Author: Dave LIndorff

It’s entertaining to watch and to read reports in the corporate media about the current stock market decline, which over the course of the last six business days erased $2.1 trillion in the market value of stocks of publicly-traded US corporations (and in a lot of ordinary Americans’ retirement savings).

CNN, in an article on Wednesday, had a piece on its CNN Money website saying not to worry about the market crashing, because, “At the moment, the US economy looks healthy. It’s on track to grow about 2% this year, and unemployment is back at the low levels it was at prior to the Great Recession.”

The New York Times, also on Wednesday, did acknowledge that there were some issues that had been “overlooked” that were now getting attention, but the article focussed entirely abroad, not at the US itself. It argued that the US economy is not as immune from global economic slowdowns as many analysts had believed. For example, while trade with China may only account for some 2% of the revenues of US public companies, much of the rest of the world, including large parts of Asia and Australia, as well as Europe, are heavily dependent upon trade with China, and the US economy is linked to all of them. So, the article concluded, if China’s economy stalls, as appears to be happening, most of the world stalls, and that would cause problems for the US too.

Let’s look at both of these arguments more closely though.

First of all, anyone who says the US economy “looks healthy” isn’t looking very closely. A 2% growth rate is hardly anything to crow about, and since the Fiscal Crisis, when growth was negative, the US economy has struggled to do much more than 2% per year, with the best year being 2014 when it made it to 2.4%. Compare that to the 1990s, when there were five years of growth rates of 4% a year or more, and only two years of below 2% growth rates.

Katie Couric, a veteran TV journalist and currently global anchor for Yahoo News, just trashed Social Security in a hit piece misleadingly called “Explaining Social Security” that purported to be explaining the system’s financial “crisis.” Far from explaining the system, she trundled out tired falsehoods and scare tactics long used by the system’s enemies — notably the Republican Party and including many Democrats in the pocket of Wall Street. (Significantly, the online video was sponsored by Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, hardly a fan of Social Security.)

First, Couric’s long list of whoppers:

She claims for starters that the system works like a bank, collecting workers’ Social Security payroll taxes, and stashing them under a government mattress, and then paying out the money as retirement checks when they take their retirement. This is simply not true and was never meant to be true. What actually happens, and happened from the beginning of the program in1936, is that the payroll taxes collected from current workers and their employers go to pay for the benefits of current retirees.

Couric makes it appear that greedy baby boomers are going to be sucking money out of the pockets of younger active workers to fund their retirements as though this were something new and unseemly, when in fact, retirees since 1936 have been getting their benefits paid by younger people actively in the workforce. That is the actual way the system was designed to work, not, as she suggests, as a enforced retirement savings program.

Then she highlights what she wrongly claims is the problem: that the system has gone out of whack because of the unanticipated burden of some 74 million baby boomers now beginning to retire and collect Social Security benefits, and a relatively diminished number of current workers who have to pay for those benefits.

Couric warns ominously that the $2.8 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund is being diminished to cover the annual shortfall in current payroll tax collections, and says this fund is going to eventually run out. Then she says that the program’s future is “well…not secure.”

This is about as disingenuous or ignorant as a journalist can be. Social Security is completely secure — unless crooked politicians kill it. Sure the trust fund would “run out” in about 2033 if nothing was changed by Congress between now and then But Couric conveniently fails to mention that even then, taxes from current workers would be sufficient to cover 77% of the retiring boomer benefits due indefinitely until the percentage of elderly begins to decline. And remember, by 2033 the youngest baby boomer would be 69, so the wave of retirees would actually already be shrinking in relation to the active workforce, meaning the alleged “crisis” would already be resolving itself.

Journalist Katie Couric and Wall Street financier Peter Peterson, two enemies of Social Security
 

I don’t know which is worse: President Obama asserting, in defense of the nuclear deal he and his Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with Iran, that “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon,” or the fact that most Americans, and most American pundits, seem to accept that limited choice of options as a given.

Nothing could be more ridiculous, of course. We already know, because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have repeatedly inspected Iran’s nuclear energy programs and reactors and verified the fact, that no bomb-making work has been going on in Iran for years. Iran has no weapons-grade uranium 235 and no plutonium. Even the US intelligence services and Israel’s Mossad leaders past and present have said that Iran has no nuclear weapons program underway.

If the existence in a country of scientists capable to make a bomb were a cause for going to war, the US would have to be attacking Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, all the countries of Eastern Europe and all the former Soviet states now referred to as “the Stans” in central Asia, as well as a host of others whose students have performed admirably as engineers and physics majors in US and European universities. Any of these countries could work out the science and the engineering issues needed to design and build a bomb, and if they didn’t have nuclear reactors that could churn out the necessary fissile material (most do), they could buy it on the black market.

