Author: Dave LIndorff

(This story appears in full in The Nation’s online edition, where it originally appeared.)

More than ten years ago, Pedro Rodriguez, a talented keyboard musician, came from his colonial homeland of Puerto Rico to go to Temple University. From a low-income family, he depended heavily on student loans to finance his four-year undergraduate study. Graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s of music, he went on to earn a master’s degree in music from Temple and then was hired for three years to teach there as an adjunct. By the end of college, he was $62,000 in debt but was making payments regularly until Temple laid him off, allegedly because of budget cuts. That’s when his problems began. (Pedro Rodriguez is a pseudonym to protect his identity.)

Unable to find a job as a music teacher in the current economic crisis, he eventually went into default on his loans, which included Stafford, Perkins and private bank loans. Then this year, he decided to go on to earn a PhD, which would make it possible for him to get hired in his field. He applied to a top-rated university in the Northeast, but when it was time to send his school transcripts, Temple froze him out. “They said as long as I was in default on my loans, they would not issue a transcript!” says Rodriguez.

A spokesman from Temple confirms that it is school policy to withhold official transcripts from graduates who are in default on their student loans. As it turns out, the school is not alone; this is the position taken by most colleges and universities, though there is no law requiring such an extortionate position. They do this despite the fact the colleges themselves are not out the money. They have received the students’ tuition payments in full and are in effect simply acting as collection agencies for the federal government.

The US Department of Education says only that it “encourages” colleges to withhold transcripts, a tactic which the department, in a letter to colleges, claims coldly “has resulted in numerous loan repayments.”

Students today are leaving college with huge debts and no job possibilities, and their schools are extorting them to pay

The US Supreme Court has a chance to do the people of America a big favor, perhaps atoning at last for its shameful betrayal of the electoral system in 2000 when a conservative majority stole the Florida, and national election, for George W. Bush, and for the liberal-led and equally shameful betrayal of fundamental property rights in the Kelo v New London case that, in 2005, upheld the public theft of private homes in Connecticut on behalf of a government-backed resort development. The court can atone for these betrayals by declaring the ramshackle, corrupt, hugely expensive and cynically misnamed Affordable Care Act to be unconstitutional.

The act, pushed through a Democratic Congress by President Obama in 2010, is a disaster, a cobbled-together set of measures that was fatally corrupted by the insurance lobby and other parts of the nation’s medical-industrial complex, which leaves millions uninsured, continues to tether workers to their employers like indentured servants, and undermines the Medicare program, which should be the cornerstone of a real health reform.

By killing this monstrosity of political expedience and lobbyist strong-arming, the Supreme Court’s conservative wing could give us a good chance to finally move the country to a real national health reform which would reduce costs substantially, provide quality health care to all, and finally drive a stake through the heart of the health insurance industry, the real “vampire squid” of American capitalism which has been sucking money out of American’s wallets and driving many into bankruptcy for decades (family health crises are the major single cause of bankruptcies and homes foreclosures in the country).

How can it be a good thing to kill a program that at least eliminates things like the denial of insurance coverage because of “pre-existing conditions,” or the throwing people off of coverage when they get seriously sick?

The Supreme Court has a chance to atone for its sins by ruling 'Obamacare' unconstitutional.

If you want to know where the real government of the United States is located, just check out one of the documents received by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in response to their Freedom of Information Act request to the Dept. of Homeland Security relating to surveillance of the Occupy Movement. That document, from the Secret Service, dated September 17, 2011, the day the Occupy movement began on Wall Street, from the US Secret Service Intelligence Division, titled Prism Demonstrations Abstract, lists the location as “Wall Street Bull” — a reference to the bronze statue of a bull on Wall Street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and the “protectee” as “The United States Government.”
NYPD's Finest protecting the 'US Government bull' on Wall Street at DHS behest?

As the National Lawyers Guild comments dryly, “American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.”

The trove of 398 documents (many of them heavily censored) received on behalf of thePCJF, the NLG and filmmaker Michael Moore, consists primarily of materials from top Homeland Security Officials, which PCJF Executive Director Mara Verhayden Hilliard says is a deliberate effort by Homeland Security officials to deflect attention from the workings of the mid-level intelligence staff of the various agencies within DHS who do the spying, and the so-called Fusion Centers around the country — all wholly funded by DHS–which link federal agencies like the FBI with local and state police agencies.

“It’s all a game of hide-the-ball” says Verhayden Hilliard, who adds that the National Lawyers Guild is challenging the effort by insisting on getting the records from all levels, including the Fusion centers.

____________________________________________________________________________________
One of the 398 pages of documents the Dept. of Homeland Security (sic) provided to the NLG in response to a FOIA request
____________________________________________________________________________________

David Plimpton Lindorff, an occasional contributor to ThisCantBeHappening! and one of the last surviving members of the Radiation Lab, a top-secret World War II project in Cambridge, MA that led to the placing of radar on aircraft, died March 15 in Storrs, CT at the age of 89 as a result of complications from ataxia.

