live ammunition at peaceful, unarmed American students, killing four of them. The illegal order to arm the Guard with live ammunition in the first place could only have come from the governor of Ohio. The very loud, very public nod to shoot some "brown shirt" students somewhere in order to chill the massive student uprising against the Southeast Asian war was spewed all over the national media by the second-highest official in US government.

Now the magnitude of Kent State's impact on American politics and culture, already immense, has been significantly deepened.

Alan Canfora intends to use this tape to re-open investigations into what happened at Kent State 37 years ago.

But the media's apparent unconcern about confirmation of the official order to carry out these assassinations may bear a simple message: be prepared for them to happen again.


Bob Fitrakis's forthcoming book, THE FITRAKIS FILES: COPS, COVERUPS AND CORRUPTION, containing further background information on James A. Rhodes, is at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Harvey Wasserman's HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org.

BC Great Bear's Great Bears Imperiled by Archaic, Immoral Hunt

More Trophy Hunting Closed - GBR Spring 2013

by Pakwani, Kiff Archer 

First Nations banning trophy killing bums..
Sign hung and songs sung.
Prayer flags fly more peaceful winds.
Kwatna belongs Bears and Wolves again.

Finally lisening Qwatsinas said.
Greatest Staltmc only one.
Examples given from Elders dead.
Next generation bear saving begun.


http://www.bearcoasttours.com/

Killers scratching BCWF heads.
Gun lobby gasping last breaths.
Bears Wolves easier rest.
Protectors watching killers do next.

Throw little cash around seeing.
Tides testing and teasing.
Huge funding possibly receiving.
If enough First Nations pleasing.

BE-STRONGER-TOGETHER
-Pakwani Kiff Archer

COASTAL BEAR & WOLF PATROL-ND

The Friends of Levi Schaeffer: Citizens Together Stopping Police Impunity

Let's Stop Police Impunity in Canada: JUSTICE FOR LEVI -  WE WANT JUSTICE FOR OUR COMMUNITIES, NOT POLICE IMPUNITY

by www.justiceforlevi.org

This is a story about people deciding to take action to make sure that governments and that police are accountable to the people in Canada.

We've gotten a number of inquiries from people who would like to make a donation but are not able or comfortable with making transactions online.

Checks, money orders and the like can be send to the:

Peterborough Community Credit Union

167 Brock St   PO Box 1600
Peterborough, ON
K9H 2P6
Phone: 705-748-4481

JUSTICE FOR LEVI account # 14629

WE WANT JUSTICE FOR OUR COMMUNITIES, NOT POLICE IMPUNITY.

This is a story about people deciding to take action to make sure that governments and that police are accountable to the people in Canada.

Summary

The Coalition was formed after the police killing of Levi Schaeffer to create a supportive personal and political network of solidarity for the Schaeffer family as they joined forces with the Minty family. The families asked Ontario’s Courts to look at whether the systemic police actions of lawyer note vetting and joint lawyer retainers pursued as internal policy by the O.P.P. during S.I.U. investigations were -or were not permitted within the law laid out in Police Services Act and legislation regarding police and oversight. The families won a unanimous decision at Ontario’s highest court in November, 2011.

The decision laid out with great clarity that the police actions in question were not permitted by law and could not be permitted without greatly jeopardizing the legitimacy of investigations, breaching necessary segregation laws and threatening the sanctity of police notes used by police in courts as they appear for the crown as state witnesses.

Unhappy with the decision that they must follow the law, the police are now taking the families to the Supreme Court of Canada. We need support so that we can support by helping to pay off family legal bills and to pay logistical costs involved with going to Supreme Court.

The Story

Maybe it’s hard to imagine… but Imagine living in a country where police can do anything- even kill you or your loved ones, but do not bear appropriate consequences because they are impune. Imagine living in a country where police can function outside of the laws that bind the common people, outside of the scope of independent oversight or outside the reach of the courts of our justice system. Imagine, just for a moment, a Canada where police live by special, extrajudicial, internal laws, paid by the public but operating outside the realm of civilian law, much as the military does.


Police officers are public employees- paid to serve and protect- to enforce laws, to keep the public peace, and to safeguard against criminality. They have special responsibilities- such as acting as state witnesses in our courts of law and special rights- such as the right to bear arms and use force- including lethal force- on members of the public. These special rights and responsibilities given to police officers must be subjected to a very high level of oversight, inquiry and transparency to ensure the Canadian public that its police and its justice system are functioning responsibly, accountably and to the standards of a proud democracy.

