Author: Dave LIndorff

A kudo to President Obama. But just one.

If he manages to pull off an agreement with Iran on limiting that country’s nuclear fuel enrichment program in the fact of determined resistance from Republicans, Neocons, the Israel Lobby and the warmongers in both the GOP and his own Democratic Party, he will have finally earned at least some small portion of the gold in his Nobel Peace medallion.

We could reasonably ask why he thinks it’s cool to negotiate with the “Axis of Evil” nation of Iran over the nuclear issue, but not with Russia over Ukraine. After all, Iran doesn’t even have a nuclear weapon, and on the evidence, isn’t trying to build one, so these negotiations aren’t really even preventing a nuclear war; they’re just calming the nerves of some trigger happy paranoids in Israel and Washington. But Russia does have nuclear weapons, and has made it clear that if the US pushes too hard at putting NATO weapons and forces near the Russian border, or if it tries to undo the annexation of Crimea, it will use them. Shouldn’t that kind of thing call for cool-headed negotiation, instead of aggressive moves like sending offensive armaments to Kiev?

But then we have some other issues too.

If Obama really wants an agreement with Iran on limiting its nuclear fuel enrichment program, why is he being so hard-assed about ending the grinding sanctions that have been imposed on the country? I mean a deal’s a deal. If one side gives you want you want, you have to give something in return. You can’t say, okay you stop enriching uranium, dilute the stuff that you already enriched to 20%, back down to 3.5%, and shut down most of your centrifuges so you can’t make much anymore. But we’re not going to end sanctions until you have done this for a while so we know you mean it.

America's latest presidential "peace" laureate.
 
 

Harold Wanless, a leading climatologist and geologist based at the University of Miami, returns to PRN.fm’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” program to revisit his year-ago claim that global warming and sea level rise are going to be much more severe than the consensus predictions of the UN Climate Committee, NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other official groups.

With recent reports of faster melting on Greenland and in both the Eastern and Western Antarctic, Prof. Wanless tells host Dave Lindorff that humans are now facing a catastrophe — one that could threaten people alive today.

He predicts sea levels rising by more than 20 feet by the end of the century, and adds that if methane begins seriously erupting from the Arctic permafrost and off the seafloor north of Siberia (where it’s already bubbling up), resulting ocean and atmospheric heating could cause a die-off of the sea’s phytoplankton, reducing oxygen in the atmosphere (currently 21%) to a point that could threaten large mammals, including us.

To hear this interview, which was recorded on Wednesday, April 1, just click here or on the image below.

Climatologist Harold Wanless says ice in Greenland and Antarctica is melting far faster than anticipated, in part because it turns out melting ice fractures, speeding the melting process exponentially over time

4/3 UPDATE: Abu-Jamal has reportedly been moved by the Dept. of Prisons back to SCI-Mahoney’s infirmary, where there is no specialist on diabetes, despite his apparently still being in an acute health crisis. Sigificantly, his supporters note that this shift makes it even more difficult for family members, supporters and reporters to monitor his treatment and condition.
 

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical Philadelphia journalist convicted of killing a white Philadelphia police officer in a trial fraught with prosecutorial misconduct, witness coaching and judicial prejudice back in 1981, spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement in the deliberately designed hell of Pennsylvania’s supermax SCI Green prison before a panel of federal Appeals Court judges eventually ruled that he’d been unconstitutionally sentenced to death.

He of course, received no apology for the state’s making him illegally and improperly spend all those years in solitary waiting to be wrongfully executed. Instead, with that ruling (after a few years of legal stalling by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office), he was simply switched over to a sentence of life without possibility of parole and moved to the SCI-Mahanoy prison in central Pennsylvania.

Now, it appears the state, which lost its chance to execute him, may be trying to kill him another way, as word comes that this world-renowned political prisoner had to be rushed to the hospital this week, unconscious from an undiagnosed case of severe diabetes.

