This Can't Be Happening!

Some on the left are writing hopefully these days that perhaps President Obama has finally realized he needs to back off on his warlike posture on drones and the War on Terror. They are seeing his talk about scaling back the use of drone killing machines and of reconsidering or having his “Justice” Department “investigate” its own outrageous attacks on the press and its use of leaks by government whistle-blowers, as a sign that he is perhaps regaining his constitutional senses and perhaps even “moving” to the left to rebuild support he has been losing in droves.

Put aside for a moment the fact that so far it’s all been just talk. We know the drones are still flying and killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere (and there’s no talk of not opening a new drone piloting base in my home county of Montgomery, PA this October). And the national security spy state is going about its nasty business as usual. But in any case, the big test, I submit, of whether this president is actually moving away from his prior five years as president of selling out his liberal, working-class and poverty-struck base to stand instead for traditional liberal and progressive ideals will be Social Security.

On Friday the Social Security Administration will announce that the Trust Fund of money collected through the FICA payroll tax from working Americans over the course of several generations will reach $2.8 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion at the end end of 2011. The SSA will further report that this fund will continue to grow, as taxes collected remain greater than the funds being paid out in the form of Social Security benefit checks, until about 2020, seven years from now, when they will reach over $3 trillion. At that point, with increasing numbers of Baby Boomers — that wave of people born between 1946 and 1964 who began hitting retirement age in 2011 — beginning to really pile into retirement, the fund will start to shrink as planned. But even with the unprecedented number of retirees, the report will state that the system should be able to pay promised benefits in full — that’s in full without any changes in the way inflation is factored into benefit amounts — until 2033. And even after that, if no changes were made at all to increase revenues, current taxes paid in by workers at that point would be able to fund 78% of promised benefits indefinitely into the future, even though we’re all living longer than planned back when the fund was being set up.

Hmmmm. In 2033, as a 1949 Baby Boomer, I will be 84 — assuming I live well beyond my expected life expectancy of 76. Maybe I’ll be lucky, but statistically speaking it’s unlikely that I, or most of my cohort, male and female, born before 1960, will be around at that point. Get that? This is a critical point nobody in the kill Social Security crowd likes to mention, but the truth is that by the time Social Security runs out the Trust Fund, the population it was created to try to anticipate will have basically lived on their benefits and passed on to that Great Beyond where Social Security checks aren’t needed anymore.

Money spent on war has long been and continues to be borrowed (stolen) from the Social Security Trust Fund

Toward the end of Roman Polanski’s masterpiece “Chinatown” an exchange takes place between “hero” Jake Gittes and the super-rich Noah Cross when Gittes finally realizes that Cross has seized control of Los Angeles’ water supply.

“I just wanna know what you’re worth,” Gittes explains. “More than 10 million?

“Oh my, yes!” Cross says with a laugh.

“Why are you doing it?” Gittes asks incredulously. “How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?”

Cross’s answer: “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.”

The “buzz” of the moment in tech circles is the purchase, by Internet colossus Yahoo, of a service called “Tumblr”. There’s also a bit of “burr” about Google buying a company that is trying to make wings that generate power.

Both acquisitions left pundits and analysts scratching their heads but, when probed under the surface, these moves give us a glimpse into these corporate giants’ intent and their thinking about our “future”.

Tumblr homepage and Makani wings

The $1.2 billion Tumblr purchase was announced by Yahoo’s Exec Marissa Meyer last week and the reaction from the tech media reflected curiousity and confusion more than anything else. Try as she did through press briefings and public fanfare, Meyer didn’t really answer the question in most analysts’ minds: Why in the world would Yahoo purchase something like Tumblr?

(This article originally written for and published by Counterpunch Magazine)
 

Maple Glen, PA war zone — Although I have been a journalist now for 40 years, I have, by design, never sought an assignment as a war correspondent. The idea of dodging enemy bullets, avoiding mines, and of course “friendly” fire, has never appealed to me. And yet, even as President Obama is claiming to be having second thoughts about the drone slaughter he has been overseeing from the White House, I find that I am now a war correspondent in a combat zone in spite of myself.

A month ago I learned, courtesy of my congressional representative, Republican Pat Meehan, that my neighborhood, the Upper Dublin and Horsham area of Montgomery County, PA, is being made into a front-line battle zone in the Afghanistan War.

Not that Rep. Meehan put it that way. No. His announcement was that Montgomery and Bucks County were going to get 250 new jobs thanks to a decision by the Pentagon to set up a new piloting facility for killer drones at the currently mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. This new drone piloting facility, like the ones in Nevada and upstate New York, will be flying drones not from the Willow Grove facility’s huge airfield, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever else America is fighting the so-called War on Terror.

With this decision, the war has literally come home. Two miles from my house, to be exact.

According to a report in the Lansdale Patch, a local weekly, the US Air Force “has chosen the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, located at the 238-acre Horsham Air Guard Station, adjacent to the shuttered Willow Grove air base to take on a new Remotely Piloted Aircraft mission.”

