Author: Dave LIndorff

Journalist Charles M. Young talks with Dave Lindorff, host of PRN.fm’s new program ‘This Can’t Be Happening!” about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, New York’s last mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the NYPD vs. the LAPD, music & politics, getting groined by Hunter Thompson and interviewing Noam Chomsky.

You can hear the podcast of Wednesday evening’s show by clicking on the image below:

Hear Dave Lindorff on 'This Can't Be Happening!' every Wednesday at 5 pm Eastern Time on PRN.fm or on the web at www.PRN.fm

Ukraine’s new rulers, in one of their first acts, have disbanded that country’s riot police.

Now without getting into the complex politics of the ongoing struggles in that country, or into the question of the covert role of the US in backing the protests that brought down the old government in Kiev, this elimination of a brutal paramilitary police organization got me to thinking: If Ukraine, which has just gone through a spasm of deadly violence, and which is still in a very dangerous and politically unsettled situation, can get along without riot police, why can’t the United States?

Lately, with political struggles occurring in the streets of Venezuela, Thailand, Ukraine and a number of other places, the US government has been declaring over and over that the governments being challenged should not resort to violence against their own people.

Here’s US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Venezuela:
 

“We support human rights and fundamental freedoms – including freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly – in Venezuela as we do in countries around the world.”
 

And here is President Obama, speaking about the police violence in Ukraine:
 

“We hold the Ukrainian government primarily responsible for making sure that it is dealing with peaceful protesters in an appropriate way, that the Ukrainian people are able to assemble and speak freely about their interests without fear of repression.”
 

Even in Thailand where, unlike in Venezuela or Ukraine, the US is backing the government against protesters seeking new elections, with State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf still insisted that the US supports:
 

“…a democratic process to resolve the ongoing political tensions in Thailand…We also continue to urge all sides to refrain from violence, exercise restraint and respect the rule of law…and we do, I would note, applaud the restraint shown thus far by government authorities in this regard.”
 

Now let’s compare those fine, high-minded scoldings and warnings — and remember, we’re talking about three countries where the protesters have been seeking the overthrow of their existing governments, not just for reforms in the system, and protesters, particularly in Ukraine and Venezuela, who have themselves resorted to violence and especially to property damage — to how our own government these days responds to peaceful public protest.
Riot police at peaceful protest in Dallas, and Oakland paramilitary cops attacking Occupy Oakland encampment

 
This article initially appeared in WhoWhatWhy News
 

If you’re a small-town police chief, or perhaps the chief of a university security department, the US Department of Defense has got a deal for you!

Thanks to the ending of the Iraq War, and the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has 11,000 heavily armored vehicles that it has no use for. Called MRAPs—Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected—they are designed to protect against AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and IEDs. And as pitchman Paul Richards used to say of the ’69 Pontiac Firebird, “They’re practically giving them away!”

Correction, they are giving them away.

All a local police department has to do to get itself an 18-ton MRAP—which originally cost taxpayers between $400,000-$700,000 complete with gun turret and bullet-proof windows—is send a few cops to pick it up and pay for the gas.

There are a few downsides: the things get only five miles to the gallon, can’t go over most bridges (or under them), and have a nasty habit of tipping over on rough terrain.

Since last summer, police departments across the country have taken possession of 165 DOD surplus MRAPs, and there are another 731 requests for the 14-foot-high vehicles. Even Ohio State University police got their hands on one, saying it would provide a “police presence” at football games. Most of the rest of the vehicles to date have gone to smaller community police forces—everywhere from Farmington, NM (pop. 45,000) to Hamburg Village, NY (pop. 9,500)

Not your neighborhood cop anymore: American police are getting surplus MRAPs like this one in Columbia, SC.

Pennsylvania Senator Republican Pat Toomey last week went before the whole US Senate to oppose the nomination by President Obama of Debo Adegbile, former head of the litigation department of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. In his speech, Toomey tried to argue that Adegbile is unfit for the job because he supervised the Legal Defense Fund’s role in helping with the appeal in federal court of the death sentence of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal — an appeal that ended up vacating that sentence, and that was left standing by the US Supreme Court.

