Remembering Grief on a Dying Planet

A missing item on the COP21 climate agenda: Grieving

by Robert Jensen - TeleSur

There’s an important item missing from world leaders’ agenda for the climate change summit underway in Paris: Grieving.

This 21st round of the U.N. Conference of Parties (COP21) hopes for an agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to hold the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That’s an ambitious goal, mocked by some as idealistic, but there’s nothing wrong with ambition yoked to ideals. Still, goals also must be realistic, consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, and honest about the possibilities within, and the impediments created by, the world’s economic and political systems.

Here’s one of the toughest parts of those realities we have to grapple with: Even if leaders produce a serious agreement with enforcement mechanisms, we will not be living in the same kind of world in which people created those social systems. The consequences of human recklessness define our future.

Even if pledges for emission reductions being discussed by world leaders were to be achieved, we are going to see potentially catastrophic global warming by the end of this century, and likely far earlier. The scientific community’s consensus on climate change includes not only models about what likely will happen if we don’t curtail emissions, but the extent of the warming already locked in by past emissions and the intensifying effects of climate feedback loops.

And climate disruption is only one part of the story of ecological degradation. Predictions are a fool’s game, but look at any critical measure of the health of the ecosphere on which our lives depend—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—and ask a simple question: Are we heading in the right direction?

Whether or not we want to confront any of this politically, many people have at least a visceral sense of what is coming. If we want to begin shaping a livable future, we should start grieving, collectively, for what we have lost and likely will lose. Grieving is not surrender but an acceptance of what can’t be changed and a commitment to what can be accomplished, within limits the ecosphere sets. We understand the importance of such grieving in personal contexts, when we lose loved ones, and now we need to apply it to the planet, together.

My friend Jim Koplin was the first person I knew who had faced these realities, decades ago, long before these crises were headline news. Jim was radicalized by the social movements of the 1960s and shaped by his rural roots in the dirt of the Depression-era farm on which he was born. As he focused on social justice, critiquing the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of exploitation within the human family, he was increasingly more alarmed about the effects of humans’ attempts to dominate the larger living world.

Because he refused to turn away from reality, later in his life Jim confided to his friends, “I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief.”

Jim wasn’t unhappy with his life or depressed. His grief, not only for people suffering but also for the destruction of the living systems of the world, didn’t lead him to retreat. Until he died at 79, Jim was actively engaged in political projects, public education efforts, and community organizing. His capacity to face difficult truths was a source of strength, and so important to me that after his death I wrote a book about him, Plain Radical, offering his wisdom to those who never met him.

Jim helped me understand that there are no solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it). Even many tough-minded activists willing to challenge unjust concentrations of wealth and power are reluctant to let go of a commitment to this so-called “lifestyle,” which has not produced a culture of life but a kind of death cult, a society that values cheap pleasures and cheap toys more than healthy people and a healthy planet.

When we refuse to grieve for what is passing away, we are more likely to cling irrationally to ways of living that cannot be sustained. When we cannot acknowledge the deep sorrow of what is lost, we scramble to hide from the reality of the loss and perpetuate the illusion that we can continue on this course. That’s why a collective grieving process should be a priority for us all, helping us let go of the delusion that we can maintain unsustainable systems.

The technological fundamentalists—those who believe we can defy all limits and invent our way out of any crisis—will tell us we need to use our imaginations. I agree, but our task is not to imagine a narcissistic science-fiction future. A decent human future—perhaps the possibility of a human future at all—depends on our ability to imagine a new relationship to the larger living world.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2015). Jensen’s other books include Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. 

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Twitter: @jensenrobertw.

Chip Falls Far from the Block: Benn Plays Corbyn's Brutus on Syria Vote

Labour’s Pro-War Left: ‘Blairites’ Team-up with Cameron to Ram Through Syria Bombing Vote

by 21st Century Wire 

December 2, 2015

21st Century Wire says…

It was reminiscent of the eve of the Iraq War vote in 2003, when Tony Blair managed to scare enough Labour members into backing an illegal war in the Middle East.

A near replay of that scenario happened tonight in the UK Parliament.

Before the ink was even dry on the vote, the bait-and-switch tactics were already underway, with Tory Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond telling the public that Britain’s ‘Anti-ISIL’ bombing operation ‘could take years.’ During a segment from BBC Newsnight Hammond was asked if the bombing would last as long as four years, to which he replied, “I hope it won’t be four years, but I caution that it isn’t going to be months.”

Despite having no legal basis under international law, and no real case being made by British Prime Minister David Cameron, the vote passed 397 to 223 in favour of bombing Syria, effective at midnight.

Today’s decision gives warfare a green light, at least in terms of the UK’s new pro-war political coalition of convenience. It will almost certainly lead to additional calls for additional US and UK “boots on the ground” in both Syria and Iraq.

Leading the Labour Party rebellion was pro-war Labour MP, Hilary Benn (image, above), who appears to have seized on an opportunity to undermine Labour’s populist leader Jeremy Corbyn – perhaps in order for Benn to then challenge the leadership position himself in the near future? Time will tell, however it’s now common knowledge that Benn’s betrayal was done with Tories in Downing Street quietly cheering him on behind the scenes – in the hopes that the new split might rid Cameron of one of the last remaining prominent anti-war , pro-civil liberty and anti-austerity voices left in government.

If Benn used something as important as a war vote in order to grab power within his party, then the backlash will not be kind at all, especially if the Syria Project rapidly goes south, as many in the know predict it will.

The 66 Labour MPs who voted for airstrikes – Full list

According to the Press Assocation 66 Labour MPs voted for the government motion approving airstrikes.

They were: Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East), Ian Austin (Dudley North), Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West), Kevin Barron (Rother Valley), Margaret Beckett (Derby South), Hilary Benn (Leeds Central), Luciana Berger (Liverpool Wavertree), Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South & Cleveland East), Ben Bradshaw (Exeter), Chris Bryant (Rhondda), Alan Campbell (Tynemouth), Jenny Chapman (Darlington), Vernon Coaker (Gedling), Ann Coffey (Stockport), Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford), Neil Coyle (Bermondsey & Old Southwark), Mary Creagh (Wakefield), Stella Creasy (Walthamstow), Simon Danczuk (Rochdale), Wayne David (Caerphilly), Gloria De Piero (Ashfield), Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South & Penarth), Jim Dowd (Lewisham West & Penge), Michael Dugher (Barnsley East), Angela Eagle (Wallasey), Maria Eagle (Garston & Halewood), Louise Ellman (Liverpool Riverside), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar & Limehouse), Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East), Caroline Flint (Don Valley), Harriet Harman (Camberwell & Peckham), Margaret Hodge (Barking), George Howarth (Knowsley), Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central), Alan Johnson (Hull West & Hessle), Graham Jones (Hyndburn), Helen Jones (Warrington North), Kevan Jones (Durham North), Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South), Liz Kendall (Leicester West), Dr Peter Kyle (Hove), Chris Leslie (Nottingham East), Holly Lynch (Halifax), Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham & Morden), Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East), Conor McGinn (St Helens North), Alison McGovern (Wirral South), Bridget Phillipson (Houghton & Sunderland South), Jamie Reed (Copeland), Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East), Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West), Joan Ryan (Enfield North), Lucy Powell (Manchester Central), Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North), Angela Smith (Penistone & Stocksbridge), John Spellar (Warley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), Gareth Thomas (Harrow West), Anna Turley (Redcar), Chuka Umunna (Streatham), Keith Vaz (Leicester East), Tom Watson (West Bromwich East), Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) and John Woodcock (Barrow & Furness).

