Obama's Perfect Successor

Why Hillary is the Perfect Person to Secure Obama’s Legacy

by John Chuckman - CounterPunch

August 31, 2016

I read a piece that said Hillary, with her speech about racism and extremists taking over the Republican Party, was making a play for a one-party state. That seems rather an exaggeration, but it does contain an important bit of truth.

I do indeed believe Hillary thinks along the lines of a one-party state as suggested, but without ever saying so directly, and she is not focused on the particular political party with which she is now associated.

Hillary stands for the establishment, and her views appear to include the idea that anyone without attachment to that establishment is to be designated as a kind of “plebe,” as in 1984, or even “untouchable,” as in the old Indian caste system. That’s the approach that she took in her “racism” speech. It is, if you will, very much a one-party approach to politics as well as an implicitly anti-democratic one.

And, of course, it represents a truly super-arrogant attitude.

But isn’t that the natural inclination of all tyrant temperaments? And there is every indication in Hillary’s past acts and words of a tyrant’s temperament.

Her views on the military and on a long history of events from the FBI Waco massacre (she advocated for aggressive FBI action to get the event out of the headlines) and the bombing of Belgrade (which she advocated privately to her husband) to the invasion of Iraq (which she supported as a Senator) and the death of Libya’s Gadhafi (there’s her infamous, “We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha, ha,” quote as Secretary of State) to the employment of paid terrorists and poison gas in Syria (an operation she oversaw as Secretary of State), could provide a good working definition of a tyrant’s temperament.

And just look at her close friends and associates in, or formerly in, government, people like Victoria Nuland or Madeleine Albright, extreme Neocon advocates for violence and America’s right to dictate how others should live. Madelaine Albright is best remembered for answering a journalist in an interview, when questioned about tens of thousands of Iraqi children dying in America’s embargo, “We think it’s worth it.” She is also remembered for her dirty, behind-the-scenes work in dumping as Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a highly intelligent, fair-minded, and decent man who just happened to disagree with the United States once too often. Victoria Nuland’s claims to fame include being recorded talking about America’s spending $5 billion to create the coup in Ukraine. There is also her wonderfully diplomatic quote, “Fuck Europe,” and a seemingly endless stream of photos of her scowling into cameras.

And the same temperament is revealed in her record of “I know better than the expert`” when it comes to matters such as a Secretary of State’s protocols around computer security. Again, her record as First Lady with the Secret Service agents assigned to her protection was so unpleasantly arrogant that there is a residual of ill will still towards her in the Secret Service, enough to cause a number of past agents to tell tales out of school to journalists and in books.

Hillary likes to use language in public speeches which puts her “on the side of the angels” where various social issues are concerned, but it is entirely an advertising campaign of no substance, much resembling the big, clown-like or grimacing smiles she puts on at public events. Many mistakenly associate her with the historic traditions of the liberal left in the older Democratic Party, the kind of traditions Bernie Sanders brought momentarily flickering back to life, although they are in reality now virtually dead in the Democratic Party. Her actual record of behavior, as opposed to her “sound bites” and slogans, just cannot support that view of her as a liberal or progressive light.

Just to start, Hillary conducted the most corrupt campaign against Bernie Sanders I can recall in my adult lifetime. It included an inappropriate insider relationship with the Chairman of the Party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who used every opportunity with the press and other means to disadvantage Bernie Sanders. It included voter suppression in a number of states as well as outright vote fraud in a number of others. Academic statistical analysis of the primaries’ data suggests that Bernie Sanders in fact won the nomination.

Search as you might, you will not find a history of Hillary actually being involved, beyond uttering slogans every so often, with social issues. She has no record at all. But her history does very much include such acts as being fired from her early job as a Watergate Committee lawyer for unethical behavior (the man who fired the young lawyer still has his contemporary notes of the event) and, in an early volunteer case, grinding down a 12-year old rape victim about fantasizing over older men and getting her brutal 42-year old attacker freed, smiling in an interview later that she in fact knew he was guilty.

There is literally a line of women who were her predator husband’s lovers at one time or another who say that Hillary afterwards approached them with threats about keeping their mouths shut. And, perhaps her single clearest achievement on social issues, is her record of enabling her husband to carry on with a convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, who lives on a private island and keeps a stable of underage girls for the use of visitors. He is a very wealthy man with wealthy friends and arranges large political contributions, so he receives visitors such as Bill. Epstein actually once claimed he co-founded the Clinton Foundation, and he and associates have made large donations, tens of millions. We have a documented record of 28 trips to the island by Bill, and there is no way on earth Hillary wouldn’t know about them. Just as there is no way she could not know about important developments with the Clinton Foundation. She implicitly approved of the relationship with her often seen money-before-morals attitude.

Her husband’s office-leaving pardon of Marc Rich is often regarded as corrupt and having been paid for by Mr. Rich’s family and friends who donated large and continuing sums over time. Mr. Rich had been indicted in New York for tax evasion and fraud, but perhaps the outstanding aspect of his career, as it relates to Hillary and her slogans about social issues, is the way he made a considerable part of his fortune. He smuggled oil to the apartheid government of South Africa over time against international sanctions, and he is said to have made $2 billion doing so. Well, it does seem more than a little hypocritical to have supported a pardon for this man and then today to be giving speeches on someone else’s purported racism, and even to have been photographed, with toe-scrunching smarminess, eating fried chicken with a group of black voters.

We also have the fact of her talking, quite fiercely and recorded on video, about black “super-predators” when she was First Lady. Her husband signed legislation which likely put more young black males in prison than any other piece of legislation. Bill also bragged, as he signed another bill, of ending “welfare as we know it,” again legislation which hit poor black people hard. And, in all these acts, we know he had Hillary’s support. By a great many reports, Bill Clinton never dared do anything major of which his wife disapproved. With his years of flagrant sexual adventures and his need, on more than one political occasion, for her public lies of support when he was caught out, she had a virtual hammer over his head. Besides, Hillary has always regarded herself as having considerable acumen in such policy matters, and hers is a personality type you do not comfortably ignore.

In terms of pure competence, despite her assuming a public air of swaggering competence, her record is simply meagre to poor. We can return to that early instance, her dismissal from the Watergate Investigation for what her boss called unethical conduct and lying. Later, as First Lady, she took over the healthcare portfolio from her husband, the President, with unprecedented arrogance for an unelected person and one holding no formal appointment to office, and she failed badly in the complicated task.

As a Senator from New York, her eight-year record is remarkably undistinguished. Only three bills she sponsored became law, a bill to rename a highway, a bill to re-name a post office building, and a bill to designate a house as a national historic site. As Secretary of State, she of course ran the Benghazi operation which saw an American Ambassador and others killed, and her handling of the families of the dead afterwards, as the bodies were returned, echoes to this day with insensitivity and even brutality. She is deeply resented by family members and accused of lying.

I do believe it would be a difficult task to come up with a more fitting candidate than Hillary Clinton for carrying on the Obama legacy, a legacy of killing in a half dozen lands on behalf of America’s establishment, lying daily, and leaving your own people, the people who elected you with great hopes more than seven years ago, with nothing.
 

John Chuckman lives in Canada.

More articles by:John Chuckman

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Dan Kovalik, Kiff Archer, Janine Bandcroft Aug. 31, 2016

This Week on GR

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

August 31, 2016

On Monday, a historic "permanent ceasefire" agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC was ratified, paving the way for an end to a civil conflict lasting more than half a century. Or so the headlines read. Representatives of the two parties have spent the last several years hammering away at peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba, and while there was dancing in the streets this week at news Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos' military forces would cease attacks against the FARC, there was no guarantee against increasingly powerful private armies and death squads continuing their war on rural peasants and urban Unionistas.