Toomey’s position — that Adegbile had “undermined the justice system” by filing that appeal claiming that Abu-Jamal’s death sentence had been unconstitutional — is ludicrous on its face. For one thing, the actual argument that led to the vacating of the death sentence was developed and presented in court by attorney Judith Ritter as lead counsel. She is not affiliated with the Legal Defense Fund. Furthermore, given that the appeal was successful in federal court, and then upheld on appeal by a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and given that the US Supreme Court, asked to reverse that ruling by Philadelphia’s District Attorney and the Pennsylvania Attorney General, refused to hear the case, thereby affirming it — to say that Adegbile, whatever role he played in the case, had somehow “undermined justice” is the same as saying that a Federal District Judge, an Appellate Court panel, and the Supreme Court all “undermined justice.”

That’s a pretty heavy indictment, even for a self-styled “Tea Party” senator!

But Pennsylvania’s junior senator didn’t stop there.

In his determined effort to pander to the wishes of Pennsylvania’s politically powerful police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, which has for years been pushing for Abu-Jamal’s execution following his 1982 conviction for the murder of white Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, and continues to fume now that he is now “just” serving a sentence of life without chance of parole, Toomey recited many of the same tired falsehoods trotted out regularly by the FOP. He said that the 1982 trial of Abu-Jamal had “conclusively proved” that he had ruthlessly shot Officer Faulkner, first shooting the officer in the back and then standing over the “prone and helpless” officer as he lay on the ground and “pumping four more bullets into him and one in the face which killed him.”

Sen. Pat Toomey speaking in the Senate, Debo Adegbile outside the Supreme Court, Mumia Abu-Jamal attending a court hearing

US Secretary of State John Kerry is a man of many convictions–many of them in open conflict with one another.

Recall that back in 2004, while trying to unseat President George W. Bush, he famously told students at Marshall University who wanted to know his stand on the US invasion of Iraq, that he “actually did vote for” a bill funding the war “before I voted against it.”

Now he’s doing the same thing on climate change, trying to say he’s both in favor of taking actions to prevent or slow the earth’s rapid warming, while he’s also in favor of actions that will make the crisis much worse. Specifically, Kerry just warned a group of students in Indonesia that climate change could threaten their “entire way of life” and also warned that “big companies and special interests” should not be allowed to “hijack” the climate debate. This was just days after word that his own State Department did exactly that, allowing oil industry lobbyists to micro-manage an environmental impact study for his State Department of the Keystone XL pipeline that Canada wants to build to bring tar sands oil slurry down from northern Alberta for sale to the US.

That industry-corrupted “study” concluded that if the US approved the controversial pipeline, it would be “unlikely to alter” the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere, because the tar sands would be developed whether a pipeline to the US was approved or not.

That kind of “logic,” of course, could be used to justify just about any kind of crazed energy development project. For example, a new coal-fired power plant being planned in California opposed by environmentalists could be supported with an argument that if it weren’t built in California, it would be built in Nevada anyhow, or a controversial drilling permit for offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska could be supported with an argument that if it were not permitted there, it would be allowed to operate off Canada.

The wasteland of Alberta's tar sands — an ecological disaster to mine bitumen that will produce far more atmospheric CO2 than even bunker oil, and that requires massive burning of gas simply to extract from the sand it is mined with.

ThisCantBeHappening! has a new radio program of the same name. I’ll be hosting the show every Wednesday at 5 pm Eastern Time on the Progressive Radio Network.

The first program, on the US Social Security system and the effort by the financial industry to destroy it, featured an interview with Theresa Ghilarducci, whom the financial industry has dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America,” for her incisive exposes of their campaign of distortion about Social Security and about the 401(k) plans that they would like us to all have to rely on. That program is not yet available as a podcast.

But the official first show, which aired Wednesday this week, is available at ThisCantBeHappening! on PRN. Check it out. The show is on climate change, and how the government and the energy industry both know climate change is happening, and that it’s happening faster than anyone imagined. I talk about how despite their knowing this, Washington is doing nothing to prevent it, and even worse, the oil industry is both gearing up to profit from a completely ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2012 by starting ocean drilling in that former ice-bound region, and at the same time is preparing a major propaganda and lobbying campaign to prevent passage of any laws or regulations to limit carbon emissions in the US.

