This Can't Be Happening!

Philadelphia–Fatal shootings and severe beatings by police are grabbing headlines nationwide, but the far more frequent forms of police abuse are – the use of foul language, conducting improper stops and frisks and the making of false arrests — abuses that remain below the public’s and the media’s proverbial ‘radar.’

Those forms of abuse comprise the daily indignities endured by thousands of mostly minority people across America.

And, it is those forms of abuse that ignite intense ire against police, particularly in poor and/or non-white communities. Citizens in minority communities feel besieged by the police who are supposed to be serving and protecting them. Too many feel that too many cops do not treat them with either the dignity or respect that is essential for effective policing, according to the report from President Obama’s task force on policing released months ago.

Abuses by police often arise from deliberate police practices, especially overly aggressive law enforcement strategies that the Obama task force noted can “do lasting damage” to public trust. That presidential task force is co-chaired by Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey of Philadelphia who ironically leads a department long assailed for its persistent brutality and corruption.

An example of that aggressive behavior is about to play out in a Philadelphia courtroom as the Philadelphia Police Department was recently hit with yet another lawsuit – this one arising from yet another incident of alleged police abuse. The victim in this case claims Philadelphia police beat, kicked and shot him twice with a Taser in May 2013 simply because he was videotaping them engaging in abusive behavior.

That police assault on Sharif Anderson provides a chilling case study of so much that is wrong with the criminal justice system in Philadelphia and too many places across America.

“I was in disbelief,” Sharif Anderson said about the police attack that occurred when officers rushed him while he was on his own front porch using his smart phone to video other police roughing-up some of his colleagues out on the sidewalk.

You have the right to videotape cops making arrests…even if you're black
 

 
      Anthropologists have found that in traditional societies, memory becomes attached to places.
                  T.M. Luhrmann, New York Times Op-ed May 25, 2015
 
Members of Veterans For Peace came from as far away as San Diego to be part of the annual Memorial Day ceremonies at the Vietnam War Memorial on the mall in Washington DC. A wide range of Americans were in attendance on a beautiful, sunny day. Some rubbed names of loved ones with pencils onto pieces of paper; others left significant items at the base of the Wall. These are collected and warehoused.

Doug Rawlings, left, and the author leaving a wreath at the Wall on Memorial Day. Photo by Ellen Davidson

Vietnam veteran poet Doug Rawlings from Maine devised a program called Letters to the Wall. It’s an on-going project of Full Disclosure, which is connected to Veterans For Peace. Full Disclosure was created to counter the current US government and Pentagon propaganda campaign commemorating the Vietnam War. The project, operated with $15 million-a-year in tax-payer funds, was begun on the 50th anniversary of the Marine landing in DaNang in March 1965.

Full Disclosure members attempted unsuccessfully to meet with Pentagon managers of the program to discuss the limitations of its website, especially a timeline of events concerning the war. The timeline emphasizes things like Medals of Honor awarded to US soldiers, but it leaves out much of the complexity and the unpleasant realities of a war that began at the close of World War Two in 1945 when US leaders chose to support French re-colonization of Vietnam. Vietnamese guerrillas were US allies against the Japanese and admired their American comrades-in-arms. After the French capitulated, the war went on until 1975, when the US left Vietnam. Going through the website and reading the timeline, it’s easy to get confused and think that the Vietnamese somehow attacked us and that our soldiers were responding bravely to being attacked. Indisputable historic facts such as how the agreed-upon unification elections designated for 1956 were scotched by US leaders (who knew Ho Chi Minh would win by up to 80% of the vote) are altogether missing on the Commemoration website. The overwhelming reality that US soldiers were sent halfway around the world as an occupying army is lost in the interest of honoring the courage and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans.

Here’s how Rawlings described the letter project for those interested in writing a letter:

“Let those American soldiers who died know how you feel about the war that took their lives. If you have been seared by the experience of the American war in Vietnam, then tell them your story. Veterans, conscientious objectors, veterans’ family members, war resistors, anyone whose life was touched by the war — all of us need to speak. All of our experiences matter.”

One hundred and fifty letters were collected, and at 11 AM on Memorial Day, VFP members walked to the Wall and dropped them at the base of the panels, along with all the other items left there. On the envelope, written by hand, each letter said: “Please Read Me.” The letters are all collected on-line.

Jeb Bush had a tough time when a female college student told him his brother, George, and his shock-and-awe debacle in Iraq had created ISIS. Jeb winced and did some ducking and covering. He’d already fumbled a question from Megyn Kelly of Fox News that, if he knew what we know now, would he have done what his brother did. He said he would have also invaded Iraq and that his older brother was one of his campaign’s foreign policy advisers.