Ironically, Hilary Benn MP is the son of Labour’s legendary anti-war activist and leader, Tony Benn, who recently passed away at the age of 89. Undoubtedly, Hilary Benn’s shrewd move to undercut his own party could leave a long sour taste in the mouths of his father’s faithful following. He will be regarded by many as a son who completely betrayed his father’s legacy as a brave voice for justice and nonintervention.

Indeed, Benn’s famous 23-year-old speech about Britain’s wars in the Middle East is still relevant today.

Watch

Let the bombing begin, but Westminster’s hawks should be warned that today’s Parliamentary decision could come back to haunt them – should they end up on the wrong side of history regarding Syria.

There’s a bigger agenda at play. Readers should know that this is all part of a step by step process in establishing a new EU Army.

Climate Technofixes and other "Negative Emissions" Myths

Climate Technofix: Weaving Carbon into Gold and Other Myths of "Negative Emissions"

by Rachel Smolker, PhD  - Independent Science News

When the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) published their most recent fifth assessment report, something surprising and deeply disturbing was lurking in the small print in chapter three on “mitigation”.

The IPCC revealed that to achieve even a recognizably normal future climate the models they reviewed relied on not only drastically reducing emissions in the future, but also on widespread use of some advanced technology that can remove some of the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere.

In fact, most (101 of 116 models they reviewed to achieve 430-480 PPM stabilization) incorporated some sort of “negative emissions” technological fix (Fuss et al., 2014).

The terminology of “negative emissions” has now entered the jargon in climate negotiations currently underway in Paris. Yet such a technology is currently nonexistent. The only approach to sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere mentioned by the IPCC as “near term available” is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, commonly referred to as “BECCS” (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration).

BECCS involves producing biomass in massive amounts and either refining it into liquid biofuels (ethanol etc.) or burning it for electricity and heat, while also capturing the resulting CO2 emissions and burying them underground.

IPCC acknowledges that there are risks and uncertainties associated with large scale BECCS. But, while IPCC has remained scientifically rigorous in their assessments of the state of our climate (chapter one of the report), when it comes to assessing “mitigation” options (chapter three), scientific rigor appears to have fallen by the wayside in favor of economic wishful thinking. The fact is that no matter how costly or difficult it may be economically and no matter how difficult to make the models “work” to lay out a path to climate stabilization, embracing fantasy technofixes is a losing strategy. We already know that for both technical and economic reasons, BECCS can never achieve “negative emissions”. In fact, in a new report on BECCS, by Biofuelwatch refers to reliance on BECCS to clean up our climate mess as being roughly as dependable as counting on a visit from carbon sucking extraterrestrials from another planet.
The reality of BECCS

There are currently only a handful of operating commercial BECCS facility in existence, based at ethanol refineries, the most notable being the Archer Daniels Midland project in Decatur Illinois. These capture CO2 from fermentation, which is cheaper and easier than capturing CO2 from other processes because fermentation results in a relatively pure CO2 stream. The Decatur project is a proof of concept project for underground storage of CO2. However, its developers never claimed to provide “negative emissions” nor even to be “carbon neutral”. A few others sell the captured fermentation CO2 for industrial applications including soft drinks and enhanced oil recovery (see below).

Meanwhile, burning wood for industrial and commercial scale electricity and heat is the bioenergy process that is scaling up most rapidly, with co-firing of wood pellets in coal power plants. Industry and governments continue to claim that burning wood for electricity is renewable and “carbon neutral”. Hence they subsidize it alongside wind and solar, even though the CO2 emissions are generally much higher even than for coal per unit of energy generated. The notion that those emissions will be offset by regrowth of the trees and crops that are used has been refuted over and over again, yet still is not reflected in policies. Yet, if the process is not “carbon neutral” in the first place, it can never be rendered “negative” by carbon capture.

We also know full well by now that the demand for “biomass” and the associated land, water, fertilizers use etc. would be hugely destructive on a variety of fronts beyond greenhouse gas emissions – affecting food production, water, human rights and biodiversity. This is clear already at the current scale of bioenergy production.

BECCS is the bioenergy twin of “clean coal”, the carbon capture (CCS) technology that has been touted for years by the coal industry. So how has that worked out?

Carbon capture from fossil fuel processes, as from bioenergy, is expensive and energy intensive. Most attempts – almost all involving coal and natural gas, have encountered a multitude of technical problems and massive cost overruns. They have failed to operate efficiently if at all.

FutureGen, a demonstration “clean coal” plant, was intended to be a US showcase example of CCS technology. Somewhere around 200 million dollars of pubic funding were spent prior to cancellation in 2013. It was canceled in part because private investors wouldn’t chip in. They didn’t consider it viable, presumably because the technical and economic challenges were simply too great.

Another CCS “clean coal” project is in progress in Kemper, Mississippi. The facility will use lignite coal strip mined from an adjacent area of around 48 square miles. Costs were initially estimated at 1.8 billion but have so far ballooned to an astounding 6.17 billion. Even then, the facility is required only to “try” to capture CO2. If they fail, they won’t be held responsible. If they succeed, they have contracted to sell the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. The project is nevertheless still presented as “good for the climate”.

Last year SaskPower’s billion dollar Boundary Dam project, capturing CO2 from a coal plant came online amid massive hype and proclamations of success. However, recent release of internal documents:

“have not only shed light on the technical and financial problems with the plant but the political deception that has gone with it… A little over a year later, the hype about the purported environmental benefits and affordability of the Boundary Dam CCS plant have gone up in a puff of green smoke.”

CCS has been held up as the promise behind “clean coal” for decades. Yet a few weeks ago, after 22 years of lobbying for so-called “clean coal” and failing to produce a single speck of it, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity announced that they will scale back their lobbying efforts.

In “Carbon capture: Miracle machine or white elephant“, the Financial Times noted “Few technologies have had so much money thrown at them for so many years by so many governments and companies, with such feeble results.”

Even above and beyond the problems already mentioned, necessary infrastructure, such as pipelines, to handle captured CO2 and transport it to storage sites are not always conveniently available. Underground storage of CO2 is also questionable. Leaks are pretty much inevitable. A slow leak would release the CO2 back into the atmosphere, while catastrophic leaks from, say, an earthquake, could be lethal to surrounding populations as CO2 is deadly when concentrated.

Where carbon capture has been implemented (primarily in natural gas refinery operations), the costs are offset in part by selling the CO2 for “enhanced oil recovery”, that is: pumping compressed CO2 into depleted oil wells which forces more oil to the surface. But this is neither considered “sequestration” nor is it climate friendly. Quite the reverse.

Still, governments continue to dole out the cash for CCS projects. Doing so is viewed, politically, as “taking action” to reduce emissions. Energy companies on the other hand, have not invested significantly into BECCS or CCS. Governments, that is, we the taxpayers, are instead footing the bill for this endless nonsense.

None of this bodes well for a miraculous, rapid and effective scaling up of BECCS as climate savior. Just recently, DRAX, one of UK’s largest power companies, announced that they were abandoning their “White Rose” BECCS project. That project, sometimes billed as “carbon negative”, was to involve construction of a sizeable new coal plant (the first new plant in UK since 1972). DRAX was slated to receive millions in government subsidies for mixing wood pellets with coal and, in theory at least, capturing and burying some proportion of the CO2 emissions.

