Questions Needing Answers in Sniper Attack

‘No Justice, No Peace!’ 

by Dave Lindorff - This Can't Be Happening

July 8, 2016

As Police Killings of Minorities Mount, Attacks on Police Like the One in Dallas, While Awful, Are Also Sadly Predictable 

The tragedy that is America has deepened with the news that several people on Thursday appear to have organized a military-style sniper attack targeting police in Dallas during a protest march and rally against police brutality and killings of black people in that city.

The murder of anybody, whether it’s a police officer or someone who is simply stopped by a cop for a minor traffic violation and is then shot because a jumpy officer mistakes reaching for a wallet to be reaching for a gun, as happened just two days ago in Minnesota, is a dreadful thing.

But it has to be said that, with American police -- most of them white -- gunning down over 500 people -- most of them black or brown and most of them unarmed -- in just the first half of this year [1], it was bound to happen that somebody, or some group of people, would decide to retaliate by taking revenge on the police (especially given the number of working-class people of all races who have had military training, thanks to this country's endless wars). That’s not to justify what happened in Dallas, and we still need to learn more about who was involved in this shooting of 12 cops and two civilian protesters, killing five police officers, and what their motives were. It’s just to say that if the police continue to treat one segment of American society as enemy combatants in a war zone, and if the legal system continues to give brutal cops a pass when they maim or kill innocent citizens, including young children, effectively granting them immunity for their atrocities, there will inevitably be a violent reaction.

Recall the origins of the Black Panther movement, which grew out of a period of urban riots and insurrections across the country to which the nation responded not with jobs, social programs and better school funding, but with military assaults and occupations by armed soldiers. The Panthers openly armed themselves and started shadowing police on patrol in their communities, determined to make it clear that police could not occupy their communities and abuse the residents with impunity. Their bold actions were effective, but they brought down on themselves the full repressive force of the federal government, which launched a full-scale attack to destroy the Panther organization, using informants, agents provocateur, dirty tricks, mass arrests and murder.

In the post 9-11 era of military policing, the situation in minority communities today is at least as bad as, and probably worse, than it was in the 1960s. Social welfare programs that were created in response to the ‘60s riots, have been gutted, causing poverty and hopelessness to spread and deepen. Prisons have been filled with mostly non-white inmates as sentencing guidelines have become stricter and sentences longer. Violence in urban neighborhoods has exploded, and police today in many cities perceive themselves not as “peace officers” but as soldiers operating in hostile war zones, and act accordingly.

Can we be surprised then, that there has been a military-style response in one of those cities? That is not to justify this bloody act in Dallas, just to explain its inevitability.

Dallas police respond to an organized sniper assault on cops 

at a protest against police abuse

There will no doubt be calls, particularly this having happened in Texas, for an even more militaristic crackdown by police on minority neighborhoods. But that would be a terrible mistake. What is needed is an amping down of the violence on both sides -- the communities and the police. And also an amping down of the rhetoric, particularly by political leaders.

American society needs to start living up to its demonstrably false claim to be a just society of equality under the law. (While it's off topic, a good place to start doing that might be to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her admitted violation of several federal laws in using a private server for her official communications as secretary, instead of giving her a free pass as the FBI and Justice Dept. have done.)

This is a good place to note that while this deadly assault on police in Dallas represents the worst attack on law enforcement personnel in memory, it is not the first planned coordinated sniper attack in Texas or the US. The last one, which was reportedly planned but never activated, was to have taken place in neighboring Houston, in November 2011. It was not, however, intended to target police officers. Rather, it was intended to assassinate the leaders of the Houston Occupy movement, which was just getting going in that city that fall.

A heavily redacted memorandum (provided to ThisCantBeHappening! by the Partnership for Civil Justice and obtained by that public interest law firm in a pile of documents it received in response to a Freedom of Information request), sent from the Houston FBI office to the Bureau’s national headquarters in Washington, DC explains:

“An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles. (Note: protests continued throughout the weekend with approximately 6000 persons in NYC. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests have spread to about half of all states in the US, over a dozen European and Asian cities, including protests in Cleveland 10//8/11 at Willard Park which was initially attended by hundreds of protesters.”

A second document, a memo from the Jacksonville, Florida FBI office sent out to a number of regional FBI offices and to Bureau headquarters in D.C., indicated that the plan, while not activated in Houston, may have been put on hold indefinitely:

“On 13 October 20111, writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.”

The really disturbing aspect of all this is that when ThisCantBeHappening! contacted the FBI in Washington to find out what the Bureau had done about this deadly plot, which, as described, sounds like it may have involved some law enforcement or perhaps private security organization in Houston, we were basically blown off, and advised to contact the Houston FBI office or the Houston Police. The former would not return calls, and the latter claimed not to have even heard of the plot.

There were never any arrests of the Houston sniper plotters, though the FBI normally makes a big public announcement whenever it busts up some real or manufactured terrorism plot, suggesting that the Bureau was not at all concerned about this known plan to murder leaders of a lawful protest movement against corporate power.

Again, none of this justifies the murder of police officers, but it is important to note the grotesque double standard of justice that exists, not just in Texas, but in the nation as a whole.

Organizing to defend a community from abusive police, back in the late 1960s, prompted the US government to organize a massive coordinated campaign of ruthless repression against the perpetrators -- the Black Panther Party. But organizing a plot to murder the leaders of a peaceful demonstration against corporate power in the capital of the US oil industry apparently led to no action at all by the nation’s top law enforcement agency. (Nor did anyone in Congress see fit to call a hearing to investigation this plot of the resulting FBI inaction.)

The same double standard applies to the problem of police brutality and murder of blacks and other people of color. If a cop is killed -- especially by a person of color -- the full weight of the law enforcement and legal establishment is brought down on the alleged perpetrator. A good example of this is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia journalist who was convicted in an abomination of a trial in 1982 for the 1981 killing of a white Philadelphia police officer. Sentenced to death initially, Abu-Jamal spent over two decades on Pennsylvania’s death row before ultimately having that sentence overturned by a federal court, leaving him facing life without possibility of parole. But at every turn, from being left to bleed to death in a police van from a police bullet before finally being brought to a hospital to having his legal appeals rejected by higher courts that had granted relief to other prisoners on the same grounds, down to the present time where the state’s Dept. of Corrections is leaving him untreated for a severe diagnosed case of easily curable active Hepatitis C, Abu Jamal has been abused by police and by the legal system.

Yet as we have seen over and over, especially in the past few years thanks to the proliferation of documentation via cellphones, when police murder an unarmed black or brown suspect (and often a white one too), they escape prosecution, or if prosecuted, skate free on a technicality.

A common refrain at #blacklivesmatter protests is the phrase “No justice, no peace!”

The intent of that phrase is that as long as there is no justice there will be protests. The reality, though, in a nation that so readily turns to guns to solve its grievances, is that there will also be events like what just happened in Dallas.

It’s time to turn things around, not by just ramping up the police repression, but by making justice a reality for all, and not just the privileged class.


Links:
[1] http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/More-Than-500-People-Have-by-Ron-Madden-America_America-Freedom-To-Fascism_Men_People_Barak_Obama-160707-326.html

From Here to Eternity (Now)

From Here to Eternity, Reboot in the Finger Lakes

by David Yearsley - CounterPunch

July 8, 2016  

It’s a set-up that itself sounds like the scenario for a musical: big-time London theater-makers transplant a flop from the West End to a regional summer stage in an off-the-beaten-track American town in order to transform the show into a hit, along the way discovering truths about themselves and the people they meet. Thus bolstered, they take Broadway by storm.

And so it is that the musical From Here to Eternity, which closed in London in March of 2014 after the very limited success of a half-year run there, landed last week on the shores of Lake Owasco, just south of the town of Auburn in the middle of New York State for its American premiere. On a cloudless summer evening I spotted one of the most successful musical lyricists of all-time, Sir Tim Rice—he of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Lion King and other smash successes—making his way into an early-twentieth-century carousel house now converted into a theater called the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse. This handsome venue stands near the magnificently renovated pavilion of the same hue and vintage, its spacious ballroom giving onto flower-lined paths across vast lawns spreading down to the lakefront where a few bathers cooled themselves in the ninety-degree heat.