Once Jeb realized he’d stumbled into a hornet’s nest, he quickly back-peddled and said he had not understood Kelly’s question. He said he thought he was being asked if he didn’t know now what his brother didn’t know then, would he invade Iraq? In other words, are you, Jeb, as cavalier and oblivious to reality as your brother was? Suddenly realizing how much bad freight his brother’s war carried, he revised his answer: Of course he would not have invaded Iraq.

There was a rare element of accountability, here, something rarely seen vis-à-vis the Iraq War — or wars like Vietnam, for that matter. The question would not have plagued another candidate quite as much. Beyond voting for the war, which Hillary Clinton did and now calls a “mistake,” even before 9/11 Jeb Bush was part of the Project For A New American Century, which functioned as a blueprint for the invasion of Iraq. The PNAC fellows were about sustaining America as ruler of the world; there is little indication they were very much concerned about the truth.

UNHCR map of Iraq; ISIS controls cities with black dots

Last week, thanks to a sand storm that grounded US planes, ISIS (or the Islamic State) was able to take Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. Since then, they’ve taken the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. ISIS already controlled Falluja, a small city between Ramadi and Baghdad, and Mosul to the north — plus a lot of sand in between. As is its inclination, the ISIS forces reportedly executed a lot of people in Ramadi. No doubt they did the same in Palmyra.

The Islamic State is largely synonymous with the Sunni dominated Anbar Province in western Iraq; its control extends into Syria. Much of the top leadership of the Islamic State is made up of former Saddam generals angry about US Proconsul Paul Bremmer’s cavalier decision to completely eliminate the Iraqi army. In the same misguided spirit, Bremmer also disbanded the Bath Party. These decisions, taken in concert, amounted to one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions of modern times, according to the national security consultant Richard Clarke.

So who should be held accountable? Or better yet, who’s gonna ever get it right?

A tectonic shift is occurring suddenly in the debate over climate change.

Only a year ago, at least in the US corporate media, there was always a rough equivalence accorded to those experts who were warning about a looming climate disaster facing mankind, and those who called the whole thing a “conspiracy” by corrupt scientists and politicians (albeit without ever explaining a motive).

Suddenly, though, that rough equivalence in the coverage is gone. The climate deniers are now exposed as charlatans in the pay of energy companies, and the coverage has shifted to talking about climate disaster being closer than we had been being told. If there is a “conspiracy,” we are now learning, it may be that climate scientists, afraid of creating a sense of hopeless and doom among the public, have been soft-pedaling their warnings, stressing the need to quickly cut back on the use of greenhouse-gas-producing fuels in order to try and keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade (roughly 4 degrees fahrenheit), when they all really know that a 4-degree centigrade rise is already “baked into” the earth’s near-term climate future, perhaps by as early as 2100.

This shift has yet to make its way into the public’s consciousness in the US (and much of the rest of the world too), but it is clearly going to happen. The question then will be: how will governments, and more importantly, the people of the world, respond to the new much grimmer reality?

Clearly, the capitalist system, fully corrupted at this point because of the size to which global corporations have grown, and the power they have gained to buy governments, cannot and will not rescue humanity from itself. Just look at the latest news from the Shell Oil Company, where internal documents just released show that company scientists have assured top executives that global warming in the far north means Shell can aggressively lease tracts of the formerly ice-bound Arctic Ocean and move floating platforms up there to extract even more oil and gas from the newly ice-free seafloor. These documents flatly declare that a 2˚C temperature rise is passé and that a 4˚C rise is already in the cards, moving towards a staggering 6˚C rise (note for US readers: that is an almost 11˚F temperature rise globally!).

The notion that corporations and a capitalist politico-economic system could ever take the necessary steps to halt climate disaster, for example by adopting energy conservation and becoming “green” companies, was always a pipedream. Just “going green,” while still producing unneeded junk and continuing to try and grow would never reduce total carbon emissions. It would require massively scaling back the production of useless or polluting goods and services, and shutting down many operations. And while the current US Supreme Court majority may think, or pretend to think, that corporations are people, they actually are institutions that are by their very nature and structure devoid of conscience, devoid of morality, and even devoid of any sense of long-term self-preservation.

Once an endless white expanse of glaring white ice in summer, Greenland is now an endless expanse of solar-energy-absorbing gray thanks to centuries of soot-laden snowfalls
 

In a couple of days, the so-called US Justice Department will be announcing an “agreement” reached with five large banks, including two of the largest in the US — JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, the holding companies for Chase and Citibank — under which these banks or bank holding companies will plead guilty to felonies involving the manipulation of international currency markets for at least the past eight years.