Incredibly, despite his having already spent the past two weeks in the prison infirmary, where he was suffering from a severe case of eczema, painful itching all over his body, lethargy, and frequent urination — all well-known side effects signaling possible diabetes — he was never tested for sugar in his blood or urine (or if was tested, nothing was done about the results). He was only finally diagnosed with the disease after his blood glucose level had risen to 779 — a level far above the normal range of 70-120 — at which point, unconscious, he was rushed to the Schuylkill Health Medical Center’s ICU and put on an insulin drip.

Supporters of Abu-Jamal say that since January he had been ill, complaining of chronic fatigue, painful itching and erupting skin, which only grew worse when the prison doctors prescribed a topical ointment.

For years, as a prisoner, Abu-Jamal has enraged the state’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, and law-and-order politicians of both parties, first by successfully battling his death sentence and his conviction, and second by using his journalistic skills to expose the horrors of the state’s, and the nation’s brutal prison system, which he has properly labeled a “prison-industrial complex.” Now this high-profile prisoner is shining a bright spotlight on another ugly aspect of that network of organized horror houses: the medical neglect of the incarcerated.

Whether there was a deliberate attempt to “execute” Abu-Jamal slowly through neglect of his diabetes — a disease that can be brought on by poor diet and/or stress, among other things, and that can kill if left untreated — or whether it was just an example of the standard neglect and incompetence faced by all those locked up by the state, Abu-Jamal’s current crisis, and the way it is being handled by prison authorities, should make any person with a shred of humanity furious.

SCI-Mahoney Prison, where Mumia is serving a life sentence, pictured here with two members of his legal team, Johanna Fernandez and Heidi Beghosian
 

When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, there was a story going around about a China Airlines flight in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had left the cockpit and then, on their return, found the door locked. They reportedly got a fire ax, and with the whole planeload of freaked out passengers watching in horror, started wailing on the metal door. The co-pilot then turned, and seeing the panic developing, calmly drew the curtain across the aisle, hiding their work from view. The axe’s bashing continued until they broke the latch and got back to the controls.

Lucky this was before the 9-11 attacks! Now, because some terrorists forced their way into crew cabins and took over a few planes, virtually all aircraft have reinforced cabin doors that cannot be broken into. Predictably, this panicky response has led to a new kind of risk: mass passenger deaths by pilot suicide. A young Lufthansa pilot, apparently with a death wish but wanting to have his demise make a murderous impact, waited until the pilot had left for the loo, then locked him out and sent the plane into the side of a French Alp.

So what do we do now? Put a toilet in the cabin of every plane so that neither pilot or co-pilot ever has to leave her or his colleague alone in the cabin during a flight?

Of course, we’ve already got a problem since another solution that the FAA came up with to terrorists on planes commandeering a flight was to allow pilots, most of whom are retired military pilots, to bring a gun on board. Of course that is only a good idea if the pilot is mentally stable and a good shot. What if the pilot is the whack job? The gun just makes the job of destroying the plane that much easier. 


It is certainly a tragedy that 149 innocent people including a class of 16-year-olds and a couple of babies, went to their doom along with the deranged Lufthansa co-pilot, but the disaster shows how nuts our societies have become because of overblown fears of terrorism.

Just think about the insane delays, the fraught confrontations, the needless X-rays, the missed flights and the sheer nuttiness of the post-9-11 security screenings — especially in the US. We have to remove our shoes because one guy tried to light up a “shoe bomb” that probably wouldn’t have done anything to the plane anyhow. I remember waiting in line once as a TSA inspector removed the booties from a three-month-old baby in a carrier at Chicago O’Hare because the rules said shoes had to come off and go through the X-ray machine. Never mind that a dedicated bomber could down a plane by bringing in six 3 oz bottles of nitro in a sealed plastic bag without any problem — enough to blow out the side of the plane from his seat. (Thankfully, fears touted by the government two years back of alleged terrorist plans to stuff explosives up their colons for detonation in flight never materialized, or we’d all be getting proctological exams now before boarding!)