Now, as the Paris climate negotiations are just beginning, the UK announced they will altogether drop their promised “pioneering” funding competition for CCS.

Now what?

The idea that we can somehow remove CO2 from the atmosphere is highly appealing. But so far it is simply not possible, and BECCS, even if it existed and was affordable, could not achieve that. Nevertheless, polluting industries, with their slick PR machinery and near infinite budgets, stand prepared to hype whatever will allow them to maintain business as usual: whether it is clean coal, carbon neutral bioenergy, or negative emissions. These are the lies and false promises upon which we are expected to hang our hopes. In reality, they are pointless babble, smoke and mirrors designed to distract a public that is finally coming to recognize the causes and magnitude of the climate crisis but which still remains naively vulnerable to false hopes for a magical technofix.

As the Paris climate negotiations are underway, we bear witness the latest fad: “CO2 recycling”. Instead of putting serious attention to addressing the roots of the problem, we are encouraged to embrace an entrepreneurial and stylishly clever mindset that CO2 is no longer a “problem” but should instead be viewed as a valuable commodity! Why not make stuff from CO2 and sell it? We can profit from our own pollution!

Recently, “XPrize” announced a collaboration with the American energy company, NRG and the oil sands innovation alliance (Cosia) to provide a 20 million dollar bounty for development of a technology capable of making something of value from CO2 removed from the atmosphere.

But, recall the famous 3R’s of waste management? Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. We learned that reuse and recycle only slightly postpone the approach into landfills: a blink of the eye in the lifetime of a plastic. As it turns out, reduce is really the key, it alone addresses the root of the problem. The same is likely to be true for CO2. The only seeming reason to make CO2 products dependent on the perpetuation of an unsustainable and polluting industry (to generate the CO2) is to keep the polluting industry alive.

This idea of CO2 recycling brings to mind the famous fairy tale of Rumplestiltskin, In that story, the princess is commanded to spin straw into gold. A magical imp offers to assist her with this impossible task, but only if she promises to hand over her firstborn child to him. When her child is born, the imp offers that if she can only guess his name, she can keep her child. Happily, she succeeds.

Now we have the fossil fuel industry, XPrize backers representing some of the most atrociously polluting industries, and even some well intentioned people who genuinely, if naively, wish for a technofix to “solve the climate problem” demanding that we spin gold out of CO2 emissions if we want our children to have a decent future.

But we don’t actually have to play mind games with magical imps. We know of tried and true solutions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Those include a global transition away from industrial agriculture and towards agroecology, good soil practices and the restoration of native ecosystems, including the halting of deforestation. Overall good stewardship of the land and nature would take us much farther towards healing the atmosphere, something that many, including organizations such as La Via Campesina (the peasant farmers), Global Forest Coalition, Indigenous Environmental Network and indigenous peoples around the world have long fought for.

Those real solutions will not generate “renewable energy” or marketable products and therefore are not technically “negative emissions”. They do not rely on shiny new technofixes or pretend to “recycle” pollution. Importantly, they are not so amenable to monetization, corruption, or corporate monopolization. Hence they are rarely given more than lip service, and when they are, it is in the context of bringing them into the market, and providing offsets for polluters as in the case with forests and “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD) and “Climate Smart Agriculture“.

What is needed more than ever is to see through the smoke and mirrors, stop providing massive funding for lifelines to the polluting industries and embrace the obvious and common sense solutions that are tried and true, and remain our best hope.

References
Fuss et al. (2014) Betting on negative emissions. Nature Climate Change 4: 850–853.

Rachel Smolker is Co-Director of Biofuelwatch

For more in-depth, see Biofuelwatch’s new report:
Last-ditch option or wishful thinking? Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage.

Turning the Knife: How Russia's Terror Victims Are Honoured in the West

Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

Normally, when a country is hit by an act of terrorism, there is universal sympathy even if the country has engaged in actions that may have made it a target of the terrorists.

After 9/11, for instance, any discussion of whether U.S. violent meddling in the Middle East may have precipitated the attack was ruled out of the public debate.


President Barack Obama uncomfortably accepting 
the Nobel Peace Prize from Committee Chairman 
Thorbjorn Jagland in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009
(White House photo)

Similarly, the 7/7 attacks against London’s Underground in 2005 were not excused because the United Kingdom had joined in President George W. Bush’s aggressive war in Iraq. The same with the more recent terror strikes in Paris. No respectable politician or pundit gloated about the French getting what they deserved for their long history of imperialism in the Muslim world.

But a different set of rules apply to Russia. Along with other prominent Americans, President Barack Obama and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman have expressed smug satisfaction over the murder of 224 people aboard a Russian charter flight blown up over the Sinai and in the slaying of a Russian pilot who had been shot down by a Turkish warplane and the killing of a Russian marine on a rescue mission.

Apparently, the political imperative to display disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin trumps any normal sense of humanity. Both Obama on Tuesday and Friedman on Wednesday treated those Russian deaths at the hands of the Islamic State or other jihadists as Putin’s comeuppance for intervening against terrorist/jihadist gains in Syria.

At a news conference in Paris, Obama expressed his lack of sympathy as part of a bizarre comment in which he faulted Putin for somehow not turning around the Syrian conflict during the past month – when Obama and his allies have been floundering in their “war” against the Islamic State and its parent, Al Qaeda, for years, if not decades.

“The Russians now have been there for several weeks, over a month, and I think fair-minded reporters who looked at the situation would say that the situation hasn’t changed significantly,” Obama said. 

“In the interim, Russia has lost a commercial passenger jet. You’ve seen another jet shot down. There have been losses in terms of Russian personnel. And I think Mr. Putin understands that, with Afghanistan fresh in the memory, for him to simply get bogged down in a inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he’s looking for.”

In examining that one paragraph, a “fair-minded” reporter could find a great deal to dispute. Indeed, the comments suggest that President Obama has crossed some line into either believing his own propaganda or thinking that everyone who listens to him is an idiot and will believe whatever he says.

But what was perhaps most disturbing was Obama’s graceless manner of discussing the tragedy of the Sinai bombing, followed by his seeming pleasure over Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-24 last week, leading to the killing of two Russian military men, one the pilot who was targeted while parachuting to the ground and the other a marine after his search-and-rescue helicopter was downed by a TOW missile.

Even more troubling, the key weapon systems used – the Turkish F-16 fighter jet and the TOW missile – were U.S.-manufactured and apparently U.S. supplied, in the case of the TOW missile either directly or indirectly to Sunni jihadists deemed “moderate” by the Obama administration.

The Ever-Smug Friedman

Columnist Friedman was equally unfeeling about the Russian deaths. In a column entitled “Putin’s Great Syrian Adventure,” Friedman offered a mocking assessment of Russia’s intervention against Sunni jihadists and terrorists seeking to take control of Syria.

While ridiculing anyone who praised Putin’s initiative or who just thought the Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought he was just crazy.

“Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”

Ha-ha, very funny! And, by the way, it has not been established that the Russian SU-24 did stray into Turkish air space but if it did, according to the Turkish account, it passed over a sliver of Turkish territory for all of 17 seconds.

The evidence is quite clear that the SU-24 was ambushed in a reckless act by Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has been collaborating with Syrian and foreign jihadists for the past four years to overthrow Syria’s secular government. And the murder of the pilot after he bailed out of the plane is not some reason to smirk; it is a war crime.