This is not really a plea deal, or what in the lingo of criminals is called “copping a plea.” It’s a negotiation in which the nation’s top law-enforcement organization — the one that just sentenced a teenager to death in Boston in the Marathon bombing case, and that routinely sends ordinary people “up the river” for minor drug offenses or even tax fraud — is taking seriously these banks’ concerns that if they plead guilty to felonies they might be barred by SEC rules from engaging in many profitable practices. So — get this — the Justice Department is seeking assurances from the commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission that they will not enforce those rules against these particular felonious banks.

There will be fines, of course, though nothing that will even dent the profits of these megabanks, which also include two British-based institutions, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, as well as the Swiss-based bank UBS. But under these deals, not one bank executive will even be forced to quit his post, much less face jail time or even a fine. As the New York Times put it in an article last Thursday, “In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft.”

What this means is that the departure of bankers’ friend Eric Holder as Attorney General, and his replacement by Loretta Lynch, has not changed the policy announced by Holder several years back that there would be no prosecutions of the leaders of the so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks for the scandals and crimes that collapsed the US and the global economies in 2008, bringing on the so-called Great Recession that is still punishing the people of the US and many other countries. In fact it demonstrates that there will be no real prosecution of wrongdoing by these monolithic banks for crimes committed since the financial crisis either and going forward.

The good news is that an appellate judge in Canada has had the courage and good sense to uphold the release from jail on bail of Omar Khadr, a native of Canada who was captured as a child soldier at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by US forces back in 2002 and shipped off to Guantanamo, where he became one of the children held in captivity there illegally.

The bad news is that Khadr, who spent 13 years in captivity, most of them in America’s Guantanamo hellhole, should never have been imprisoned in the first place. Brought along at the age of 14 to fight in Afghanistan by his father, a Canadian Muslim extremist who was killed in Afghanistan, the young Khadr should have, when captured, been treated under international law not as a combatant, illegal or otherwise. Under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty signed by the US and thus an integral part of US law, all children under the age of 18 captured while fighting in wars are to be offered “special protection” and treated as victims, not as combatants.

Instead, as Reuters reports, “Khadr claims that during at least 142 interrogations in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, he was beaten, chained in painful positions, forced to urinate on himself, terrorized by barking dogs, subjected to flashing lights and sleep deprivation and threatened with rape.”

Under these circumstances, and fearing that he would never leave Guantanamo, Khadr in 2010, at the age of 23, agreed to plead guilty to the US military’s spurious murder charge, so that he could be sent to serve out his prison sentence in his home country of Canada. Now appealing his sentence, and renouncing his plea on the grounds that it was made under duress, he will be confined to the home of his attorney under the court’s order.

This plea clearly cannot be fairly considered a real admission of guilt. It was a desperate maneuver by someone who had spent half his young life in an unregulated and illegal prison to escape all the endless torture and abuse, not to mention the lengthy separation from his home and family.

Omar Khadr at 14, when his father brought him to Afghanistan to fight, and at 28, after 13 years of US and Canadian captivity, mostly at Guantanamo
 

 
 
BAM!
Echo, like thunder off the shell of the sky-dome.
We, all on the terrace, glance at each other,
Jump to action.
Everyone knows what to do.
Grab something quick,
Whatever we don’t want to have to wash
Or hose off tomorrow:
Mugs of ice-tea,
Trays of cucumber slices, carrot sticks,
Bowls of chips, cheese, cold-cuts,
Pitcher of wine. . .
We all know how long we have too.
About three and a half minutes
And the shit will be raining down.
Pig shit, horse shit, chicken shit, human shit, bullshit,
A fine mist of shit, covering everything.
That’s how they get rid of it now,
They fire it into the sky
As high as they can
And let it rain down on our party.
BAM!
BAM!
Echo thunders again and again.
The kids are already inside,
Watching from behind the curtains.
Dog is barking angrily at the sky.
He’s the only one who is angry.
He hasn’t learned
It’s useless to rail at fate,
I mean, the gods.
 
—Gary Lindorff

I was seething inside as I watched the live television coverage of the recent rebellion/riot in Baltimore as we witnessed yet another explosion caused by America’s historic failures to rein in abusive police. Then I received a text message that led to a conversation that absolutely broke my heart.

The conversation was with my 11-year-old grandson, who himself was seething from what he saw going on in Baltimore.

My grandson told me he was mad…mad because police “keep killing black men.”