Listen. Hear.

And worse, fears are, those loyal to former president and head of the official opposition in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe will follow his lead in opposing the peace accord the only way they know how, with violence.

Daniel Kovalik teaches international human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is Senior Associate General Counsel for the United Steel Workers union. He's also a long-time peace and justice activist, specializing in that in Colombia and Central America, where he serves as an attorney for Colombian plaintiffs in cases alleging corporate human rights violations. Kovalik is also co-recipient of a Project Censored Award for chronicling the murder of trade unionists in Colombia.

Dan Kovalik in the first half.

And; all is not well in British Columbia either, where the oppressive weight of colonial history is straining relations with First Nations on myriad issues. There is a distinct sense of tension here, a feeling of impending collapse, as though one were watching a heavily laden camel standing unsteadily beneath an overloaded hay loft. The anticipation is a wondering, "Which issue will prove the proverbial straw to lay the dromedary low?"

Kiff Archer has worked decades with his partner, Deb "Wilhpun" Nelson to help save the Bears and Wolves of the Bella Coola Valley, at the end of the only road entering deep into the Great Bear Rainforest. He's just returned from the Kwatna Gathering, a meeting of Bear-loving Central Coast nations, who have called a moratorium on trophy hunting in their territories.

Kiff Archer and standing Stronger Together to end trophy bear hunting forever in the Great Bear Rainforest in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of good goings-on in, on, and around our streets, and beyond there too, for the coming week. But first, Dan Kovalik and Colombia's dissonant Peace Accords.
 

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.

A Seated Ovation for Colin Kaepernick

Three Cheers for Kaepernick: Is Sitting During the National Anthem an Acceptable Form of Protest?

by Mike Whitney - CounterPunch

August 30, 2016

“Yes, I’ll continue to sit. I’m going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed. To me this is something that has to change. When there’s significant change and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way that it’s supposed to, I’ll stand.”     — Colin Kaepernick

If you don’t think it takes guts to stay seated during the National Anthem, then buy a ticket for a major sporting event –let’s say, a baseball game– and refuse to stand up when the singing starts. Then you’ll see the fur fly. Then you’ll see how rankled people get when you don’t participate in their patriotic rituals.

On Friday night, San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, refused to stand for the national anthem before a preseason game with the Green Bay Packers. As a result, he’s been universally excoriated, scorned and reviled by liberals and conservatives alike. I mean, it’s only been 48 hours since the incident, and already the man has already been dragged through the meat grinder. Almost overnight, Kaepernick has become the guy that everyone loves to hate, the new Hitler.

But, why? Because he had the audacity to make a statement about the treatment of blacks in America today? Because he wanted to draw attention to the numerous young black men that have gunned down by cops in cities across the country? Because he wanted people to realize that the “land of the free” ain’t so free if your skin isn’t lily-white? Is that why everyone is so pissed off?

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” (C. Kaepernick)

He’s got a point, doesn’t he? The killing of black men by cops has reached an epidemic level and yet nothing ever happens. Nothing. The perpetrators conjure up some goofy alibi with the help of their lawyers, and invariably get off scott-free. Every damn time. Why is that? Why can’t African Americans get justice in this country? It’s sickening and ridiculous at the same time.

Why is it ridiculous?

It’s ridiculous because the masses are more incensed about Kaepernick’s ‘sit-down’ protest than they are about the dozens of black men who end up getting snuffed-out by trigger-happy cops. Talk about ‘getting your priorities wrong.’

So now we’re going to have to suffer through weeks of anti-Kaepernick hysteria and demonization so the media can further exacerbate racial divisions by triggering a firestorm of rage from the uber-patriot crowd that thinks that black athletes should ‘shut-the-hell-up and play ball or leave the country’.

Think I’m kidding? Take a look at some of these statements on the Washington Post comments line:

“What a F-ing clown. His sorry a** should be focused on claiming the starting spot and gaining the respect and trust of his teammates instead some stupid a** protest. He’s done. What a scrub!” DooDoo

“If America is so bad why not move somewhere else? Ungrateful jerk.” David Nicholson

“This Country does NOT oppress anyone….stop being a victim.” Barry Rock

“What an A Hole. Blacks kill each other on a nightly basis in every city in this country. No one brings up black lives matter then do they? Maybe people should put their efforts into stopping these senseless killings. Only when it is a cop killing a black, which by the way were doing things criminally wrong in the first place, does anyone want to protest. Sorry I mean loot, vandalize and burn down cities. I was taught at a young age if you stay out of trouble you won’t have any problems with the law. There’s a new concept for you. Kapernick you can rot in hell.” Yogi4130

“….Somebody needs to slap a pair of fatigues on this little nitwit and drop him off in a firefight in the Afghan War. My guess is he lives in a gated community where he has the darkest skin of anyone. Millionaire sport figures, even ones who don’t perform all that well, are not an inspiration for social justice. Colin should work on his performance in the game rather than try and make social statements.” Vanzetti

“Kaepernick has every right to act like a sulking egotistical brat. Fans have every right to think less of him, and of the team’s management.” balt21212

“A lot of people died in my family so this millionaire dimwit ball-chucker can shoot his uninformed mouth off when he wants and disrespect our country. If I owned the SF team I would sack you by text message, Colin.” Roy

“I’m about as liberal as they come, but I’d fire his a** if I owned the 49ers. I can’t think of many companies that would allow their employees to use their workplace, uniform, resources and reputation as props for personal and controversial protests.” recordhigh

“What has this slime done for this country except get paid way too much for throwing a football. It is just a game. This guy is just another Jesse Jackson/ Al Sharpton poverty pimp in the making.” liberty

Nice, eh? And there’s nothing unusual about the comments I chose either, in fact, the vast majority of the submissions were stridently anti-Kaepernick.

But does Kaepernick really deserve this outpouring of hated and vitriol? Isn’t he just asking whether the values espoused in the National Anthem actually apply to African Americans or not? That’s a fair question, isn’t it?

Think of it this way: Maybe this IS the “land of the free and the home of the brave” if you’re white, but if you’re black, not so much.

Do you really get a square deal in America if you’re black? Is it really a level playing field? Is equal opportunity a fact or fiction? Aren’t you much more likely to be harassed, threatened, brutalized and incarcerated if you’re black than if you’re white?

These are no-brainer questions. Everyone knows the answers to these questions if they’re honest with themselves, that is. Life is just tougher if you are black in America, there’s no two-ways about it.

So why don’t we try something entirely different for once. Why don’t we give Kaepernick the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s not an attention-seeking “America hater”. Let’s assume that he’s just trying to do the right thing by pointing out our shortcomings as a nation just like Mohammed Ali did when he refused to be inducted into the military in April, 1967.

Remember that? At the time Ali was raked over the coals too, but he toughed it out because he was a man of principal. People conveniently forget about the hostility and scorn that was heaped on Ali because it doesn’t jibe with the modern-day remake of Ali as a national treasure. But, trust me, the man was more widely despised than Kaepernick.

And Ali didn’t hate America any more than Kaepernick does. He just decided that it was more important to do the right thing and take his lumps than stay silent and cave in to public pressure.

It looks to me like Kaepernick is following the same moral blueprint. He just wants America to deliver on its promise of freedom and equality for all.

Is that too much to ask?