A wag might want to suggest that with his residency in Upstate New York, Sir Tim, a UKIP donor, is seeking not just to resuscitate From Here to Eternity, but also hopes to enjoy some colonial calm as the Brexit he supported convulses a rapidly fragmenting Britain. “It would be good to spend one’s final years as part of a truly independent nation once more,” he told the Spectator in elegiac tones before the vote. That his stay in American got rather more expensive with the free-fall of the British pound precipitated by the referendum outcome won’t register much with a man worth an estimated $250 million. And on the plus side, the receipts in surging U. S. dollars should the show indeed make it to Broadway will be that much more robust with the old country’s economy in ruins, its bankers fleeing the City of London just hit by the Brexit bomb.

Along the banks not of the Thames but of Owasco Lake, where General John Sullivan led his revolutionary army of freedom-fighters in 1779, laying waste to the Iroquois settlement that was once here but of which the historic marker to Sullivan and his men makes no mention, Sir Tim strolled towards the playhouse with his son Donald, who did the book for the show for the North American reboot. How fitting that just after the 4th of July weekend marking the Americans' own exit from the British empire, the Brexited Brit was nurturing Anglo-American ties by doing what he does best—coming up with clever lyrics like those delivered from the Hawaiian stockade by the scheming Maggio (the part played by Frank Sinatra in the movie, and rendering with cynical, sprightly panache by Michael Tacconi) in his shop-stopping number of military disaffection, “I love the army”:

If this is all they can muster

They can give it back to Custer.

The musical platform for Rice’s couplets, enjambments, and quatrains comes from the capable pen of Stuart Brayson, an unproven entity in comparison to most of Rice’s collaborators, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alan Menken, and Elton John among them. Brayson’s is serviceable stuff in a wide variety of genres: there’s some slack-key sonorities and slithering female harmonies for the requisite Hawaiian sound; there’s some anachronistic rock-and-roll to impart a period touch (even if slightly the wrong one); a smattering of swing for the same purposes; the necessary pop ballads of lust and love, fate and folly; macho, metrically varied choruses; and a rousing, up-tempo blues duet, “I Ain’t Where I Wanna Be” between the two male leads—the tormented, stubborn bugler Pruitt (who in the musical doesn’t get to bugle or buzz into his mouthpiece as Montgomery Clift does in the movie) played with stubborn charm by Corey Mach and the career soldier and man of principle, Sergeant Warden, done with resigned gusto by Kevin Aichele. Warden is sleeping with his commanding officers’ wife (or more provocatively rolling in the surf as Burt Lancaster did with Deborah Kerr on the silver screen—a scene that strangely doesn’t rate its own surging song in the musical). Mach and Aichele sang fiercely in-tune, with grit and gusto, Aichele even taking a chorus with a harmonica drawn from his trouser pocket (or so it seemed). The pair’s compelling, complementary musicality projected their kindred moral intransigence, one that threatened to doom one or both of them. Their performance of the song slammed the pedal to the metal towards an absurd fate.

The setting of the show puts one in mind of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific: in both entertainments the air is humid and soon thick with Japanese planes. One important is that you’re unlikely to hum Grayson’s tunes as you leave the theater, as might do “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” or “Some Enchanted Evening” after South Pacific. Still, Grayson’s engaging and serviceable tunes allow, even encourage, some fine performances like that of the adulterous, damaged captain’s wife Karen, played with fierce poise by Aleka Emerson. In her crystalline ballad “Another Language,” the song’s caged melody suggested her own entrapment and yearning. “There must be more before I die,” Rice’s lyric has her sing—a touching echo of his own Brexit views.

It was Grayson who came to Rice with a few songs and the idea to make From Here to Eternity into a musical. The lyricist originally planning only to produce the show, but then couldn’t resist the urge to contribute creatively. Rice bought the rights not to the film, but to the 1951 novel by James Jones on which the movie is also based. Jones’ book includes frank, realistic treatment of the Army’s gay sub-culture, a theme absent from the movie version even if some would like to detect it in Montgomery Clift’s glances in the direction of buff Burt.

Be all that as it may, these themes figure prominently in the plot and pathos of the musical, although Rice, father and son, do not bless gay love with a song of its own, but merely use it as a driver of the heterosexual melodrama.

In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the military sadism of the show doesn’t provide a shock or even much texture. Instead, it works almost as a cliché in the jaded world of the American War on Terror. The projected moving images of FDR announcing the Pearl Harbor attacks, the silhouettes of Japanese planes, the scrolling shots of the names of dead soldiers engraved on memorials work less as commentary on the devastations of war as on its necessity. The chorus “Boys of ’41” framing the show starts as a dirge but builds towards transcendent hymn that provides the icing on the stars-and-stripes 4th of July cake, one dangerously high in patriotic calories. The beasts and misbegotten heroes within the army that have troubled the boards for the show’s two hours are quickly forgotten as ranks quickly close to fight the good fight.

One suspects that such flag-waving may partly explain the show’s failure in London, which, in contrast to the rest of Britain, never wanted to flee Europe into open American arms. But this ideological positioning could well fuel the success of From Here to Eternity Now, if it makes it to Broadway in the months to come. Perhaps Sir Tim’s dreams will come true, ones that, in spite of nostrums about British sovereignty, will see the island kingdom from which he hails become even more firmly anchored as the geographical pendant in the Atlantic to Hawaii out in the Pacific. Just as the lights never dim on the Great White Way, so too the sun never sets on this empire.
 

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His recording of J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas is available from Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com

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Norwegian disease found in BC’s farmed salmon

Deadly Norwegian disease found in BC’s farmed salmon is a game-changer

by Ray Grigg in Oceans via Common Sense Canadian

July 5, 2016



The discovery of Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI) in BC’s farmed salmon has been couched in cautious and evasive terms by the industry and government. HSMI “might” have been found. It’s “yet another piece in the complex puzzle of salmon health on the Pacific Coast,” noted the former Minister of Fisheries, Hunter Tootoo.

Jeremy Dunn, executive director of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association, also downplayed the significance of the announcement:

The findings announced by the SSHI [Strategic Salmon Health Initiative] regarding a potential diagnosis of Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation in fish from one Atlantic salmon farm in B.C. are important. However, there is no consensus amongst the scientific community about the finding as the fish sampled in this farm showed no clinical signs of the disease.

But the finding of HSMI is extremely significant. Understanding why requires some additional information.
Virus causes disease

HSMI is related to piscine reovirus (PRV) as HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is related to AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Salmon don’t get HSMI unless they have PRV. Just as HIV is asymptomatic, PRV is also asymptomatic — which explains why it is not technically called a “disease”. In its early stages, HSMI may also exhibit no “clinical signs of disease”. But it can be fatal.

HSMI is the symptomatic stage of PRV. As the degree of PRV infection increases, heart muscles are damaged, organs are impaired and muscles are compromised. Eventually fish are so debilitated by a weakened heart, malfunctioning organs and inflamed muscles that they are unable to swim.

HSMI is now the third largest cause of mortality for salmon farming in Norway. But this is the industry’s problem. The real environmental concern is the spread of PRV and HSMI to wild salmon.

A BC-raised farmed Atlantic salmon with signs of HSMI 

(Alexandra Morton) 

Virus can spread quickly

PRV is extremely infectious. First identified in Norway in 1999, it spread quickly to 417 farms, and in 2010 was identified by Norwegian scientists as the cause of HSMI. On July 9, 2010, the scientific journal, PLOS One, published “Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation of Farmed Salmon is Associated with Infection with Novel Reovirus” (Gustavo Palacios, W. Ian Lipkin, et al.), linking HSMI with this “novel” piscine reovirus. PRV eventually spread to BC, probably by infected eggs imported to salmon farms from Norway.