Perhaps the most important thing police officers do is complete their notes by the end of their shift. Though this might sound trivial compared to chasing robbers and saving lives- it is an officer’s notes that lay the foundation of evidence, investigation and witnessing as members of the public come into contact with police and are brought through the Canadian justice system. Legislation and acts related to police make it clear that police notes must be written independently (without consulting with anyone else) and contemporaneously (as soon as possible after an occurrence).

In September 2009, an Ontario family whose son was killed by police that June came to realized the incredible importance of police notes. The director of the Special Investigations Unit, Ontario’s independent police oversight body- revealed that officers involved in the death of Levi Schaeffer completed their notes days after his death and all officers involved in the case submitted notes to the S.I.U. which had been reviewed and vetted by a singular lawyer for the Ontario Provincial Police Association. The Schaeffer family combined efforts with Minty family who also lost their son Douglas to police action and went, with their lawyers to asked Ontario’s courts to interpret the Police Services Act and other relevant legislation and to determine whether police lawyer note vetting was or was not permitted within the law.

On November 15th, 2011- The Ontario Superior Court of Appeal released its unanimous decision in which it clarified that police officers could, of course, contact their lawyer for general legal advice but that they could not postpone writing their notes or handing them in for the S.I.U. until after their lawyer has checked and approved them. The decision spelled out that the personal interests of an officer for self protection or protection of another member of the force, or of the force- must be understood as secondary to the sworn duty that an officer has as a public employee and professional state witness. Lawyer vetting of police notes could obstruct the well functioning of all levels of our justice system.

Unsatisfied with the courts decision, police interests now take these matters and these grieving families to the Supreme Court of Canada where police lawyers are prepared to argue that the decision laid out by Ontario’s highest court is ‘unworkable’.

On April 19th, 2013 Canada’s highest court will hear arguments and in the months that follow- render a decision- that will establish once and for all whether police in Canada- will be allowed to function from a special law- unfettered by accountability standards, legislation or the will of the public.

It is both absurd and obscene it has been left to the efforts and the pocket books of two Ontario families to insist that enormous systemic problems of impunity and lacking accountability be resolved. They continue, knowing that there can be no justice for their dead, but that there can be justice for the living… if we act fearlessly to insist that we want justice for our communities, not police impunity.

JUSTICE FOR LEVI IN THE NEWS!!!!

An article about this case publshed in the Toronto Star, the Calgary Herald and others.
By: Colin Perkel The Canadian Press, Published on Fri Apr 19

Only two weeks left for our Indiegogo fundraising campaign... Help crowd source a thank you to the families by helping to pay off one small chunk of the legal bills... Let's Stop Police Impunity.



Supreme Court to hear arguments about whether police under investigation can have lawyers vet notes.
www.thestar.com
 
Whether police officers under investigation by a civilian watchdog can have a lawyer help them prepare their notes finds its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Fundraising Campaign 

Along with lending support to the families and coordinating education and solidarity efforts, the Coalition Justice For Levi exists in order to help raise legal funds. It is absurd that it has been left to the efforts and to the pocket books of two grieving Ontario families to bring a widespread, systemic, governmental mess to light and to seek firm resolution through the courts. For many, many long years, the Office of the Attorney General of Ontario, the Special Investigations Unit, police associations, Ontario’s courts and Ontario’s justices have all been embrangled in a dispute and conflict. Each of the aforementioned parties is funded by taxpayers and each is, in fact, a public employee. Each of these parties has a substantial budget and each one has an obligation to meet their mandates as funded by the public and to assure the greatest level of transparency, efficiency and accountability possible. Where the resources and responsibility to address these matters do exist within the mechanism of the state, the cohesive political will necessary to finally and clearly resolve this systemic mess does not.

The Coalition Justice For Levi is helping with fundraising efforts because grieving families should not be forced into the poorhouse as they seek the courts’ assistance to resolve these systemic matters. The Coalition Justice For Levi is helping to raise legal funds, as well, because the outcomes of this historic court case are of great impact and relevance to the greater public interest.

Who is the Coalition Justice For Levi?

The Coalition Justice for Levi is a small group of family members, friends and community members who have directly lost loved ones to unaccountable police violence with a support circle of grassroots prison, policing and mental health organizers and media activists who work to help ensure not only that this particular story gets out but that it functions as a platform for directly linking problems of systemic police lack of accountability to struggles across communities particularly affected by unaccountable or abusive policing.