 

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

More articles by:Mike Whitney

Resembling Their Remarks: Dumbing America at the NYT

The Dumbed Down Times Columnist: Sometimes you can't believe people can write such crap

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening

August 29, 2016

I was reading the latest smug piece by New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, when I came across the most amusing example of being what you're criticizing. Egan, in a piece titled "The Dumbed Down Democracy," bemoaned the spreading ignorance of the American electorate.

Not only are 10 percent of Americans illiterate, Egan groaned. They're also "politically illiterate." Expressing mock astonishment, he wrote, "I give you Texas. A recent survey of Donald Trump supporters there found that 40 percent of them believe that Acorn will steal the upcoming election."

He goes on:

"Acorn? News flash: That community-organizing group has been out of existence for six years. Acorn is gone, disbanded. dead. It can no more steal an election than Donald Trump can pole vault over his Mexican wall."

In Egan's view, it's those Trump voters who are ignoramuses.

Egan continues:

"We know that at least 30 million American adults cannot read. But the current presidential election may yet prove that an even bigger part of the citizenry is politically illiterate -- and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life."

Example?

Well, Egan says,

"If Trump supporters knew that illegal immigration peaked in 2007, or that violent crime has been on a steady downward spiral nationwide for more than 20 years, they would scoff when Trump says Mexican rapists are surging across the border and crime is out of control."

Maybe he's right (though I've heard supposedly well-educated college grads tell me they believe the same stuff), but then Egan goes on to write:

"If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it -- two years after they had, in fact, invaded it."

I don't know what knowing that Ukraine shares a long border with Russia has to do with knowing Russia supposedly invaded the place in 2014, but in any case, Russia never invaded Ukraine. Only in the New York Times would you read such bullshit propaganda.

The NY Times, in April 2014, ran this photo allegedly showing Russian soldiers 

fighting in Ukraine, based on unverified claims by the Kiev post-coup government. 

The image was later shown to have been an old photo taken in Russia, not Ukraine

Egan apparently doesn't know that there has been no evidence of Russian troops fighting in Ukraine, though there are NATO troops, including US ones, there. And as for Crimea, a former part of Ukraine populated by about 90 percent ethnic Russians, it came under Russian military protection not by way of an invasion, but because with the government in Kiev threatening an ethnic cleansing campaign against Russian speakers living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea (where Russia had a long-term lease on its Black Sea naval base), the 20,000 Russian troops stationed in Crimea, also by treaty with Ukraine, simply took control of that territory.

There was then an internationally observed plebiscite, much like ones the US supported in Kosovo and other breakaway states over the years. In that plebiscite, over 90 percent of the citizens said they wanted to rejoin Russia, which Crimea had historically been an integral part of, and so the region was annexed by Russia.

As for the breakaway region in eastern Ukraine known as the Donbass, its primarily ethnic Russian people have been doing their own fighting against Ukranian military forces thank you, albeit with Russian aid (the kind of military aid that the US has provided to Georgia, Ukraine, Syrian rebels, Afghan mujahadeen, and myriad other places. No Russian invasion occurred in the Donbass either. In fact, while the people of Donbass have been begging to be allowed to rejoin Russia, and would probably overwhelmingly vote to do so if allowed a chance, Moscow has said no, for fear of sparking a wider conflict in eastern Europe.

Egan may be confused because he no doubt gets most of his information about current affairs by reading the paper he works for, a paper which is notorious for spreading lies and scare stories about an allegedly resurgent and expansive Russia led by a dangerous dictator, Vladimir Putin. (Putin, for the record, is elected and various polls show him backed by 80-90 percent of Russian people.)

In fact, part of the reason that American voters -- and that applies to Clinton supporters too -- are so "dumb" is that the Times, a publication that much of the rest of the US media rely on to calibrate their own reporting, has been doing such a great job of misinforming them. And not just about Russia. It misinforms them about Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank, it misinforms them about NATO, it misinforms them about the nuclear-tipped missiles that the US is installing near Russia's border in Poland, it lies about Venezuela, it lies about Iran, and most egregiously, it lies about Syria, just as it earlier lied about WMDs in Iraq.

Here at home the Times lies too. It lied during the primaries about Bernie Sanders and his chances to win the Democratic primary, and it has lied about Hillary Clinton's accomplishments as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State.

The thing is, if a supposedly well-intentioned and honest Times columnist like Tim Egan can be so wrong about Russia in the Ukraine, it shows how pernicious the Times lying really is. Either that or Egan is just one of the deliberate liars at the Times.

Dicamba: Another Monsanto "Mistake"

Monsanto Mistake Spawns Widespread Crop Loss

by Dr. Mercola  - Mercola.com

 

August 30, 2016

After two decades of planting glyphosate-tolerant crops, resistant weeds have overtaken farm fields across the U.S., leaving farmers to battle an increasingly difficult situation. At least 35 weed species are now resistant to glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Monsanto's broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup.1

Studies2 have also linked glyphosate to increases in Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a deadly plant disease that causes plants to turn yellow and die — including crops that have never been sprayed with the herbicide but were planted in a field that received an application the previous season. 

 

 

In an effort to skirt disaster, Monsanto developed a new breed of genetically engineered (GE) seeds tolerant to other pesticides besides Roundup. This, they claim, is the answer to rising weed resistance — a side effect the company said would not occur from the use of their GE seeds in the first place.

We now know, without any shadow of a doubt, they were wrong. And there's every reason to believe they are wrong about their next generation of GE seeds as well. If anything, it will likely boost weed resistance, continue driving the increase in pesticide use and make our food even more toxic. 

Monsanto Makes Another Massive Mistake

Earlier this spring, Monsanto released a new crop of soybean and cotton seeds called Roundup Ready Xtend, designed to tolerate being drenched in not just glyphosate-based Roundup but also dicamba, an older and highly toxic herbicide known for its tendency to cause unintended crop damage. As noted by Mother Jones:3

"[T]he dicamba products currently on the market are highly volatile — that is, they have a well-documented tendency to vaporize in the air and drift far away from the land they're applied on, killing other crops.

Monsanto's new dicamba, tweaked with what the company calls 'VaporGrip' technology, is supposedly much less volatile."

Alas, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had approved the seeds, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had not yet signed off on Monsanto's "new and improved" glyphosate/dicamba formulation to be used on them.

At present, the use of dicamba on cotton and soybean crops is restricted to pre-planting or post-harvest burndown applications only. It is illegal to spray dicamba on the crop itself.

It would have been prudent to not sell the seeds until the, allegedly, safer and less volatile dicamba formulation was approved and ready for market, but Monsanto decided not to wait, thinking farmers could simply use Roundup in the meantime.

However, facing an infestation of pigweed, which has developed resistance to Roundup, farmers took to illegally spraying older dicamba products on their brand new Roundup Ready Xtend plants, thereby setting off a chain reaction of crop decimation.4

According to the EPA, crop damage and crop losses blamed on dicamba drift have been reported in 10 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

In Missouri, 117 complaints "alleging misuse of pesticide products containing dicamba" have been filed. The illegal use of dicamba has affected more than 42,000 acres of a diverse array of crops, including peaches, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, peas, tomatoes, peanuts, alfalfa, cotton and soybeans.
Arkansas Considers New Dicamba Rules to Protect Crops From Drift Damage

In response to 25 formal complaints over dicamba drift damage,5 the Arkansas Pesticide Committee has brought forth a proposal to expand mandatory buffer zones and outright ban the use of certain dicamba products during the growing season, from mid-April until mid-September.

Fines may also be raised to dissuade illegal spraying.6 When asked what actions Monsanto would take against the farmers who used their product with an illegal herbicide, they told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette7 that revoking farmers' licenses for product use was "difficult if not impossible."