So, for that matter, could Iran, if its leaders really wanted The Bomb. How hard would it have been for Iran to surreptitiously buy a nuke or three from ally and fellow Muslim state Pakistan, which has a bunch of them, or from financially strapped North Korea, or just to buy the ingredients for a bomb from them? But Iran has not done this, and despite years of unprovoked Israeli threats to send bombers to attack Iran, a fairly impressive and vicious cloak-and-dagger Mossad campaign to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, a US/Israeli-orchestrated cyber attack, called Stuxnet, that destroyed most of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and supercomputers, and covert US support of terrorist actions inside Iran, Iran’s leaders have not reconsidered their decision back in 2003, a full 12 years ago, to halt the country’s research on developing a nuclear bomb, which Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has declared to be a “sin” under Islam.

Anyone who is convinced Iran plans to build a bomb and create Mideast mayhem by using it should ask themselves how that would benefit Iran. The country has been battered by sanctions and an oil embargo that have hampered any and all of its efforts to grow its economy and to improve the lives of the Iranian people. Iran also experienced first hand the horrors of war in the prolonged and horrific struggle it had against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (who had US backing). Even if there are people who occasionally still shout “death to America” at demonstrations in Tehran, it would be hard to find someone in that country who would really want a war with the US, or with Israel either for that matter — a country that has at its disposal some 400 nuclear weapons (and which, unlike Iran, has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, does not allow international inspectors on its territory, and most importantly, has never ruled out using nukes first or against a country that has no nukes).

The US can't expect fellow Security Council member states China, Russia, France, and even Britain and Germany, to stick with sanctions on Iran if Congress kills the nuclear deal just negotiated
 

You can read the entire article in the New York Times Tuesday business section reporting on Puerto Rico’s default on a payment on its staggering $72 billion debt without once learning that the little Caribbean island, home to 3.5 million US citizens, is a territory of the United States, or more properly, a colony, insofar as its residents have no representation in Washington, cannot vote for national candidates for office, and furthermore, are subject to US federal courts, whose judges are all appointed by the federal government.

At least USA Today made the story its page one lead, instead of just a business story, but it too just notes that the island is a “commonwealth” and that as such it cannot be bailed out as Greece hopes to be, by such international bodies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Union. The meaning of the term “commonwealth” is not defined.

The Wall Street Journal ran its report on the bankruptcy on the front of its Money & Investing section, making it clear that the only significance of this story was to the many institutional and individual investors who hold Puerto Rican tax-free bonds in the municipal bond allocation of their investment portfolios. It too failed to explain what it meant to call Puerto Rico a “commonwealth.”

US citizens outside of Puerto Rico, most of whom don’t even know Puerto Ricans are fellow citizens, and not potential “illegal immigrants” to their shores like the Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans and other residents of neighboring islands, are no doubt understandably confused about Puerto Rico’s status, given that Kentucky, Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania all refer to themselves as “commonwealths” and not as states.

But Puerto Rico is no “commonwealth,” a term which the Oxford dictionary defines as “an independent state or community, especially a democratic republic,” and which Websters dictionary defines as a nation or state or alternatively — in a special category for Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, presented without any sense of irony — as “a political unit having local autonomy but voluntarily united with the United States.”

I’m not sure how that last definition got past the editors, though. Puerto Rico is can never, with a straight face, be said to have been “voluntarily united” with the United States. The island was a spoil of war when the US defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and it instantly became a colony under brutal military rule, its indigenous independence movement crushed, and even its native Spanish language barred from public education from 1898 until 1948.

When Puerto Rico’s purely symbolic but powerless elected delegates assembly voted in 1914 to call unanimously for the island’s independence, the US Congress responded in 1917 with the Jones Act, which declared all residents of Puerto Rico to be US citizens, whether they liked it or not (people were given a one-time chance within the next 30 days to renounce that citizenship forever, but nobody since then has had that right).

Puerto Rico's debt crisis is only the latest crisis caused by its colonial status under US rule

I’m not a fan of war or of killing of any kind, but the labeling of the deadly attack by Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez on two US military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee as an act of terror is absurd.

Maybe Abdulazeez will turn out to have been a nut-case bent on committing “suicide by police.” There are plenty of those kinds of psychos in the gun-soaked culture of America. But what we’re hearing,

increasingly, is that he was somehow linked to Middle East jihad, and ultimately to ISIS, and that he is therefore a “terrorist.”

That is ridiculous!

If it turns out that Abdulazeez was in any way linked to ISIS, then his action in attacking US military personnel in the US and killing them has to be seen not as terrorism but as a legitimate retributive act of war. That is no dishonor to those Marines killed. It simply makes it clear that they were killed in a war, not by some crazy person.

