This Can't Be Happening!

If the best the US can do to pin the blame for the Malaysia Flight 17 downing on Russia is to have Secretary of State John Kerry say that “circumstantial evidence” points to Moscow being behind it, we can be pretty certain it was not Russia at all.

Kerry’s credibility on such matters has been in the toilet since last August when he claimed during last year’s furor and push for war against Syria’s Basher al Assad that he had seen “clear and compelling evidence” that the Syrian government had used poison gas against its own people. That “evidence” turned out (clearly with Kerry’s knowledge) to have been ginned up, falsified and staged, and in the end it was evident that Syria had not been the guilty party. Had Kerry and the White House succeeded in duping the world and the American people the way President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney succeeded in duping them about Iraq’s “WMDs,” an armada of US planes and ships already in position around Syria would have begun a massive aerial bombardment of Syria sparking a whole new war in the Middle East, even as Iraq was already in the throes of a civil war.

Fortunately, John Kerry’s and the accommodating US corporate media’s lies that time were exposed, and that bloody catastrophe was averted.

Now, undeterred by that first attempt at a full-blown campaign of lies, Kerry and the Obama White House are at it again, trying to falsify a casus belli against Russia by blaming Moscow for the downing of a civilian airliner that killed 298 people.

The problem for Kerry and Washington’s warmongers is that the story they’re selling is ludicrous.

Ukraine's military has a hundred or so Buk anti-aircraft missiles and dozens of mobile launchers like these seen in a Kiev parade

When a journalist in a news article refers to a woman as “strident,” you know what you’re reading is a hit piece, not a dispassionate report, and that’s what the New York Times offered up to readers in today’s piece about a court appearance yesterday by Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan.

The Times reporter, Monique O. Madan, as a professional journalist, surely knows that the meaning of “strident” is, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “loud, harsh and grating” and that it implies the slanted presentation of a point of view in an “unpleasantly forceful way.” If she somehow didn’t know this, her editors certainly do, and yet they were okay with her disparaging and loaded word choice.

Supposedly Madan was writing a news report on McMillan’s appearance in a Manhattan criminal court on a misdemeanor charge of “obstructing governmental administration.” This related to an incident in 2013 in which she allegedly advised two people being ordered to show their identification to a Transit Police officer in the Union Square subway station that they did not have to comply.

Madan referred to McMillan as a “cause célèbre” because of her earlier arrest at a March 2012 rally in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park commemorating the months-long Occupy Wall Street action that had begun six months earlier in September, 2011. McMillan, in that earlier arrest, had been charged with second degree felony assault of a police officer and, following a trial earlier this year, was convicted and sentenced to three months in jail at Rikers Island plus five year’s probation.

Not mentioned by the reporter was the reality that McMillan’s fame and notoriety is deserved (she received thousands of letters of support from around the world, and even a supportive jailhouse visit by two recently freed members of the celebrated Russian protest rock group Pussy Riot). Not only was McMillan grotesquely overcharged by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. She was also treated by both prosecutor and judge throughout the trial as though she were a dangerous menace, not even being granted bail after the verdict was rendered and she was awaiting her sentence hearing (a courtesy routinely granted to first offenders and to the powerful and well-to-do). The reporter might also have noted that, once convicted, McMillan’s incredibly short felony sentence (the charge carried a maximum term of seven years!) and her subsequent release from jail after serving just under two months’ time at Rikers, probably rank among the shortest punishments for someone convicted of “felony assault” of a cop in the history of US jurisprudence.

Photo of Cecily McMillan showing the bruises and abrasions on her right breast caused by an officer's grabbing her from behind

In an exclusive intervew on the Progressive Radio Network’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” program, Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan, just released after two months of a three-month sentence to the Women’s Prison on Riker’s Island, talks about her conviction on a trumped-up charge of felony assault of a New York Police Officer.

A master’s degree student at New York’s New School, McMillan explains how the arresting officer she was convicted of felony assault for elbowing in the eye had actually grabbed her breast from behind, causing significant bruising, and then threw her to the ground, where she was further injured.

Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan after being released from Rikers' Island jail. Her puny three-month sentence and her early release after 2 months are proof that the charge of felony assault of a NYPD cop was trumped up DA Cyrus Vance Jr.
 

McMillan, who refused on principle a plea bargain offered by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. that would have left her with a felony conviction but perhaps no jail time, insisted on a full trial. She tells host Dave Lindorff how she was then barred by a pro-prosecution judge from presenting evidence to the jury about the arresting cop’s history of brutality and corruption.

In Spanish, the word hondura means “depth; profundity.” The related word hondo means “deep, low; bottom.” Hondon means “dell, glen, deep hole.” An example given in my dictionary is meterse en honduras, “to go beyond one’s depth.”