Lindorff, a native of Flushing, NY, was a polymath, an artist/writer/scientist/philosopher/analyst who, after writing an acclaimed book, Theory of Sampled Data Control Systems (Wiley, 1965), which addressed some fundamental challenges posed in analog computing, and working in his chosen field of engineering and computer science, took early retirement from the University of Connecticut at the age of 57 to remake himself as a licensed Jungian analyst and scholar.

It was a second career he pursued for another 28 years, and it led to his writing a second book. Pauli and Jung: A Meeting of Two Great Minds (Quest Books, 2004). This volume, which is based on two decades of letters of correspondence between Jung and a famous patient of his, the enigmatic and brilliant theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, explores the issues of genius, creativity, and these two men’s discourses and debates over such concepts of quantum theory, synchronicity and the controversial notion of mind over matter.

Lindorff’s leap from engineering to a study of the psyche came in 1979. He said he was in the UConn faculty club dining hall having a weekly lunch with an informal group of professors who liked to practice their German, when the topic turned to a court decision, just in the news, in which several male state employees had won a lawsuit claiming discrimination because at the time, female state workers could retire at 60, while men had to wait until they were 65. Lindorff said, “With my three years’ military credit, I could retire now!” A colleague advised him, “If you’re going to do that, you better do it right away, because this decision is going to be so expensive it’s bound to be overturned on appeal.” Lindorff left his lunch, pushed back his chair, got up, and walked across the campus to the personnel office and filed for retirement. “I didn’t even call my wife to discuss it!” he said. Shortly after this impulsive act, the court ruling was overturned as predicted, but Lindorff and a few others who had already filed their papers were allowed to remain retired.

D.P. Lindorff, Sr., electrical engineer to Jungian analyst, wartime researcher to pacifist, 1922-2012 (photo by Dave Lindorff, Jr.)

The sorry state of American journalism is on full display in the coverage by the corporate media of the ongoing crisis surrounding Iran’s nuclear fuel program.

The leaders of both Israel and the U.S. have publicly threatened to attack Iran — Israel saying it could do so within weeks, President Obama warning that he would consider attacking Iran militarily if he were convinced that that nation was building an atomic bomb.

Not once, in reporting on these threats of aggressive war by Israel and/or the United States, has any major U.S. news organization, in print or on the air, included any reference to the U.N. Charter or to the fact that what is being contemplated is an invasion by Israel or the United States of a country that has not even been shown to be producing or planning to produce a nuclear weapon, much less to be in possession of one. Not once, in any of these daily reports on the Iran “crisis,” has any report by these news organizations — including National Public Radio — interviewed a source who could point out that what is being discussed is the most serious of all war crimes: the crime against peace (the same crime that led to the hanging, after World War II, of several military leaders in Japan and Germany).

The law itself is crystal clear. Under the UN Charter it is the ultimate war crime for a nation to initiate an aggressive war against another country that has not attacked it or that does not pose an “imminent threat” of attack. And given that even Israeli and US intelligence officials concede that Iran is not at this time making a bomb, and thus cannot hope to have a working one even a year from now were they to begin a crash program, there is simply no imminent threat.

Even when a perfect opportunity arrived for making this point — a public statement Feb. 27 by Brazil’s Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota, at the United Nations, reminding UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that an attack by Israel or the US on Iran would be “contrary to international law,” and urging Ban to address the issue — this trenchant and news-worthy warning was totally blacked out by the U.S. corporate news media.

There was no news report on Patriota’s warning in the Washington Post, the New York Times or other major newspapers. There was no mention of it on CNN or other major news stations either.

Israel's nuclear weapons facility at Dimona

A few hundred years ago in colonial Massachusetts, the theocratic fascist men who ran that society had a way of dealing with free-thinking women in their midst: they burned them at the stake or drummed up hordes of frightened and unthinking neighbors to stone them to death.

Most of us today imagine that if we had lived in those dark times, we would have stood up against such an outrage. Now is the time to find out.

Salem, Massachusetts of 1690 is alive and well in the state of Kansas, where a thuggish regime of charlatans currently led by Republican Governor Sam Brownback and supported by the terrorist organization Operation Rescue have been hounding doctors who have dared to provide desperate pregnant women of the midwest with access to safe abortions out of business and literally to death. (It was after a botched attempt by these theological fascists to charge and convict Dr. George Tiller of operating his abortion clinic in the state illegally that Scott Roeder, a fevered backer and confidante of activists in Operation Rescue, made the decision to kill the doctor, shooting him in the face as he greeted parishioners at his church on Sunday.)

Today, the target of Gov. Brownback and his fellow women haters and religious fanatics is Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus. A courageous physician, Neuhaus was long one of the few doctors in this benighted state, dubbed Brownbackistan by Neuhaus and her journalist/farmer husband Michael Caddell, to offer abortions. From 1999-2007 she acted as a consultant to whom Dr. Tiller could refer women and young girls — many the victims of rape and incest — for a second opinion required by the state.

Kans Gov. Brownbeck and the anti-abortion hordes want to take away Dr. Neuhaus's medical license and clap her in jail (photo by Angela C. Bond)

The US stock market jumped up today on word that the number of new unemployment applications fell to the lowest level in four years.

