Author: Dave LIndorff

I just had the experience of sitting on a jury in a criminal trial in the County Courthouse of Montgomery County, PA, a sprawling urban/suburban/rural region just north and west of Philadelphia. The first indication that something was amiss was when I entered the jury assembly room at 8:15 am on Monday. There were some …

Continue reading “In Montgomery County PA, It’s Often a Jury of White People”

Word is that Michael Bloomberg, the mega-billionaire former mayor of New York City who watched his wealth more than double while he sat in the mayor’s office is thinking of running for President as a Democrat in 2020.

Why does that suck?

Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD cops he ordered as mayor to attack the Wall Street Occupy movement in November 2011
Well, listen as my dear departed friend and co-founder of this site, Chuck Young, recounts (in an article written foR TCBH! published almost eight years ago) his conversation in late 2010 with a Bloomberg “push-poll” caller trying to convince Chuck to support Bloomberg in his re-election bid:
…
Pollster: Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to close the $4-billion budget by taking control of the pension plan from the state and enacting pension reform.

Chuck Young: Didn’t you just ask that?

P: No, that’s a new statement.

CY: Well, it sounds like a statement I disapproved of with only slightly different wording.

P: So you somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove?

CY: Strongly. Now it’s your turn to answer my question. Do you know how much Mayor Mike Bloomberg is worth?

P: No, I don’t.

CY: I’ve seen different estimates, but it’s probably about $18 billion. You can put on your survey that I strongly disapprove of that.

P: The statement is this, sir: Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to avoid raising taxes on the middle class by taking control of the city union pension plans from the state legislature.

CY: Didn’t I already answer that?

P: No, sir.

CY: Strongly disapprove.

P: Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to shift control of service union pensions to the city council because the city council understands the needs of the people of New York City better than the state legislature. Do you strongly approve…

CY: $18 billion. You know what Mayor Mike could do with that all that money in his wallet?

P: Sir, I just need to know: Do you strongly approve, somewhat approve…

CY: Mayor Bloomberg could cover the entire budget gap all by himself, and still have $14 billion to live on. How bad could his life be with a mere $14 billion to spend? Would his daughter have to give up even one of her dressage ponies?

This article is running on the website of RT-TV
Yet another upstart socialist-leaning candidate, Ayanna Pressley, ousts a long-time liberal Democratic House incumbent
The Democratic Party leadership, composed of centrist and conservative Democrats who covet the money donated into party coffers by big Wall Street banks, arms manufacturers and the drug and medical establishment, was upset with the surprise primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young upstart Puerto Rican woman in the Bronx Queens congressional district of a 10-term House incumbent in June, as well as by victories of left and socialist candidates in various state legislative and local primaries across the country.

Liberal opponents of serious, aggressive action on climate change like California Governor Jerry Brown are the strange bedfellows of right-wing survivalists on one thing: Both are quick to warn darkly that if environmentalists have their way and impose strict cuts on oil, gas and coal production or on mileage standards for automobiles and pollution controls on power plants, or in the case of right-wingers, if the banking system is allowed to continue to run US economic policy and the Fed isn’t audited, the irate citizens of the US will descend into an orgy of anarchic violence and mayhem.

The argument is that if Americans are told they can no longer drive gas-guzzling automobiles and blast their air conditioners at will, or if the US financial system again collapses as it did in 2008 leading to the Great Recession, the people of this country will essentially go mad and a lawless chaos of dog-eat-dog, kill thy neighbor for his food, will ensue.

“It will be like the Great Depression all over,” I read in one account of a recent report by one JP Morgan Chase analyst who is predicting a dramatic market crash of over 40% followed by armageddon. (I learned about this little report of impending disaster from a former cop friend who advised me to get a gun and plenty of ammo and to stock up on food to be able to protect my family.)

But this is truly ignorance regarding what actually happened when everything did collapse back in the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.

Feeding hungry kids during the Great Depression
 

It’s true that a few despondent investors did leap from windows of tall buildings in lower Manhattan after the 1929 stock market collapse, but not all that many, and things continued fairly calmly after that as the economy began to seize up. After all, very few Americans were actually invested in the market. But even as the lay-offs, bank collapses, bankruptcies and home foreclosures began to mount, there was no revolution in the US.

My own father, then just a young kid, recalls his family losing their home in Flushing, NY as his father, a carpet jobber, lost so many customers he had to give it up, unable to make the mortgage payments. He didn’t pick up a gun and go on a rampage, or join others in his situation and storm Washington. He just started looking for odd jobs to support his wife and two kids, and voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the next presidential election in 1932 and the other three after that.

