Author: Dave LIndorff

(This article, the second in a three-part series on climate change, first appeared in WhoWhatWhy
 

For years, climate change skeptics in Congress and energy lobbyists like the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Coal Council (ACC) have been successfully blocking significant action in the US on reducing this country’s emissions of carbon into the air. But as the ice melts up north, some of these same industry skeptics are moving to profit from it.

Certainly the Pentagon knows the earth is getting hotter. Here’s what US Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Robert J. Papp wrote in the February 2012 issue of Proceedings, the magazine of the US Naval Institute:
 

“The world may seem to be growing smaller, but its seas are growing bigger—particularly in the great North, where a widening water-highway beckons both with resources and challenges.”
 

The Admiral, while ignoring issues of causality, continued:
 

“The Arctic Ocean, in the northern region of the Arctic Circle, is changing from a solid expanse of inaccessible ice fields into a growing navigable sea, attracting increased human activity and unlocking access to vast economic potential and energy resources. In the 35 years since I first saw Kotzebue, Alaska, on the Chukchi Sea as a junior officer, the sea ice has receded from the coast so much that when I returned last year the coastal area was ice-free.”

Coast Guard vessels patrolling in a melting Arctic Ocean (Pentagon photo)

(This article, the first in a three-part series, was written on assignment for WhoWhatWhy News)
 

Miami Beach -– Len Berry was relaxing with colleagues on a hotel patio here one evening last October when one of them shouted, “Look! It’s happening!”  Peering over the railing, the group could see water pushing up onto the street below from storm sewer drains – something that thanks to sea level rise has been happening with increasing frequency in this low-lying resort city. Berry, director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Environmental Studies, says he and the others were in town to attend a conference on climate change when they got this first-hand view of the crisis.

Far north of Florida, skeptics of the chaos caused by climate change are rare. The denizens of Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland and northern Canada have been witnessing firsthand the frightening effects of a rapidly heating Earth: Lakes and shallow seas bubbling with methane, the Arctic Ocean’s icecap shrinking, soon to vanish altogether in summer, “drunken forests” whose tree roots once sat firmly atop permafrost, now wobbling helplessly on mud. They know what’s happening.

But in America’s Lower 48, there are still plenty of climate-change naysayers. In Florida, you will find fewer and fewer of them, though, especially along the state’s long, low-lying coastline. The evidence of climate change is getting harder to ignore down here, too.

The playground city of Miami Beach may seem an unlikely place to spot such radical changes. But at its greatest elevation this heavily developed island sits just four feet above mean sea level. Much of the land is even lower and these days it gets inundated when the tide is high.

Miami Beach’s Holocaust Memorial sculpture by Kenneth Treister, rising 40 feet above the island, could end up being the last visible sign of Miami Beach, and an unintended symbol of a drowning city’s climate change fate

The US Department of “Justice” has a distinctly nuanced concept of that term, taking a tough, no-holds-barred stance when it comes to individuals — especially little people without much power or influence — and trying at all costs to avoid prosecution when it comes to the powerful, and to big corporations — especially big financial corporations. That schizoid approach to prosecution is personified in the recent actions–and inaction–of the DOJ’s man in Manhattan, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

You remember Preet. He’s the guy who came down so hard on a deputy consul general of the Indian Consulate in New York who was accused by his office of “human trafficking.” Setting aside the deliberately incindiary “slave trade” language, what the 39-year-old Devyani Khobragade stands accused of is lying to US visa officials in New Delhi when she applied for a visa to bring an Indian maid to the US to work in her home, allegedly claiming to them that she would be paying the woman some $4500 a month, when the maid, who left the job, claimed she was paid just $573 monthly. The US prosecutor (himself a naturalized citizen and native of India who grew up in the US) had Khobragade arrested as she dropped her two children off at school, brought her to the federal lock-up in Manhattan, where she claims she was strip searched and cavity searched several times, and finally released her on $250,000 bond, to face felony charges that could potentially result in 10 years’ jail time. (Khobragade has denied the charges and claims that the maid in question was extorting her family.)