Like so many others killed by police, Levi Schaeffer and Douglas Minty were both men who suffered their whole lives from extreme mental health challenges and the associated poverty, stigmatization and criminalization. An overwhelming number of police killings relate to low income victims and their adjoining low income families who often spend all savings to bury their dead. And the links between poverty and race and gender and sexuality and ability and age… are all too clear. The Coalition works to empower an opportunity for the people most directly affected- the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and lovers of those killed to lead a struggle to affirm the right of all peoples to insist that legal frameworks exist to ensure police do not have unfettered powers. The long history of police targeting of low income, racialized, stigmatized communities reveals a particular necessity to ensure that it is those very voices receiving support to come together and say NO MORE.

What is this funding for?

The Coalition Justice For Levi is hoping to offer direct logistical needs funding to family members as they go to Ottawa for the Supreme Court of Canada. We are hoping to relieve the stress of self-funding bus trips, hotel stays, food, in city travel and incidentals for family members by taking on the bill.

All funding, aside from these logistical costs, will go towards helping to pay off a portion of owing and accruing legal bills.

It has been a long and arduous battle since the deaths of their sons, and the Schaeffer and Minty families have paid dearly. Help repay them for their efforts and determination by making a donation or by sharing this campaign so that they do not have to bare the costs alone of daring to insist that police be held to account.


Other ways you can help

*Indy-go-go campaign. Help to share and highlight this campaign

*Help to share our new 2 minute fundraising video created for this campaign

*Publish the J4L story/fundraising appeal on your website (and put up link to www.justiceforlevi.org), in newsletters, in community publications… and ask your allies to do so as well

*Pass on info about this campaign to any friendly media sources

*SAVE THE DATE: APRIL 19th 2013 ….we will need people writing, tweeting and posting on the day that we go to Supreme Court to make sure that this important day does not go unnoticed

*Link this campaign each time that you deal with police-related issues… Help us make it very clear that we are dealing with issues of systemic police impunity, not a series of bad apple scenarios

*Screen “We Want Justice for Our Communities, Not Police Impunity”, our 15 minute educational youtube video at a meeting, an event etc… or play the audio on radio shows

*Learn more and share what you learn by checking our www.justiceforlevi.org

*Send words of encouragement to info@justiceforlevi.org

Iron Man: IM3 Takes Out the (Chinese) Laundry

Iron Man 3: The Ironing 

by Peter Lee - China Matters

Interestingly (though from the point of Western media outlets, somewhat understandably), the unique suckitude of the Chinese version of Iron Man 3 (to the right is my proposed rendering for the China market one sheet, with the tag line When China said it needed Iron Man, I had no idea they meant...Man with Iron) is being blamed on the Chinese bureaucracy, despite the fact that IM3 is a Disney production, and not a Chinese co-production.

Why Disney did not take the co-production route for Iron Man 3 is something of a mystery; co-production would have entitled Disney to a bigger share of the Chinese box office—25%, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Since Iron Man 3 is doing record box office in the PRC, a certain chunk of change has been left on the table by Disney.

Apparently the upcoming China angle was presaged in the first Iron Man movie with a reference—that I missed—to Mandarin’s insidious organization, the Ten Rings, and director Shane Black would be expected to deal with the China theme in this movie, before the franchise ran out of steam.

The Mandarin, the purportedly Chinese supervillain, is the slice of Orientalizing, Fu Manchu style bullshit one would expect from a comic book. Emphasis on bullshit, from what I can see in Wikipedia (which is a treasure trove of Iron Man information, including a separate entry for the diabolical dragon Fin Fang Foom):

The Mandarin's late father was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary mainland China (and a descendant of Genghis Khan), while his late mother was an English noblewoman. Their son was born in an unnamed village in mainland China before the Communist revolution. The boy's parents died soon after his birth, and he was raised by his (paternal) aunt, who was embittered against the world and raised him with much the same attitude. Every last bit of the family fortune was spent obsessively training the Mandarin in science and combat, with the result that he was completely broke upon reaching adulthood. Unable to pay the taxes on his ancestral home, the Mandarin was evicted by the government.

So that’s why US anti-big government activists call themselves the Tea Party. It’s all because the gummint took that tea-loving Chinaman’s house! Just because his aunty forgot to file her income taxes for 18 years!

To be honest, I suspect the co-production issue was not a matter of Yellow Peril stereotyping.