As early as 2008 reports from BC’s veterinarian pathology lab showed “congestion and hemorrhage in the stratum compactum of the heart” in farmed salmon, symptoms consistent with HSMI. Estimates are that most farmed salmon in BC now have PRV — not a serious problem if their fish don’t die of HSMI.
Wild salmon at risk

But the situation is very different for wild salmon. The PRV imported from Norway is now thought to be spreading to BC’s wild fish. As early as 2011, Dr. Kristi Miller found PRV in Fraser River sockeye. A year later, 13 of 15 Cultus Lake cutthroat trout were found with PRV. Norwegian scientists are of the opinion that HSMI may never be discovered in wild salmon because the fish would be too debilitated by the disease to survive predators and the challenging conditions of oceans and rivers.

The combination of PRV’s ubiquitous presence in salmon farms, its extreme virulence, and the fatal symptoms of HSMI could have devastating consequences for wild salmon populations.

Ray Grigg is in his ninth year as a weekly environmental columnist for the Campbell River Courier-Islander on BC's Vancouver Island. Before this column, titled Shades of Green - now appearing on commonsensecanadian.ca as well - Ray wrote a bi-weekly environmental column for five years. He is the author of seven internationally published books on Oriental philosophy, specifically Zen and Taoism. His academic background is in English literature, psychology, cultural history, and philosophy. He has travelled to some 45 countries around the globe.

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Talking of Entanglements with the CBC: The Tangled Politics of Whale Rescue

Re Humpback entanglement interview with Chris Walker

by Ingmar Lee

July 7, 2016 

Dear Almanac; just now I was interviewed by Chris Walker regarding our recent rescue of an entangled Humpback whale in Lama Passage near Bella Bella BC.

I am thankful that Almanac was interested in our story, however, I am feeling very frustrated to have been very clearly and deliberately prevented from discussing a serious aspect of the story.

Chris Walker cut me off, stating that he "had to get to the callers," which is a regrettable new Almanac euphemism (since the days of Mark Forsythe - which whom I was able to speak freely with on numerous occasions on Almanac) for allowing several comments from " the callers," but with the actual intention of then allowing the currently "acceptable" (to Almanac") propagandists to expound at length on the issue at hand.

The issue I wished to mention, is that DFO, and its favourite propaganda organization, the Vancouver Aquarium jealously guard their BC-wide monopoly on whale disentanglement services. Unlike virtually everywhere else in the world where locally trained and equipped citizen groups take on the responsibility of rescuing whales, in BC there is only one single "certified" DFO- employed whale disentanglement "expert," Paul Cottrell. Currently, even professional DFO agents out on the water are not qualified to do actual whale rescue, but instead, may only deploy one of a very few tracking transmitters into the net trails of entangled whales, after which Mr Cottrell may then fly in several days later from his Vancouver office to attempt the disentanglement.

As your Vancouver Aquarium spokesperson mentioned, there are estimated to be at least 400 pinipeds currently entangled in various gear along the BC coast, and who knows how many cetaceans. One single Vancouver-based trained and "certified" person, no matter what his skill and experience, is absolutely not sufficient, given the increasing scale of the problem.

Two years ago, while working at the Koeye River Sanctuary in Fitzhugh Sound just south of here, two Humpbacks, which we had been observing for weeks bubble- net feeding below our work site were promptly netted after DFO allowed a gillnet opening at Uganda Point near Koeye. It would have been utterly obvious to anyone with the slightest awareness that allowing at least 30 100 metre-long nets to be extended perpendicular to the shoreline along which numerous Humpbacks were feeding would guarantee entanglements, and it happened.

Needless to say, this was very outrageous and disturbing to everyone working at Koeye, and I decided to get involved in getting trained and certified to perform disentanglement services.

But when I got in touch with Mr Cottrell, he told me that, no, no training was being offered, and that "it was highly dangerous work, only to be undertaken by trained and certified operators." I asked him where he had obtained his "certification" but he could not answer that. He said that under no circumstances would anyone other than himself be permitted to undertake the service.

Here around Bella Bella, almost everyone is an extremely experienced boat operator, many of whom are, no doubt far more experienced than even Mr Cottrell. Many of us are eager to be trained, certified, and eager to acquire all the equipment, -boats, tools, knives, floats to conduct these rescues.

Certainly, in the case of our recent disentanglement, the guaranteed timelag for the whale had we deferred to DFO and waited for "professional" help would have been lengthy, - if they even bothered to show up at all. They certainly weren't interested in responding to that incident. We took that into consideration, as well as the perfect conditions, the state of the animal and the tools at hand when we undertook to disentangle that whale. I am very glad to have done what we did, and will do it again when the opportunity presents itself, - a very likely scenario. Meanwhile, I will continue to accumulate tools to do this work, and will seek training from my Alaska volunteer counterparts.

It is extremely and especially disturbing to see CBC resorting to such controversial propagandists as the Vancouver Aquarium for the bulk of any commentary regarding our local sea and its inhabitants. Here, and everywhere along the BC coast, DFO and Vanaqua are not respected institutions, in fact amongst virtually all the mariners and conservationists I know, they are held in outright contempt.

Mark Forsythe was always generous in allowing me to air my respectful, but often institutionally iconoclastic environmentalist views, and we sorely regret the milquetoast, corporate-lackey, business-as-usual Almanac which has replaced him. We were expecting some more progressive refreshment from CBC after the Harper years, but alas, this just doesn't appear to be happening.

Sincerely,

Ingmar Lee
Denny Island, BC

Whatever Hilly Wants... Cheatin' at the Heart of Dem. Nomination "Win"

Hillary Cheated

by Ted Rall - CounterPunch

July 4, 2016

Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That’s the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the “allegations” by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

I used scare quotes around the word “allegations” because the truth is plain to see and undeniable by anyone with a microgram of honesty: Hillary Clinton cheated.


Joseph Sohm | Shutterstock.com

If the rules had been followed, Bernie Sanders would be the nominee.

As with all things Clinton, of course, definitions matter. It depends on what the meaning of “cheat” is.

To most people, “cheating” means breaking the rules of a contest. By this standard definition, there’s no doubt that the Clinton campaign, its political allies and the Democratic National Committee cheated in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. They broke the law. They disenfranchised voters. They broke party rules. And they violated long-standing customs that are so widely accepted that they are essentially de facto rules of the Democratic Party and the American political system.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, ran a clean campaign.

Like many other voters, I subscribe to a somewhat broader definition of cheating in political elections. To me, Richard Nixon-style “dirty tricks” – the disgusting tactics George W. Bush used against John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 – rise to the level of cheating because they deny voters the facts that they need in order to make an educated decision in the voting booth. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that people are entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts, and outright lies about your opponent’s – and your own – positions and experience not only violate Moynihan’s dictum but constitute the essence of cheating in the political arena.

If Hillary Clinton manages to dodge both an Emailgate-related indictment as well as fallout from her husband’s corrupt tarmac rendezvous with the now-tainted Attorney General Loretta Lynch for the next few weeks and formerly secure the nomination she’s been working on since at least the year 2000, it will be a historic moment for identity politics. But it is absolutely imperative that no one watching the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major American political party be fooled into believing that she did it on the up and up.

Hillary Clinton did not run a clean campaign.

She cheated.

If we want to be the kind of country that doesn’t care about that sort of thing, if fair play isn’t an American value, fine with me. But let’s go into this general election campaign with our eyes wide open.

Caucus after caucus, primary after primary, the Clinton team robbed Bernie of votes that were rightfully his.

Here’s how. Parties run caucuses. States run primaries. The DNC is controlled by Hillary Clinton allies like chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Democratic governors are behind Clinton; state election officials report to them. These officials decide where to send voting booths, which votes get counted, which do not.

You thought this was a democracy? Ha.

In the first in the nation Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders pulled off a surprising tie where he was expected to lose badly — Hillary won by just 0.2%. However, party officials never bothered to send vote counters to the most rural parts of the state, where Bernie was favored over Hillary. About 5% of Iowa caucus votes were never counted. At other caucus sites, Democratic officials loyal to Hillary purposefully undercounted Sanders caucusers. No doubt about it, Bernie should have won that one, as well as votes in other states that would have been affected by a big Sanders upset.

Voters in pro-Sanders precincts in Arizona faced long lines because pro-Hillary elections officials didn’t provide enough voting booths. With lines of three hours or more still to go, the media called the state for Hillary.

