This Can't Be Happening!

ThisCantBeHappening! has a new radio program of the same name. I’ll be hosting the show every Wednesday at 5 pm Eastern Time on the Progressive Radio Network.

The first program, on the US Social Security system and the effort by the financial industry to destroy it, featured an interview with Theresa Ghilarducci, whom the financial industry has dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America,” for her incisive exposes of their campaign of distortion about Social Security and about the 401(k) plans that they would like us to all have to rely on. That program is not yet available as a podcast.

But the official first show, which aired Wednesday this week, is available at ThisCantBeHappening! on PRN. Check it out. The show is on climate change, and how the government and the energy industry both know climate change is happening, and that it’s happening faster than anyone imagined. I talk about how despite their knowing this, Washington is doing nothing to prevent it, and even worse, the oil industry is both gearing up to profit from a completely ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2012 by starting ocean drilling in that former ice-bound region, and at the same time is preparing a major propaganda and lobbying campaign to prevent passage of any laws or regulations to limit carbon emissions in the US.

You can hear this program by clicking on the image below:

Listen to the new show each week and tell everyone you know about it: ThisCantBeHappening! on PCN.fm ,Wednesdays at 5 Eastern time

You’ve read all about the dangerous, Orwellian spying by the National Security Agency, that at this point threatens to erase all our liberties and plunge us into the depths of a fascist, all-knowing police state. You’ve read the articles by TCBH! member Alfredo Lopez, explaining exactly what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Well today, on the anniversary of the death of web freedom activist Aaron Swartz, who took his life after the US government threatened to lock him up for life on trumped up charges, we join thousands of other organizations big and small in a movement to fight back. Join us by clicking on the image below:

I never really knew Pete Seeger, but he taught me how to play the banjo.

As a young amateur musician in junior high school in the early 1960s, just learning to play guitar and banjo and to sing folksongs, I certainly felt like I I knew him, going through the instructions in the manual he and his life companion Toshi copied and stapled together themselves. His high tenor renditions of wonderful old folk tunes that I’d never heard before, and his renditions of the powerful political songs of people like Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill–people I’d never heard of–didn’t just broaden my musical sensibilities, but actually shaped me politically more than I could have possibly realized at the time.

A few years later, as I got old enough to have to confront the draft, and to think about the horrors of the US war on the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and as I began to attend major anti-war demonstrations, there was always Pete there, banjo gripped by the neck, lanky in his bluejeans, climbing up on the stage to sing one anti-war anthem after another.

He never got old. I remember going to hear him back in the late 1970s at a SRO concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and just being amazed at the range of ages in the audience, from little toddlers sitting on their parents’ shoulders in the standees area at the back of the hall to ancient-looking people sitting in the seats, craning to hear through aging ears.

Remembering Pete Seeger: 1919-2014

(This story originally appeared in WhoWhatWhy.com)
 

This is the third and final of a three-part series on climate change. See Part I on climate change impacts already happening in Florida, and Part II on how the Pentagon and the oil industry know the North Pole is melting (and why), but are still acting as though global warming is not real, not a threat, and is nothing to worry about, even as they try to profit from it.
 

To the list of “things the NSA is interested in”, we need to add Climate Chaos. The latest release of documents obtained by National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in Denmark’s newspaper Information, shows that the NSA spied on negotiating teams for the countries participating in the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen. At that conference, widely declared a failure, the US was accused of playing hardball by refusing to agree to any set limits on carbon emissions. The new spying revelation raises serious questions about whether the US government is really interested in reaching any international agreement to limit global warming—or prefers to monitor and handicap those who actually might want to do something constructive.

More recent evidence that the Washington establishment is fiddling while Nome melts appeared at a January 23 conference in Washington on climate change sponsored by the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank founded during the Cold War.