Apparently, Mandarin is one of your nobler supervillains, maybe not up there in the 70% right/30% wrong decile occupied by Mao Zedong, but all in all a wise, mighty, honorable, and--in contrast to his aunty--financially astute authoritarian who is perhaps the Communist Party’s secret beau ideal of the perfect Chinese strongman.

And, after all, Marvel, as part of its world-conquering (film) strategy, inserted the Chinese theme several years ago, and in Iron Man 3 came up with a movie the Chinese censors were happy to release to a mainland audience.

No, judging from the description of the comic book Mandarin: The Story of My Life, I suspect that the whole Mandarin/Oriental stereotyping/no co-production angle was viewed as a complex meta exercise by Shane Black, a sort of superhero Being John Malkovich :

In Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction, a new updated origin of the Mandarin is offered. Here, the Mandarin kidnaps a young up and coming film producer to tell his life's story. He relates the same story he once told Iron Man in Tales of Suspense of his English noblewoman mother and his schooling at the finest boarding schools in the land.

The director begins to learn that much of what the Mandarin says is contradictory and false with photos from this time staged (it is hinted that the Mandarin had used one of his own rings to make himself believe this tapestry of half truths) and discovers a different tale of the Mandarin's origins: The Mandarin was the son of a opium den prostitute who went on to become a powerful underworld figure before discovering the Ten Rings of Power in an alien craft …

Angered at the Mandarin holding his wife hostage, the director shoots the movie as he wishes not as the Mandarin dictates. The Mandarin denounces this telling of his past as lies and angrily destroys the cinema in which it was being shown, before having the director killed.

Later he regrets murdering the director, noting that he really did love his films.

Everybody got that?

Good luck trying to explain that to the China Film Bureau.

Better just forgo the co-production bennies, but show the Chinese there’s no hard feelings by helping them cash in on the can’t-miss Iron Man 3 boom with a hacktackular Chinese version.

According to reports, the much-touted Chinese version is actually four minutes of awkward and awkwardly inserted product placement footage, including the Chinese doctor guy awkwardly guzzling some Yili milk. Perhaps Yili will get better traction from this appearance than it did in Transformers 3 (Chinese engineer guy awkwardly guzzles Yili milk just before he gets killed).

Just to make sure consumers get the message (and Yili gets a decent return on the gigantic chunk of change it presumably threw at Disney and/or the Chinese), there’s an Yili commercial shown prior to the film in Chinese theaters.

Apparently, in the main feature, Yili milk is still only suitable for second-string Oriental talent, not Occidental stars, let alone spandex (or iron)-clad superheroes. Elsewhere, Yili gets some facetime with the above-the-line talent:





As far as I can tell, the copy reads "It fills one out so one can fight for righteousness!", presumably addressing Yili's target market: anxious mothers who would feed their kids fortified Yili milk so that they are the proper size, either to fight for righteousness or join China's growing ranks of obese children.

Maybe that's why the Avengers seem to be fighting with Yili milk, instead of drinking it.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, William Blum, Miko Peled, Janine Bandcroft May 6, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

The Imperial project progressed another step towards the abyss over the weekend with Israel's unprovoked air bombardment of Syria. It continues a consistent pattern of unilateral aggression followed by America and close ally Israel over especially these last twelve years, but going back much longer.

William Blum is an award-winning American journalist, founding editor of the Washington Free Press, celebrated author,and creator of The Anti-Empire Report, an internet bulletin marking the passage of his sad nation at its most historically corrupt moment.

Listen. Hear.

Blum's book titles include: 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower,' 'Killing Hope: CIA Military Interventions Since World War II,' 'Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire,' 'West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir,' and the freshly released, 'America's Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else.'

William Blum in the first half.

And; a few months ago, Israeli-American peace activist and author, Miko Peled visited Victoria, addressing a full house here at the UVic with the lecture, 'Beyond Zionism, a New Paradigm for Israel/Palestine.' Peled's first book is, 'The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.'

As Middle East tensions ratchet up, with Israel's second and third bombing attacks against neighbour Syria in as many days, it's as good a time as any to air a hopeful perspective on the seemingly intractable conflicts in the region.

Miko Peled and Beyond Zionism in the second half.

And Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around our city in the coming weeks. But first, author, historian, and US policy critic, Bill Blum and 'This Thing Called Terrorism and the United States.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Israeli Jailers Deny Water to Hunger Striking Jordanians

To Break Their Strike; Israel Denies Jordanian Detainees Access To Liquids

by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies

The Israeli Prison Authority decided, Friday, to deprive the hunger striking Jordanian detainees in its prisoners access to liquids in an attempt to force them end their strike that entered its second day.