You can hear this program by clicking on the image below:

Listen to the new show each week and tell everyone you know about it: ThisCantBeHappening! on PCN.fm ,Wednesdays at 5 Eastern time

I never really knew Pete Seeger, but he taught me how to play the banjo.

As a young amateur musician in junior high school in the early 1960s, just learning to play guitar and banjo and to sing folksongs, I certainly felt like I I knew him, going through the instructions in the manual he and his life companion Toshi copied and stapled together themselves. His high tenor renditions of wonderful old folk tunes that I’d never heard before, and his renditions of the powerful political songs of people like Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill–people I’d never heard of–didn’t just broaden my musical sensibilities, but actually shaped me politically more than I could have possibly realized at the time.

A few years later, as I got old enough to have to confront the draft, and to think about the horrors of the US war on the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and as I began to attend major anti-war demonstrations, there was always Pete there, banjo gripped by the neck, lanky in his bluejeans, climbing up on the stage to sing one anti-war anthem after another.

He never got old. I remember going to hear him back in the late 1970s at a SRO concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and just being amazed at the range of ages in the audience, from little toddlers sitting on their parents’ shoulders in the standees area at the back of the hall to ancient-looking people sitting in the seats, craning to hear through aging ears.

Remembering Pete Seeger: 1919-2014

(This story originally appeared in WhoWhatWhy.com)
 

This is the third and final of a three-part series on climate change. See Part I on climate change impacts already happening in Florida, and Part II on how the Pentagon and the oil industry know the North Pole is melting (and why), but are still acting as though global warming is not real, not a threat, and is nothing to worry about, even as they try to profit from it.
 

To the list of “things the NSA is interested in”, we need to add Climate Chaos. The latest release of documents obtained by National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in Denmark’s newspaper Information, shows that the NSA spied on negotiating teams for the countries participating in the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen. At that conference, widely declared a failure, the US was accused of playing hardball by refusing to agree to any set limits on carbon emissions. The new spying revelation raises serious questions about whether the US government is really interested in reaching any international agreement to limit global warming—or prefers to monitor and handicap those who actually might want to do something constructive.

More recent evidence that the Washington establishment is fiddling while Nome melts appeared at a January 23 conference in Washington on climate change sponsored by the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank founded during the Cold War.

That conference, “Global Implications of a Rapidly Changing Arctic,” featured three speakers—all key advisors to policymakers—including White House science advisor Dr. Brendan Kelly, assistant director of polar sciences at the Office of Science & Technology, Dr. Martin Jeffries, program officer and assistant science advisor at the Office of Naval Research, US Arctic Research Commission, and Rear Admiral Jonathan White, oceanographer and navigator of the US Navy.

What these three said during the conference was not as remarkable as what they did not say.

Organizer and panel moderator Heather Conley, a senior fellow at CSIS, acknowledged in an interview with WhoWhatWhy the absence of any discussion at the event about what was causing the polar region to heat up so dramatically, or what might be done to slow the pace of melting, which is likely to render the Arctic Ocean ice-free in summer months as soon as 2016. As she put it:

“You’re absolutely right that there is a paradox that climate change is transforming the Arctic and freeing up exploitation of more oil and gas that will make climate change even worse, but here we’re focused on ‘How do we deal with this change?’ We’re not talking about causality.”
 

Scenes like this 1841 painting of a walrus hunt by Francois August Biard will soon no longer exist in the Arctic, as the polar ocean continues to melt

Mumia Abu-Jamal has long been a living litmus test for whether people really want justice. Convicted in what even the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time was calling a terribly unfair trial over the alleged killing a white police officer, and sentenced to death by a racially biased and bloodthirsty “hanging” judge, Albert Sabo, Abu-Jamal spent 30 years on Philadelphia’s death row, always in solitary confinement, until a federal court, backed by the US Supreme Court, finally vacated the sentence, switching it to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

When the court tossed out Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, the reasons given were faulty jury instructions by the judge and a flawed jury sentencing form that the federal court believed could have led jurors to mistakenly believe that they could not individually oppose the death penalty, but would have to unanimously agree to oppose it. (In fact the opposite is true: any one juror in a death penalty sentencing can block execution by opposing the sentence, while death can only by imposed by a unanimous vote of the jury.)