Keeping America safe from terrorism: The TSA

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know all that much about Yemen, or about the Houthi rebels who have taken control of Sana’a, the ancient Arab country’s capital, leading to the hasty evacuation of all US military forces (some 250 Special Forces personnel and the staff of the US embassy) from that country located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

But I do know that what is being portrayed as a “disaster” for for the US global “counter-terrorism” effort is not being reported honestly to us by this country’s complacent and compliant corporate media.

Nowhere can I find any article in the corporate news media asking what role the US’s massively unpopular campaign of bombings and drone-fired missile attacks on alleged terrorists — attacks that have killed countless civilians, and that have also included wholly erroneous massacres of innocents such as wedding caravans — has played in the creation of a situation that is likely to become a bloody civil war. This in a country that already endured one such catastrophe lasting from roughly 1964 – 1994. We’re talking about a generation’s worth of bloodletting, both between tribes, and between a north dominated by the US-puppet Saudi monarchy, and a south supported by the Soviet Union and, for many years, its alley, Egypt. The idea that the US would casually take actions that could re-ignite such a horror in a place that had to be seen as a tinderbox is simply appalling.

If the goal of President Obama’s global drone wars was to combat and degrade global terrorism, it has been an embarrassing and tragic failure not just in Yemen, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia too.

Yemini fort and tank base, where US Special Forces were stationed before fleeing, and wreckage of a Yemini wedding caravan hit by a US drone strike that killed 15
 

With Republicans now in control of both houses of Congress, the current president already on record as having supported cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and all signs pointing to the likelihood that the 2016 election could bring us either a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative president, and an increasingly Republican-dominated Congress, it’s time for an aggressive mass movement built around defending and expanding both those critical public funding programs.

The first step is getting out the truth that Social Security is not broke or doomed, but simply needs to be better funded by ending the free pass given to the wealthy. Simply eliminating the cap on income subject to the FICA tax, currently set at the first $118,500 of earned income, would make the system fully able to pay all promised benefits for the next century or more. Extending the tax to cover unearned income — basically capital gains (a tax that only impacts the wealthy) would allow for an expansion of benefits.

There is today $2.8 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, a fund that was created by a compromise reform reached by President Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress led by House Speaker Tip O’Neill back in 1983. The idea at the time was to have Baby Boomers and their employers pay more into the system ahead of the time they would be retiring, when their numbers would place a burden on current workers (the Boomers’ kids and grandkids), since the system has always since its inception financed current retirees’ benefits through current workers’ FICA payroll tax payments. (The reform also raised the full retirement gradually from 65 to 66 and later to 67 for people born after 1964.)

That advance funding of Boomer retiree benefits is now starting to be tapped but that is what was supposed to happen to it, a point the doom-sayers and political scare-mongers fail to mention. It turns out, though, that the advance funding was not large enough for several reasons. One, very positive, is that people are living longer than projected because of improved nutrition and medical advances. Another is that a series of recessions and market collapses, especially during the “lost decade” of 2000-2010, caused in large part by corrupt investment banks in 2001 and by Wall Street’s mega-banks turned casinos in 2007-9, cut severely into FICA contributions, as well as into workers’ personal savings and net worth.

Right-wing and corporate propaganda to the effect that the Trust Fund is smoke and mirrors or just “IOU” scrips, is absurd. It’s true that Washington politicians promptly borrowed FICA tax revenues as soon as they came in the door to allow them to fund things like endless wars and Pentagon war-profiteers without raising taxes, but that debt is every bit as real as the federal debt held by investors in the form of treasury bills and notes. It will be covered, whether by rolling it over into new debt or by raising taxes.
Boomers have the political power to remake Social Security and to expand Medicare to all! We just have to use it!
 

In any event, as has been often pointed out, even were the fund to be exhausted in 2033 or 2034 because of inaction by Congress to boost revenue for Social Security, the system would, at the current FICA tax rate of 6.2% for employee and employer, still be able to fund 77-78% of promised benefits out into the distant future beyond the time when the last Baby Boomer has moved off to some Woodstock in the sky.