"For its part, Monsanto says it expects the EPA to approve the new, improved dicamba formulation in time for the 2017 growing season, and that it never expected farmers to use old dicamba formulations on the dicamba-tolerant crops it released this year," Mother Jones writes.

"If the VaporGrip formulation does indeed control volatization as promised, the drift incidents of 2016 will likely soon just be a painful memory for affected farmers. If not, they portend yet more trouble ahead for the PR-challenged ag giant." 

Environmental Groups Predict the Worst Is Yet to Come

Meanwhile, environmental groups like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Save Our Crops Coalition (a "grassroots coalition of farm interests organized for the specific purpose of preventing injury to non-target plants from exposure to 2,4-D and dicamba"8) are not surprised with the present chain of events.

In a recent blog post, EWG agriculture policy director, Colin O'Neil, and research analyst Emily Cassidy write:9

"[On August 9, 2016] Steve Smith, chair of the Save Our Crops Coalition, wrote an open letter10 to Hugh Grant, Monsanto's chairman and chief executive officer, that said, essentially, we told you so.

For years, the Save our Crops Coalition … has warned that illegal use of generic dicamba would occur and that dicamba drift would be especially hazardous. Now it appears that environmentalists' worst fears are coming true. This situation is likely to only get worse. What can be done?

For starters, Congress should update the nation's outdated federal pesticide law to ensure that there are adequate buffer zones around neighboring farms, schools, hospitals and churches, as well as mandate stricter enforcement and higher penalties for non-compliance.

Congress should also reward good stewardship … [T]he incentives created by Congress are backward. The federal government does not give enough support to reverse these damaging practices.

One thing is clear: If pesticide regulation continues to be a Wild West, then farmers and consumers can expect pesticide drift to expand." 

Dicamba Likely to Worsen Toxicity of Food Supply

According to research11 published in 2014, phenoxy herbicides, which include 2,4-D and dicamba, are clearly associated with three distinct types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer that originates in your lymphatic system.

It's the sixth most common type of cancer in the U.S., with an estimated 69,000 Americans diagnosed each year. Worldwide, NHL accounts for an estimated 37 percent of all cancers.

Besides cancer, other documented health hazards associated with these herbicides include developmental and reproductive problems. This is particularly chilling considering the fact that use of these herbicides have risen several-fold since the early 2000s, and their use will increase even further now that 2,4-D and dicamba-tolerant crops have been approved. (Dow AgroSciences' Enlist corn and soybeans are resistant to glyphosate and 2,4-D.) 

Monsanto Betting Big on Dicamba

In April 2016, Monsanto announced a $975 million expansion plan for its Luling, Louisiana facility where dicamba is produced. As with its Roundup Ready seeds, the primary reason for creating these genetically modified (GM) seeds it to expand the market for the chemicals that go with them.

For decades, Roundup ruled supreme, becoming the most commonly used weed killer in the world. Now, Monsanto is betting on dicamba, apparently without much thought to the health and environmental effects it will wreak as farmers start to douse our food supply with both glyphosate (recently classified as a probable human carcinogen) AND dicamba (which despite its known toxic profile can be found in over 1,100 different weed killer formulas sold in the U.S.)

After all, volatility and drift is not the only hazard with dicamba. Whether Monsanto's "VaporGrip" formula works or not, this chemical poses health and environmental threats over and above those of glyphosate. I shudder to think what scientists may find in the years to come when they start investigating the synergistic effects of this Roundup/dicamba combination on health.

What's certain is that Monsanto will do everything it can to make dicamba the new go-to solution, just like Roundup was before its serious health and environmental hazards became more widely known. As reported by Mother Jones:12

"Within a decade, the company wrote, the new GM crops will proliferate from the U.S. Midwest all the way to Brazil and points south, covering as much as 250 million acres of farmland (a combined land mass equal to about two and a half times the acreage of California) — and moving lots of dicamba."

 

Signs and Symptoms of Dicamba Exposure

Dicamba (as well as 2,4-D) acts like auxins — natural plant hormones that control plant growth. When a plant is treated with dicamba, it begins growing in abnormal ways, typically resulting in plant death. As mentioned, dicamba has a long history of use as a weed killer both in agriculture and other places, such as lawns, golf courses and along roadsides. Exposure can occur via inhalation or skin contact. Signs and symptoms of dicamba exposure include:13

 

• Dizziness
• Coughing
• Skin irritation
• Vomiting and loss of appetite
• Muscle spasms

Signs that your pet may have been exposed, either by eating treated plants or walking through an area where dicamba has been applied include: 

• Shortness of breath
• Muscle spasms
• Excessive saliva production
• Birds may exhibit signs of wind drop, loss of motor control and weakness.
• Pesticide Cocktails Threaten Human and Environmental Health

In this 37-minute video, Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., an American agricultural economist and former research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, discusses the use of GE crops and how they affect your health and environment.

Originally marketed as a means to reduce the use of pesticides, GE crops have led to the creation of resistant weeds and an increased use of chemicals to control them. Just as bacteria can develop a resistance to antibiotics, so can weeds develop a resistance to herbicides.

Stacked trait refers to the combination of two or more genetically engineered genes spliced into a single plant. Monsanto's Roundup Ready 2 Xtend seeds is one example. The seeds are engineered to tolerate both Roundup and dicamba. But will stacked trait plants actually slow down or even prevent resistance? Hardly. The more likely scenario is that it will simply speed up the process of resistance, making more weeds resistant to more chemicals.

There's also the problem of synergy, which is what happens when two or more compounds combine to create an effect that is larger than the sum of their parts. Research shows that combining two chemicals increases the toxic effect compared to using each chemical in isolation. In the past, the EPA has claimed it could not assess the potential synergistic effect of the chemicals without data.

However, in late 2015, the EPA discovered that synergistic chemical reactions were actually recorded in patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Database. Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, told EcoWatch:14

"It's alarming to see just how common it's been for the EPA to ignore how these chemical mixtures might endanger the health of our environment. It's pretty clear that chemical companies knew about these potential dangers, but the EPA never bothered to demand this information from them or dig a little deeper to find it for themselves." 

Tips to Help You Avoid Pesticides

Research has linked long-term pesticide exposure to infertility, birth defects,15,16 endocrine disruption,17 neurological disorders18 and cancer.19 It is only a common sense conclusion that ingesting and being exposed to fewer pesticides would result in improved health. Here are some basic suggestions to help you reduce the amount of pesticides you and your family are exposed to.

• Eat organic foods. In a survey of 1,000 Americans, 71 percent expressed a concern over the number of chemicals and pesticides in their food supply.20 If you're among them, the best strategy at your disposal is to buy organic produce, pastured, organic meats and dairy products.

Investigate the farmers markets in your area and consider planting your own garden to supply produce through the summer months. Although buying organic foods may be slightly more expensive today, they help to reduce your overall health costs in your future.

If you cannot afford buying everything organic, print out the EWG's 2016 "dirty dozen" list for most pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables. These you'll want to buy organic. You can purchase the conventional versions of produce that tend to be the least contaminated, thereby spending the extra money where it counts the most. You can find the EWG's 2016 Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 lists in my previous article, "Which Fruits and Vegetables Have the Most Pesticides?"

• Clean up your lawn and garden care. Don't apply chemical pesticides or herbicides to your yard, and if you use a lawn care service, don't allow them to use them. Remember that a neighbor's lawn chemicals can potentially contaminate your property as well. Also avoid lawn care and other gardening products that contain insect growth regulators (IGRs), especially if you have pets.