US citizens need to start accepting the reality that if the United States is going to go around the world blowing up people with fighter-bombers, special forces actions and drone missile attacks, eventually the targets of those aggressive acts of war will start responding against the US in kind. And they would have a legal right to do this under the rules of war.

Was the Chattanooga shooting an act of terrorism or an act of war? (Think before answering)
 

Afghan Brigadier General Abdul Sama was accused recently of smuggling over 40 pounds of heroin.

It should come as no surprise that an Afghan general was caught smuggling heroin, the surprise is that any high official in that country should be charged with a crime for profiting from the trade in illegal drugs while under the watchful eye of American forces.

Under American occupation, Afghanistan quickly became the world’s leader in opium production, producing over 90% of the world’s supply. The Taliban had almost shut down opium production prior to the US invasion in 2001 to the chagrin of international drug runners, and no doubt the international banking industry, which earns big profits laundering billions of dollars in illegal drug money annually. Illegal drugs account for about 8% of all international trade.

Few Americans are aware of the long history of the CIA’s running illegal drugs internationally, thanks to the untiring efforts of the mainstream press. Were citizens aware, few would be surprised that heroin production has skyrocketed under US occupation of Afghanistan.

The tragic case of journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News is a case in point, and represents perhaps the widest-known attempt at suppressing the story of CIA drug-running endeavors, with the mainstream US press shamelessly and dutifullly attacking Webb for attempting to expose the inconvenient truth.
Afghan harvests opium as US Troops ignore him (or protect him?)

Something huge has happened in Greece, though you wouldn’t know it if you rely on the US corporate media for your information.

That reporting has, with rare exceptions, followed the party line that a bunch of naive “leftists” led by Greece’s relatively young and new prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his motorcycle-riding radical economist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, have pushed Greece “to the brink of chaos” through their ineptitude. This same biased reporting has been pushing the argument that Greece has “no choice” but to swallow even more austerity, selling off all its public assets to circling capitalist vultures, in the vain hope that someday the country’s economy will bottom out and begin “growing” again.

The reality of what has just happened is quite different. Actually, Greece has suffered seven years of austerity the likes of which countries like the US and northern Europe haven’t seen since the Great Depression. Unemployment is over 20% (50% for young people!), and there is no end in sight if the so-called Troika — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — continues to hold the country by the throat, demanding regular payments on a debt that even the IMF admits can never be repaid.

Far from being naive or inept, Tsipras, Varoufakis and the ruling Syriza Party have done two remarkable things brilliantly — one of which should not really be remarkable at all, except that the so-called “free world” has moved so far away from real democracy at this point that it’s forgotten what democracy is, and the other of which would not have been necessary were the global media not so fawning towards ruling elites in their respective countries.

The first of these two things was the bold decision by Tsipras to hand the question of what to do next in Greece to the Greek people, by allowing them to vote on whether they wanted to surrender to global and European bankers and the governments of the world’s wealthiest nations, or wanted to say “No!” to further demands for austerity. When Tsipras walked away from further bailout negotiations and made his surprise call for that referendum, and when the Greek parliament backed him by passing a bill setting the poll up, a cacophony of doomsaying pundits in Europe, the US and the Greek conservative media all warned the Greek people to “see reason” and to “vote for Europe,” as though voting against more austerity would inevitably mean pariah status for Greece.

There was a kind of smug gloating over early polls showing that a majority of Greeks planned to vote “Yes” to accepting whatever the banks and the European Union demanded, or later, when it appeared that the vote would be close.

In the end, of course, the Greek people voted by a landslide (61% to 38%)against European austerity demands that Tsipras labeled “blackmail” and “national humiliation,” and that Varoufakis called “fiscal waterboarding.” Tsipras was fully vindicated in his trust in democracy and in the people of his country, which he pointedly reminded had “invented democracy.”

Is Greek PM Alexis Tsipras, in letting Greeks vote on national policy, and in putting their interests first, at risk of becoming another Mossedegh or Allende?
 

The pig-headed small-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty of most fundamentalists of whatever religion knows no bounds.

Kudos to the narrow majority of the five Supreme Court justices for today at least blowing one result of that pig-headedness out of the water with their ruling declaring that states cannot abridge or deny gay couples from marrying in a state-sanctioned union, and receiving all the benefits that come from such a union.

The opposition to gay marriage has never made any constitutional sense. It has always been based upon a false conflating of church weddings and the legal marriage that is conferred by local governments in accordance to state laws. The fundamentalists — people like Jerry Falwell or ex-Senator and perennial GOP presidential wannabe Rick Santorum and their ilk — have claimed ad nauseum that sanctioning gay marriage would “weaken” marriage as an institution, citing in support the Bible, which they erroneously claim “defines” marriage as the “union of one man and one woman.” (Hell, it doesn’t even include the number one, as many male characters in the Bible have more than one wife.)