The Great Depression, when unemployment soared to 25% of the workforce by 1933, remaining above 15% as late as 1940, far past any level it has hit since that time, even in the recent Great Recession, which of course was also much shorter. But even in the depths of that monstrous economic collapse in the 1930s, the American public didn’t turn on each other. In fact, quite the opposite, it was an era of sharing of what people had, and of collective action for change — especially in the field of labor union organizing. The Socialist Party also saw it’s biggest surge of support (the Communist Party, too), as workers saw the need to band together to defend themselves against a capitalist class that was viewed as predatory and criminal.

The politically ambitious mainstream Democratic Senator Cory Booker has been posing as a courageous man ready to put his seat in the Senate at risk by violating Senate rules and releasing “confidential” emails of Supreme Court nominee and current Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). Whose the real 'profile in courage'?
 

The truth of course is that some of what Sen. Booker “released” had already been declassified, and that in any event, nothing was of a national security nature. Furthermore, as a senator from a very Democratic state — New Jersey — and one with a Democratic governor and legislature, Booker would not be in any real danger even of losing his seat. In the highly unlikely case that Senate Republicans might try to have him tossed out of the Senate for a rule violation — something that hasn’t happened since 1862 — the New Jersey governor would certainly respond by just using his authority to reappoint him to fill the unexpired term.

All good for Booker, right? Where’s the downside?

(public domain photo)
 

Most of the uproar, left and right, about the revelation — in both a NY Times anonymous opinion page article by a “high official” in the White House, and a new book by Bob Woodward — that there are top people working for President Trump who are actively trying to keep him from doing dangerous or reckless things out of ignorance or anger, has focused on the question of whether such actions constitute treason, or whether it validates the claim that a “Deep State” cabal of secret behind-the-scenes Machiavellians is working to subvert a duly elected president.

There are grounds for making both arguments, but I’d toss in a third.

Missing from most of these analyses is the reality that officials working for the White House, and indeed the entire US government, don’t take a vow or have any legal obligation to support a leader, or even to support the government or for that matter such a nebulous concept as the “country” or “nation” or the United States of America. Rather, like all members of the military, they take an oath to “uphold and defend” the Constitution of the United States.

That is a big difference.

If the person who wrote that piece in the Times, and those he refers to as also acting behind the Trump’s back to prevent disaster (for example the president’s call to invade Venezuela or, as reported by Woodward’s sources, to murder Syrian leader Bashar Assad, or just to kill more people in Afghanistan), they are acting to prevent the president from violating international law and the US Constitution. If they prevent him from firing Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller who is investigating him and his campaign, which would be obstruction of justice and a high crime under the Constitution, they are protecting that Constitution.

I found them today: five plump zebra-striped caterpillars munching with gusto on milkweed leaves in an area of the tall dark-leaved plants growing in my front yard.

The beautiful orange-and-black monarch butterfly that I saw a few weeks ago flitting from plant to plant in that milkweed patch I have nurtured and allowed to expand naturally in my front yard over the last few years, apparently deposited an egg on each plant it landed on, and these ultimately hatched out a batch of voracious little larvae this year for the first time.
Monarch butterfly perched on a Milkweed flower
 

In a time when the evidence of the damage caused by mankind’s profit-driven environmental depredations — especially climate change — is becoming truly damning and deeply depressing, it’s a spirit-lifting bright spot for me to see the success of this one small effort to aid one beautiful and remarkable insect in its desperate struggle to survive.

The monarch, truly one of the most beautiful creatures on earth, has an almost unbelievable life cycle. Born in late summer, it has for millennia flown by the millions from the temperate part of North American continent in the US and Canada all the way down to Mexico — or if they are on the west coast, to California. Those who make the journey successfully to Mexico gather in a relatively small tree-covered forest region, choosing the oramel pine as their resting place. After over-wintering, they begin a migration back towards their summer habitat in the north.

No single monarch makes this epic round-trip migration, though. Rather, the delicate insects mate and lay eggs along the way and die, with their offspring beginning the return journey the following spring. They too don’t make it all the way north either, but mate and lay eggs en route, with their offspring continuing the journey north. Finally these undocumented immigrants flooding across the border from Mexico mate and their offspring are the ones I saw laying eggs on my milkweed plants, and whose offspring in turn are now gobbling away preparing for their short time in the chrysalis stage before becoming butterflies and beginning their own journey south.