The focus of organic lawn care is to produce a healthy lawn and soil using natural organic fertilizers. An organic lawn has grass roots grown deep into the soil, which makes them less vulnerable to drought, weeds, insects, disease and other stressors. There are many excellent online resources about how to naturally control weeds and improve soil health, and in many communities' organic lawn care services are readily available.

The same goes for pests. Ants, wasps and other bugs can all be safely combated. Boric acid powder, for example, has been found to be a very effective deterrent to roaches and ants. Sprinkle some in the inner corners of your cabinets and in the corners under your cabinets.

Pests will carry it back to their nests on their feet and kill the remainder of the infestation. Boric acid is non-toxic for animals and only kills the insects. For natural pest solutions, check out the book "Dead Snails Leave No Trails" by Nancarrow and Taylor.

• Talk with your school board about lawn care at your children's school. Pesticides sprayed on the school lawn and play areas can increase your child's exposure. You may be able to change how they care for the lawn when you educate the administration about the risks involved to the children.

• Play in a healthy environment. Before joining a golf club, talk with the course superintendent about the pesticides they use to control weeds and insects. Bring members together to request cleaner and safer lawn care. Talk to your city administrators about the care given to the lawn in your local parks. Educate them about the risks to adults, children and pets from pesticides.

 

 [+] Sources and References

• ¹ Weedscience.org, International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds
• ² Institute for Responsible Technology, Monsanto’s Roundup Triggers Over 40 Plant Diseases
• ^3, 12 Mother Jones August 17, 2016
• ⁴ KTICradio.com August 16, 2016
• ^5, 7 NWADG.com July 26, 2016
• ^6, 9 Environmental Working Group AgMag August 18, 2016
• ⁸ Save Our Crops Coalition
• ¹⁰ Save Our Crops Coalition, Open Letter August 9, 2016
• ¹¹ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health April 2014;11(4):4449-527
• ¹³ npic.orst.edu, Dicamba Information
• ¹⁴ How the EPA Ignores the Dangers of Pesticide Cocktails. (2016). EcoWatch. Retrieved 30 July 2016
• ¹⁵ National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Retrieved 29 July 2016
• ¹⁶ Organic Food during Mother's Pregnancy Reduces Risk of Male Birth Defects. (2016). I-sis.org.uk. Retrieved 29 July 2016
• ¹⁷ Effect of Endocrine Disruptor Pesticides: A Review. International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health, 8(12), 2265-2303.
• ¹⁸ Environ Health Perspect, 112(9), 950-958.
• ¹⁹ Carina Storrs, S. (2015). Report: Pesticide exposure linked to childhood cancer, lower IQ. CNN. Retrieved 29 July 2016
• ²⁰ Prnewswire.com. Retrieved 29 July 2016

 

Putting Lipstick on Kiev: CNN's Coup Government Makeover

Criminal Kiev Regime Gets a CNN Makeover… Cue More War

by Finian Cunningham - SCF

August 26, 2016

This week Ukraine marks 25 years of independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and American news channel CNN was only too willing to lend an audacious rewriting of history to sanitize current conflict in that country.

A TV newscast on Wednesday, featuring CNN anchorwoman Rosemary Church, ran the following headline: «Ukraine still fighting for independence from Moscow».

The channel then cut to a report by its correspondent Phil Black from eastern Ukraine purporting to show Kiev-controlled armed forces coming under heavy gun and artillery fire from «Russian-backed separatists». Viewers were told that the separatists launched their attacks against Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) two years ago in August 2014.

Between whistling bullets, the intrepid CNN reporter also informed viewers, without verification, that the Russian army was amassing troops on its side of the border with Ukraine.

This absurd reduction of history provides a much-needed makeover for the illegal Kiev regime that seized power in February 2014. It also sanitizes the involvement of Washington and the European Union in fomenting the coup against Ukraine’s then elected government. And, recklessly, this kind of US media distortion serves to embolden the Kiev regime to continue its criminal aggression against the people of eastern Ukraine, and to ignore its commitments to the February 2015 Minsk peace deal, as well as reportedly conduct acts of terrorism against Crimea.

In other words, this is a case study in how ostensibly independent Western media dutifully perform a propaganda function and are in effect complicit in war crimes.

Moreover, in the bigger perspective, the gross caricature of Russia as a villain with regard to Ukraine also augments the warmongering narrative of Moscow allegedly posing a threat to European security. This week saw US Vice President Joe Biden traveling through the NATO-member Baltic states promising them that American forces would leap to their defense if they were attacked by Russia. Biden’s inflammatory, defamatory rhetoric is fuel for the anti-Russian Baltic regimes to escalate their unhinged accusations of hostility from Russia.

This wholly deranged dynamic is largely permitted because major Western news channels such as CNN engage in outrageous falsification of past and present events. Or, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly said recently, such Western media indulge in «telling their audiences that white is black and black is white».

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, while running up the national flag this week marking 25 years of independence, vowed that the Kiev regime would one day retake Crimea.

Due to CNN’s corny coverage, the narrative that the Western public assimilates is that the «evil Soviet empire» [that is, its successor Russian Federation] has not forgiven Ukraine for declaring independence a quarter of a century ago, along with several other former Soviet Republics.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine is thus cosmetically and pleasingly presented as a continuation of «liberation» from «Moscow’s tyranny», in which the «freedom-loving» Ukrainians are heroically still battling for independence and for the desire to join the American-led «free world».

Nowhere in the schmaltzy CNN reportage was there mention of relevant historical background, such as how US planners like Zbigniew Brzezinski from the outset saw the newly established Ukraine in 1991 as a strategic spearhead with which to destabilize Russia. That is, Washington’s policy was far from detente. It was immediately hostile and expansionist with regard to Ukraine’s historic ties with Russia.

CNN did not mention either that the US State Department funneled $5 billion into Ukraine for the purpose of undermining fledgling governments there. We know of this clandestine subversion courtesy of bragging by State Department official Victoria Nuland.

The culmination of Washington’s «pro-democracy» operations was the violent overthrow of elected President Victor Yanukovych in February 2014, involving a mass sniper-shooting of police and protesters, conveniently used to blacken the Yanukovych government, again by dutiful Western media who never checked facts or followed up on later disclosure of a false flag atrocity, as EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton let slip.

The US State Department, CIA and EU governments pulled off the coup with the instrumental deployment of fascist Ukrainian paramilitaries. The political regime that then seized power and later installed the oligarch Poroshenko as president owes its existence to fascist goon squads orchestrated by the CIA.

That the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join with their historic Russian motherland rather than being subjected to the caprice of Nazi-adulating fascists was their moral and legal prerogative. Crimea did so promptly in a referendum within weeks of the illegal seizure of power in Kiev, and yet, fantastically, Western governments and media invert reality by accusing Russia of «seizing» Crimea.

A similar revolt occurred in eastern Ukraine among the mainly ethnic Russian population there. They were simply unwilling to be ruled over by an illegally constituted west-Ukrainian cabal who extol their ancestors’ collaboration in Nazi extermination of millions of compatriots during the Second World War.

In CNN’s grotesque reduction of history this week, we are told that separatists from east Ukraine launched a war against Kiev-controlled forces. This is flagrant falsification by a supposedly reputable news channel. The verifiable record shows that CIA director John Brennan visited the new Kiev regime weeks before it launched the so-called «Anti-Terror Operation» in eastern Ukraine in August 2014.

Two years later, the Western-backed Kiev ATO proceeds unabated, albeit on a lower-intensity scale. Some 10,000 people have been killed and up to one million refugees displaced, many of them fleeing across the border into Russia.