When I probed further into his anger he said he feared for his own life -– not because of what might happen when he gets older but because of what could happen even now if he encountered a police officer.

“I’m scared Pop Pop,” he confided. “I’m scared that police might hurt me. I’m scared because police don’t know how to control themselves!”

The heartbreak of hearing my own grandson’s fear was compounded by the ugly reality that the thing he now fears is a daily fact-of-life for children living in East Baltimore and too many similar places across America.

Children should be focused on fun, like enjoying those computer games they like to play, instead of fearing police violence arising from the reality that too many cops really cannot “control” themselves.

Police brutality and militarization present as just witnessed in Baltimore present a scary reality for black kids growing up: Police can kill you with impunity
 

It was 40 years ago today that the last troops from America’s criminal war against the people of Vietnam scurried ignominiously onto a helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and fled the country where US forces had killed some 3-4 million people in the name of “fighting Communism.”

It’s hard to celebrate the end to that nightmare conflict, which is still destroying lives in Indochina thanks to the thousands of tons of carcinogenic Agent Orange defoliant which American planes spread across the land in a vain effort to starve out the peasants and to destroy the jungle to deprive Vietnamese fighters of cover.

Final US retreat from the roof of the Embassy in Saigon in '75, and Guard troops on a Baltimore street, 2015
 

Many of the generals who lead today’s imperial wars and who cooly contemplate new bloody conflicts against Syria, Iran, Russia or China, “earned” their initial promotions and battle “cred” by contributing to the slaughter in Vietnam. Many of today’s politicians, like Sen. John McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry, got their start committing war crimes in Vietnam. Henry Kissinger, one of the country’s greatest living war criminals, and a key architect of the US war against the people of Vietnam, has grown fat and rich on the reputation he gained for ruthlessness as President Nixon’s national security director and later Secretary of State.

While we may not celebrate April 30, it is a good time to reflect on how that wretched and criminal war directly produced the dysfunctional war-mongering nation and society that we live in today. There is a direct link between the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on that decade-long military mayhem in Vietnam, and the hollowed-out cities of today’s United States, the schools that crank out fodder for more wars and new workers for the low-wage service-sector jobs that are all that is left in an economy that no longer makes anything but burgers and bombers.

Today as you read this article, armed US soldiers are patrolling the streets of Baltimore enforcing a kind of martial law, and police who are hard to distinguish from occupying troops are doing the same in cities across the country, as tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest the police murder of a young man arrested for running away from two cops who looked at him funny. Freddie Gray hadn’t done anything wrong when two Baltimore bicycle cops rode by and decided to harass him, causing him to flee. But that didn’t stop the cops from chasing him down and stomping on him, crushing his larynx and breaking three vertebra in his neck. Nor did it stop them from binding his wrists behind his back, shackling his feet and tossing him, un-restrained by any seatbelt, into the back of a van which they then drove with deliberate recklessness through the city, slamming his limp and unprotected body all around the floor of the vehicle until they had severed his spinal cord at the neck, killing him.

In August 1936 nearly 20,000 people filled a vacant lot next to a municipal building in a small Kentucky town to watch the hanging of a man convicted of rape. This hanging, conducted by two executioners retained by that town, would be the last official ‘public execution’ in America.

Although states across this country have banned executions where the public can freely attend, some contend that the American public is again witnessing the spectacle of a public execution – more precisely: the spectacle of a killing occurring in plain sight administered by governmental authorities.

This current spectacle of governmental killing involves a high-profile inmate in Pennsylvania that evidence indicates is quite possibly experiencing a ‘slow execution’ through calculated medical mistreatment.

Author/activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps the most widely known prison inmate in America, is gravely ill, hardly able to walk or talk because of severe complications related largely to the diabetes which medical personnel inside a Pennsylvania prison failed to diagnose for months. Prison medical personnel either did not detect the diabetes earlier this year while giving Abu-Jamal numerous blood tests that easily identify the elevated blood sugar levels of diabetes or did not inform Abu-Jamal of the blood test results.

That failure to find his raging diabetes led to Abu-Jamal’s emergency hospitalization at the end of March, after he collapsed, unconscious and in sugar shock. When authorities finally transported Abu-Jamal from the SCI Mahanoy prison to the hospital, he was on the verge of a potentially fatal diabetic coma. Weeks before that emergency hospitalization, Abu-Jamal’s blood pressure spiked to a level that required hospitalization that he did not receive, stated persons working with Abu-Jamal.

After four months of substandard or nonexistent treatment for serious diabetes in prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal is at risk of organ failure — perhaps the goal of prison officials.