New York State was arguably the most important contest of the primary season. Had Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in her adopted home state where she had served 1 1/3 terms as senator, he would have dealt her campaign a blow from which she might never have recovered, along with a pile of delegates. Because of her local roots and the fact that New York was a closed primary state in which independence were not allowed to vote, it was a long shot for Bernie. But like the LAPD in the O.J. Simpson case, the Clinton team wasn’t taking any chances.

Did they drop a line to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who endorsed Clinton? Or did state elections officials act on their own initiative? Either way, Bernie Sanders stronghold, the borough of Brooklyn where he was born, was targeted for massive voter suppression. At least 125,000 New Yorkers were illegally purged from the rolls, had their votes lost/thrown away, or were not permitted to vote due to broken voting machines – all in Brooklyn.

Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who endorsed Clinton, was angry. “It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists,” De Blasio said.

“The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed.”

The skullduggery continued through the last major primary, California. The night before, the Associated Press put its thumb on the scale, declaring Hillary the nominee in an epic act of voter suppression. Who knows how many Sanders voters decided to stay home once they heard it was all over?

Hillary Clinton was declared the winner by a substantial margin, but after it turned out that state election officials, who report to Governor Jerry Brown, who endorsed Clinton, didn’t bother to count a whopping 2.5 million provisional ballots. According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, the nation’s leading expert on the manipulation of elections, Bernie Sanders actually should have won the state of California along with the majority of its delegates. (Disclosure: I work with Palast as a Fellow of his Investigative Fund.)

One of the most disreputable moves of the campaign was the Associated Press poll of party superdelegates, party insiders who are allowed to vote for whoever they want but, because they are party insiders, inevitably support the establishment candidate. Truth is, the superdelegate system itself is official cheating. But the AP survey made a terrible system even more deadly to democracy.

If they cared about free elections, the superdelegates wouldn’t have stated their loyalty in public. The DNC ought to have told superdelegates that they would lose their status if they expressed their opinions before the convention. As it was, Bernie Sanders started the race miles behind the finish line.

The only way Bernie could have caught up would have been to have scored one landslide win after another. As it was, he came close to doing that. His surprising early momentum, big rallies and popularity with younger voters might have convinced superdelegates to back him, but after they told the AP they were for Hillary Clinton, it was too late for them to change their minds.

I’m out of space. So I can’t get into the DNC’s attempts to deny Bernie Sanders airtime in the form of widely seen debates against Hillary Clinton, her ridiculous claim that she supported Bernie’s $15-an-hour federal minimum wage at the same time that her website confessed that she didn’t, the Nevada Democratic convention in which Sanders supporters were denied seats by Clintonites in charge and then falsely accused of violence, and Clinton’s sleazy “I was for the TPP before I was against it, and now that the primaries are over, I’m for it again” gambit.

That stuff isn’t the usual hardball.

 

It’s cheating.

 

Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower.

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No Hashtag for Baghdad's Slaughtered?

No Flag Memes for Baghdad, No Hope for Terror War Respite  

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

03 July 2016

JeSuisBaghdad? Iraqi flag colors on the Eiffel Tower, the White House? No? Wrong sort of victims, I guess.The responsibility for Sunday’s carnage in Baghdad — and countless other killings around the world — goes directly to George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who willingly, even eagerly, launched a war of aggression on false evidence and tore the entire region apart.

ISIS was spawned in the brutal prisons Bush & Blair set up after the invasion, and has thrived in the chaos that US/UK policies have fomented in all the years since, particularly in Libya and Syria. But these two men walk free, honored and enriched, while thousands upon thousands of innocent people continue to die for their ignorant, arrogant, murderous folly.

And there is no end in sight. Both presidential candidates have proudly proclaimed they will double down on the evil idiocy of the War on Terror; Trump promises indiscriminate bombing and whole new levels of torture, while Hillary — gathering Dick Cheney’s old neocons around her — is bent on policies that will not only exacerbate chaos and Islamist terror, but will also bring us to the brink of war (if not beyond) with Russia and China.

In Britain, the Brexit vote has shaken the political foundations of the nation, bringing new people to the fore — but none of them will change a single jota of the UK’s slavish kowtowing to Washington’s Terror War, nor the British establishment’s never-ending attempts to act like an imperial power. Only one leader opposes these policies — Jeremy Corbyn — but he is facing an almost certain overthrow, or else a split of the party into ineffectual factions, in a rebellion organized by the adherents of the war criminal Tony Blair.

So on the most important matter driving the madness and misery of the world today — the insane, never-ending, hydra-headed, multi-directional, all-corrupting Terror War — nothing is going to change. Brexit or no Brexit, Trump or no Trump, the blood and fire will continue to flow.

After the Last [Climatic] Sky

After the Last [Climatic] Sky 

by Hatim Kanaaneh MD via Mazin Qumsiyeh

[Dr. Kanaaneh published two excellent and highly acclaimed books 'A Doctor in Galilee' and 'Chief Complaint' and he occasionally writes his beautiful descriptions of life here as it really is. He is worth reading]

My wife and I are back in our home in Galilee after tarrying for several months in New York. Last night we visited family and dear friends. The sky was phenomenally clear and we stayed up past midnight, a rare event for an early riser like me. It was the coincidence of June’s Strawberry Moon, a reminder of the rich environmental legacy of Native Americans, those forgotten sacrificial victims of othering and settler colonialism, and the summer solstice, a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Our last visit for the night was with our age mates Said—Arabic for ‘Happy’--and Nabiha—‘Witty  Woman’—, better known in our village parlance by their first born son’s name as Abu- and Umm-Ayman. Said is my retired biochemist fellow villager who has spent more time in his land in the Battouf Valley for pleasure than he ever did in the hospital laboratory that he headed as a career. His hobby farming had kept his family, as well as mine, supplied with fresh vegetables throughout the summer months for many years.


Last night he and Nabiha were apologetic about the limited amounts of fresh peas and melons that they insisted on gifting us. Alas, the heat this summer had ruined the crops. As you know, they explained, the Battouf’s best vegetables are grown ba’il—without irrigation—thanks to the nightly dew precipitation in the valley. This year the morning fog lifts early, the dew is evaporated with the first rays of sun that desiccate the vegetation except for a hardy okra plant here and a mutant melon there. To keep himself busy in retirement, my friend had increased the number of goats in his yard and we were treated to our fill of qataif, freshly baked light pancakes stuffed with homemade cheese then deep-fried in olive oil and smothered with spicy syrup. Yummm!!

Always a super housewife, Nabiha still supervises all the household chores despite her failing vision, limited mobility and the confinement of home dialysis. Thank God for small favors! Not everyone has an  accomplished biochemist for a husband and not every husband is so loving and dedicated. Said had won her hand in marriage competing with a dozen other suitors, including closer relatives of hers than he was. But that all is history. By the time he retired, they had raised a good family and lived happily for over four decades. It has been only few years now that she stopped her daily trips to their Battouf fields where she pulled more than her fair share of physical labor. She did it more to pamper her children with fresh produce and to keep the traditions of the good old days than for the extra income. Tending the fertile land and gathering the fresh produce was a joy, second nature to the old couple. They passed it on to the next generation effortlessly. You don’t teach kids how to breathe, Umm-Aymen says.

By the time Said retired, the family was quite well-off by village standards: He collected a good retirement pay, three out of the four girls worked in the village and their boy, Ayman, was a pharmacist at a hospital in the south of the country. Now Nabiha can hardly ambulate within the house with the help of a cane. She sits in the kitchen and the two surviving daughters are always at the ready to follow her tuitions. She does most of the food preparation for all four remaining members of the family, the two parents and their attentive two daughters. Ayman’s widow and his baby girl, named after one of her late paternal aunts, come to visit every few weeks and that is when everyone gets a life again.