Despite the Minsk ceasefire that was proclaimed in February 2015, the Kiev forces have not withdrawn heavy weaponry from the contact lines with separatist-declared Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples’ Republics. Towns and villages within these areas continue to be shelled by the UAF and its associated neo-Nazi militias. And all with NATO training and equipment.

Of course, the Kiev regime claims that the separatists are the ones in breach of the ceasefire. The CNN report cited above tends to substantiate that claim, and that’s exactly why CNN shows itself to be a propagandist service, rather than a public information service.

Meanwhile, the supposedly neutral Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) sits ineffectually on its hands and mealy-mouths claims that «both sides» are violating the ceasefire. The fact is that civilian homes are being bombarded by Kiev’s forces in acts of criminal aggression. There is no excuse for such war crimes. If separatists fire back at the UAF it is with the reasonable aim to push back what are offensive forces targeting civilians.

Besides, a touchstone for which party is to blame for the ongoing conflict is this: why hasn’t the Kiev regime implemented commitments it signed up to in Minsk for political devolution in the separatist Donbass region? The Kiev regime has not moved one iota towards affording the people of Donbass any autonomy, as it is obligated to do under the terms of Minsk.

This is the same regime that is covertly engaging in «special operations» to sabotage civilian infrastructure in eastern Ukraine as it reportedly did again earlier this month on the Crimean Peninsula.

Russia’s President Putin is reportedly prepared to meet with German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China next week. Putin has indicated that Kiev’s Poroshenko is no longer welcome to the discussions owing to his regime’s evident disinterest in finding a political solution to end the conflict in Ukraine.

Merkel and Hollande, as with the whole of the EU, need to come to an unequivocal and realistic determination about the source of instability in Ukraine – and that is the regime that they indulged to install in the first place. The EU’s ludicrous sanctions against Russia over trumped-up claims only compounds the problem and panders to the Kiev regime’s reckless belligerence.

The Europeans need to form an independent and accurate assessment on Ukraine that repudiates the historically falsified nonsense peddled by Washington. Europe also needs to repudiate its own past complicity.

The lionizing of the Kiev regime as exemplified by CNN this week is not just a travesty of history that offends common intelligence. It is an incendiary incentive to the Kiev regime to escalate its rogue conduct. And it also plays into the wider nefarious narrative Washington is pushing for an all-out war with Russia. A war that would mean Europe’s third conflagration in a century. Are European leaders really that gullible to be led by illiterate Americanized history? Do they have the moral and intellectual fiber to renounce?

In Fearless Support of Mass Murder: Financial Times, Propagating War More

The Financial Times: Megaphone for Mass Murder

by James Petras - Dissident Voice

August 28th, 2016

The Financial Times editorial page carries a logo that proclaims: “Without fear and without favour”. Indeed the editors have shown no fear when it comes to… fabricating lies, promoting imperial wars decimating countries and impoverishing millions, whether in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Venezuela.

The fearless “Lies of Our Times” have been at the forefront forging pretexts for inciting imperial armies to crush independent governments.

Despite its pretentious scribblers and prestigious claims, the FT is seen by the Anglo-American financial class as a belligerent purveyor of militarist policies designed for the most retrograde sectors of the ruling elite.

What is most striking about the FT fearless fabrications on behalf of imperial militarism is how often their political and economic prognostications have been incompetent and flat out wrong.

For the past ten years, the FT editorial pages have described China in economic crisis and heading for a fall, while in reality, the Chinese economy has grown at between eight and six percent a year.

For over a decade and a half, the FT editors claimed Russia under President Vladimir Putin presented an international existential threat to ‘the West’. In fact, it was the ‘Western’ armies of NATO, which expanded military operations to the borders of Russia, the US, which financed a neo-fascist coup in Kiev and the US-EU which promoted an Islamist uprising in Syria designed to totally undermine Russia’s influence and relations in the Middle East.

The FT’s economic gurus and its leading columnists prescribed the very catastrophic deregulatory formulas which precipitated the financial crash of 2008-09, after which they played the clownish role of “Mickey the Dunce” – blaming others for the failed policies.

The fearless FT scribes are currently leading a virulent propaganda campaign to promote the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro.

This essay will identify the FT’s latest pack of fearless lies and fabrications and then conclude by analyzing the political consequences for Venezuela and other independent regimes.

The Financial Times and Venezuela: From War in the Suites to Terror in the Streets

In covering the crisis in Venezuela, the FT has systematically ignored the ongoing campaign of assaults and assassinations against elected officials, security officers, military and police who have been murdered by the FT’s favored ‘opposition’.

The FT did not cover the horrific murders of an elected Chavista congresswoman and her two young children, who were executed (shot in the head) in broad daylight by opposition-paid hitmen.

These ongoing opposition terror campaigns against the elected government and the general public are systematically ignored in the FTs ‘reports’ and on its editorial pages, which focus more on the shortages of consumer items.

The FT cover-up of right-wing terror extended to inventing a ‘possible’ army or National Guard plan to open fire on opposition demonstrators. In this case, the FT anticipated right-wing violence by laying the blame on the government in advance.

The FT covers-up the opposition business elite’s campaign of hoarding essential goods to create artificial shortages and panic buying. They deny the ongoing price gouging and pin the blame for shortages and long consumer lines exclusively on ‘regime mismanagement’.

The FT conveniently omits to mention that the decline in world oil prices has affected not only the economy of Venezuela but all countries dependent on commodity exports, including the Financial Times favorite neo-liberal regimes in Brazil and Argentina.

The Financial Times cites bogus ‘opinion’ polls, which wildly exaggerate the government’s declining popularity: In the recent elections Maduro’s supporters secured 40% of the popular vote while the FT claims his support to be 7%!

US client regimes (Mexico, Peru, and Colombia) are the largest producers of illegal drugs and US banks are the largest launderers for narco-money. Yet the FT reports on “Venezuela’s role as a conduit for illegal drugs smuggled north to the US and east into Brazil, Africa and thence to Europe”. Drug enforcement experts all agree that Colombia, home to seven US military bases and with a regime closely linked to paramilitary-narco gangs, is the source of drugs smuggled through Venezuela. That Venezuela has become a victim of the violent Colombian narco-trade is never acknowledged by the elegant City of London pen-prostitutes.

The FT blames the re-emergence of ‘malaria and other possible diseases’ on the leftist Maduro government. In fact the recent ‘malaria outbreak’ (also cited by the New York Times propagandists) is based on a single illegal gold miner.

The FT ignores how the US- backed neo-liberal regimes in Argentina and Brazil, which rule by presidential decree, have slashed public health programs setting the stage for much greater public health crises.

The Financial Times: Big Lies for Mass Murder

The Financial Times is waging an all-out propaganda war with one goal: To incite the violent seizure of power in Venezuela by US political clients.

In line with the Obama-Clinton ‘regime-change by any means’ policies, the FT paints a deceptive picture of Venezuela facing ‘multiple crises’, representing a ‘destabilizing’ threat to the hemisphere, and on the brink of a global ‘humanitarian crisis’.

Armed with these deadly clichés, the FT editorial pages demand “a new government soon and certainly before the 2018 elections”.

Recently, the FT proposed a phony legal gimmick — a recall referendum. However, since the opposition cannot initiate the vote in time to oust the elected President Maduro, the FT calls for “events which precipitate changes sooner” – a violent coup!

FT’s scenarios aim to precipitate a violent right-wing “march”, eventually provoking civil bloodshed in early September of this year.

The FT expects that “blood in Caracas will require an active Latin America response”(sic). In other words, the FT hopes that a US-backed military invasion from neighboring Colombia would help eliminate the Chavistas and install a rightist regime.