Even uglier is the lack of any sympathy or outrage over the terrorist bombing that killed 224 innocent people, mostly tourists, aboard a Russian charter flight in Egypt. If the victims had been American and a similar callous reaction had come from President Putin and a columnist for a major Russian newspaper, one can only imagine the outrage. However, in Official Washington, any recognition of a common humanity with Russians makes you a “Moscow stooge.”

The other wacky part of both Obama’s comments and Friedman’s echoes of the same themes is this quick assessment that the Russian intervention in support of the Syrian government has been some abject failure – as if the U.S.-led coalition has been doing so wonderfully.

First, as a “fair-minded” reporter, I would say that it appears the Russian-backed Syrian offensive has at least stopped the advances of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its jihadist allies, including Ahrar al-Sham (which technically separates itself from Al Qaeda and thus qualifies for U.S.-supplied weaponry even though it fights side-by-side with Nusra in the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest).

The Afghan Memories

Obama’s reference to Afghanistan was also startling. He was suggesting that Putin should have learned a lesson from Moscow’s intervention in the 1980s in support of a secular, pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, which came under attack by CIA-organized-and-armed Islamic jihadists known then as mujahedeen.

Wielding sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and benefiting from $1 billion a year in Saudi-U.S.-supplied weapons, the Afghan fundamentalist mujahedeen and their allies, including Saudi Osama bin Laden, eventually drove Soviet troops out in 1989 and – several years later behind the Taliban – completed the reversion of Afghanistan back to the Seventh Century. Women in Kabul went from dressing any way they liked in public, including wearing mini-skirts, to being covered in chadors and kept at home.

Obama’s bringing up Afghanistan in the Syrian context and Putin’s supposed one-month Syrian failure was ironic in another way. After Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of bin Laden and has been bogged down in a quagmire there for 14 years, including nearly seven years under Obama.

So, Obama may not be on the firmest ground when he suggests that Putin recall Moscow’s experience in Afghanistan a few decades ago. After all, Obama has many more recent memories.

Further, what is different about Putin’s Syrian strategy – compared with Obama’s – is that the Russians are targeting all the terrorists and jihadists, not just the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). While U.S. propaganda tries to present the non-ISIS jihadists as “moderates” (somehow pretending that Al Qaeda is no longer a terrorist organization), there is, in reality, very little distinction between ISIS and the alliance of Nusra/Ahrar al-Sham.

And, as for Official Washington’s new “group think” about the Syrian government’s lack of progress in the war, there is the discordant news that the last of rebel forces have agreed to abandon the central city of Homs, which had been dubbed the “capital of the revolution.” The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that “thousands of insurgents will leave the last opposition-held neighborhood in” Homs, with the withdrawal beginning next week.

Al-Jazeera added the additional fact that the remaining 4,000 insurgents are “from al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and the Free Syrian Army.” In other words, the “moderate” Free Syrian Army was operating in collusion with Al Qaeda’s affiliate and its major jihadist partner.

While it’s hard to get reliable up-to-date information from inside Syria, one intelligence source familiar with the military situation told me that the Syrian government offensive, backed by Iranian troops and Russian air power, had been surprisingly successful in putting the jihadists, including ISIS and Nusra, on the defensive, with additional gains around the key city of Aleppo.

The Belated Oil Bombings

Also, in the past week, Putin shamed Obama into joining in a bombing operation to destroy hundreds of trucks carrying ISIS oil to Turkey. Why that valuable business was allowed to continue during the U.S.-led war on ISIS since summer 2014 has not been adequately explained. It apparently was being protected by Turkish President Erdogan.

Another irony of Obama’s (and Friedman’s) critical assessment of Putin’s one-month military campaign came in Obama’s recounting of his meeting during the Paris climate summit with Erdogan. Obama said he was still appealing to Erdogan to close the Turkish-Syrian border although radical jihadists have been crossing it since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

“With respect to Turkey, I have had repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria,” Obama said. 

“We’ve seen some serious progress on that front, but there are still some gaps. In particular, there’s about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”

In other words, all these years into the conflict – and about 1½ years since Obama specifically targeted ISIS – Turkey has not closed its borders to prevent ISIS from reinforcing itself with foreign fighters and trafficking in illicit oil sales to fund its terror operations. One might suspect that Erdogan has no intention of really stopping the Sunni jihadists from ravaging Syria.

Erdogan still seems set on violent “regime change” in Syria after allowing his intelligence services to provide extensive help to ISIS, Al Qaeda’s Nusra and other extremists. The Russians claim that politically well-connected Turkish businessmen also have been profiting off the ISIS oil sales.

But Obama’s acknowledgement that he has not even been able to get NATO “ally” Turkey to seal its border and that ISIS still remains a potent fighting force makes a mockery of his mocking Putin for not “significantly” changing the situation on the ground in Syria in one month.

Obama also slid into propaganda speak when he blamed Assad for all the deaths that have occurred during the Syrian conflict. “I consider somebody who kills hundreds of thousands of his own people illegitimate,” Obama said.

But again Obama is applying double standards. For instance, he would not blame President George W. Bush for the hundreds of thousands (possibly more than a million) dead Iraqis, yet Bush was arguably more responsible for those deaths by launching an unprovoked invasion of Iraq than Assad was in battling a jihadist-led insurgency.

Plus, the death toll of Syrians, estimated to exceed a quarter million, includes many soldiers and police as well as armed jihadists. That does not excuse Assad or his regime for excessively heavy-handed tactics that have inflicted civilian casualties, but Obama and his predecessor both have plenty of innocent blood on their hands, too.

After watching Obama’s news conference, one perhaps can hope that he is just speaking out of multiple sides of his mouth as he is wont to do. Maybe, he’s playing his usual game of “above-the-table/below-the-table,” praising Erdogan above the table while chastising him below the table and disparaging Putin in public while cooperating with the Russian president in private.

Or maybe President Obama has simply lost touch with reality – and with common human decency.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Regime Change - Chicago: Murder and Cover-Ups in High Places

Regime Change - Chicago: Cover-ups In Police Murder Requires Resignation of Chicago Mayor Emanuel

by Linn Washington - This Can't Be Happening

December 2, 2015

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a bold yet belated move when he fired his embattled police superintendent in the wake of a national uproar surrounding the release of a chilling video that captured the police killing of a teen.

Included in that uproar is anger over mounting evidence of a cover-up connected to the flawed shooting graphically displayed on that video. Political and civic leaders in Chicago had demanded the removal of Chicago top cop Garry McCarthy months before Emanuel's uproar triggered ouster.

If Mayor Emanuel is really serious about his stated desire to rebuild “public trust” he needs to do two other things and do those two things quickly.

The first thing Emanuel needs to do is issue a strong public rebuke of Chicago’s top prosecutor, Anita Alvarez.

This prosecutor dragged her feet for over a year on indicting the policeman shown in that video firing 16-shots into Laquan McDonald. That police video clearly shows the 17-year-old McDonald walking away from police not lurching towards officers as Chicago’s Police Department and its police union had maintained falsely since McDonald’s fatal shooting in October 2014.

Alvarez did not charge Officer Jason Van Dyke with murder until after the release of the police video that captured McDonald’s wrongful death. Mayor Emanuel had fought against release of that video claiming it would undermine ongoing investigations into McDonald’s death – a stance Alvarez embraced as her explanation for not filing charges against Van Dyke earlier.

Hispanic leaders in Chicago – political and civic – are among those calling for the resignation of Alvarez, the first Hispanic to hold that post in Chicago.