Now, the old couple constantly pleads with God for forgiveness. The good lord continues to test their faith and endurance. But how does one deal with the added curse of the fields losing their productivity. Of late the Battouf Valley is turning sterile. But they insist on sharing what little vegetables Said picks every few days with friends and neighbors. Stores are full of fresh produce from the irrigated fields of Jewish commercial farms. But the stuff lacks the bite of Ba’il produce. It tastes like soggy hay and sinks in your stomach, never fills your body and soul with the flavor of the land in which it grew. Nabiha recalls how her late father used to know from the first bite from which exact area of the Battouf Valley a fresh tomato, a watermelon or a dish of cooked greens came. And Said, like some other locals, believes that there is a direct link between the name “Battouf” and the Netufa Spring at its eastern edge. From there the jump is easy to the Netufians who happened to have introduced agriculture to the human race a dozen millennia ago. Alas, it seems like it all is coming to an end. Unless God envelopes us with his mercy and blesses the Battouf again with more rain at the height of winter and with cooler summers.

***

This morning I woke up with a peculiar sense of dislocation, a fugue state I first attributed to jetlag. I was fully aware of my time and space coordinates and felt in full command of my senses and memory. But when I looked at the newspaper headlines from yesterday I didn’t understand what I read. The meaning seemed to seep out of the words: First, several headings in Arabic, my mother’s tongue, seemed to be confused:  Government approves additional 82 million shekels to build settlement homes,” one said. Then right next to that another heading read: “Government approves 20 million shekels in a plan to demolish thousands of homes of its Arab citizens.”

Yes, we are 20% of Israel’s population and the budgets are proportionate, I figured. But I sensed I missed something. For some reason the two statements didn’t make sense. A third heading said “Saudi Arabia supported Netanyahu with $16 billion.” I could already imagine the next double-speak heading about the ‘Green Patrol’ spraying Bedouin crops in the Negev with Agent Orange. First I was lost between the real and the imagined headings. Then I missed the inner coherence of each statement. Finally words seemed to have been stripped of their meaning, the concepts becoming empty shells: What did ‘state,’ ‘king’ or ‘citizen’ mean? They were collections of letters that I could read and I sounded the words out several times. But each had no significance beyond the auditory impact it made on my neurological system. Looking at words and sentences on the page seemed like scooping ladles of alphabet soup. The whole page meant nothing beyond the different black dots, lines, twists and turns on a white background.

Did I suffer from a serious brain dysfunction, I wondered? I checked my memory again by reciting a few lines of poetry from elementary school days. They flowed nicely with rhythm and rhyme. But I couldn’t tell what they signified. Then I recited ‘Alfatiha,’ the opening chapter of the Koran. I didn’t miss a beat. But  what did the word ‘God’ mean? I put the paper down, closed my eyes and breathed slow and deep. This was a peculiar neurological symptom, I could tell and I hoped it was a passing one. I went to my study and turned my Mackintosh laptop on. I immediately connected to the instrument and could navigate in its myriad functions. I felt reassured. I checked my email. A welcome name glared at me from the screen: Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh had sent out another one of his weekly messages to his many thousands of contacts. I recognized the name and immediately connected it to the dark face, the bespectacled focused black eyes and the persistent smile, all stored in my memory. I ticked on the message and read. Slowly I made out words other than the inspiring name. The guy is so spot-on! OMG! His words made sense. Yes, ‘God’ is the friendly big guy in the sky. I Knew Him well, of course. Thank you, Mazin, for bringing me back to reality and full comprehension. Your words make sense:

“From Palestine we send our deepest condolences to Brenden Cox and all the family of the murdered British labor party MP Jo Cox. … The best thing we can do to honor Jo is to redouble our efforts for peace and justice. …Please think of how World Wars were started and the devastations they caused. It was not bad leaders but an acquiescent public. …”

Mazin then quotes a lovely fable from Kurt Kauter’s “New Fables: Thus Spoke the Marabou,” to buttress the need for the peace-minded to speak up. He then provides three more links to significant current events and signs off with his standard “Stay Human!”

***

My wife interrupts me with a loud chuckle from the bedroom. I go over, sit on the edge of the bed next to her and listen to the funny news item from the New York Times: A woman in the Big Apple is offering her sexless cuddling services at the rate of $80 an hour.

I give my wife a good-morning kiss and go back to my study. I choose the last link from Mazin’s email on the strength of Naomi Klein’s name recognition. Lo and behold, in her eloquent 2016 Edward Said Lecture delivered in London on May 5, she speaks directly to me and to my village friends. She addresses our issues and personal concerns more meaningfully than I ever dreamt possible from a lead global environmental  campaigner. I wish she were here right now so I can thank her with a sincere hug. Her lecture is entitled “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” It ranges far and wide yet feels personal and immediate. She is talking about our Battouf Valley, of course. I can hardly distinguish her voice from that of my village friends. I swear I can detect in her voice that telling twang of mixed fear and hope I heard during my last visit last night. She decries the fact that “… climate refugees aren’t recognized under international law.” And there is no legal recourse for my friends, local, national or international.

Naomi Klein doesn’t shy away from addressing the mother of all Middle East conflicts, Europe’s settler colonialist project in Palestine. The intellectual legacy of Edward Said, another ‘Happy’ Palestinian, and his mythic relationship to land and exile necessitates that. She avers that environmental racism, designated ‘sacrifice areas’ and ‘sacrifice peoples’ and “The trauma associated with these layers of forced separation—from land, from culture, from family” is at the base of the continuing violence in the Middle East and elsewhere. Said, the legendary exposer of Orientalism, didn’t trust “tree huggers” apparently because of the special experience of the Palestinians with the Jewish National Fund’s successful camouflaging of its “green colonialism” and of its “feel-good conifers” replacing Palestinian habitats. The roots of colonialism, Othering, and massive human rights abuses on one side and of environmental neglect and international debauchery to control carbon resources on the other are one and the same: insatiable greed.

Edward Said “was and remains among our most achingly eloquent theorists of exile and homelessness.” In the spirit of his many relevant insights on the matter, Naomi suggests “climate Sumud” as a strategy. She points to the example of “staying put” practices of the locals in Nauru as they struggle to face the rising seas. Environmental Sumud and the struggle for freedom know no borders. I am reminded of the legacy of such unsung heroes as David Eggers’ Zeitoun in New Orleans (Vintage, 2010), which is one and the same eons-old tradition of steadfastness born of physical rootedness in one’s piece of our shared terra firma. In this same spirit of human solidarity, the one state solution is the ultimate Sumud strategy for us sane Palestinians and Israelis alike. It has been practiced in this crossroads locale over the millennia thus depositing in my native Canaanite genes the layered residues of all the invaders and their slave gladiators from Hittites, Hyksos, Egyptians and Hebrews through Greeks, Romans, Persians,  Byzantine and European Crusaders all the way to the Arabs with a light Turkish flavoring.

Abu- and Umm-Ayman would agree with Naomi a hundred percent. The soil of the Battouf Valley under their fingernails drenched with the oil of the olives they collect from the adjacent hillside gives them instant comprehension of her words. And, like me, they would reach out and hug her. We are ready to offer her all the cuddling she needs free of charge. Who else could better illuminate the relevance of Edward Said’s concepts of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Othering’ to the global climate change and of ‘Sumud’ as the last global weapon of the weak in facing the impending climate Nakba? Sumud is all that all of us have left. Without Sumud, where would we all set up camp after the last climatic sky?

----------------------

[Thank you Dr. Hatim for sharing and for Staying Human. It was great to see you here in Bethlehem albeit for a short visit last week. Visits inspire us to push harder . Mazin Qumsiyeh]

Where Houston's Yellow Bricks End or, Sidewalks Without Purchase

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Walking the Bad Streets of Houston’s Super-Elites

by David Yearsley - CounterPunch

July 1, 2016

To walk in Houston is crazy. Many think it’s illegal, or at the very least forbidden by god. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the underclasses might, or so the car-loving locals like to think.

One of my walks took me from the downtown Hilton Americas a few miles through the historic black district of Third Ward to the University of Houston. When I informed the old friend who’d enlisted me to come to review concerts at the biennial convention of the American Guild of Organists held in the city last week, his face took an uncharacteristically grave aspect. He grabbed my shoulder and said, “Never do that again.” Needless to say, that only encouraged me to do just that.

In surveying my possible route from the air-conditioned, eleventh-floor safety of my downtown hotel room, I had ascertained that a few years back the neighborhood surrounding the intersection of Dowling and McGowen Streets in the Third Ward ranked as the fifteenth-most-dangerous area in America according to statistics compiled by the F. B. I. Still higher crime rates prevailed a bit farther south in the Sunnyside district, which ranks in the top-ten on this ignominious list.

