This Can't Be Happening!

If you want to make moral or legal pronouncements, or to condemn bad behavior, you have to be a moral, law-abiding person yourself. It is laughable when we see someone like Rush Limbaugh criticizing drug addicts or a corrupt politician like former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) voting for more prisons, more cops, and tougher rules against appeals of sentences.

The same thing applies to nations.

And when it comes to hypocritical nations that make pious criticisms of other countries about the “rule of law” and the sanctity of “international law,” it’s hard to find a better laughing stock than the United States of America.

After invading Iraq illegally in 2003, with no sanction from the UN, and no imminent threat being posed by that country to either the US or to any of Iraq’s neighbors, after years of launching bombing raids, special forces assaults and drone-firing missiles into countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, and killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children, after illegally capturing and holding, without charge or trial, hundreds of people it accuses of being terrorists and illegal combatants, after torturing thousands of captives, the US now accuses Russia of violating international law by sending troops into Crimea to protect a Russian population threatened by a violently anti-Russian Ukrainian government just installed in a coup.

How many times has the US sent troops into neighboring countries based upon the claim that it had to protect American citizens during a time of turmoil? We have Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Haiti in 2003, for starters. Would the US hesitate for even a moment to send troops into Mexico if the Mexican government were overthrown in an anti-American coup, and if demonstrators who had led to that overthrow were attacking Americans? Of course not.

The Panama invasion, and the overthrow and arrest and removal to the US of Panama’s elected President Manuel Noriega, is particularly instructive, as it involved protecting a strategic US overseas base — the US Canal Zone — much as Russia is protecting its naval bases in Crimea, operated under a long-term lease from Ukraine but threatened by the recent Ukrainian coup. The US, headed at the time by President George H.W. Bush, invaded Panama under the pretext of protecting Americans in that country, but the attack (which had been planned well in advance of any threats to Americans) quickly morphed into an overthrow of the Panamanian government, the arrest of its leader, and the installation of a US puppet leader.

But the US trashing of international law goes far beyond all these examples.

Invading US troops of 'Operation Just Cause' in Panama (1989), and Russian troops in Crimea (2014)

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

Panchimalco, El Salvador — Thirty years ago, on a miserably hot and humid July day in 1983, I went to Washington DC with my wife and two-year-old son in his stroller. We were there with tens of thousands to protest US involvement in civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Last month, I became re-acquainted with the political struggle of El Salvador as a member of an international delegation to observe the first round of their presidential election on February 2nd.

Old enemies ran representing parties that either ruled during the civil war or grew out of the armed struggle after peace accords were signed in 1992. On the right, there’s the Nationalist Republican Alliance or ARENA, and on the left, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front or FMLN. After the accords, ARENA retained the presidency until the 2009 election, when the FMLN and independents of the center and left won the presidency with the candidacy of Mauricio Funes, a respected Salvadoran journalist.

Salvador Sanchez Ceren during the war and running for president this year
 

This election was among three candidates: Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander and the current vice president representing the FMLN; Norman Quijano, a former ARENA mayor of San Salvador; and Antonio Saca, the ARENA president from 2004 to 2009 who was expelled from ARENA in 2009 and formed a new party called the Grand Alliance for National Unity of GANA that has worked with the FMLN in the legislature.

I arrived in San Salvador a week before the election with a good friend. We were met at the airport by seven other members of the delegation and began a process of getting to know, and learning to work with, what eventually became a 70-person delegation that included supporters of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), National Lawyers Guild, Share and Sister Cities. Together, we would observe voting at some 30 centers with more than 300 stations, each the voting location assigned to 500 people.

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

It might seem like a game of Monopoly played by real monopolies and, with a tired groan, one might be tempted to dismiss it as part of an ugly but irreversible trend. But the merger of cable-television mammoth Comcast with its runner-up competitor Time-Warner Cable is a huge piece of news whose outcome, if it goes forward, will be crippling to communications in this country.

With this $45-billion deal, Comcast’s 21.7 million subscribers will combine with Time-Warner’s 11.4 million to put most tv subscribers in the pocket of one company, giving it control over about a third of all cable TV customers and unprecedented leverage over smaller regional and local providers. (Comcast has agreed to “divest” or sell off about 3 million subscribers, a ripple in the power pond.) Since cable television is now the primary source of news, education and entertainment for a large and increasing number of American families, this deal would make one company our primary newspaper, movie theater and library.

Comcast Trucks: soon to be visiting many more homes
 

What’s more, the deal would deepen the grave for the Internet as we know it: a grave already being dug with the recent Net Neutrality decision. Both Comcast and Time-Warner are major providers of high-speed Internet services. By combining Internet with the cable television services, the companies have been able to offer a slightly lower price and more convenient hook-up for Internet connectivity than the telephone and other companies offering it. That’s won them a huge market — about 40 percent of all high-speed connections in this country.

That market power has allowed Comcast to strike first in taking advantage of the recent Net Neutrality decisions. Netflix, the popular Internet-based movie and television provider, has now agreed to pay Comcast more money for smoother and quicker connections signalling a blow to Net Neutrality.

What that will do to prices is anyone’s guess but the more important threat is to Net Neutrality because, with one company controlling so much of the market and legally allowed to choose what you can and can’t access, there will be no open Internet. It will turn into a clone of cable television: charging you more for seeing some pages on the newspaper, viewing certain movies in the theater and accessing sections of the library.

Click on the image below to listen to Dave Lindorff interview ThisCantBeHappening! journalist Alfredo Lopez explain why a federal court’s latest ruling against net neutrality could mean the end of the Internet.

Click here to listen to Dave Lindorff interviewing Alfredo Lopez on PRN.fm's "ThisCantBeHappening!" latest program

Also, tune in at 5 pm Eastern Time Wednesday to PRN.fm (www.prn.fm) to hear this week’s edition of the new program ThisCantBeHappening! on PRN.FM to hear TCBH!’s Charles M. Young. Chuck will be giving listeners his take on New York’s last mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the $21-billion member of the 0.1% who spent his mayoralty trying to nickel and dime the city’s teachers and municipal workers, while catering to the tax dodging demands of the city’s ruling elite. Chuck will also be talking with host Dave Lindorff about the Occupy Movement that he covered for TCBH! and of course about rock & roll.

As always, the show will be a call-in during the second half hour, so bring on your questions.

 
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.

Philadelphia — Back in 1978, a respected newspaper columnist in in this city blasted local black elected officials for their failure to criticize police brutality – the scourge that ravaged blacks for decades, often with the sanction of white elected officials like then Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, a former city police commissioner.

“Those black elected officials lack courage,” respected journalist Chuck Stone wrote three-decades ago, slamming Philadelphia’s four top black officials as servile, betraying their constituents.

During the weeks before publication of Stone’s July 18, 1978 news commentary, Philadelphia police had killed two unarmed black men and viciously beat scores of people including a group of black teens attending a party at the home of a Methodist minister.

Now, 36 years later in 2014, Philadelphia black elected officials again face harsh criticism for their failures both to publicly condemn continued police brutality and to utilize their electoral clout to end that festering scourge.

Once again, black officials are being disparaged as servile and betraying the people who elected them. And once again, the trigger for this latest volley of criticism against Philadelphia’s black elected officials is their collective failure to publicly condemn a high-profile incident of alleged police abuse. That incident in question was a vicious January 7 police assault on a teenage honor-roll student that left the 16-year-old needing emergency surgery for a damaged testicle.

In Philadelphia, the election of blacks to top posts as mayor, city council president and DA, and having a black as police chief, has done little or nothing to end police brutality and abuse against blacks and other minorities

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.