This was an important ruling that upheld the “integrity” (such as it is) of the capital punishment system. It didn’t correct for the three decades that Abu-Jamal spent, wrongfully and unconstitutionally, in the hell-hole of Pennsylvania’s Death Row, but it at least ended that cruel and unusual torment, substituting another — life without parole.

Now one of the attorneys who helped craft the legal case that ultimately led to the lifting of that unconstitutional sentence, Philadelphia attorney Debe Adegbile, has been nominated by President Barack Obama to head the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department. Adegbile, on the merits, is an excellent choice for the post. A long-time civil rights litigator, well versed in the issues that the division is responsible for dealing with, he has also served with distinction as senior counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But Adegbile’s nomination has predictably aroused the wrath of the right-wing media and the pro-cop fanatics in Congress and elsewhere because of one thing he did, which was to volunteer to assist the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in developing its argument in federal court for overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.

From left: Debe Adegbile, Mumia abu-Jamal, Sen. Pat Toomey and Philly DA Seth Willliams
 

UPDATE: On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee, voting 10-8 along party lines, approved Adegbile’s nomination. ignoring a belated attempt by the Fraternal Order of Police (an organization that hasn’t met the brutal or corrupt cop it won’t defend as a maligned “hero”), to get Maureen Faulkner, widow of the police officer Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing, to be able to testify against Adegbile. With the filibuster no longer available for stopping votes on nominees, it is likely Adegbile will be approved for the Civil Rights post.

President Obama, five years late, in his fifth State of the Union speech, decried the terrible income gap in the US, a gap which has worsened during his years in the White House. Saying he was tired of the obstruction of his policies by Republicans in Congress, he said he would take action on his own, and as evidence offered up the puny “fix” of raising the minimum wage paid to employees working on federal projects from its current $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. This executive order, which could have been done when he took office in the depths of the Great Recession back in 2009, would be not immediate but would be phased in over the next three years.

What a pathetic joke!

As the New York Times pointed out the next day in its report on the president’s speech, the “raise” he was offering would only apply to “a few hundred thousand” workers. If we assume that “few” to be 300,000 people, and that each of those people works a 40-hour week 50 weeks per year, that would mean that in the first year, when the incremental increase will be 95 cents/hour, each worker currently earning $7.25 per hour will earn an extra $1900, for a total gain by all the impacted workers of $570 million.

Just to give a sense of how little that $570 million is, it works out to just over one-third of the unit cost of one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. That’s the Pentagon’s latest new fighter jet, designed and built by Lockheed-Martin, the one that has no enemy to fight and that is probably too flawed and too costly to ever risk in battle anyhow.

What is really obscene about the president’s token wage-increase gesture is that the $10.10 wage that he is saying the federal government will ultimately pay to its contract workers in three years would, in constant dollars, still be less than what the federal minimum wage was back in 1968, almost half a century ago! Heck, if the president had really wanted to show the obstructive Republicans and the American people that he meant business about going it alone, he could have used that same executive authority to grant those impoverished workers an immediate raise to $15 per hour — the rate that voters approved as a minimum wage last November in Seattle, Washington, and that labor activists say would actually go a ways towards alleviating rampant US poverty.

Even worse is the reality that we wouldn’t even be talking about this pathetic offer, or about a current federal hourly wage of $7.25, if Obama, back in 2009, fresh off a huge election win and with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress, had honored his campaign pledge to re-establish fairness in the National Labor Relations Act by passing “card check” legislation, making it possible for workers to unionize their workplaces by simply having a majority of workers sign cards saying they wanted a union. As things stand, and as the Obama the candidate denounced on the stump, employers are able to use the NLRA to delay union elections for years, during which time they typically engage in a campaign of lawless intimidation, illegally fire union organizers and end up defeating union drives, suffering no penalty afterwards (labor law limits employers found guilty of violations to having to pay back lost wages. There is no provision in the law to hit violators with penalties.)

The raise offered by Obama to federal contract workers for next year is just a third of the cost of one F-35 fighter jet