The time has come for us to upgrade our website.

Our website hosting service, Mayfirst.org, is upgrading their system to make it work better and to improve security, as they have been frequent targets of hacks and denial-of-service efforts. Besides, our site, we know, can be a bit clunky, too.

But doing the upgrade costs money, of which we have very little. So we’re turning to you, our readers, to please click on the Paypal button at the top right corner of this page, and make a contribution of whatever you can afford. If you don’t want to use Paypal directly, they have an option that allows you to use a charge chard too.

Alternatively, you could send us a check made out to David Lindorff or just cash folded up in a sheet of paper. Our address is TCBH/Dave Lindorff, PO Box 846, Ambler, PA 19002

Please donate what you can so we can get this project done.

By the way, this would be a good time for you readers who have ideas or requests regarding the design of this site to send them to us so we can forward them to the guy who’s making the upgrade. Send any suggestions or criticisms to tcbhmail@gmail.com

Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined today in publishing, often on their front pages, editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, often making note of their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”

However, missing from most of these full-throated editorials is any real defense of those who are in the trenches doing the hardest job of a free press, which is exposing the worst offenses of government: the war crimes, the craven systemic corruption of the political system, and the purveying of propaganda and disinformation in the furtherance of anti-democratic policies. (A good example would be the employment by most major news organizations of retired generals and colonels as war commentators without noting their roles on corporate boards of arms merchants that profit form war — a scandal that not one major news organization will expose.)

Nowhere does one read, in these coordinated and seemingly impassioned editorial paeans to press freedom, a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador, hiding from a secret sealed indictment that since the days of the virulently anti-free-press Obama administration has been sitting in the Attorney General’s office waiting for his capture.

Assange is trapped in the cramped Ecuadoran embassy by a complicit British government that has threatened to arrest him if he exits the building, claiming he is wanted for jumping bail in a court case that was already long-ago mooted by the expiration of Swedish arrest warrant that itself was based upon trumped-up charges of “rape” made against Assange by women who say they had not wanted those charges made in the first place. His real crime, and the thing the US wants to extradite him from Britain for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes.

Although news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post made the most of those Wikileaks documents, publishing their horrific evidence of war crimes, such as the helicopter gun-ship machine-gun slaughter of a group of innocent Iraqis, including two journalists, shown in graphic detail in a leaked gun-sight video, and profited handsomely from the circulation and attention they derived from those stories, both those papers have slammed Assange, shamelessly questioning his status as a “journalist,” impugning his integrity.

Economists say they are stumped by a mystery: Since the US economy is doing so well, and unemployment is down to below 4%, which many argue is close to “full employment” in historic US terms, why is it that wages are not growing, and in fact, are lower in real dollars than they were in 1974, almost half a century ago.

Reading articles like these in news reports ranging from NPR to the New York Times to the Economist magazine in the UK, is a good source for some laughs.

These poor financial journalists and the economists they quote as their sources are all struggling because their models, and everything they learned in school about market theory, says that if labor markets are “tight,” meaning that there are few jobs available to unemployed workers, it should drive up wages of those who have jobs, because employers would have a hard time replacing workers who ask for more money.

Perhaps in some magic world where workers and bosses were operating basically as equals in some mystical “free marketplace,” that might be true, but it ignores things like power relations and labor law, the pernicious role of the new digital age where a worker’s employment record is immediately available for inspection by any potential new employer, and of course the existence of an asymmetric “global” economy which allows for the virtually free flow across borders of goods and especially investment capital, but that tightly restricts the flow of labor (that is, workers cannot just up and move to another country where pay and working conditions are better).

Workers picketing for a $15/hour minimum wage.
 

Add to that the reality that statistics upon which economists base their views are developed and reported by a government that is almost totally in the pocket of the bosses. So when, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that unemployment is down to just 3.9 percent, that agency is using a definition of unemployment which has been changed multiple times over the years, always in a direction of reducing that number from what it would have been under an earlier definition. Basically the BLS defines the unemployment rate as the number of people who want a job and cannot find one (that’s the numerator), divided by the number of people who are “in the labor force” (the denominator). But the BLS today restricts its definition of “in the labor force” to meaning just those who either have a job, or who may not have a job but looked for one at least once during the prior four weeks. Being employed meanwhile, is currently defined broadly as anyone who has worked as little as one hour during the week prior to the survey! One hour!