That conference, “Global Implications of a Rapidly Changing Arctic,” featured three speakers—all key advisors to policymakers—including White House science advisor Dr. Brendan Kelly, assistant director of polar sciences at the Office of Science & Technology, Dr. Martin Jeffries, program officer and assistant science advisor at the Office of Naval Research, US Arctic Research Commission, and Rear Admiral Jonathan White, oceanographer and navigator of the US Navy.

What these three said during the conference was not as remarkable as what they did not say.

Organizer and panel moderator Heather Conley, a senior fellow at CSIS, acknowledged in an interview with WhoWhatWhy the absence of any discussion at the event about what was causing the polar region to heat up so dramatically, or what might be done to slow the pace of melting, which is likely to render the Arctic Ocean ice-free in summer months as soon as 2016. As she put it:

“You’re absolutely right that there is a paradox that climate change is transforming the Arctic and freeing up exploitation of more oil and gas that will make climate change even worse, but here we’re focused on ‘How do we deal with this change?’ We’re not talking about causality.”
 

Scenes like this 1841 painting of a walrus hunt by Francois August Biard will soon no longer exist in the Arctic, as the polar ocean continues to melt

 
It was to be expected. A famous person’s death by heroin overdose becomes a catalyst for today’s equivalent of the lynch mob. Leading the pack, Bill O’Reilly immediately and aggressively called for heads to roll. Soon, four people were arrested in Manhattan for allegedly selling the drugs to the Academy Award winning actor.

“Selling narcotics is a violent crime,” O’Reilly declared. He cited CNN’s Ashleigh Banville who that day said, “…the guy who gave an addict the drug that killed him deserves to go away for life.”

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[The haunting portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, at left, affects a daguerreotype plate circa the late 1800s. It was taken by photographer Victoria Will at the Sundance Film Festival two weeks prior to Hoffman’s death on February 2nd.]

Hoffman’s tragic death immediately mobilized drug warmongers to beat their drums for the usual reaction of police, courts and prisons. Outcries like O’Reilly’s were predictably vengeful and directed at demonizing drug dealers as disgusting pariahs who must be purged from the company of good, law-abiding citizens.

Fox News house liberal Alan Colmes stood up to O’Reilly’s vigorous bluster and responded rationally. He compared the selling of heroin that leads to an overdose like Hoffman’s to the person selling a gun to a suicide.

“That’s crazy!” hollered O’Reilly.

But is it any more crazy than this: The New York Times just ran an editorial about a study on prescription testosterone drugs like Androgel, made by the huge pharmaceutical Abbvie. Use of Androgel doubles the odds of a heart attack for men over 65, and it triples the risk of an attack in middle-aged men with a history of heart disease. If instead of the problems he self-medicated for Hoffman had suffered from “low T” and had been obsessed enough with jacking up his masculinity to rub Androgel into his armpit, given his lifestyle, he could well have fallen prey to a fatal heart attack. Would these lynch-mob talking heads, then, be calling for the marketing chief of Abbvie to get life in prison?

No need to answer that. Everybody already knows the answer:

If your drug connection has an MD and your dealer is a legitimate pharmacy, you’re OK, since the source of the drug is on the New York Stock Exchange and makes an outrageous profit. If your free private enterprise entrepreneur is a self-made small businessperson providing substances that aren’t tested by the FDA “nanny state” and that don’t come with a yard-long sheet of cautions, then we’re gonna call down some well-armed, high-testosterone nannies on that small businessperson. Presuming, as in this case, your corpse was once a celebrity beloved for providing insight into troubled souls. If you were a nobody, then it’s a Darwinian plus. That’s how it works.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has long been a living litmus test for whether people really want justice. Convicted in what even the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time was calling a terribly unfair trial over the alleged killing a white police officer, and sentenced to death by a racially biased and bloodthirsty “hanging” judge, Albert Sabo, Abu-Jamal spent 30 years on Philadelphia’s death row, always in solitary confinement, until a federal court, backed by the US Supreme Court, finally vacated the sentence, switching it to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

When the court tossed out Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, the reasons given were faulty jury instructions by the judge and a flawed jury sentencing form that the federal court believed could have led jurors to mistakenly believe that they could not individually oppose the death penalty, but would have to unanimously agree to oppose it. (In fact the opposite is true: any one juror in a death penalty sentencing can block execution by opposing the sentence, while death can only by imposed by a unanimous vote of the jury.)