More importantly, there is no way that will happen. Why? Because the Baby Boom generation, in retirement, will constitute not just the largest block of elderly voters in the nation’s history (almost 78 million people!), but also will represent the largest elderly bloc proportionately, in history, fully 1.5 times as large a segment of the electorate as the already powerful current senior vote.

In an interview Wednesday on the Progressive Radio Network’s program “This Can’t Be Happening!”, TCBH! colleagues Dave Lindorff and Alfredo Lopez talk about the recent coup plot broken up by Venezuelan police, consider President Obama’s outlandish and absurd claim that Venezuela, one of the leading suppliers or oil to the US, poses a “unique and extraordinary threat” to US national security, and also discuss Alfredo’s contention that the telecom industry has become a counterattack on the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision in favor of net neutrality.

Lopez, a long-time Latino activist and founder of the progressive web hosting service MayFirst/PeopleLInk, reports on how for years, Venezuela has been essentially under attack by US funded right-wingers and oligarchs trying to oust the popular elected government, first of Hugo Chavez, and now his successor Nicolás Maduro. This has included a coup, recently broken up by Venezuelan police, which allegedly had the backing of the US, like the nearly successful one in 2002, when Chavez was actually captured and held hostage by coup leaders until freed by a mass mobilization of the country’s poor and its military enlisted ranks.

Lopez notes that the Bolivarian socialist experiment launched by the late President Chavez has been essentially working in a constant state of “impending coup,” a US funds and advice have poured into the country from outfits like USAID and the Congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — subversive organizations that have funded violent protests and riots aimed at destabilizing the existing government, as was successfully done in Ukraine last year.

Lindorff and Lopez talk about what lies behind the absurd claim, made in an executive order Tuesday by President Obama, that Venezuela, a functioning Latin American democracy, poses a threat to US national security. Is this a prelude to military action, as feared by Venezuelan government officials, or just part of a longer-term plan to destabilize and ultimately unseat Venezuela’s socialist-minded central government.

Listen too, to the second half of the PRN program as Lopez explains how the telecom industry is organizing a counter-attack against the successful progressive campaign that lead to the last month’s surprise announcement by the FCC that it was endorsing reclassifying the Internet as a public utility, subject to equity rules that require it to provide equal services at equal costs to subscribers of all income levels.

“The pushback by the big media corporations against this FCC ruling has already begun,” warns Lopez, suggesting that this is a battle that the left can win — if people are paying attention.

Dave Lindorff and Alfredo Lopez discuss Venezuela's coup, US imperialism and the Internet on the Progressive Radio Network

Seriously? Venezuela is a “national security threat”?

That is what President Obama has reportedly declared today in a new executive order. Actually, he went further, calling Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.”

And how exactly is poor Venezuela, a nation of 29 million, with a small military upon which it spends just 1% of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world (the US spends 4.5% of GDP on its own bloated military), so incredibly dangerous a threat to the United States?

Well, according to the new executive order, some of Venezuela’s leading officials have “criminalized political dissent” and are corrupt. That’s about it. There’s nothing in there about Venezuela threatening military action against the US, or trying to subvert our government, or promoting terrorism, or even of threatening Americans.

But hold on. I remember reading in documents obtained through Freedom of Information petitions by the Partnership for Civil Justice from the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, that back in the fall of 2011, during the Occupy movement that swept the nation, the US national security apparatus, including the NSA and the 72 so-called Fusion Centers that had been set up to link federal, state and local intelligence organizations in all major US cities devoted most of its domestic intelligence and police resources to spying on, infiltrating, and ultimately crushing a purely peaceful wave of political protest against the rampant corruption of the political class and the banking industry.

Guess: Is this photo of Venezuela or the United States?
 
 

And what about the National Security Agency, which Edward Snowden and others have exposed as being focused, in its unprecedented monitoring of all possible forms of communication among the American people, not as claimed on preventing terrorism but on simply gathering dossiers on millions of law-abiding citizens?