The Jordanian Detainees Support Center reported that all liquids, except for water, have been banned for all the striking Jordanian detainees.

The Center added that, usually, hunger-striking detainees have access to water and other liquids such as mild, but Israel decided to place the Jordanian detainees in solitary confinement, and to deny them access to liquids.

Also, the Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies reported that the Palestinian detainees, held by Israel, have been unable to contact the Jordanian detainees after Israeli ordered them into solitary confinement.

On Friday, dozens of Jordanians held a protest In Amman – Jordan, demanding the government to act for the release of their sons.

There are 25 Jordanians imprisoned by Israel; they decided to hold hunger strike and demanding the Jordanian government to act for their release.

Terror and US: The Boston Bombings and What We Do and Don't Call "Terrorism"

Boston Marathon, this thing called terrorism, and the United States

by William Blum – The Anti-Empire Report #116

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?

The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy. 1 Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well. 2 The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

But if the American military sends out a bombing mission on Monday which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Tuesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Wednesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and the military then announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” … Thursday … Friday … How long before the American military loses the right to say it was an accident?

Terrorism is essentially an act of propaganda, to draw attention to a cause. The 9-11 perpetrators attacked famous symbols of American military and economic power. Traditionally, perpetrators would phone in their message to a local media outlet beforehand, but today, in this highly-surveilled society, with cameras and electronic monitoring at a science-fiction level, that’s much more difficult to do without being detected; even finding a public payphone can be near impossible.

From what has been reported, the older brother, Tamerlan, regarded US foreign policy also as being anti-Islam, as do many other Muslims. I think this misreads Washington’s intentions. The American Empire is not anti-Islam. It’s anti-only those who present serious barriers to the Empire’s plan for world domination.

The United States has had close relations with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar, amongst other Islamic states. And in recent years the US has gone to great lengths to overthrow the leading secular states of the Mideast – Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Moreover, it’s questionable that Washington is even against terrorism per se, but rather only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There has been, for example, a lengthy and infamous history of tolerance, and often outright support, for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. Hundreds of anti-Castro and other Latin American terrorists have been given haven in the US over the years. The United States has also provided support to terrorists in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.

Under one or more of the harsh anti-terrorist laws enacted in the United States in recent years, President Obama could be charged with serious crimes for allowing the United States to fight on the same side as al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Libya and Syria and for funding and supplying these groups. Others in the United States have been imprisoned for a lot less.

As a striking example of how Washington has put its imperialist agenda before anything else, we can consider the case of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention in the 1980s by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how these horrible men spent their time when they were not screaming “Death to America”. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material”. 3 This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. 4 Hekmatyar is still a prominent warlord in Afghanistan.

A similar example is that of Luis Posada who masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. He has lived a free man in Florida for many years.

USA Today reported a few months ago about a rebel fighter in Syria who told the newspaper in an interview: “The afterlife is the only thing that matters to me, and I can only reach it by waging jihad.” 5 Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have chosen to have a shootout with the Boston police as an act of suicide; to die waging jihad, although questions remain about exactly how he died. In any event, I think it’s safe to say that the authorities wanted to capture the brothers alive to be able to question them.

It would be most interesting to be present the moment after a jihadist dies and discovers, with great shock, that there’s no afterlife. Of course, by definition, there would have to be an afterlife for him to discover that there’s no afterlife. On the other hand, a non-believer would likely be thrilled to find out that he was wrong.

Let us hope that the distinguished statesmen, military officers, and corporate leaders who own and rule America find out in this life that to put an end to anti-American terrorism they’re going to have to learn to live without unending war against the world. There’s no other defense against a couple of fanatic young men with backpacks. Just calling them insane or evil doesn’t tell you enough; it may tell you nothing.

But this change in consciousness in the elite is going to be extremely difficult, as difficult as it appears to be for the parents of the two boys to accept their sons’ guilt. Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, stated after the Boston attack: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks … We should be asking ourselves at this moment, ‘How many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?’” 6

Officials in Canada and Britain as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice have called for Falk to be fired. 7

President Kennedy’s speech, half a century ago

I don’t know how many times in the 50 years since President John F. Kennedy made his much celebrated 1963 speech at American University in Washington, DC 8 I’ve heard or read that if only he had lived he would have put a quick end to the war in Vietnam instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years, and that the Cold War might have ended 25 years sooner than it did. With the 50th anniversary coming up June 13 we can expect to hear a lot more of the same, so I’d like to jump the gun and offer a counter-view.