I traversed this supposed no-go zone without incident in the middle of the day, encountering one young man on a bicycle. He gave me a pleasant greeting. Few cars were to be seen on the quarter’s roadways.

Compared to the desert of downtown, with its gleaming skyscrapers rising next to weedy parking lots, the Third Ward is lush and green, its many empty lots filled with garrulous birds, mature trees and diverse plants. On foot, one realizes that Houston was once a swampy place, and likely will be again before too long.

The houses of the Third Ward are mostly small and dilapidated, many teetering on the wooden posts that keep them off the ground a few inches. Lots of dwellings are abandoned. The roads are bleached and rutted. Obviously poor, the area appears almost rural because of the number of disused parcels. These function as de facto nature preserves.

In advance of the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, Interstate 45 was blasted between downtown and the Third Ward, cordoning it off from the geographic center of the city. More recently I-69 was added to this vast moat of segregation, which now number some eighteen lanes. From the overpass at Elgin Street, the modernist high-rise monuments to capitalism rise to the north above the horizontal torrent of automobiles, and the vines of the Third Ward beckon to the south.

The bridge at Elgin Street is one of the few crossing points over the interstates between Third Ward and the so-called Midtown district with its gated townhouses rising amidst light-industrial blocks and the usual retail detritus. It’s impossible to know what midtown is in the middle of, since Houston doesn’t have one. “Midtown” suffers, if somewhat less urgently, from the surreal incoherence endemic to Houston. Near the north end of the bridge is Baldwin Park with its eucalyptus and oak trees, curving paths, and lawns many shades darker than the color of money. Faux Tudor townhouses face the park. The drinking fountains are three-tiered—one each for adults, kids, and dogs.

Across the bridge after a couple of blocks I came to Emancipation Park, purchased by former slaves and in 1872. The dangerous Dowling Street runs along the park’s southeast border.

Neglected for decades, the park is now under full-on reconstruction with a pavilion, a recreation center, a pool, water features, and sculpted landscaping taking shape beyond seemingly impregnable temporary fencing; “Your Tax Dollars At Work” a large sign proclaims. Whether this will “reenergize” the Third Ward as the city’s PR claims or provide a beachhead for gentrification remains to be seen. The architects’ renderings imagine shimmering condos in the blocks surrounding the park rather than the weathered churches and battered houses that are there now.

I did couple of more miles past Emancipation Park in the direction of a towering McDonald’s sign. This garish monument marks the corner of the University of Houston. A light rail station and the usual chainstore outlets suddenly crop up. Just beyond them are the spreading sports fields and football stadium of the university.

Temperatures were in the high 90s and I was sweaty. I went around back of the Moores School of Music, took off my t-shirt and draped it over some shrubs, then put on my dry one and joined the flow of organists moving into the air-conditioned dimness of the concert hall for a program of works by Mozart and the Bach sons given by the world-class baroque orchestra, Ars Lyrica Houston.

That’s when I got the talking to from my host.

In spite of his protestations, far more perilous than this walk spanning at least three worlds in three miles was the first one I had undertaken in Houston a few days earlier.

I’ve done many walks: over the icy cliffs and receding glaciers of the Ptarmigan Traverse in the North Cascades; across long stretches of New York City’s five boroughs; over boggy fields and treacherous canals—into one of which I lost my shoes—along Germany’s North Sea coast; late-night hikes from the ferry terminal to my parents’ house while being threatened continually by the vicious dogs of then-rural Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. But none of these has been as dangerous as the nearly ten miles west from Houston’s downtown Hilton to St. Philip’s Presbyterian Church to hear a program of Bach, Brahms, and Liszt presented by a famed German organ virtuoso.

I gave myself three-and-a-half hours for the trek.

After passing under I-45 and leaving the blight of downtown, I picked up some sunscreen at Walgreens and set off through a district that apparently calls itself Hyde Park. Here as elsewhere townhouses are quickly replacing arts-and-crafts bungalows. These modest structures are rapidly disappearing from Houston, and the charm of those that remain is badly diminished by the sturdy security fences that usually surround them.

Houston has the terrible habit of permitting some blocks to dispense with sidewalks. This isn’t so bad in the unthreatening calm of Vermont Street.

But it is life-threatening along the busy four-lane thoroughfare of San Felipe Avenue running through River Oaks. There are long sidewalk-less stretches in this super-rich enclave’s main automotive artery. For most of these I could still walk along the grassy verge, robustly green from all the pricey irrigation. It’s important to the super rich to keep up appearances on the outside of their walls.

Occasionally, however, the way forward for the pedestrian would be blocked by hedges or other obstacles, so I’d have to wait for the traffic to clear and then run to the other side of the street. Mansions loomed behind brick walls with their own slate roofs as huge cars whizzed by at fifty miles-per-hour.

When gaps in the fortifications allowed views to a circular drive with porte-cochere I could see no sign of people. The environment was as humanless as it was downtown, though I was fairly sure that at least someone must be inside those piles of brick, just as there were certainly drivers behind the darkened windows of those SUVS careening along San Felipe.

With my journey approaching the three-hour mark it began to rain big tropical drops as I crossed train tracks that look like they had ran through pastureland just a decade ago. I was now entering the so-called Uptown district—though “up” from what I couldn’t say. New glass towers rose around the church that was my destination and the horizon was thick with cranes making more of them.

In ten-miles I had encountered two other pedestrians. Both were walking their dogs.

The first part of this article can be read here.
 

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His recording of J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas is available from Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com

More articles by:David Yearsley

A Study of the Modern American Massacre

Massacres: Where Have all the Islamist Gone?

by James Petras

June 30, 2016

Over the past fifty plus years, over 125 mass shootings/massacres have occurred within the United States but not one perpetrator has been identified as a trained member of an international Islamist terrorist organization.

A review of the massacres will shed considerable light on the political, cultural and socio-psychological features of US society. The frequent and intensely bloody nature of these mass shootings are a distinctly US phenomenon. The high proportion of fatalities over wounded survivors is a reflection of the availability of high-power weapons in the US and the poorly coordinated police response - where SWAT teams place ‘force protection’ over saving lives.

Method and Scope

Until very recently, civilian-initiated massacres were an infrequent phenomenon in US society. In order to understand the rise of civilian-initiated massacres as an American phenomenon, we will first set out approximately 20-year time frames, then list the number of massacres in each time period, examine the number of fatalities and the political and social ethos within each time frame. It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatalities to wounded survivors in order to gauge the effectiveness of the police/medical response.

We can identify three time frames: the early period between 1960-1980; the middle period between 1981-1998; the most recent period between 1999-2016.

Political Dynamics of Massacres

There is a clear and consistent increase in the number of massacres and fatalities over the entire half century. From 1960 to 1980, there was one large massacre resulting in at least 14 fatalities and 32 wounded.

In the subsequent period between 1981-1998 the number of massacres jumped four-fold and the number of fatalities increased four-fold from fourteen to seventy-one.

In the most recent period (1999-2016) the number of massacres almost doubled again and the number of fatalities increased two and a half times.

The number of massacres and victims have ‘taken off’ in the last few years There are grounds to believe that we have moved from massacres as a rarity to a transitional period, to a significant upsurge which has become the ‘new norm’ for mass killings.

Myths: State Propaganda and Social Realities

Large, civilian-initiated massacres were rare (The Texas University Tower in 1967) during the two decades (1960-1980) despite this being a time of mass popular protest against the war and racism, cultural revolts, labor unrest and community-based collective action.

During these tumultuous years, the political-cultural climate encouraged mass collective action directed at changing government policy. Individual political, social and local grievances or psycho-cultural resentments were channeled through well-structured community based organizations. State propaganda was challenged by a widespread system of robust opposition media, well-publicized critical voices and familiar places of revolt. Domestic massacres, when they occurred were more often perpetrated by the State - as in the massacres against the Black Panther leadership, or shooting of students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities.

The growth of civilian-initiated massacres as public events began to find prominence between 1980-1998, a time of growing elite dominance over everyday life and the retreat of collective expression.