What about the FBI and other national intelligence agencies, which have been labeling anti-war activists, environmental activists and even animal rights activists (and this news site!) as “terrorists” in their files?

Looked at objectively, isn’t it the US that is a national security threat to Venezuela?

There are some famous film clips of the US Congress that stand the test of time. One is of attorney Joseph Welch as s subpoenaed witness denouncing the redbaiting charlatan Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the military and the government. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welsh says angrily, as the senator from Wisconsin uses lies and innuendo to assassinate the character of a junior member of Welch’s law firm who had shown the temerity to join the “commie front” National Lawyers Guild as a Harvard Law student.

Another such famous clip was the 1973 testimony of White House lawyer John Dean admitting to his knowledge of the criminal acts of President Nixon and his key advisors in the so-called Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s impeachment and resignation from office.

A third unforgettable clip shows when Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), in a packed Senate hearing room, read out the text of the Pentagon Papers, which the Nixon administration was trying to get a federal court block the New York Times from publishing.

Now to that venerable list we must add the appalling video of a foreign leader, invited as a speaker by the Republican leadership of the House, denouncing the current negotiations of the State Department aimed at preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and in effect telling the US it should prepare instead to launch a catastrophic war against Iran. Whatever one may think of President Obama, the image of a packed House chamber, filled with slathering, mindlessly applauding Republicans and a majority of the feckless Democrats of the House and Senate (only 40 Democrats chose to boycott this treasonous address by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu), leaping up and down and clapping to Netanyahu’s verbal garbage, is shocking. It also exposes the extent to which a tiny apartheid nation based upon a tribal ethic and a long history of genocide, has hijacked the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country.

As Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace advocate and former Knesset member, writes in his article titled “The Speech,” the unseemly image of Republican members of Congress leaping up as one and hooting rabidly at almost every line uttered by Netanyahu reminded him of nothing so much as the Reichstag members in the 1930s leaping up to cheer and salute each applause line of Chancellor Adolph Hitler.

Years or decades from now, if the US still exists as even a nominal democracy, this video will surely shock any citizens who view it every bit as much as do the above listed iconic videos.

Two images, two legislatures, two speeches, same ugly reality
 

The Republican-dominated Congress, with the help of a cadre of sell-out conservative Democrats in both chambers, are gearing up to attack Social Security again, under the guise of “saving” the program.

The attack will be brutal, because the program’s assassins understand that this is probably their last chance to undermine Social Security. With the Baby Boom generation born after 1946 now seriously starting to file for retirement benefits, it will soon become such a mainstay for so many people that it will be impregnable, unless already undermined.

A person born in 1946 could have retired at age 62 as early as 2008, and next year could retire at 70 and receive maximum benefits. There are already seven years’ worth of Baby Boomers who are at least eligible to start collecting benefits. By the time the last Baby Boomer born in 1964 is eligible to retire in 2026, the “senior lobby” of Social Security-eligible voters will be more double what it is today, and more importantly, will represent a bloc 50% larger as a proportion of the voting population than it is in today’s elderly population. Social Security’s enemies in Congress and in the business world know that as powerful as the elderly vote is today it will be 50% more powerful in years to come. And don’t forget, it’s not just retirees who ardently support Social Security. It’s people in their 50s and early 60s, who are looking ahead at the program as their salvation in retirement.

Polls show that even among the young, there is strong and abiding support for this flawed but critical program founded in 1936, which today provides 100% of income for one-seventh of all America’s elderly, and 90% or more of income for one-third of the elderly. Another one-third depend upon those benefits for more than half their income. Most of the rest too depend on their Social Security benefits for basic expenses like food and rent. It’s the rare American who just uses their benefit checks for vacations, luxury purchases or investment purposes.

But for all that Americans remain incredibly ignorant about the program, and are losing out on many of its benefits because of that ignorance. If this information were more readily available and understandable, it would be far harder for the program’s enemies to successfully attack it. I will attempt to do that here.

The Social Security program is under attack by both Republicans and many Democrats