The second thing Emanuel needs to do is resign. The mounting evidence of a multi-layer cover-up surrounding the killing of McDonald includes actions by Emmanuel.

Chicago’s mayor contends he did not view the McDonald murder video until hours before its release – a release ordered by a Chicago judge over Emmanuel’s objection. Yet, months ago Emanuel approved a $5-million payout to McDonald’s estranged family. Emanuel authorized that payout before that family even filed a lawsuit.

If Emanuel approved that payout without seeing the video that contradicted the official ‘justified shooting’ posture of his Police Department then he was irresponsible with the purse strings of cash-strapped Chicago.

If Emanuel was aware of the contents of that video and approved the payout that occurred at the time of his struggle to beat back a strong electoral challenge to unseat him then that payout is arguably a payoff to lessen public uproar over the true details of McDonald’s death. Withholding that video helped Emanuel win reelection.

Emanuel’s actions/inactions in the McDonald matter, rather through his irresponsible mismanaging of Chicago’s money or through mendacious efforts to maintain his post as mayor, have displayed convincing evidence that Chicago’s Mayor and former Chief of Staff to President Obama is unfit to hold elected office.

Shortly before Emanuel sacked top cop McCarthy from his $260,000 salary post, the Mayor announced formation of a task force to review all aspects of the Chicago Police Department – a police force with a decades long history of brutality and corruption.

If the announced task force review is not a ploy to provide political cover for Emanuel, why didn’t the Mayor set up a task force earlier this year in the wake of news reports that Chicago paid out $521-million between 2004-2014 due to police misconduct that ranged from false arrests to excessive force? Misconduct by Chicago police cost $50-million in 2014 – a sum that news reports stated totaled more than the combined budgets of Chicago’s mayor office, city treasurer office, city council and its department of human services.

Why didn’t Emanuel establish a review in September 2013 when he made an unprecedented apology for a two-decades long reign of torture and terror by a secret unit inside the CPD that cost the city over $85-million in payouts to victims – some of whom spent years on death row falsely?

Payouts for police misconduct have real-time consequences for cash-strapped Chicago. In 2012 Mayor Emanuel cited lack of funds as justification for his closure of six mental health clinics in low-income areas. In 2013 Emanuel cited lack of funds as justification for his closure of 4 public schools in low-income areas. The closures of those clinics and schools have had adverse impacts on the communities where they were located. Some in Chicago track increases in crime to the closures of the mental health clinics.

The same Mayor Emanuel who cuts needed services for the neediest citizens of his city is the same mayor who presides over the payments of multi-million dollar settlements in police misconduct cases where the offending police keep their jobs. Officer Van Dyke who is now facing murder charges for killing McDonald had over a dozen brutality complaints lodged against him that included a $350,000 payout and the $5-million payout to McDonald’s family.

The cost of payouts in police misconduct cases does not include the tens of millions of dollars Chicago has paid to private law firms to fight those police abuse cases ($63-million from 2002-2012 according to news reports). And that payout figure does not include the continued salaries of the police officers cited in lawsuits for brutality but still kept on the CPD payroll.

The Chicago police killing of Laquan McDonald again dramatizes the duplicity and complicity surrounding unjustified police brutality that extends from patrol officers to the highest reaches of government.

Chicago has an epidemic of civilians murdering each other and a low rate of police solving those murders. Now ousted Chicago top cop McCarthy once declared that the biggest reason for why so few of Chicago’s murders are solved is the “no-snitch” code of silence among residents in too many communities.

Top cops like McCarthy rarely address the Code of Silence operative in police forces across America. That police "snitch code"e is on display in the McDonald shooting case. Over six officers at the scene of McDonald’s shooting followed the Code of Silence when they filed reports falsely stating that McDonald lunged at Van Dyke thus certifying McDonald’s wrongful death as justified -- and when they reportedly chased eye-witnesses from the scene after the shooting, instead of taking down their names as witnesses, as they should have done.

Those officers that filed false reports supporting Van Dyke’s killing violated Illinois law on accomplice liability. According to that law, knowingly assisting or helping someone commit a crime –- before, during or after the crime –- is an offense punishable with imprisonment.

Chicago top prosecutor Alvarez has yet to arrest any of those law-breaking law enforcers who aided and abetted Van Dyke’s [alleged] crime. This inaction by Alvarez evidences duplicity in the form of double standards of justice: one standard for errant cops another standard for errant civilians.

Chicago is definitely in need of ‘regime change’ beginning with the removal of Mayor Emanuel and prosecutor Alvarez.

It is pathetic that the same politicians, presidential candidates, pundits and preachers that loudly demand ‘regime change’ in places like Syria remain silent on crimes against humanity in Chicago.

The End of America's Blue-Collar White

Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites

by Barbara Ehrenreich  - TomDispatch

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years.

The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. 

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, America to Working Class Whites: Drop Dead!

[Note for TomDispatch readers: Who knew? Not me, but there’s now something called “Giving Tuesday” -- this very day, no less. It’s meant to be a response to the commercialism of Black Friday and to spur your impulse to put your money where your non-commercial mouth is during a holiday season increasingly devoted to private gift-giving of an extravagant nature. So if you’re in a Giving Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or even a Giving December mood, we wanted to remind you not to forget TomDispatch. To keep our analytical heads above water, we rely to a remarkable extent on the generosity of our readers, so check out our donation page where, for a contribution of $100, you can get signed, personalized books from a number of TomDispatch regulars, including Nick Turse and me. Tom]

It’s the American mean season. No question about it. Racism. Xenophobia. Refugee bashing. Seemingly endless blatant police killings (and other kinds of mistreatment) of black citizens. All of it out in the open for anyone to see and denounce -- or cheer. And at rallies nationwide, Republican candidates, especially Donald Trump, are indeed being cheered (and protestors ejected, spit upon, or beaten up) by large, almost totally white crowds for saying whatever comes next on the downward slope to hell. Even on the right, a few commentators and pundits are starting to raise the ugly word “fascism” when it comes to prospective federal registries of Muslim Americans and the like.

We know now that election 2016 is increasingly an open portal into an age-old American dark side of slavery, repression, internment, and know-nothing-ism that couldn’t be grimmer. And behind it all, running like an interstate highway through our history, is a powerful sense of white skin privilege that has traditionally extended even to those who were relatively powerless. Much attention these days is being given to the next outrageous statement, whatever it might be, from Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Ted Cruz. Far less attention is being paid to those cheering them on in their collective folly or to the media which is, post-Paris, pounding the drums, 24/7-style, when it comes to the threat of Islamic terrorism, which has since 9/11 been one of the lesser dangers in American life. The "news" has become, in essence, a fear-creation machine and so, despite all Donald Trump's attacks on it, a promotion machine for the likes of him.

Of course, in the 2016 campaign season, it couldn’t be clearer that the billionaire version of white privilege is going great guns, but as for working class whites, not so much. As Barbara Ehrenreich, founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, notes today, the sense of white privilege has taken a hit in America and that’s not surprising. A recent study she cites suggests that middle-aged whites with no more than a high-school degree now have death rates that, in developed countries, come close only to those last seen among Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words, whole cohorts of white Americans have ever less to cheer about in their lives, which may help explain all those public cheers for Trump et al. Tom

Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off 

of America's Blue Collar Whites

by Barbara Ehrenreich

There has also been a major racial gap in longevity -- 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women -- though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor -- from waitressing to construction work -- tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The Wages of Despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back -- and better yet, a strong union -- could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent -- mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.