Explaining his tough approach to the case, Bharara has stated that Khobragade’s treatment under arrest was not harsh, and that she was simply subjected to “routine procedures of the US Marshal’s Service” for persons being placed in detention following arrest. In fact, he claimed she had been extended “special courtesies” such as being allowed to make multiple phone calls to assure that her children would be cared for in her absence, and being offered coffee by her arresting officers. Bharara also defended his department’s tough approach in this case saying that human trafficking is a serious crime and that “Foreign nationals brought to the United States to serve as domestic workers are entitled to the same protections against exploitation as those afforded to United States citizens.” He went on to declare that the alleged lying to visa officials and the alleged “exploitation of an individual” were something that “will not be tolerated.”

Some might immediately point out that exploitation of low-paid American workers is rampant — including in Bharara’s jurisdiction of New York–and that the Justice Department largely ignores it. (US workers routinely are defrauded out of overtime, get paid below minimum wage, are denied unemployment benefits they are owed, are forced to work in dangerous conditions, and are abused on the job and the “Justice” Department does nothing.) But even putting that huge hypocrisy aside, there’s the matter of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

US Prosecutor Preet Bharara (center): On the one hand, $65-billion fraud-abetting bankster Jamie Dimon gets no prosecution or arrest, on the other, Indian consular worker Devyai Khobragade gets arrested, strip-and-cavity-searched and hit with a felony charge for lying on a visa application

There is no question but that New York’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, owes his landslide victory in the November election to the Occupy Movement.

It was Occupy Wall Street’s minions, hemmed in by thug-like NYPD officers armed with sidearms, clubs and pepper spray cans, who in 2011 abruptly changed the national conversation about capitalism, introducing the concept of “We are the 99%,” and focusing attention on the enormous enrichment of the top 1% of Americans at the expense of the other 99% over the past several decades, as a direct result of public policies on taxation and bank deregulation.

And it was that new focus on the country’s yawning wealth and income gap that provided De Blasio with his winning campaign theme.

It’s a sad commentary on the diminished influence and power of the left in America that De Blasio and Kshama Sawant, who won a little city council seat in the second-tier small city of Seattle (pop. 635,000) as an openly socialist candidate, are being hailed as the heroes of a resurgent progressive movement. (I don’t mean to diminish the victory that Sawant has achieved, merely to point out the fact that the left in the US has to be pretty weak for us to see one city council seat going to a socialist as a big deal nationally.)

The truth is, it’s hard to know how progressive and “left” De Blasio really is. Certainly his background as a backer of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua beats Barack Obama’s short stint as a “community organizer,” and there are other reasons, not least the evident lack of greed in his personal life, that suggest De Blasio may be the real deal and at least a worthy heir of New York’s last truly progressive mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. But there are also troubling signs that he may not be all that he presents himself as. The most troubling of these is his chumminess with former president Bill Clinton — the man whose presidency brought us war in Bosnia, the unravelling of habeas corpus, the beginnings of the war on terror (see Effective Death Penalty Act), the “end to welfare as we know it,” and of course, the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act that converted banks into casinos.

Inviting Clinton to administer his oath of office was a bad sign. There were so many New Yorkers who would have been better suited for that symbolically important job — for example Ruth Messinger, former New York City Councillor and Manhattan Borough President and a life-long fighter for progressive causes in the city, or Heidi Beghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, whose minions struggled mightily over 12 years to defend civil liberties under the onslaught of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his riot-clad centurions. Instead of someone like them, De Blasio handed the job to a man who, like the current president, spent most of his time in office betraying whatever progressive principles the Democratic Party may have had since the time of FDR.

Bill De Blasio as a Sandinista supporter in 1988, and with his family, being sworn in as New York's new mayor in 2014

Let’s start here by conceding that today’s New York Times editorial saying that President Obama should “find a way to end (Edward) Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home” was pretty remarkable.

It shouldn’t be, though.