This was an important ruling that upheld the “integrity” (such as it is) of the capital punishment system. It didn’t correct for the three decades that Abu-Jamal spent, wrongfully and unconstitutionally, in the hell-hole of Pennsylvania’s Death Row, but it at least ended that cruel and unusual torment, substituting another — life without parole.

Now one of the attorneys who helped craft the legal case that ultimately led to the lifting of that unconstitutional sentence, Philadelphia attorney Debe Adegbile, has been nominated by President Barack Obama to head the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department. Adegbile, on the merits, is an excellent choice for the post. A long-time civil rights litigator, well versed in the issues that the division is responsible for dealing with, he has also served with distinction as senior counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But Adegbile’s nomination has predictably aroused the wrath of the right-wing media and the pro-cop fanatics in Congress and elsewhere because of one thing he did, which was to volunteer to assist the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in developing its argument in federal court for overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.

From left: Debe Adegbile, Mumia abu-Jamal, Sen. Pat Toomey and Philly DA Seth Willliams
 

UPDATE: On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee, voting 10-8 along party lines, approved Adegbile’s nomination. ignoring a belated attempt by the Fraternal Order of Police (an organization that hasn’t met the brutal or corrupt cop it won’t defend as a maligned “hero”), to get Maureen Faulkner, widow of the police officer Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing, to be able to testify against Adegbile. With the filibuster no longer available for stopping votes on nominees, it is likely Adegbile will be approved for the Civil Rights post.

 
In this town, money talks and bullshit walks.
-PA Rep. Ozzie Myers on his Abscam tape
 
 
Political sports scorekeeper Chris Matthews recently predicted American Hustle would become a classic film of American politics of the order of Citizen Kane. I’d add All the King’s Men and All the President’s Men.

What’s so wonderful about American Hustle is that it’s very serious at the same time that it has great fun with a contemporary political system dominated by the archetype of the aggressive prosecutor. While a servant of the state, he or she ruthlessly advances a career by bringing down others. Dishonesty and the entrapping scam are major tools of the trade.

With Chris Christie, the whole smelly system has narratively come full circle. An aggressive federal prosecutor with eyes on the White House is suddenly the hunted prey of other hungry prosecutors looking for a career boost. The attorney credited with getting the goods to put away Governor Blagojevic in Illinois has been hired to go for Christie.

Who’s scammin’ whom? Having fun at the public opening of a renovated historic Jersey building.

While American Hustle may be based on the late seventies Abscam scandal, it’s more art than journalism or history. “Some of this actually happened,” we’re told on screen up front. Like all good fiction based on reality, the art is in finding a deeper truth. In this case, writer Eric Warren Singer and writer/director David O. Russell have changed the names to make it work in a mythic mind space. Great acting enriches a great script. (In the photo above, left to right, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Jenner, Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence.)

Philadelphia — A January 7, 2014 police assault on Darrin Manning that resulted in the 16-year-old honor student’s needing emergency surgery to repair a ruptured testicle, is outrageous but hardly unusual in this city.
That sidewalk assault on Manning began with a physical attack by a Philadelphia policeman with a record of citizen complaints. It was followed by separate abuse to his testicle by a policewoman. Doctors fear the damage to Manning’s testicle may leave the teen permanently sterile.

That double assault is consistent with an infamous history of brutality by police in Philadelphia. As far back as 1998, a report by Human Rights Watch said the Philly cops “have earned one of the worst reputations of big city police departments in the United States.” Things haven’t changed much in the intervening years.

And, consistent with incidents of police brutality here, cops in Philadelphia routinely charge their victims with assault on police and resisting arrest – two of the criminal charges police slapped on Darrin Manning.