The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working class parents like myself, sting with condescension.

Of course, there was also the election of the first black president. White, native-born Americans began to talk of “taking our country back.” The more affluent ones formed the Tea Party; less affluent ones often contented themselves with affixing Confederate flag decals to their trucks.

On the American Downward Slope

All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.

If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap -- perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

Acts of racial aggression may provide their white perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort -- and a strong stomach -- to paint a racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place near the bottom of an undependable economy.

While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to those who express it -- after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived quite nicely -- the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those -- of any color or ethnicity -- who are falling even faster.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular and founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword) and most recently the autobiographical Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Barbara Ehrenreich

Attention Captain Obermeyer: Stop These Oil Tankers!

Letter to Captain Kevin Obermeyer, CEO of the Pacific Pilotage Authority, Responsible for all shipping plying the BC Coast

by Ingmar Lee - 10,000 Ton Tanker

Hello Kevin; I have written a short note to your new boss, federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau regarding the ever-growing swarm of USA ATB's and tow barges carrying petroleum products between Alaska and Washington via the entire BC Coast Inside Passage, but I recognize he will need some time to clear out all the Big Oil-lackey corruption that so previously defiled his office, so I am patiently awaiting a reply.

Nevertheless I am hopeful that he will see the importance of getting this dangerous, risky traffic out of the Salish Sea, Johnstone and Hecate Straits, and the "protected" waterways of the Inside Passage, - and make it go out through Juan de Fuca and 20 miles offshore where it belongs with all the other tanker traffic.

I am hopeful that Transport Minister Garneau will see it as reasonable that this dangerous, risky, entirely American business, will upgrade their tanker fleet so that they may safely travel offshore to their Alaska customers and stop threatening these precious waters.

I'm hoping that he will see that this business offers utterly nothing whatsoever of benefit to Canada, - no jobs, - not even a single BC Pilot's job -, no tariff, no duty, no remuneration of any kind, no service at all to a single one of the BC coastal communities it passes, no First Nation's protocol permission, - nothing at all but the dreadful risk of imminent ecological disaster.

I am hoping that he will agree that it is outrageous that even the goods that this traffic is transporting is kept secret, - so secret that even you, the senior person responsible for all shipping on the BC coast has to wait on bended knee for three weeks to get that information, as happened earlier this year.

Actually, - and speaking on behalf of a rapidly increasing number of concerned coastal residents, we are DONE with hoping, we are expecting, - nay DEMANDING - big, immediate changes.

Please do something with your power and responsibility over this coast, to help us help Minister Garneau get this scourge out of the precious, "protected" waters of the BC Inside Passage.

Sincerely, Ingmar

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Robert Tercek, Ingmar Lee, Janine Bandcroft Dec. 2, 2015

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

Do you ever get the feeling things are disappearing around you? Afraid to turn your attention away for a moment, in case you look back to see the world you knew irreparably altered; gone forever?

You're not mad. Our world has become ever more ephemeral; a lot less "reality" based lately. Whether "the cloud," or other digital technologies emerging to nudge our familiar hardware existence aside, it's all a part of what my first guest calls being, "Vapourized."

And, this is not only happening in media, where the last decade has seen the newspaper, magazine, and music business rocked by new digital habits, but is also moving into the electronics industries.

Listen. Hear.

Robert Tercek is a 21st Century Renaissance man whose nearly 23 year career pre-dates most of what makes up our modern world.

Tercek has created breakthrough entertainment experiences across digital platforms, including: satellite television, game consoles, broadband Internet, interactive teevee, and mobile networks. His expertise includes too working the executive suites; most recently serving as President of Digital Media at OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a Senior Vice President of Digital Media at Sony Pictures, and as Creative Director at MTV. Robert also co-founded five startup ventures, including 7th Level, Inc, and is the author of the book, 'Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success In A Dematerialized World.'

Robert Tercek in the first half.

And; last month, barely a week into his mandate, Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau ordered Transport Canada coordinate with the Fisheries, Natural Resources, and Environment Ministries to put in place an oil tanker moratorium along BC's north coast. It's a stunning reversal of federal policy; but what does it mean in real terms?

Ingmar Lee is a long-time, BC-based environment defender whose latest effort is '10,000 Ton Tanker' campaign to clear BC's inside passage of dangerous tanker traffic currently flying under the radar. His past efforts to save the forests and watershed ecosystems of Vancouver Island include being among the few who took to the trees in the iconic Cathedral Grove, and remaining for two years while the law, loggers, and
Weyerhaeuser threatened them every day in every way they could. The fact the Grove remains at all is due in great part to he and his "outlaw" cohorts.

Between campaigns like Cathedral Grove, fighting the destruction of the suburban forest to make way for highways in Langford, scaling the BC Legislature flag pole to garner press in opposition to the Enbridge pipeline scheme, and dismantling seismic explosives in the heart of Sandhill Crane nesting grounds, Ingmar earned an Asia Studies degree from the University of Victoria, with a minor in Environmental Studies.

Ingmar Lee and a tanker by another name in the second segment.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good doings and otherwise planned for the streets of our town in the coming week; and beyond there too. But first, Robert Tercek and 'Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success In A Dematerialized World.'

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm 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.

Teaching Unwell Your Children: Bill McRaven's Delusion Direction on National Strategy

McRaven’s delusional, dangerous national security strategy

by Robert Jensen

Bill McRaven is a highly respected retired admiral and popular chancellor of the University of Texas System.

But his remarks at a recent conference on national security left me doubting his intellectual and moral fitness to lead institutions of higher education.

While my lack of deference to a boss who is a decorated veteran may seem uppity, it’s important — especially for professors at highly respected public universities — to contest McRaven’s ahistorical analysis, which offers a deluded account of the past and prescribes a dangerous course for the future of U.S. foreign policy.

This statement of McRaven’s captures his main points:

“In the end, we know the right strategy: It is continuous and direct action on the extremists until they have no more capacity and no more reach. It will be a generational fight. But if we don’t take it on now, then we should not be surprised when the barbarians are at the gate and we’re wondering how they got here.”

Before worrying about whether the extremists in this case, the Islamic State or ISIS, might one day be at our gate, we should reflect on how they got where they already are, in Iraq and Syria. McRaven spent no time in this talk pondering the role of barbaric levels of violence, past and present, used by U.S. military forces and our allies in the region. To assess honestly that history doesn’t justify anyone’s terrorism but simply takes seriously the task of creating the conditions for stability and peace. Anyone wanting to stop brutal attacks on innocents should want to understand the context for the violence.

To avoid that inquiry and claim that we all agree on the “right strategy” is typical of those who spout the conventional wisdom and hope to close off critique. I am a U.S. citizen and one of the professors under McRaven’s supervision — part of the “we” to which he refers, I hope — but I believe his strategy is doomed to fail, as is typically the case with imperial strategies, especially at the end of an empire’s period of dominance.

That assessment — that the United States attempts to undermine the sovereignty of other nations in pursuit of power and profit — no doubt puts me on the opposite side of the political fence from McRaven, a career military officer who long served the U.S. empire. For those opposed to U.S. imperial policies, the right strategy starts with a recognition that this longstanding bipartisan foreign policy of seeking dominance is morally indefensible, and an awareness that — whatever one’s moral evaluation — the United States no longer can project the same power it once did in regions such as the Middle East. For both principled and pragmatic reasons, U.S. leaders should abandon their arrogance and accept a role as part of the international community, seeking real diplomatic solutions rather than compounding past mistakes with more terrorist-generating military action. Instead, McRaven doubles down on imperial violence.