Former National Security Agency employee and contractor Edward Snowden, currently living in exile in Russia under a temporary grant of amnesty, but facing charges of espionage and theft of government property here at home for his copying of thousands of pages of NSA files and for releasing them to US and foreign journalists, is a hero of democratic freedom. He has raised the bar for whistleblowers everywhere, putting his own life at risk to let Americans and citizens of the world know just how pervasively the NSA is spying on us all. The Times, as well as the rest of the news media in the US, should have joined in a campaign to have him nominated for a Nobel Prize. Instead the nation’s leading newspaper, long an ardent supporter of the national security state, simply says he should be offered some kind of a “plea bargain” or presidential clemency, so that he doesn’t have to face the prospect of “spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder,” or of facing a life sentence in prison.

I’m glad the Times is finally calling for at least some kind of justice or leniency for Snowden. Back on June 11, the paper’s same editorial board was pontificating that Snowden should accept the price of civil disobedience, which the board wrote means “accepting the consequences of one’s actions to make a larger point.” The same editorial writers (none of whom has ever shown that kind of courage), stated that Snowden had “broken the agreement he made” to keep NSA documents secret,” and that he would likely be charged with violating the Espionage Act, a hoary 1917 law that the Obama administration has already dusted off and started using to keep its activities secret, and they said he could face 10 year sentences for each count of document theft — enough to keep him in jail for life.

That earlier editorial view wasn’t quite as bad as some political hacks like House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein, who have been ignorantly calling Snowden a traitor (a crime that carries the death penalty), or journalistic hacks like CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who called Snowden a “grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.”

The Times is now admitting Snowden did the whole country and the world a favor by exposing the “crimes” of the NSA, but in its latest cautious editorial, the editors are still saying that Snowden “may have committed a crime” in copying and disclosing NSA files, and they are still okay with the idea that he might end up having to face some “substantially reduced punishment.”

If I were advising Snowden, I would say don’t trust your life to the thugs now running the US government. They might cut you a deal offering you some reduced charge and a short prison term, but first of all, you’d still be a convicted felon at the end of your shortened stay. And that’s if you survived it. Prison in the US is a violent place, and the prison authorities have ways of turning a short stay into a death sentence if their bosses have it in for somebody on the inside.

Who's the real criminal in the NSA scandal, Edward Snowden or President Obama?

I don’t care if you are 75 and retired, 61 and just about to reach the age when you become eligible for Social Security, 50 and looking out 15 or 20 years to the time when you’ll need to retire, or 25 with grandparents collecting retirement benefits and wondering what will be there when you get old. Whatever your age, don’t let anyone tell you Social Security is in trouble, or that it “won’t be around” when you need it.

That’s a hoary lie that has been pushed by Republicans as far back as 1935 when Social Security was being established, by leaders like President Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and by corporate lobby groups like the Business Round Table and the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s also been pushed by Democrats like President Clinton and President Obama.

Some, like Bush, have tried to use the lie to convince people to support getting rid of Social Security and replacing it with private investment funds. Others, like Clinton and Obama, have used the lie to try to get the public to agree to cutbacks in Social Security benefits, or to delays in the age of eligibility for benefits. In the most recent iteration of the scam, President Obama has been calling for a shift in the way the Social Security Administration calculates inflation in setting new benefit levels each year, substituting a so-called “chained” Consumer Price Index for the traditional CPI. (In the chained version, appropriately called the cat-food index, instead of looking what has happened to a “market basket” of goods and services people typically use, economists would substitute cheaper or lower-quality goods for goods whose price had risen too much — for example chicken for steak, beans for chicken, Fiats for Fords, bus and subway tokens for commuter rail tickets, smaller apartments, etc.)

The truth is that there is not a chance in hell that Social Security is going to go bust, or get cancelled. There isn’t even a chance in hell that Social Security benefits will be cut, at least over the long term. Why? Because there are 78 million Baby Boomers — one fourth of the entire population of the US — a group whose older members, born between 1946 and 1951, are already old enough to start collecting benefits, and who will increasingly be filing for benefits (technically the Baby Boom is a wave of babies that were born between 1946 and 1964).