Fatal shootings and vicious beatings by Philadelphia police during the 1970s prompted an unusual 1979 federal lawsuit, the first-ever filed by the U.S. Justice Department charging a mayor and top city officials with openly aiding police abuse. Philadelphia police fatally shot 162 persons during the nine years before that federal lawsuit. Between 2007-2012 Philadelphia police fatally shot 65 people, with 15 of those fatalities coming in 2012.

Perhaps the worse brutality incident occurred in 1985 when Philadelphia police dropped a bomb from a helicopter on a house that they had under siege. That attack on a home known to have children in it at the time, killed five children, six adults and burned down 61 surrounding homes.

This legacy of police brutality in Philadelphia, spanning over a century, routinely includes high-profile assaults on teens, primarily blacks and Latinos. In January 2010, for example, a police assault on a teenaged student left that concert violinist beaten and missing dreadlocks which were torn from his head by officers. Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner defended a June 2012 vicious assault on a teen stopped for a minor traffic violation. That assault, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said, was as an appropriate use of force because that 18-year-old suspect had allegedly resisted arrest. In the Manning matter, Ramsey belatedly launched an investigation into the assault but only after news coverage of the incident and public complaints.

Police abuse victim Darrin Manning and his principal, Veronica Joyner, who says police lied about the reason for stopping Manning

President Obama, five years late, in his fifth State of the Union speech, decried the terrible income gap in the US, a gap which has worsened during his years in the White House. Saying he was tired of the obstruction of his policies by Republicans in Congress, he said he would take action on his own, and as evidence offered up the puny “fix” of raising the minimum wage paid to employees working on federal projects from its current $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. This executive order, which could have been done when he took office in the depths of the Great Recession back in 2009, would be not immediate but would be phased in over the next three years.

What a pathetic joke!

As the New York Times pointed out the next day in its report on the president’s speech, the “raise” he was offering would only apply to “a few hundred thousand” workers. If we assume that “few” to be 300,000 people, and that each of those people works a 40-hour week 50 weeks per year, that would mean that in the first year, when the incremental increase will be 95 cents/hour, each worker currently earning $7.25 per hour will earn an extra $1900, for a total gain by all the impacted workers of $570 million.

Just to give a sense of how little that $570 million is, it works out to just over one-third of the unit cost of one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. That’s the Pentagon’s latest new fighter jet, designed and built by Lockheed-Martin, the one that has no enemy to fight and that is probably too flawed and too costly to ever risk in battle anyhow.

What is really obscene about the president’s token wage-increase gesture is that the $10.10 wage that he is saying the federal government will ultimately pay to its contract workers in three years would, in constant dollars, still be less than what the federal minimum wage was back in 1968, almost half a century ago! Heck, if the president had really wanted to show the obstructive Republicans and the American people that he meant business about going it alone, he could have used that same executive authority to grant those impoverished workers an immediate raise to $15 per hour — the rate that voters approved as a minimum wage last November in Seattle, Washington, and that labor activists say would actually go a ways towards alleviating rampant US poverty.

Even worse is the reality that we wouldn’t even be talking about this pathetic offer, or about a current federal hourly wage of $7.25, if Obama, back in 2009, fresh off a huge election win and with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress, had honored his campaign pledge to re-establish fairness in the National Labor Relations Act by passing “card check” legislation, making it possible for workers to unionize their workplaces by simply having a majority of workers sign cards saying they wanted a union. As things stand, and as the Obama the candidate denounced on the stump, employers are able to use the NLRA to delay union elections for years, during which time they typically engage in a campaign of lawless intimidation, illegally fire union organizers and end up defeating union drives, suffering no penalty afterwards (labor law limits employers found guilty of violations to having to pay back lost wages. There is no provision in the law to hit violators with penalties.)

The raise offered by Obama to federal contract workers for next year is just a third of the cost of one F-35 fighter jet

(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)