Although U.S. pundits and politicians like to ignore history that is inconvenient, a sensible policy in the Middle East would recognize how often our policy of undermining democratic regimes and propping up dictatorships has indeed created terrorists. We should recall that our main “enemy” in the region, Iran, suffered under the barbarism of the Shah for more than two decades, a direct result of U.S. support for his tyranny. Meanwhile our key “ally” Saudi Arabia is at the center, both intellectually and financially, of the Islamic fundamentalist political ideology that we claim to be fighting. And our wanton destruction of Iraq in 2003 created the traumatic conditions in which ISIS has flourished.

In these cases, a desire to control the flow of oil and oil profits, not humanitarian principles, dictated U.S. policy. That’s what we mean by imperialism. Throughout the post-WWII period in which the United States has dominated global politics, the United States has consistently ignored the legitimate democratic aspirations of the people of the developing world, including the Middle East, in favor of support for regimes that cooperated with U.S. planners’ goals.

ISIS doesn’t represent those legitimate aspirations, of course, but we aren’t likely to formulate a coherent strategy without an awareness of how the people of the Middle East view the United States. The success of U.S. pop culture around the world — the spread of blue jeans and hip hop music — should not be confused with support for U.S. policies. Even after the abject failures of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — again, on both principled and pragmatic criteria — U.S. politicians and pundits seem unable to grasp that these failures were tied to the United States’ delusional dreams of dominance. The right strategy is to reverse that course and renounce the unilateralism that folks such as McRaven euphemistically refer to as “leadership.”

I’m neither a military strategist nor a diplomat. I do not pretend to have a foolproof strategy for contributing to stable democratic regimes in the Middle East, and I would doubt the sanity of anyone who at this point claimed to have a magical formula. But a good starting place is an honest accounting: The United States has failed to act in accordance with the moral principles on which we claim our government is based — the rule of law, the inherent dignity of all people, the right of self-determination — and the result has been failed policies that sacrifice people all over the world.

McRaven unintentionally acknowledged past U.S. violations of moral and legal principles during the Q&A following his prepared remarks. Defending U.S. drone strikes, McRaven claimed that they minimize civilian casualties, noting that “in the old days — you know, go back to Vietnam, Korea, World War II, any of those wars — we’d of just leveled the whole place.”

“Leveling the whole place” means indiscriminate bombing, a staple U.S. tactic not only in the wars he mentions but notably in both the 1991 invasion of Iraq and the even more brutal “shock and awe” devastation unleashed in 2003. Such attacks, which kill large numbers of civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure, are indeed war crimes, as McRaven seemed to recognize when he continued, “We don’t do that anymore because we believe in the law of armed conflict, we believe in rules of engagement, we believe in protecting civilians, for that exact reason.”

I’m not sure how McRaven squares that acknowledgment of past U.S. war crimes with his call for the United States to lead “civilized” nations in the struggle against terrorism, a task he said is made more difficult by our opponents willingness to “lie, lie, lie” about us. But whatever McRaven’s explanation, he might consider whether instead of continuing to use our military power to try to shore up our morally bankrupt empire, we should start to tell the truth and take those moral principles seriously before we repeat our mistakes once again.

The UT conference at which McRaven spoke was titled “Great Powers, Failed States, and New Frontiers: National Security Challenges in the 21st Century.” Let’s meet those challenges by admitting that the greatest of the current great powers — the United States of America — is also a failed state of sorts, both abroad where U.S. leaders are responsible for crimes against peace and war crimes, and increasingly at home where our affluent nation ignores the needs of our most vulnerable citizens.

That would be the civilized thing to do and would make possible real leadership.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2015). Jensen’s other books include Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Twitter: @jensenrobertw.

Meeting Tough Torture Standards: Turkey, as American as Apple Pie

Torture And Other Abuses Makes Turkey American As Apple Pie: Mumia aids Turkish inmate

by Linn Washington - This Can't Be Happening

November 30, 2015

 
On the topic of torture the nation of Turkey could teach some gruesome techniques to ISIS, the terrorist movement executing a savage reign across Syria and beyond (reportedly with Turkish government support).

That reality of brutality in Turkey – another problematic American ally – is a fact known all too well by Turgay Ulu, a Turkish journalist who endured a 15-year imprisonment in Turkey, where he was tortured.

During Ulu’s long imprisonment, Turkish authorities justified his conviction on their claim that they had evidence against him –- evidence authorities obtained from two other victims of torture.


Turgay Ulu, Turkish dissident and
political prisoner caught in a
Kafkaesque trap between
Turkey and Germany

“I was tortured with electro shocks,” Ulu said during an interview earlier this year in Berlin, Germany where he is a leading figure in a movement for refugee rights. Ulu’s long imprisonment in Turkey led many, including Amnesty International, to consider him a political prisoner. Ulu was released from a Turkish prison in 2011 and he immediately fled to Europe.

Ulu was initially arrested in 1996 when Turkish authorities accused the then 23-year-old of belonging to two communist organizations. Ulu admits being a “Marxist” activist in Turkey but denies membership in those two organizations. A report Amnesty International released in 2006 examining serious flaws in Turkey’s justice system cited Ulu’s case. That AI report noted it was “highly improbable” that Ulu would be involved in “two ideologically unrelated” armed organizations.

“They tortured me but I still would not talk to the police,” Ulu said.

“When I did not talk to the police they said that was proof that I was a terrorist because I did not talk.”

Ulu received a death sentence for one of the many charges Turkish authorities filed against him. That death sentence was converted to a life sentence in 2002. Twenty-days after Ulu’s release from prison in 2011, Turkish authorities reinstated the life sentence. If Ulu returns to Turkey he faces a return to prison.

The U.S. State Department’s most recent “Human Rights Practices” report noted the existence of “torture” in Turkey despite torture being prohibited by Turkish law. That State Department report, released in June 2015, also stated the Turkish “government or its agents allegedly committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.” Prison conditions in Turkey are “poor” that report stated, noting “brutality” by guards -- including brutality against children.

Turkey made international news recently when it shot down a Russian jet bomber that it alleged had briefly entered Turkish airspace near the border with Syria (Russia, and even some US government sources, say the Russian plane did not enter Turkey, and in fact say the Turkish jet that downed it fired its missile while in Syrian airspace). A few months ago Russia began bombing opponents of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. For the past few years Turkey’s president, Recep Erdogan, has actively worked to overthrow Syria’s president.

Some experts contend Turkey downed that jet as retaliation against Russia for Russia’s bombing of anti-Syrian-government rebels supported by Turkey, and even for bombing tanker trucks delivering embargoes ISIS fuel oil for sale and transhippment inside Turkey.

However, experts also see the shoot-down as yet another attempt by Turkey to drag the U.S. deeper into the Syrian conflict. In 2013 Turkey urged a U.S. attack on Syrian government forces as retaliation for a deadly poison gas incident initially blamed by Turkey and the US on al-Assad forces. That incident, evidence later indicated, was actually a covert "false flag" operation by Turkish intelligence operatives devised to provoke a strong American military response against al-Assad. Russia brokered a deal back then that averted a U.S. aerial attack on al-Assad –- a deal that angered Turkey’s Erdogan.