The Financial Times, which actively promoted the NATO-led destruction of the government in Libya, now calls for a US-led invasion of Venezuela. Never ones to re-assess their promotion of ‘regime change’, the FT now calls for a violent coup in Venezuela, which will exceed that of Libya in terms of the loss of thousands of Venezuelan lives and the brutal reversal of a decade of significant socio-economic progress.

“Without fear and without favor”, the FT speaks for imperial wars everywhere.

Conclusion

The US presidential elections take place just as the Obama-Clinton regime prepares to intervene in Venezuela. Using bogus ‘humanitarian’ reports of widespread hunger, disease, violence and instability, Obama will still need Venezuelan thugs to provoke enough violent street violence to trigger an’ invitation’ for Washington’s Latin American military partners to ‘intervene’ under the auspices of the UN or OAS.

If ‘successful’, a rapid overthrow of the elected government in Caracas could be presented as a victory for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and an example of her policy of ‘humanitarian-military interventions’ around the world.

However, if Obama’s allied invasion does not produce a quick and easy victory, if the Venezuelan people and armed forces mount a prolonged and courageous defense of their government and if US lives are lost in what could turn into a popular war of resistance, then Washington’s intervention could ultimately discredit the Clinton campaign and her ‘muscular’ foreign policy. The American electorate might finally decide against four more years of losing wars and losing lives. No thanks to the ‘fearless’ Financial Times.

James Petras is author of The End of the Republic and the Delusion of Empire, Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism's New Frontier (with Henry Veltmeyer), and The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.

It Ain't Justice, It's Just How: America’s Criminal Injustice System

America’s Criminal Injustice System: The Annals of a Private Eye

by Judith Coburn - TomDispatch

August 16, 2016

Once upon a time, I was a journalist, covering war in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of war, the "civilian casualties." To me, they were hardly "collateral damage," that bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were the center of war.

Now, I work at home and I’m a private eye -- or P.I. to you. I work mostly on homicide cases for defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, one of America's murder capitals. Some days, Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There's the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by out-of-the blue mayhem. Oakland's poor neighborhoods are a war zone whose violence can even explode onto streets made rich overnight by the tech boom.

Any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, one for every Oaklander killed by gun violence, year by year, fills its front yard.

Tomgram: Judith Coburn, On the Mean Streets of America

Step aside, Sam Spade. Move over, Philip Marlowe. You want noir? Skip the famed private eye novels and films of the 1930s and 1940s and turn to our present American world and to neighborhoods where the postman doesn’t ring even once, but the police are ready to shoot more than once, often on the slightest excuse. It’s a world that TomDispatch regular Judith Coburn, whom I’ve known since the Vietnam era when she was a war correspondent, enters regularly. It’s her job. It may not be Afghanistan or Iraq, but in its own way, it’s close enough.

Think of Coburn as today’s Sam Spade and let her take you deep into an American world in which justice couldn’t be blinder. Tom 

America’s Criminal Injustice System: 

The Annals of a Private Eye

by Judith Coburn

Whenever I tell people I'm a private eye, they ask: Do you get innocent people off death row? Or: Can you follow my ex around? Or: What kind of gun do you carry?

I always disappoint them. Yes, I do defend people against the death penalty, but so far all my defendants have probably been guilty -- of something. (Often, I can only guess what.) While keeping them off death row may absolve me of being an accessory after the fact to murder, it also regularly condemns my defendants to life in prison until they die there.

And I find spying on people their ex-spouses fantasize about killing much sleazier than actual murder. Finally, I'm a good shot, but I don't carry a gun because that's the best way to get shot.

I work on the low-profile cases: poor people charged with murder, burglary, or robbery, who don't have the money for a lawyer or their own P.I. (I'm paid, if you can call it that, by the state.)

Then people invariably want to know: How can you help defend a murderer? The law school answer is: the constitution guarantees everyone a fair trial.

For me, however, if it's a death penalty case, it's simple: I'm against the death penalty no matter what the accused did (or didn't do). But in this age of stop and frisk, racial profiling, mandatory sentencing, the death penalty, and life without parole, not to mention execution-by-cop, the real answer is: I can't. Defend anybody, that is. Not really.

I'm just a tiny cog in America’s vast Criminal Injustice System. One of the lawyers I work for sometimes calls himself "just a potted plant." My defendants may be guilty -- but seldom of what they are charged with. They are rarely convicted of what they actually did and are never sentenced fairly.

“He Snapped”

One day recently, I was getting ready to hit the Oakland streets in search of a witness to a murder when I found in my email Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Supreme Court Case of Utah v. Strieff. It had been forwarded to me by a psychologist with whom I once worked on a death penalty case.

Anyone lulled into thinking the new coalition of liberals and conservatives who hope to reform the criminal justice system will actually get somewhere should read Strieff. The facts are the following: a Salt Lake City cop was watching a home rumored to house methamphetamine dealers. When Edward Joseph Strieff left the house, the cop stopped him, questioned him, and checked his record. When the cop found a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket, he searched Strieff, found meth in his pockets, and arrested him for possession of drugs. In Strieff and other cases leading up to it, the Supreme Court has now decreed that evidence gathered in an illegal search isn’t "the fruit of the poisoned tree" as Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in 1939, and so no longer must be suppressed. Even though gathered illegally, evidence can be used at trial against a defendant.

In short, stop-and-frisk policing and racial profiling, key targets of the new civil rights movement, just got a stamp of approval from the highest court in the land.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented. But it was Sotomayor who sounded the alarm in an opinion evoking nothing less than James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and adding quotations from W.E.B. Du Bois, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Michelle Alexander for good measure.

She wrote:

"The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: this case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic war­rants -- even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arrest­ing you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent."

And she concluded:

"This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.

"We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere."

Sotomayor's dissent describes daily existence for my defendants. Too poor to buy car insurance, fix broken tail lights, pay parking tickets, or get green cards, they are always on high alert for the police. (Alice Goffman's brilliant study, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, describes just how it works in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods). My defendants have been sentenced to life in a war zone even before they find themselves charged in court. They have been sentenced to a life without parole or sometimes to death, caught as they are in a crossfire between cops and warring neighborhood gangstas.

A warrant for, say, unpaid parking tickets discovered in a Strieff-approved stop gets you a search of yourself and your car by police and maybe a bust for weed, the intoxicant of choice for many of the poor. If you object or run or the arresting officer is having a bad day, it may get you dead. (Refusing to pay protection money to your neighborhood punks or standing on the wrong corner at the wrong time may do the same.)

Once you're arrested, if you say you want a lawyer, you get a public defender with so many cases she or he may not even be able to meet you or read the complaint against you before you appear in court. You may serve weeks or months in jail, even if you're innocent, before your case is heard, and years before you are tried.

A district attorney (DA) has a whole police department to use to investigate a crime (although the Oakland Police Department, which I'm often up against, solves only 27% of its murder cases, and so is not exactly the most formidable of foes). A recent investigation by the East Bay Express reveals that many Oakland cops are too busy hooking up with underage prostitutes on Facebook and screwing them in police cars to solve murders. But if a DA needs to find a witness, the OPD's army of street cops can often locate him through their CIs (confidential informants), or they can pull him in on a warrant for those unpaid parking tickets, threaten a drug bust or revocation of his parole or probation, or hold him as a material witness if he resists cooperating.

At best, a defendant gets just me -- and most of the accused don't get an investigator at all. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright may have given poor defendants the right to an attorney, but there is no legal right to an investigator (except in death penalty cases). And unlike a DA, no one has to talk to me or face trouble with the law. I have no muscle. But I have been known to find a witness who doesn't want to be found and nag him or her into submission.