I imagine some gold-seeking Spanish conquistador in the 16th century passing through the isthmus and, with a bit of cruel wit, calling the place where he stood The Hole. Sort of like when I was in the Army, Fort Hood, Texas, was known as “the asshole of the world.” In Honduras, my imaginary conquistador no doubt left a lieutenant with troops enough to turn the residents into slaves before he moved his entourage on to the more appealing Costa Rica.

Honduras is the saddest basket case in the Western Hemisphere, and the behemoth to the north has done everything in its power to keep poor Honduras in the basket case category. Technically, Honduras is a sovereign nation; but in reality it is a vassal state of the United States. Maybe more like a flea-ridden junkyard dog resigned to being kicked.

The US Border Patrol at work and children who want to live
 

In 1935, two-time Medal of Honor winner and retired Marine General Smedley Butler famously wrote the following in an essay for the socialist magazine Common Sense:
 

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. … I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. … Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. 

Germany, after all, has a powerful economy — one that, driven as it is by a strong manufacturing sector and a solid trade surplus, including with the US, in many ways is much stronger than the US economy. Germany has no need to worry about any risk of US trade sanctions, the way most countries …

Continue reading “Station Chief Ousted as CIA Spies Found in German Parliament and Spy Agency”

The vote by the US Supreme Court’s five reactionary Catholic male members in the Hobby Lobby case, declaring that companies substantially owned by people who on religious grounds believe that contraception is a sin can not be compelled to offer coverage for it in any health plan provided to their employees raises a few important questions.

The biggest one of course, is: Why if this is a decision based upon the Constitution’s separation of church and state, would it stop at contraception?

How about a company owned by Jehovah’s Witness believers? They believe that the bible, by banning the ingestion of blood, makes any blood transfusions, or even for many believers, the storing of blood for later use, a sin. Should such employers be allowed to offer insurance plans to their worker that don’t cover blood transfusions, or perhaps that even deny coverage for operations that require blood transfusions — for example dialysis, heart surgery, treatment for leukemia and bone cancer, or just emergency surgery following some injury that involves major blood loss?

Or what about a company owned by a Christian Scientist, who opposes any and all medical intervention. Should such a company be able to offer a plan that only covers palliative care by a hospice nurse, or visits by a religious “healer”?

We have, of course, entered that Alice-in-Wonderland world here of “faith-based conservatism.” Any kind of nonsense could be justified in such a world, and with the five right-wing Catholics now ensconced on the court supporting such a mad world view, we should be ready for it. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the sixth Catholic on the nine-member court (the other three are Jews, in an astonishing turn of events that has filled the court entirely with representatives of two faiths that historically were barred from the court or that were allowed just token representation), will have her hands full trying to make the theological argument against the troglodyte and anti-woman sentiments of her five catholic colleagues.
Five pushy, conservative old Catholic men are running the Supreme Court
 

Dave Lindorff is interviewed by Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips of Project Censored on their June 27 program on San Francisco public radio station KPFA. Lindorff tells Huff and Phillips about how TCBH! learned, from a Department of Homeland Security document obtained recently thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filing by the Partnership for Civil Justice, that ThisCantBeHappening! had been labeled a “threat” by the DHS.

As Lindorff explains, the DHS’s Office of Threat Assessment “alert” to 72 Fusion Centers, in a Nov. 18, 2011 alert its Office of Threat Assessment in Washington fired off to all 72 Fusion Centers then operating, does not say ThisCantBeHappening! and the journalists in the collective are terrorists or that we are supporting terrorism. Rather, they warn that an article we had run three days earlier, on November 15, 2011, at the height of the national crackdown by local police paramilitary thugs on Occupy actions across the country, had exposed the DHS’s central role in orchestrating and coordinating that crackdown.

The memo sent out to the Fusion Centers — organizations established by DHS after 9-11 that link up regional offices of all the three-letter spy and law enforcement agencies with local and state police in large metropolitan areas, ostensibly to combat terrorism — did not deny the assertions in our article, but goes on to express relief that the information in our exposé had, to date, remained “compartmentalized” in the alternative media. It goes on to warn that the office “wanted to make you aware of these references in case the national news media begins [sic] speculating about fusion center involvement.”

To hear this KPFA interview, just click here and slide the bar to the point 47 minutes and 27 seconds into the Project Censored program. You can also just click on the image below and go to the same point in the program.

For a full report on this story, and an actual image of the DHS “alert” memo obtained by ThisCantBeHappening!, click here.

An Oakland Police nighttime assault on Occupy Oakland became the DHS's model for similar assaults nationwide (click onimage to go to the program)

How does the news on the Internet make you feel?

What sounds like a frivolous question, the kind you might be asked in a bar after a few drinks, is actually a profound and powerful one. If the Internet’s content can affect your feelings, the manipulation of that content can exert powerful social control.