Kennedy declared:

Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war … that there is a very real threat of a preventative war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union” … [and that] the political aims – and I quote – “of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries … [and] to achieve world domination … by means of aggressive war.”

It is indeed refreshing that an American president would utter a thought such as:

“It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write.” This is what radicals in every country wonder about their leaders, not least in the United States. For example, “incredible claims such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war’.”

In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States had unleashed many different types of war, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat – one or more of these in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Congo, Haiti, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil. This is all in addition to the normal and routine CIA subversion of countries all over the world map. Did Kennedy really believe that the Soviet claims were “incredible”?

And did he really doubt that that the driving force behind US foreign policy was “world domination”? How else did he explain all the above interventions (which have continued non-stop into the 21st century)? If the president thought that the Russians were talking nonsense when they accused the US of seeking world domination, why didn’t he then disavow the incessant US government and media warnings about the “International Communist Conspiracy”? Or at least provide a rigorous definition of the term and present good evidence of its veracity.

Quoting further: “Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.” No comment.

“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people.” Unless of course the people foolishly insist on some form of socialist alternative. Ask the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, British Guiana and Cuba, just to name some of those in Kennedy’s time.

“At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends …” American presidents have been speaking of “our friends” for many years. What they all mean, but never say, is that “our friends” are government and corporate leaders whom we keep in power through any means necessary – the dictators, the kings, the oligarchs, the torturers – not the masses of the population, particularly those with a measure of education.

“Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides.”

Persistent, yes. Patient, often. But moral, fostering human rights, democracy, civil liberties, self-determination, not fawning over Israel … ? As but one glaring example, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, perhaps the last chance for a decent life for the people of that painfully downtrodden land; planned by the CIA under Eisenhower, but executed under Kennedy.

“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”

See all of the above for this piece of hypocrisy. And so, if no nation interfered in the affairs of any other nation, there would be no wars. Brilliant. If everybody became rich there would be no poverty. If everybody learned to read there would be no illiteracy.

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

So … Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and literally dozens of other countries then, later, and now, all the way up to Libya in 2012 … they all invaded the United States first? Remarkable.

And this was the man who was going to end the war in Vietnam very soon after being re-elected the following year? Lord help us.
Bush’s legacy

This is not to put George W. Bush down. That’s too easy, and I’ve done it many times. No, this is to counter the current trend to rehabilitate the man and his Iraqi horror show, which partly coincides with the opening of his presidential library in Texas. At the dedication ceremony, President Obama spoke of Bush’s “compassion and generosity” and declared that: “He is a good man.” The word “Iraq” did not pass his lips. The closest he came at all was saying “So even as we Americans may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families.” 9 Should morality be that flexible? Even for a politician? Obama could have just called in sick.

At the January 31 congressional hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, Senator John McCain ripped into him for his critique of the Iraq war:

“The question is, were you right or were you wrong?” McCain demanded, pressing Hagel on why he opposed Bush’s decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the so-called ‘surge’.

“I’m not going to give you a yes-or-no answer. I think it’s far more complicated than that,” Hagel responded. He said he would await the “judgment of history.”

Glaring at Hagel, McCain ended the exchange with a bitter rejoinder: “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it.” 10

Before the revisionist history of the surge gets chiseled into marble, let me repeat part of what I wrote in this report at the time, December 2007:

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. A recent analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: “The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.”

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead, wounded, in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. So the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas? nicht wahr?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down. On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like … well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq”; as well as exaggerating “Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.” The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

How long can it be before vacation trips to “Exotic Iraq” are flashed across our TVs? “Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon”. Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a “business development/tourism” expert to work in Baghdad, “with a particular focus on tourism and related services.” 11

Another argument raised again recently to preserve George W.’s legacy is that “He kept us safe”. Hmm … I could swear that he was in the White House around the time of September 11 … What his supporters mean is that Bush’s War on Terrorism was a success because there wasn’t another terrorist attack in the United States after September 11, 2001 while he was in office; as if terrorists killing Americans is acceptable if it’s done abroad. Following the American/Bush strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there were literally scores of terrorist attacks – including some major ones – against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific: military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States.