The battle for Social Security unites across race, sex, class and age lines

(This article was first published in WhoWhatWhy.com)
 

A few weeks ago, WhoWhatWhy ran a piece I wrote criticizing a subtly deceptive article in the New York Times that made light of a wave of exhumations of popular leftist figures in Latin America. Quoting unnamed “scholars,” the paper’s Latin American correspondent Simon Romero suggested the forensic digs may be the secularized continuation of customs from the time of early Christianity, when a vibrant trade involved the body parts of saints.

That, in fact, is nonsense.  The purportedly “natural”, “accidental”, or “suicide-related” deaths of such important left-leaning figures as Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, Brazil’s President Joao Goulart and Chile’s President Salvador Allende all occurred during the rule of various rightist dictators.

The re-examination of evidence in these cases is based therefore on strong skepticism about the “official” narratives of their deaths.  This skepticism, in turn, is based on a well-documented history of thousands of cases of political murder in the region.

Far from looking for relics to sell, investigators are looking for evidence that these deaths were actually assassinations, the work of fearful tyrants anxious to prevent the victims’ return to power.  Now one result is in, and it’s explosive.

Truth Commission: Juscelino Kubitschek Assassinated

Investigators from Brazil’s Truth Commission, looking into the 1976 car crash of former leftist Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek and his limo driver, have discovered a bullet fragment lodged in the driver’s skull. This finding, the Commission ruled, along with other evidence, suggests that Kubitschek was murdered—most likely at the behest of the leaders of the CIA-backed military coup that also ousted his successor Joao Goulart.

What Romero Did Not Report: U.S. Involvement

Romero himself reported this new inquest finding on December 10 in a short article datelined Santiago (“Brazilian Panel Says Ex-Leader Was Murdered”). Romero noted that at the time of Kubitschek’s death, Brazil was ruled by a junta, but as in the case of his earlier article on exhumations, he very significantly chose not to mention the role of the CIA in bringing Brazil’s junta to power.

“There is a remarkable and almost charming egalitarianism in it. Everybody is treated in exactly the same disrespectful, casually brutal, and arrogant fashion.”

–Defense Attorney Ron Kuby about how “standard procedure” works for arrests in the United Police States of America
 

The diplomatic brouhaha between the US and India over a federal arrest and multiple strip-search and cavity search of a high-ranking Indian consular official in New York has exposed the astonishing hypocrisy of the US when it comes to the issue of diplomatic immunity, even as it has also exposed the ugly, brutal and sadistic truth about what passes for a “justice system” in 21st Century America..

India’s government is outraged not just at the abusive treatment of Deputy Consul General for Political, Economic, Commercial and Women’s Affairs, Devyani Khobragade, who was arrested a few days ago by US State Department Agents and charged with lying on a visa application for her Indian housekeeper. It is claiming that as a diplomat in the country’s New York consulate, she is entitled to diplomatic immunity.

The US is denying that she has diplomatic immunity, because she is a consular official, not an embassy official. The difference is important. Larger countries like the US and India often have many consular offices in cities of larger countries, primarily to handle visa and other issues, both for citizens of the home country, and for citizens of the host country who may wish to travel to the home country. But each country is allowed only one embassy in a foreign country, with the primary purpose being conducting diplomacy. Embassies are thus always located in the capital city of the host nation.

Denying Deputy Consul General Khobragade immunity might be okay, because under the Vienna Conventions governing Embassies and Consulates, consular officials only are granted limited immunity. Specifically, they are immune from prosecution for crimes involving their performance of consular business, but not for crimes outside of their official duties. Embassy employees, however, have broader immunity. The only exception, which applies to both Embassy and Consular officials, is “serious crimes,” such as rape or murder, where a host country can over-ride immunity, even of an ambassador.

Arguably, Deputy Consul General Khobragade’s alleged crime of lying on a visa document (about the amount she was planning to pay in wages) for an Indian woman she was bringing to the US as a housekeeper, would fall outside of her official duties, which would allow the US to prosecute her, (though I suppose a case could also be made that as an on-call envoy, having in-home round-the-clock childcare might be considered part of the job of deputy consul general–something that it might be worth seeing how us consular officials handle).