But aside from the obvious point that with divorce rates in the US running at close to 50% for first marriages, the “institution” itself is pretty weak on its own and doesn’t need any help from gay couples, who actually have a pretty good record of staying together, when it comes to that, even when denied the right to marry as has long been the case.

More importantly, nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision would require any church to itself offer marriage services to gay couples. That is a battle that has to be fought religious sect by religious sect — something that has been going on for some time now. What the court has done, and its action is shamelessly long in coming — is say that the civil procedure of registering a marriage cannot be denied to anyone because of sexual orientation, and that with that change, gay couples who marry in accordance with Constitutionally protected state law anywhere in the US (or elsewhere in the world one would assume), have the same rights and legal responsibilities and liabilities as do heterosexual couples.

With this decision, gay couples have the same right to adopt children, to visit each other in the hospital, to have joint bank accounts, to obtain health benefits offered to employee spouses, to file joint income taxes and to share in driving a rental car. They also will enjoy the protection of divorce law, will be liable where appropriate, for paying child support and sometimes alimony in the event of a divorce, and will have the protection of shared ownership of property except where there are pre-nuptial agreements signed.

If any of that weakens what’s left of religious marriage vows (which I sincerely doubt), then tough.

The SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage strikes a small blow against fundamentalist bigotry, but there’s plenty left to combat
 

A few weeks ago, I got a vivid comparative look at how far this country has moved towards becoming a police state. The occasion was a brief visit to Montreal, where my wife was to give a harpsichord recital at an early keyboard music conference.

At the Canadian border crossing, just above Lake Champlain, the Canadian official politely asked us our purpose in coming to Canada. Informed it was to perform harpsichord music at a music conference, he actually asked my wife what composers she was playing! (It was Gaspard le Roux) I tried to imagining even being asked such a question by an American border official and simply couldn’t. The Canadian officer also asked us if were were bringing anything in with us. Told that we had a keyboard, he asked if we planned to sell it — a fair question for a customs official. Then, assured we’d be bringing it back home with us, he waved us through with a smile.

On our way back into the US, we found ourselves being questioned by a grim-faced, beefy, cop-like guy, complete with sidearm, about where we’d been and what we’d done in Canada. Now this is getting draconian. We are both US citizens traveling back from home from a visit to a country that is about as close an ally to the US as a country can be. There is no reason why an immigration official, having looked at our passports, should be asking us about our activities while in Canada. Hell, I could have said I was attending a conference on promoting world socialist revolution, or a global meeting of some white supremacist organization. It wouldn’t matter. He’d still have to grant us entry. I have every right to attend such political meetings in the US with impunity if I want to, and I have the same right as a US citizen to attend them abroad too.

The stupid thing, of course, about such questions, is that if I actually were doing something illegal — say passing stolen state secrets to a spy connection in Canada, or meeting with some terrorist organization to plot a bombing in the US — I certainly wouldn’t offer that information to a border patrol officer.

So why would we be asked by a border patrol official to report what we had been doing in Canada?

Lines of cars carrying US terrorists returning from training in Canada wait to cross the US border just south of Montreal, so they can head down to New York City. Luckily, alert border guards ask each driver what they did in Canada before letting them back into the country.

Attorneys from the Abolitionis Law Center in Pennsylvania, an organization defending prisoner rights and challenging the state’s penal system, have filed suit in federal court demanding that Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections stop preventing them from even seeing their client, journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on occasions when he has to be hospitalized for a critical diabetes condition.

In an hour-long interview with Dave Lindorff on ThisCantBeHappening’s radio show “This Can’t Be Happening!” that aired last Wednesday on PRN.fm, Abolitionist Law Center founder and legal director Bret Grote says that Abu-Jamal, who is serving a term of life imprisonment without possibility of parole, was allowed to develop a case of diabetes through poor diet and medical neglect in the SCI_Mahanoy prison where he is incarcerated, and then, when finally rushed to a hospital after he had collapsed in diabetic shock, was barred from seeing supporters and relatives (even his wife and brother!) or even his attorneys, on orders of the DOC.

Grote says that intense pressure from local and international supporters, who demonstrated outside the hospital and deluged the DOC and the Governor’s Office with calls and emails, led the DOC to relent and allow some brief visits, but then began denying Abu-Jamal’s attorneys access to his medical records.

Grote, who earllier won a major victory in the same federal court district, overturning a recently passed “anti-Mumia” law passed unanimously by the state legislator barring state prison inmates from talking or writing about their cases, talks about this latest attack on Abu-Jamal and all prisoners, and about the intentionally inadequate and punitive medical support provided to state inmates on the program, which can be heard by clicking here

Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI-Mahanoy prison before his diabetes crisis (l), after losing 80 1bs. due to the undiagnosed condition (center), and his attorney, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center (r)