Even the claim that the War on Terrorism kept Americans safe at home is questionable. There was no terrorist attack in the United States during the 6 1/2 years prior to the one in September 2001; not since the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It would thus appear that the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States is the norm.
William Blum speaking in Wisconsin, near Minnesota

Saturday, July 13th, the 11th Annual Peacestock: A Gathering for Peace will take place at Windbeam Farm in Hager City, WI. Peacestock is a mixture of music, speakers, and community for peace in an idyllic location near the Mississippi, just one hour’s drive from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Peacestock is sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Chapter 115, and has a peace-themed agenda. Kathy Kelly, peace activist extraordinaire, will also speak.

You can camp there and be fed well, meat or vegetarian. Full information at: http://www.peacestockvfp.org
22


Notes

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapters 1 and 2, for cases up to about 2003; later similar cases are numerous; e.g., Glenn Greenwald, “They Hate US for our Occupations”, Salon, October 12, 2010 ↩
Huffington Post, April 20, 2013; Washington Post, April 21 ↩
Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990), p.149-50. ↩
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II ↩
USA Today, December 3, 2012 ↩
ForeignPolicyJournal.com, April 21, 2013 ↩
The Telegraph (London), April 25, 2013; Politico.com, April 24 ↩
Full text of speech ↩
Remarks by President Obama at Dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library ↩
Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013 ↩
Anti-Empire Report, #52, December 11, 2007 ↩

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.


← Issue #115

Green Giants That Would Profit First the Planet's Destruction

The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction

by Naomi Klein

A new movement has erupted demanding divestment from fossil fuel polluters – and Big Green is in their sights.

'Purists will point out no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires.'

Illustration by Belle Mellor

The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the "Fossil Free UK" banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.

Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).

There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. We believe that educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other institutions that serve the public good should divest from fossil fuels." I am proud to have been part of the group at 350.org that worked with students and other partners to develop the Fossil Free campaign. But I now realise that an important target is missing from the list: the environmental organisations themselves.

You can understand the oversight. Green groups raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to make the catastrophic inevitable. According to the UK's Carbon Tracker Initiative (on whose impeccable research the divestment movement is based), the fossil fuel sector holds five times more carbon in its reserves than can be burned while still leaving us a good shot of limiting warming to 2C. One would assume that green groups would want to make absolutely sure that the money they have raised in the name of saving the planet is not being invested in the companies whose business model requires cooking said planet, and which have been sabotaging all attempts at serious climate action for more than two decades. But in some cases at least, that was a false assumption.

Maybe that shouldn't come as a complete surprise, since some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading, carbon offsets, natural gas as a "bridge fuel" – what these policies all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon. We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement – using the power of the market to fix market failures.

Now it turns out that some of these groups are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with is serious. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded securities, and boasts that its piggybank is "among the 100 largest endowments in the country". The Wildlife Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment of the World Wildlife Fund–US is worth $195m.

Let me be absolutely clear: plenty of green groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organisations such as Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don't have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct investments "we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil fuels, and other areas of the energy sector". However, the NRDC continues to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to "divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years".)

Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It's a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites can both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?

Clearly not. And it makes even less sense to raise money in the name of fighting climate change, only to invest that money in, say, ExxonMobil stocks. Yet that is precisely what some groups appear to be doing. Conservation International, notorious for its partnerships with oil companies and other bad actors (the CEO of Northrop Grumman is on its board, for God's sake), has close to $22m invested in publicly traded securities and, according to a spokesperson, "we do not have any explicit policy prohibiting investment in energy companies".

The same goes for Ocean Conservancy, which has $14.4m invested in publicly traded securities, including hundreds of thousands in "energy", "materials" and "utilities" holdings. A spokesperson confirmed in writing that the organisation does "not have an environmental or social screen investment policy". Neither organisation would divulge how much of its holdings were in fossil fuel companies or release a list of its investments. But according to Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, unless an institution specifically directs its investment managers not to invest in fossil fuels, it will almost certainly hold some stock, simply because those stocks (including coal-burning utilities) make up about 13% of the US market, according to one standard index. "All investors are basically invested in fossil fuels," says Apfel. "You can't be an investor that is not invested in fossil fuels, unless you've actually worked very hard to ensure that you're not."

Another group that appears very far from divesting is the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its financial statement for fiscal year 2012 describes a subcategory of investments that includes "energy, mining, oil drilling, and agricultural businesses". How much of WCS's $377m endowment is being held in energy and drilling companies? It failed to provide that information despite repeated requests.