However, the US has often taken a different view of such matters, when it is on the other side of a case.

Two 'diplomats' arrested, one in Pakistan, one in the US, one for a visa fraud, one for murder. Which deserves diplomatic immunity?

For the third time in three years, a CIA station chief has been outed in Pakistan, a country where the CIA is running one of its largest covert operations. It’s a remarkable record of failure by the CIA, since each outing, which has required a replacement of the station chief position, causes a breakdown in the agency’s network of contacts in the country.

The full names of all three station chiefs have been published widely in Pakistan and India and all over the world via the Internet—though Americans getting their news exclusively from domestic mainstream media wouldn’t know, as those organizations have consistently blacked out the names.

The latest outing was the work of a major political organization, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) and its founder, cricket star Imran Khan, who has been calling for an end to US drone strikes inside his country. Khan’s party came in second in Pakistan’s recent parliamentary election.

The PTI, angry that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has not demanded a halt to the US “targeted killing” of Pakistanis, filed a public complaint with police in late November.

Outed: Craig Osth:

That complaint, called a “nomination letter,” identified as the alleged CIA station chief Craig Peters Osth, and said he was residing and working—illegally, if actually working as a spy and not a diplomat —in the US Embassy.

In the complaint, the PTI accused Osth of being responsible for a deadly November 21 drone strike inside Khan’s home district, which is outside the Pashtun tribal area to which such attacks have normally been confined. The letter also called for the arrest of CIA Director John Brennan, accusing him of “waging war against Pakistan.”

US drone strikes are hugely unpopular in Pakistan, as they are seen as violating Pakistan’s sovereignty and and because they have killed a large number of civilians, including women and many children.

The CIA has refused to confirm or deny Osth’s role in the Agency, or even if he is on its payroll. But in this case the CIA’s standard stonewalling rings especially hollow: this is not Osth’s first outing.

Opposition Leader Imran Khan's party outed an alleged CIA station chief, the third such outing in Pakistan in three years

So Pope Francis, the new pope who has conservative American Catholics, particularly those in politics and the media, freaked out because he is criticizing capitalist greed, knows Marxists who are “good people,” and isn’t upset to be labeled one of them, even though he says “Marxist ideology is wrong.”.

That’s quite a lot for many Americans to swallow. For someone like Rush Limbaugh or Fox commentator Andrew Napolitano, it must feel like the world is collapsing. A “Marxist” pope! How could God allow such a thing!

Part of the problem is that Americans don’t even know what Marxism is. The pope made his remarks on the subject in Italy, to the newspaper La Stampa. Italians, who are busy organizing increasingly massive “pitchfork” demonstrations in cities across their country, and are calling on police and soldiers to take off their helmets and join them in bringing down their country’s corrupt government, have greeted his remarks with a collective yawn.

After all, many of Italy’s largest urban areas have been governed on and off, and sometimes for generations, by Marxists of one stripe or another — even by the dreaded Communist Party itself, which, of course, in Italy has long been something quite different from the Stalinist party that Americans have been trained to imagine when they hear the word. Such “red” municipal governments have been elected over and over by the Italian public because they tend to do a better job, are less corrupt, and try to do what New York City’s new left-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wants to do: reduce the wealth gap in his city, and do more to help its poorest residents.

Americans, thanks to decades of overt, blatant propaganda in our schools and our media, don’t know that Marxism is a philosophy, a school of thought, an economic and social theory, not a political party. Even the pope got that partially wrong. There is an ideology of Marxism too, but that’s something else again. Marxism, as developed by the man who lent the theory its name, Karl Marx, and his colleague and friend Friedrich Engels, is really a way of thinking, a form of analysis. It posits a few important things. One is that economic relations are a key driver of history. The other is the concept that each new development in history or in social or economic relations contains within itself the seeds of resistance or, ultimately, its own destruction.

Model for the US?: In Italy, a growing mass Pitchfork Movement is seeking to overthrow the Italian government.