This ‘middle’ or ‘transitional period’ was characterized by state and media emphasis on individual justifications and resentments, together with the growing cult of private greed- the ‘animal spirits’ of the market - and the promotion of military revivalism, through Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, and George Bush’s destruction of Panama and Iraq.

The previous political culture, which had absorbed grievances and offered outlets for individual aggression, was in retreat.

The elites, led by President Reagan, established the culture of the ‘Lone Ranger’ (or lone wolf), vindicating grievances with his ‘righteous rifle’. The conflation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution with the worship of the lone vigilante helped to create the contemporary mass killer.

The political culture of resistance was replaced by the pathology of resentment; protests directed at political targets were replaced by violent terror directed at diffuse apolitical publics - the amorphous innocents.

The transition period established several key determinants that led to the subsequent massification of massacres.

First, the political-cultural elites deliberately and systematically discredited the social context of mass popular protest, ridiculing popular discontent and suppressing dissent while enhancing the image of the power of the individual. The cult of the ‘individual over the collective’ morphed into a deranged Ayn Randian Atlas with his semi-automatic 9 mm.

Secondly, the transitional political culture renewed and enhanced the role of state violence in resolving conflicts and extended the notion of social violence downward into the mass of society.

Under the guardianship of the political and media elites, the 1980’s and 1990’s did not encourage or permit any effective mass cultural alternative to violence.

The deregulation of the economy and the Clinton regime’s open-ended policy of conquest (or ‘regime changes’) through massive bombing of overseas adversaries led to a massive policing of both foreign (imperial clients) and domestic civil societies, which fed into the pathological tendencies of individuals who set out to vindicate their private grievances.

The first two decades of the 21st century witnessed a sharp increase in domestic civilian-initiated massacres with an even greater proportion of fatalities. The cumulative effects of mass murders of previous decades, found expression in a rising spiral of massacres.

The 21st century is the epoch of multiple serial killings at every geographical region, from global, regional, national and local levels. The bloody consequences of lawless imperial wars of aggression and pillage (with such psychotic justifications as ‘regime change’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’ especially under the First Clinton Dynastic Regime) are features of everyday life. Military budgets have skyrocketed at the international and national level and are mirrored by multi-million arms purchases by individuals at the domestic civilian level.

Military metaphysics and quasi-religious public displays of superhuman ‘avengers’ wrapped in the national flag have permeated every cranny of society - from mega-million dollar sporting extravaganzas to school assemblies, business meetings (like the Rotary Clubs) and workplace gatherings.

Millions have entered the war zones; daily police killings of citizens, especially African American and marginalized youth, have become the norm. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of immigrants are demonized, assaulted, dragged from their homes or workplaces, incarcerated and deported with barely the shirt of their backs - leaving sundered families and communities.

Most important, the US imperial state has brutalized and, directly or indirectly, massacred millions of Muslim civilians, citizens of once-sovereign nations, throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa and even in the immigrant ghettos, raising lawlessness to a new and more diffuse level.

The pathology of the American state, with its embrace of state-sponsored massacres, has created mass psycho-phobia against Muslim people and is in the process of stirring up the boiling pot of even more brutal civilian massacres. It must be emphasized that American citizens, overwhelmingly non-Muslim, have committed the vast majority of mass shooting in America. Even those mass shooting committed by self-described Islamists have involved US-born Muslims or converts who have shown an affinity and commitment to the dominant gun ethos of America. None have been ‘trained abroad’, none have proved to be ’soldiers’ of some remote international Islamist movement. Most have learned their requisite ’skills’ at ‘for-profit’ US shooting ranges and all have imbibed the national gun ideology over community and mass collective action.

Only two of the most recent seven large massacres have a remote link to Islam - and these assassins were not directly related to overseas, organized terrorist groups but had been ’self-radicalized’ in the context of the individualist US gun culture. Omar Mateen, who massacred scores of unarmed young, mostly Hispanic, people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida clearly had much more in common (spiritually and operationally) with the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik (who shot and killed over seventy youth at a multi-cultural summer camp in 2011) or with Adam Lanzo (who killed 20 small pupils and 6 teachers in Connecticut in 2012), than with any fighting units in Syria or Afghanistan.

Conclusion

The personal-political grievances of mass murderers have everything to do with their cultural and psychological isolation, resentment and deep spiritual commitment to the dominant arms culture of America: these massacres have become their self-prescribed psycho-therapy. The dominant political and police institutions naturally use these for propaganda to advance the imperial agenda, rather than encourage positive collective expressions of grievances to address social issues.

Today there is no collective social expression with highly credible, committed mass activists as there had been during the 1960-70’s, when large-scale civilian initiated massacres were very rare. The notorious 1967 mass shooting in Austin Texas by a former Marine champion sharpshooter (one shot per kill) was followed by meticulous expert examination of the circumstances and context. Today, there are no political collective or community responses like that of the Texas tower sniper. During the 1980-90’s, the elites encouraged and promoted voracious aggressions against rival markets and whole nations, which the financial press pundits have celebrated as expressions of the ‘animal spirits’, the triumph of the ‘fittest’, most individualistic capitalism. From 2000 to the present, the mass media has saturated its audiences with military solutions to individual grievances. The psychopathology of the mass murderers is reflected in the state writ-large.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 68 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, Temps Moderne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet.

Petras has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Join the Paddle for the Peace

Join the Paddle for the Peace

by PVEA

July 3, 2016

Dear Friends,

Our flagship event, the 11th Annual Paddle for the Peace is almost upon us! We are thrilled with the fantastic response we have had to this event and look forward to seeing many of you up here in the Peace Country on
Saturday, July 9th.

*If you can’t make it to the Peace River, join a solidarity paddle elsewhere in the province!*

We realize that many of you cannot make it up for the Paddle in Fort St. John; however don’t despair, there are many solidarity paddles happening elsewhere in the province! We hope you can join others who care deeply about the Peace River Valley and the future of all British Columbians at one of the following events:

*Vancouver: Grab a Paddle Event, July 9th, Kits Beach*

- On July 9th, paddlers and supporters will gather for a solidarity march, paddle & community event with speakers, kayactivists, music and more!

- Meet at Vanier Park, 12:30 (kayaks, boats & stand-up paddleboards come at 12 noon) with flotilla and march to Kits Beach.

- More information on the Facebook event page here
<http://SaveBCfromSiteC.us12.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2f09d9cdec841fd9c9a949e99&id=944b62752e&e=698354cb9c>

*Sechelt: Paddle for the Peace – Support Indigenous Rights, No Site C Dam, July 9th , Porpoise Bay Provincial Park – right beside the children’s playground*

- Fundraising paddle and cultural tour. Funds go to First Nations legal costs associated with their battle against Site C.
- Starts at 10 a.m. (arrive 15 mins early) and ends at 2:00 p.m.
- Salmon bbq and public event in solidarity with Paddle for the Peace with Sechelt First Nation.
- More information here
<http://SaveBCfromSiteC.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2f09d9cdec841fd9c9a949e99&id=440193c082&e=698354cb9c>

*Nelson: Paddle the Kootenay for the Peace, July 9th, Lakeside Park Launch*

- Come paddle a short stretch on the Kootenay to show your support for the Peace Valley and the battle to protect it from Site C dam.
- Starts at 11 a.m. – come early to create signs and posters marking the event.Bring your own kayak or canoe.Launch is at noon.
- More information on the Facebook event page here
<http://SaveBCfromSiteC.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2f09d9cdec841fd9c9a949e99&id=556cb0924e&e=698354cb9c>

Here’s hoping one of these events will fit into your summer schedule. If not, feel free to create your own event, even if it’s just you, paddling on or around July 9th in solidarity. Share your pictures from whatever event you are a part of with us on Peace Valley Environment Association’s Facebook page here
<http://SaveBCfromSiteC.us12.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2f09d9cdec841fd9c9a949e99&id=35271074aa&e=698354cb9c>
.

Have a great summer everyone and as always, THANK YOU for your continued support as we work to protect the Peace River Valley.