The WWF-US told me that it doesn't invest directly in corporations – but it refused to answer questions about whether it applies environmental screens to its very sizable mixed-asset funds. The National Wildlife Federation Endowment used to apply environmental screens for its $25.7m of investments in publicly traded securities, but now, according to a spokesperson, it tells its investment managers to "look for best-in-class companies who were implementing conservation, environmental and sustainable practices". In other words, not a fossil fuel divestment policy. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy – the richest of all the green groups – has at least $22.8m invested in the energy sector, according to its 2012 financial statements. Along with WCS, TNC completely refused to answer any of my questions or provide any further details about its holdings or policies.

It would be a little surprising if TNC didn't invest in fossil fuels, given its various other entanglements with the sector. A small sample: in 2010, the Washington Post reported that TNC "has accepted nearly $10m in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations"; it counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell among the members of its Business Council; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest US coal-burning utilities, sits on its board of directors; and it runs various conservation projects claiming to "offset" the carbon emissions of oil, gas and coal companies.

The divestment question is taking these groups off guard because for decades they were able to make these kinds of deals with polluters and barely raise an eyebrow. But now, it appears, people are fed up with being told that the best way to fight climate change is to change their light bulbs and buy carbon offsets while leaving the big polluters undisturbed. And they are raring to take the fight directly to the industry most responsible for the climate crisis.

Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment movement organisers, told me:

"Just as our college and university boards are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone." But, she added, "students now know what communities facing extraction have known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone – even the big green groups – is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or with the forces wrecking the planet."

It doesn't seem like too much to ask. I mean, if the city of Seattle is divesting, shouldn't WWF do the same? Shouldn't environmental organisations be more concerned about the human and ecological risks posed by fossil fuel companies than they are by some imagined risks to their stock portfolios? Which raises another question: what are these groups doing hoarding so much money in the first place? If they believe their own scientists, this is the crucial decade to turn things around on climate. Is TNC planning to build a billion-dollar ark?

Some groups, thankfully, are rising to the challenge. A small but growing movement inside the funder world is pushing the big liberal foundations to get their investments in line with their stated missions – which means no more fossil fuels. It's time for foundations to "own what you own", says Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund. According to Dorsey, her foundation, which has been a major funder of the coal divestment campaign, is now "99% fossil free and will be completely divested by 2014".

But convincing the biggest foundations to divest will be slow, and the green groups – which are at least theoretically accountable to their members – should surely lead the way. Some are starting to do just that. The Sierra Club, for instance, now has a clear policy against investing in, or taking money from, fossil fuel companies (it once didn't, which caused major controversy in the past). This is good news for the Sierra Club's $15m in investments in publicly traded securities. However, its affiliated organisation, the Sierra Club Foundation, has a much bigger portfolio – with $61.7m invested – and it is still in the process of drafting a full divestment policy, according to Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune. He stressed that "we are fully confident that we can get as good if not better returns from the emerging clean energy economy than we can from investing in the dirty fuels from the past".

For a long time, forming partnerships with polluters was how the green groups proved they were serious. But the young people demanding divestment – as well as the grassroots groups fighting fossil fuels wherever they are mined, drilled, fracked, burned, piped or shipped – have a different definition of seriousness. They are serious about winning. And the message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one yourself.


First published in The Nation; www.naomiklein.org

Palast of Kazakhstan: In Search of the Boston/Chechen Connection

Palast reports from Kazakhstan: FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation

by Greg Palast - Vice.com UK

Astana, Kazakhstan - Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked "SECRET" from the files of the FBI's Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.



[Click through to get a free download of the film Bush Family Fortunes, which contains the fascinating background to this story.]

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me. [Rocco, no fool, won't let me print his full name.]

After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers' guilt.

Here in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn't find on a map?

The second question: How did America's trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber's connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra: it's amazing what you don't see when you don't look.

And that's related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.

According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America's Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn't be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, "that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden".

Hey, it was a family affair. Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called "ABL" – Abdullah Binladden, Osama's brother.



When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that "SECRET" memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that "compassionate young man" Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).

Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI. They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents. Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?

The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself. The FBI spokesman told us at BBC:

"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."


Well, what else are we not supposed to know?

We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a "clean" phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government's half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.

Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost.

As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me,

"It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials."

It's utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it's more than likely the elder brother's connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.

The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There's surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media's new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers' uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan's "I LOVE AMERICA" schtick, noted,

"[Ruslan's] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope' sent by Tsarni."

I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan's messages. Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and has lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that "no one else ought to know" about our government playing footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.

Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast's BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, just named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store and find great Holiday Gifts for your loved ones.
Or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com