In the last 10 years, in cases mostly in Northern California, among scores of people I've helped defend, only three have been white -- and they were as destitute as the poor blacks and Latinos who jam American jails and prisons.

Defense teams I've been on start off by guessing if and why the accused might have done what he's charged with. It's human nature to do so. But if the accused is pleading not guilty, it's better not to know.

"I don't know what happened, I wasn't there," one death penalty lawyer I work with regularly says to shut off such speculation. As for the why, the shrinks often can’t help, even if you call on them to testify. Decades of research into the criminal mind often comes down to: "he snapped." That's not a good line for a jury, but it's the kicker to many a defense meeting.

"It Ain't Just, But That's How They Do"

In a real trial, the truth of what actually happened doesn't matter anyway. Only the truth of the evidence counts.

Are poverty, racism, and a desperate childhood a defense? Prosecutors love to face this argument. They get on their high horses and trot out the American dream and all the poor people who suck up their rage and despair and don't murder someone.

All the folks who don't snap.

But in California, what might have caused someone to snap isn't admissible at trial anyway, except in death penalty cases. A "diminished capacity" defense was abolished in 1981 after ex-San Francisco Supervisor Dan White used one to beat a murder rap for killing Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The jury bought his lawyer's argument -- which came to be known as the "Twinkie defense" -- that White was addled by junk food when he killed the two of them. It ignored evidence that White intended and planned the murder, taking his gun to City Hall, climbing through a window to avoid metal detectors, and reloading it after first shooting Moscone.

These days, only in the penalty phase of a death penalty case -- when the jury decides whether the defendant they've just found guilty will face capital punishment or life in prison without parole -- can defense lawyers present evidence of the tragic facts of the defendant's life. The jury may then hear of his years in foster care, his Mom the crack addict, his Dad absent in prison, and the older brother who initiated him into street life. Only then will the jury be asked to see the accused as a person with a life beyond the crime with which he is charged. The defense will finally replace a prosecutor's blown-up mug shot of the defendant and Facebook screen shots of him showing off a gun with family photos of him at his sixth birthday party decked out in a silly hat and others of his toddler and baby mama.

Most jurors don't much like this defense. They assume it's just an excuse. But it's not. It’s an explanation.

Take Larry. He's an OG (original gangsta, or old guy), a 50-year-old African-American man who grew up in dire poverty in Deep East, Oakland's most murderous neighborhood. Larry has symptoms of schizophrenia but has never been able to get real mental health care. He’s been living, on and off, with his mother who is also schizophrenic in Acorn (“The ‘Corn”), one of the toughest housing projects in West Oakland. His mother is too afraid of its gangbangers to leave her apartment. Larry recently told a counselor at a walk-in clinic for the poor that he thought he had PTSD from all the shooting and killing he's witnessed.

Like many poor Oaklanders, he makes his meager living in the underground economy, dealing small amounts of weed to regular customers who phone him on his cell. While cell phones have made it possible to sell drugs without the turf battles of the past, The 'Corn is ruled by a gang of young punks called The Acorn Mob and their rivals, The Gashouse Team. The Mob doesn't just support itself moving guns or drugs. It also makes money ripping off small-time dealers like Larry, demanding protection money from neighborhood people, and robbing the elderly when they cash their social security checks.

Like many poor people living on such mean streets, Larry is always looking over his shoulder. A simple walk down the block might mean being rolled by The Mob, accosted by police, or caught in the crossfire of someone else's feud.

In early 2012, Larry's life dropped off a cliff. His brother died of cancer; his daughter died in a freak case of emergency room malpractice; he witnessed a friend gunned down in a gang battle; and he was robbed at gunpoint on a street near The 'Corn. Meanwhile, the Acorn Mob was stepping up pressure on OGs like Larry to pay them protection money.

As Larry tells it, one morning that August, two of the most vicious Mob gangbangers dogged him on the streets around The 'Corn, demanding to know when he'd take up a collection from his OG buddies to pay them off. He took shelter along with his crew in a friend's apartment in one of the project’s towers. When he told his friends about the latest threats, the group debated what to do, damping their fears by smoking weed and drinking mai tais.

Later, near dark, Larry and his friend Arthur wandered over to the local liquor store to buy the cigarillos they filled with weed to make blunts. On the way, the same two Acorn Mob punks who had accosted them earlier that day threatened to kill Larry if he didn't come up with some money fast. Larry and Arthur sought refuge in the store, but one of the young thugs followed them inside. The other waited outside the door.

Larry had had enough. He snapped. He grabbed an old handgun Arthur carried for protection and ran out of the store. He says he fired once, hoping to scare off the two of them. That started a volley of wild shots. When Arthur's gun jammed, Larry ran back inside the liquor store. As soon as the shooting stopped, Larry and Arthur split the neighborhood. Somehow in the melee, one of the Acorn mobsters was shot and later died at the county hospital.

Larry and Arthur were arrested some months later. Larry was charged with murder and Arthur with being a felon with a gun and an accessory with knowledge of a crime. Word on the street was that the victim had been killed accidentally by his own cousin, the gangsta who had followed Larry into the liquor store. Even the victim's stepfather told me he believed that. But no witness -- and there were many standing outside the liquor store during the melee, including several of Larry's buddies -- would come forward. They all had records, were doing drugs, and were afraid of the police.

Six cartridges from one gun and a single cartridge from another were found in the street near the body. Neither gun was ever found. The victim had suffered a "through and through" wound, which meant there were no bullet fragments to match to a particular gun anyway.

California's self-defense and provocation laws -- unlike Florida's "stand your ground law," which figured in George Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin -- are very strict. Larry's lawyer worried that a judge would rule self-defense couldn't be justified because Larry had fired the first shot (even if it was, as he claimed, in the air). His possible PTSD, the recent dire tragedies in his personal life, the pressures of Oakland's mean streets, the fact that his mind was addled by weed and mai tais -- all would be irrelevant in a California trial.

So Larry didn't have the luxury of a Twinkie defense. He feared a jury. No poor person gets a jury of his or her peers. Few poor people are called for jury duty because the lists of potential jurors are made up from voter and drivers' license records; few poor people living the fugitive life vote and many don't have a driver's license. Coming to court might mean being stopped and frisked by the police. (I've had a defense witness arrested on a warrant while waiting to testify outside court and others who have been followed home by the police after they showed up to support a family member on trial.) No prosecutor would permit anyone on a jury who's led the kind of life Larry has -- someone with a drug record (even if 20 years old), or who understood life and death in Oakland's war zones firsthand.

Larry feared mandatory sentencing, which severely restricts a judge's ability to vary a sentence by taking into consideration mitigating facts in a particular person's life like Larry's clean record for the last 20 years, his possible PTSD, or the daily grind of violence in The 'Corn. That meant he was facing 25 years to life if convicted of murder. For defending himself. For firing one shot when it wasn't even clear who had killed the victim.

Larry took a plea to a killing he may not have done. Voluntary manslaughter with a mandatory sentence of 12 years in prison.

The Acorn Mob youngster who threatened Larry in the liquor store that August night and probably fired the fatal round was soon arrested for many armed robberies and sent to prison for 15 years.

I saw Larry right before he left the county jail for prison. I apologized for not being able to defend him. He thanked me for trying and added, "It ain't just, but that's how they do."

Judith Coburn, after decades as a journalist writing for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and TomDispatch, among other media outlets, became a private eye 10 years ago, specializing in death penalty cases.

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Copyright 2016 Judith Coburn