Sounds good, right? It’s meant to sound good, but if you look at the number, and if you think about what it really means, it’s not good news at all.

What the US Labor Department reported was that new unemployment claims filed for the week ended Feb. 24 totaled 351,000, which was slightly lower than the 353,000 new claims filed the prior week. “Slightly” indeed! A better term for this 0.57% decline is “statistically insignificant!

The idea that such a “drop” in new claims would spark a jump in the Dow or the S&P shows how completely divorced from reality investors–and the reporters in the corporate media who trumpet these kinds of things–really are.

But it is worse than that. The number, remember, is new unemployment claims. That is to say, over a third of a million more Americans, all of them previously working, were laid off last week. Anyone who sees that as some kind of good news is really stretching to find a silver lining on a pretty dark cloud.

Happy talk on the economy is just talk when nearly 30 million are jobless and most others are struggling.

If a bunch of street toughs decided to gang up and beat the crap out of some guy in the neighborhood because they feared he might be planning to buy a gun to protect his family, I think we’d all agree that the police would be right to bust that crew and charge them with conspiracy to commit the crime of assault and battery. If they went forward with their plan and actually did attack the guy, injuring or killing him in the process, we’d also all agree they should all be charged with assault and battery, attempted murder, or even first-degree murder if he died.

In international relations and international law, the same applies. Under the Nuremberg Principles, later incorporated into the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, which is defined as a war started against another nation that does not pose an imminent threat of attack on the aggressor nation or nations, is the highest of war crimes, for which the perpetrators are liable for the death penalty. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of those above acts is an equally serious capital crime.

How then to explain the casual way that civilian and military leaders of the US and Israel are talking openly about plans and threats to attack Iran?

The supposed casus belli or justification for such an attack is that Iran, which has a uranium enrichment program underway which it claims is to produce nuclear fuel for its new nuclear reactor (a completely legal activity for any nation under international law), secretly plans to further enrich uranium to make an atomic bomb. Yet that is a process which, even if it were to be implemented, would not lead to an actual bomb suitable for testing for at least a year, and which would not give Iran a functioning, useable weapon for even longer. (US intelligence sources say that Iran at this point is not even trying to make a bomb!).

The very table at which US leaders, including President Obama, would make the criminal decision to attack Iran
 

I just received an object lesson into how easily we Americans are able to compartmentalize our principles and our sense of basic human decency.

My father, David Lindorff Sr., who is 89 (and an occasional contributor to ThisCantBeHappening!), recently took a bad fall, hitting the back of his head on the bedpost and suffering a concussion that has temporarily left him with some periods of confusion. In the rehab facility where he was recovering, he would sometimes, when he was tired and half-asleep, get confused about his location, and would try to climb out of the hospital bed he was in, putting him at risk of another serious fall.

I asked the nurse in charge of the floor, and later also asked the head of the facility, if he could perhaps have a safety strap placed over him so that he would not be able to inadvertently hurt himself, and in both cases received a shocked reply: “We do not restrain our patients here. That would be a kind of torture! We are a restraint-free institution.”

The revulsion in the director’s voice at the notion of even gently restraining a patient like dad in a bed for his own protection was so evident I was struck by its basic sincerity.

And yet, this is in a country where most of the citizenry is cheering the ongoing torture of captives in the government’s trumped-up “war” on terror. A country that also routinely–and again with the enthusiastic endorsement of the public–tortures many of the millions of human beings it incarcerates every year.

Hospital bed or torture rack? If you're an American, it may depend on who's occupying it.

The attacks and attempted attacks this week on Israeli embassy personnel in Georgia, India and Thailand should serve as a serious warning to the people of both Israel and the US that there will be an increasingly heavy price to pay for the kind of government-sponsored terror that both countries have long practiced, and that too many Americans and Israelis have mindlessly cheered on.

The technology of terror has become so wide-spread, and the materials needed to construct magnetically-attached car bombs, cell-phone detonators, armor-piercing IEDs, diesel/fertilizer bombs and the like, are so accessable at consumer shops, hardware stores and local junkyards, that any government, and even any relatively savvy non-government group, can assemble and employ them.

What this means is that when a country like Israel decides to mount a covert campaign of assassination of scientists in a country like Iran, either by using its own agents, or by buying the help of an in-country terror organization like the MEK, it has to expect that the target country will turn around and do the same kind of thing back. There’s no stopping such a tit-for-tat campaign of slaughter, and in fact, it’s more likely that such covert actions will escalate than that they will subside. It is almost laughable to hear Israeli officials and Iran-War hawks in the US government and media decrying what they say are these allegedly Iranian-backed attacks on Israelis when it is well established at this point that the Israelis have been long doing the same thing in Iran!

The US had better quickly realize that the same thing problem of blowback retaliation in kind applies to America’s actions. There is an attitude currently in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the US intelligence services, that the US can act with impunity when it engages in “secret” wars, and even that such secret wars in support of its imperial agenda are a cheap alternative to the massive wars like those against Iraq and Afghanistan (which have not gone well for the US, truth be told).

These days, pretty much anyone, not just Mossad, can attach a drive-by bomb to a car, as Israel is learning