So for a week in 2012, Facebook, in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, set out to explore that possibility. It edited the content seen by a select 689,000 of its users, overloading its news feed content with positive news for some users and negative news for others and then studied their posts in reaction without their knowledge.

Just what are they testing? (courtesy Technewspedia).

As a result, Facebook learned a lot. According to an abstract of the study, “for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.”

And, when news about the study broke last week, Facebook confronted an immediate and powerful push-back from horrified activists and users (and now a couple of governments) who raised some significant questions. Does a company have the right to use its customers as test subjects without their knowledge? Is it ever ethical to change news feed content for any reason?

But the more important issue sits behind those questions. Facebook obviously thought this was okay; it does research on users all the time. And its hunch about the outcome proved correct. So what does it mean when one of the largest information companies on earth, the centerpiece of many people’s information experience, practices how to program people through lies?

New Wasichu, Crossing: Our Story is Just Beginning.
 

A Silent Spring for the new century? Gary Lindorff’s new book, New Wasichu, Crossing: Our Story is Just Beginning is, on one level, a bold attempt to disturb the silence of denial that has muted our ability to reverse Schweitzer’s curse quoted by Rachel Carson right at the threshold of her prophetic narrative: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” Perhaps if we had heeded Rachel Carson’s shot over bow of Western post-industrial “progress” we would not be where we are now. Silent Spring is one of those books that you don’t necessarily have to read anymore because it is in our bones, just like the strontium 90 that was falling with the rain back when Carson was writing. But what good did it do? Maybe that still remains to be seen. .
 
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Hello TCBH! readers. I am pleased to announce the publication of a book I have been writing for the last 3 years, spanning the deaths of both of my parents, a period of time fraught with disturbing change and upheaval across the board. I am no longer young but that’s not a bad thing. My heart is strong and, dare I say, wiser. I have read that a heart that reacts unpredictably (or spontaneously) to the emotional climate it finds itself in is a healthy heart. Our heart is not just a pump, it is the organ that gets us through the maze of multiple realities that has become our world. Sure, I use my brain but I have come to depend upon my heart for everything, especially since the head (our heads) seems to be running out of ideas.

New Wasichu, Crossing: Our Story is Just Beginning, is the distillation of several decades of experience, study and practice in three over-lapping fields of access to certain wellsprings of creativity and transformation: Jungian Psychology, Native American wisdom traditions and shamanism. What is offered here is a way through the ominous darkness of our times. In this work I braid together a colorful, carefully researched, sometimes autobiographical narrative-lifeline that will guide the reader ever deeper into a landscape of dreams, intentionality, revelation and real answers to the problems that we face as human beings. Chapter by chapter the path to the future becomes less metaphorical and more substantial and walkable.

The writing explores certain archetypal themes. One such theme is crossing for spiritual survival. At the same time the reader is equipped to orient him- or herself by a new (or older than old) set of coordinates, facilitating participation in an epic crossing to something more human and more sustainable. Another recurrent theme is the return of the doppelganger or our soulful double, which, it turns out, embodies the template of the undamaged self.
The author and his book (Click on image to go to Amazon page)

As bad as things get for our movement in this country, we are not yet feeling the full throttle of repression and, if one needs a reminder of that and perhaps a profile of what’s in store for us if we don’t organize now, the situation facing Internet activists in the Middle East provides it.

Two weeks ago, June 11, Egyptian blogger and on-line activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was sentenced to 15 years in jail by an Egyptian court. His crime? He was part of a Nov. 26, 2013 peaceful demonstration in front of the Egyptian Shura council protesting a proposed constitutional provision allowing military trials for civilians. His trial was held at a police station and he and 23 other defendants in his case weren’t allowed to be present. They were all sentenced in absentia as they stood outside the courtroom.

Fattah is one of the world’s best-known Internet activists; he’s given interviews to so many countries he’s like a United Nations of sound-bites. That makes even more brazen the farcical trial and nightmarish sentence handed down. It also makes clear how far governments will go in implementing the blueprint for Internet repression that is being followed, in one way or the other, world-wide.

Ahmad (left) and Fattah: profiles in principle and courage

About a week later, Pakistan’s chapter of Bytes for All (among the most acclaimed Internet rights organizations in the world) released a remarkable study about hate speech in Pakistan. The study is among the most informative ever on this topic and that’s an enormous contribution. But its most important finding is that hate speech isn’t some random rant by a fool or a crazy person; it is political, organized and a motor of repression.

Perhaps the greatest lesson is that the study was publized at all. Bytes for All (Pakistan) operates under relentless attack and repression. Its coordinator, Shazhad Ahmad, has been sentenced to death (the sentence deferred) and can’t live with his family for security reasons. Its staff is constantly harassed and some staff members have been arrested and one was beaten fiercely outside the organization’s office.

This is about how much worse repression can get and how it is being facilitated. But it’s also about how, despite the conditions, brave people keep fighting and should be supported.