 
Copyright © *|2016|* *|Peace Valley Environment Association|*,
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reserved.*


*Our mailing address is:*
Peace Valley Environment Association
PO Box 6062
Fort St. John, BC V1J 4H6

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Peace Valley Environment Association ·
PO Box 6062 ·
Ft St John,
BC V1J 4H6
· Canada


Andrea Morison, BA, MA
Peace Valley Environment Association
PO Box 6062
Fort St. John, BC V1J 4H6

pveacoordinator@gmail.com
250.785.4711 (home/office)
250.793.7279 (cell)


Keep up-to-date with us on Facebook
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website http://www.savebcfromsitec.ca/

Varoufakis on Orwellianism and European Disintegration

Yanis Varoufakis on the European Constituion, Economic Disintegration and Orwellianism

by Information Clearing House

July 03, 2016

Video

In this video the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, provides us an insight into why the European constitution does not represent the people of Europe and lacks substance. He also talks about disintegration of the European Union, what forces are driving its demise and how Orwellian language is used to hide this.

- Do we have a constitution that represents the voice of the European people?
- Could the EU disintegrate in the near future?
- What are the observerations that are pointing towards a disentigrating European Union?
- Is Orwellianism being employed to deceive the population?

These questions and more are addressed in this video.

Europe's Lost Lambs: Silence of the Left on Brexit

The Silence of the Left: Brexit, Euro-Austerity, and the T-TIP

by Michael Hudson - CounterPunch

July 3, 2106

The media in the United States have treated the British vote against remaining in the European Union (EU) as if it is populist “Trumpism,” an inarticulate right-wing vote out of ignorance at being left behind by the neoliberal economic growth policy. The fact that Donald Trump happened to be in Scotland to promote his golf course helped frame the U.S. story that depicts the Brexit vote as a “Trump vs. Hillary” psychodrama – populist anger and resentment vs. intelligent policy.

What is left out of this picture is that there is a sound logic to oppose membership in the EU. It is Nigel Farage’s slogan, “Take Back Control.”

The question is, from whom? Not only from “bureaucrats,” but from the pro-bank, anti-labor rules written into the eurozone’s Lisbon and Maastricht treaties.

The British tabloids opposed EU membership by depicting unelected Brussels bureaucrats as making laws binding on Britain. The argument was largely a nationalistic plea for “British laws to help the British people.”

The real problem is not merely that bureaucrats are making the laws, but the kind of laws they are making: pro-bank, anti-labor austerity. Tax and public spending policy has been taken out of the hands of national governments and turned over to the banking centers. They insist on austerity and scaling back pensions and social spending programs.

The Maastricht and Lisbon treaties – along with the German constitution –deprive the eurozone of having a central bank to spend money to revive the European economy. Instead of working to heal the economy from the debt deflation that has occurred since 2008, the European Central Bank (ECB) finances banks and obliges governments to save bondholders from loss instead of writing down bad debts.

To top matters, Brussels bureaucrats seem quite bendable to U.S. pressures to sign the T-TIP: the Obama Administration’s neoliberal Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This is a corporatist program shifting regulatory policy into corporate hands, away from government: environmental policy, public health policy and food labeling for starters.

The Brussels bureaucracy has been hijacked not only by the banks, but by NATO. It pretends that there is a real danger of Russia mounting a military invasion of Europe – as if any country in the world today could mount a land war against another.

This fictitious threat is the excuse for 2% of European budgets earmarked for spending on arms purchases from the U.S. military-industrial complex and its counterparts in France and other countries. Brussels-NATO war-mongering is used to depict the pro-labor left as “soft” on national security – as if Europe really faces a problem of Russian invasion. Opponents of euro-austerity are depicted as agents of Putin.

The dissenting voice has been Le Pen’s National Front party in France. She decries French participation in NATO, on the ground that it relinquishes military control to the U.S. and its adventurism.

What used to be a socialist left has been silent about the fact that there are very good reasons for people to say that this is not the kind of Europe they want to be a part of. It is becoming a dead zone. And it cannot be “democratized” without replacing the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties on which it is founded, and removing German opposition to public spending on recovery for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and other countries.

What is remarkable is that in the face of rising resentment by the “losers” from neoliberalism – the 99 Percent – only the nationalist right-wing parties have criticized the EU’s neoliberalism and the T-TIP. The formerly left-wing Socialist parties of France and Spain, German Social Democrats, Greek Socialists and so forth have endorsed the neoliberal, pro-financial program of austerity and rollbacks on labor union power, wages and pensions.

So the riddle is, how did originally pro-labor parties become anti-labor?

Bureaucratic corruption of all parties over time

The 14th-century Islamic philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun, estimated that every dynasty runs its course in about 120 years (four generations). The tendency is to start out with a progressive “group feeling” of mutual aid. But in time, dynasties succumb to luxury and greed, and become corrupt and easily manageable by special interests.

The same thing may be said of political parties. Every party that identified with the left in the Progressive Era – the Labour and Socialists parties of Europe, and the progressive Democrats in the United States – have now moved to the neoliberal right as it has become part of “the establishment.”

It is as if left and right parties have switched positions politically. The socialist left is not protesting against eurozone austerity, but is applauding it. Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain, they have become Thatcherite, pushing privatization and corporatism.

At least Europe’s political system offers a way out: New parties can be formed to replace the old, and parliamentary representation reflects approximately the public vote. That is what enabled Italy’s Five Star movement, Spain’s Podemos and even Greece’s Syriza to organize and win parliamentary seats. Their program is to restore a left-wing, pro-labor government regulating the economy to raise wages and living standards, not siphon off income to pay the financial centers and the One Percent.

What blocks a progressive U.S. Political Left?

The United States is locked into a two-party system that blocks opponents of neoliberalism. Our presidential election system was warped at the outset by the favoritism for southern slaveowners. It fixed their representation to reflect a slave population that could not vote, but was counted in the South’s Congressional representation, and in presidential elections via the electoral college.

I won’t go into the details here, but the way in which the two-party system has emerged blocks a third party from gaining control of key congressional committees or other nitty-gritty instruments of government. That is why Bernie Sanders found it necessary to run as a Democrat – despite the fact that the Democratic Party apparatus if firmly controlled by its main Wall Street and corporate campaign contributors.

Just as the EU is non-reformable under the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties – the U.S. political system seems unreformable. In the hands of neoliberals it favors Wall Street over labor, and corporate power over environmental protection, public health and economic recovery.

For example, last week the Democratic National Committee rejected Bernie Sanders’ urging that the platform for this year’s elections reject the TPP and TTIP. These trade policies have been called “NAFTA on steroids.” While Hillary initially supported them, she is making a left-wing feint claiming to oppose them – but won’t permit this to be put in writing in the platform, even though it is “only a piece of paper,” as Jane Sanders has said.

This leaves it to Donald Trump to denounce the Democrats as supporting corporatism at the expense of labor. It puts him in the position of Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France, or the nationalists in Austria and Hungary.

And it puts the Democrats as solidly on the neoliberal, anti-labor, anti-regulatory side of the political equation as are the French Socialists and their right-wing counterparts in other countries Lorrie Wallach, Paul Craig Roberts and others are making the case against TPP and TTIP, but only Mr. Trump seems able to play this key political card.

So the great problem of our time is how to create an alternative to neoliberalism, the TPP and TTIP that is pro-labor and pro-environmental. Why can’t America create a party that has a realistic ability to set government policy? Many Green Party members seek to do this. But the U.S. two-party system marginalizes them.

Although the Socialist and other third-party movements a century ago ended up influencing the Democratic Party, the Sanders campaign shows how little chance there is of this happening today. Hillary’s corporate donors have tightened their stranglehold on the party apparatus. They have hijacked Progressive Era rhetoric and slogans, to wrap around right-wing neoliberal policies.

So there are two problems with countering austerity and debt deflation. First of all, the U.S. electoral system prevents an alternative.

Second, the former left-wing parties have stultified and rejected their pro-labor origins to support Thatcherism, privatization, balanced budgets and pro-bank austerity. Rejecting Marx, they have joined the New Cold War.

There is another European economy that is possible. But it cannot be built on the current foundations. It is necessary to break up the eurozone to rebuild a pro-labor Europe.