Shortly after Turkey shot down that Russian jet, U.S. President Obama declared publicly that Turkey – a member of NATO – had a right to defend its territory. In 2014 when the U.S. began bombing ISIS targets in Syria, U.S. news coverage at that time stated Obama Administration personnel expressed frustration over Turkey’s failures to do more “militarily” against ISIS. After the shoot-down, Obama announced sending more special ops troops into Syria and increased bombing in Syria.

Some funding for ISIS comes from selling oil on the black market. ISIS gets that oil from Syrian oil fields that ISIS controls. ISIS ships that oil through Turkey. Entities in Turkey, including, allegedly, a son of President Erdogan, purchase some of that ISIS oil, according to reliable reports.

ISIS also receives funding from entities and individuals in Saudi Arabia, another American ally and another nation working to overthrow Syria’s al-Assad. That 2015 U.S. State Department human rights report also criticized authorities in Saudi Arabia for jailing “non-violent critics” and clamping down on “free and open media.”

The U.S. government justifies ‘regime change’ in Syria based on al-Assad’s violations of democratic rights – rights routinely violated by American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia according to the U.S. State Department and other human rights monitors like Amnesty International.

The Kafkaesque arrest and long imprisonment of Turgay Ulu is now compounded by actions of another American ally, Germany.

German courts have denied Ulu’s request for asylum. German courts adopted the posture of Turkish authorities that Ulu is a terrorist and is thus not a politically persecuted person entitled to asylum in Germany.

“Currently, I can’t get asylum in Germany but t [they Germans] won’t deport me because they know I would be tortured in Turkey,” a perplexed Ulu said.

Charges lodged against Ulu by Turkish authorities included the claim that he physically attempted to help a terror group leader escape from a hospital. Authorities said three policemen saw Ulu participate in that failed escape that occurred at a time when Ulu was virtually blind from eye problems. Ulu said his impaired vision made it impossible for him to participate in such a daring escape attempt.

During a court proceeding years after his arrest two of those three policemen stated Ulu was not the person they observed. Turkish authorities refused to produce the third policeman in court yet constantly cited that policeman’s claims against Ulu to continue Ulu’s incarceration. During another court proceeding, a Turkish prosecutor admitted that evidence “does not exist” against Ulu on any of the charges against him, but Turkish courts nonetheless continued his imprisonment.

Ulu said he maintained his sanity inside Turkish prisons by reading the works of American political prisoner – Mumia Abu-Jamal. Some newspapers in Turkey publish Abu-Jamal’s writings. Abu-Jamal remains in a Pennsylvania prison serving a life sentence since his death penalty was overturned. Amnesty International states that Abu-Jamal’s conviction for killing a Philadelphia policeman rests on a fundamentally unfair trial and appeals process.

“I tried to be disciplined in prison so I would not go crazy,” Ulu said. “I read books. I wrote books. I kept by sanity the same way Mumia has kept his sanity.”

Israel Celebrates International Solidarity with Palestine Day with Kindergarten Raid

Dozens Injured in Clashes Across West Bank, Kindergarten Raided

by IMEMC News and Agencies

November 29, 2015

At least 29 kidnapped overnight.

Dozens of Palestinians were injured Sunday, during clashes with Israeli forces across the occupied West Bank, while at least 29 Palestinians were kidnapped by Israeli forces, overnight.

Dozens were injured by rubber-coated metal bullets at the northern entrance of al-Bireh, according to WAFA Palestinian News & Info Agency.

Following a peaceful rally called for by the Fateh movement and national factions, which took off from the center of Ramallah to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinians, clashes broke out between protestors and Israeli forces.

The Secretary of Fateh in Ramallah and al-Bireh, Mwaffaq Suhwahil, asserted that the event is a clear message to Israel that 'Fateh’ and the Palestinian people will continue to fight against the occupation until the establishment of independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.'

Meanwhile, Israeli forces raided a kindergarten in Beit Ummar, to the south of Hebron, according to a local official.

Spokesperson of the anti settlement popular committee in Beit Ummar, Mohammed Awad, said that armed Israeli soldiers raided the kindergarten at dawn, after breaking down its main front door and windows.

He said that forces further destroyed the furniture, computers, and children’s belongings, and ripped up the tiles from one of the classrooms before withdrawing from the area.

The Israeli army has previously carried out numerous such attacks, with deliberate and reckless use of force, against schools and educational facilities across the West Bank, in a serious violation of international law and students’ right to pursue education in a safe environment.

To be noted, Defense for Children International (DCI) described the year 2014 as the most difficult year for Palestinian children, due to ongoing Israeli violations, mainly the 2014 summer aggression on the Gaza Strip.

See video: Gaza City's Devastated Al-Shuja'eyya Suburb

The Global Coalition to protect Education from Attack also said, “During situations of armed conflict, attacks on education may violate international humanitarian and criminal law and constitute war crimes (or crimes against humanity during war or peacetime) as set out in the 1907 Hague Regulations, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and customary international humanitarian law.”

Mohammad Awad, the coordinator of the popular committee against settlements and the Apartheid Wall in Beit Ummar, said that clashes also broke out in the al-Thaher area, near the illegal settlement of Karmei Tzur, where Israeli soldiers fired teargas canisters in the direction of Palestinian houses, resulting in suffocation cases.

At least five Palestinian students were injured by live fire, while dozens others suffocated due to teargas inhalation during renewed clashes with Israeli troops at the campus of Palestine Technical University (Kadoorie) in Tulkarem, on Sunday, according to medical sources.

The Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) said that five students were injured by live ammunition and dozens others suffocated due to inhaling teargas, as Israeli forces raided the university’s campus. Other students were also injured by rubber-coated rounds, and were treated at the scene.

PRC reported that three students lost consciousness due to excessive tear gas inhalation, which necessitated their transfer to hospital for treatment.

Since the beginning of unrest in October 2015, the university has been a scene of renewing clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians students, which have resulted in numerous injury cases and affected daily classes.

Israeli forces, overnight, abducted at least 29 Palestinians, including minors, from across various West Bank districts, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS).

PPS said that at least 15 Palestinians were detained from the Hebron area, 11 of whom were identified as Turkey al-A’lami, 37, Mohammed Abu Jhaisheh, 21, Mohammed Swaiti, Mo’ath Masalmeh, Mohammed Masharqa, Ayman and Mohammed Masharqa, Khalil Dasseh, 23, 26-year-old Ashraf and Amjad, 26, al-Qadi, in addition to Mohammed, 19, and Mohannad,17, Awad. The identity of the remaining four remains unknown until the moment.

In al-Bireh and Ramallah, forces kidnapped five Palestinians, including a 52-year-old mother of a Palestinian detainee held in Israeli jails, as she was on her way to visit her imprisoned son.

The five were identified as Nada Shokeh, 52, and Fadi Atallah, 17, in addition to three brothers identified as Ahmad, 19, Mahmoud, 21, and Mohannad, 17, Salahat.

Forces further took two more Palestinians from the Nablus area. They were identified as Mohammed Khader, and Ja’afar Ramadan.

In Tulkarem, army soldiers detained minor Ismail I’tair from the village of Faro’un.

In the meantime, forces served a number of Palestinian youths from Qabatiya, to the south of Jenin, with notices ordering them to appear before Israeli intelligence, at Salem military camp, in Jenin.

PPS said that, during the past two days, Israeli forces have detained at least 34 Palestinians, including a young women identified as Maryam Sawafteh, 21, from Tubas.