Effective October 1 the Air Force will have established, in already existing buildings on the currently unused base, a ground-control station for the MQ-9 Reaper. This is one of the two drones (the Predator is the other) that have been responsible for most of the drone killings during the Obama administration’s over four-year expanded use of drone warfare, and that has, according to the organization Drones Watch, been responsible for the documented deaths of over 172 children.

Col. Howard “Chip” Eissler, commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, which had been flying A-10 Warthog ground attack jets from the base on training runs for years until the base was shut down, issued a press release saying, “This is an exciting time for our wing, and our airmen are energized to embrace this new mission.”
Willow Grove's shuttered Naval Air Station, soon to be on the front line of the Afghanistan War and 'War' on Terror

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to myself
And to the wonder of my birth.
I pledge allegiance to my health
And to cherish my own worth.

I pledge to serve my conscience
No matter where it leads
And to maintain my defense
Against hypocrisy of creeds.

With my hand above my heart
I pledge to serenade my soul
And learn to amplify my part
Just like a singing bowl

In which my truths are held secure
Against allegiances to greed.
I pledge myself to tend
To both the flower and the seed.

And to call all life around me
My equal and my peers
And may the great Earth ground me
For the balance of my years.

— Gary Lindorff

Poet at rest in Ireland

 
PREFACE
 
Asked by veterans from the Vietnam Veterans of America inmate Chapter 466 in Graterford state prison to be the official speaker for their Armed Forces Day event on May 18th, the following was given as a speech. Members of VVA Chapter 466 were in attendance, along with a host of friends and supporters of the chapter, some who are quite conservative veterans. Several Graterford staff and security officials were in attendance. Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel was invited and had committed to attend the Armed Forces Day event, but at the last minute he had a conflict and did not show up. Wetzel worked his way up from a corrections officer and was given the top prison job in May 2010 by conservative Republican Governor Tom Corbett. A copy of the speech has been sent to Wetzel’s office and to other officials in Harriburg. During these years, I have become acquainted with a number of decent, hard-working Graterford officials and staff employees. The following remarks were written with all these individuals and parties in mind.

As a Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans For Peace, I have worked with the VVA chapter and other interested groups for a number of years as an advocate for prison reform in the area of veterans. Of particular interest to me is recognition of the mitigating factor of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Pennsylvania’s draconian life-without-parole sentence in which the only way out is a coffin or a commutation. And in the current political climate in Pennsylvania commutations are rare and tend to be given as a governor is leaving office.
 

It is a great honor to speak here today for Armed Forces Day. I must say, when I was asked to be the speaker today I was a little surprised. While I’m very much an American, I am not a flag-waver.

So I’m not going to give the usual Armed Forces Day speech that praises our military for preserving our freedom here in America. Everyone has heard that one many times before.

Since I’m speaking to a mixed audience of prison inmates (most of them veterans), prison officials and other distinguished guests, I want to talk about the Armed Forces and incarcerated veterans.

Graterford Prison outside of Philadelphia

Like others in this room, I’m a Vietnam veteran. But that identification really doesn’t tell anyone much other than triggering stereotypes.

I joined the Army in 1965 a week out of high school. I had just turned 18. My father had been a PT boat captain in the south Pacific, and my brother was in the Army infantry at the time. I ended up as part of the Army Security Agency, was sent to Vietnam and was assigned, first, to the 25th Division, then to the 4th Division, both headquartered in Pleiku. I was a fairly intelligent kid, but, frankly, very naïve. I was trained in Morse code to work as a radio direction finder.

I was what we called — and pardon the obscenity — a REMF, or rear echelon motherfucker. Still, I ended up working in forward areas in support of large infantry operations. I was at a firebase near the famous Ia Drang valley where a year earlier Commer Glass fought as a young soldier. I was dropped by helicopter on remote mountaintops near the Cambodian border with a half squad of grunts to protect my sorry REMF ass. It was all pretty amazing experience for a young kid just out of high school.

(This article was originally written for WhoWhatWhy)
 

The horrific bombing of the Boston Marathon, to hear the FBI and the Boston Police tell it, is solved: One bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is dead, gunned down by police and then run over for good measure by his fleeing brother Dzhokhar, who was captured a day later in a citywide manhunt, after being hit by a fusillade of police bullets fired into a trailered pleasure boat he was hiding in.

Among the reasons law enforcement sources are so confident they “got” their men were video surveillance photos from a Lord & Taylor store-front area showing the two brothers as they arrived at the finish-line area, each wearing a backpack, allegedly carrying what the FBI now says were two identical 6-quart steel pressure cookers marketed by the Canadian corporation Fagor. Fragments of those pots, which the FBI says were packed with black powder (gathered from a collection of fireworks) as well as nails and BBs, were recovered at the scene.

Besides the photos of the two brothers wearing their packs, the FBI also has released a photo of the remnants of one of the backpacks, allegedly the black, or dark-colored, one worn by the elder Tamerlan Tsarnaev. There is also a photo of what is described as a white backpack, that was placed on the street side of a metal crowd-control fence. It was said to contain the second bomb, which exploded 10 seconds later, further from the finish line. This is presumed to be the same light-colored pack Dzhokhar is seen wearing in the store video as he arrives on the scene.

There are a number of serious problems with this supposedly damning evidence, however.

First of all, nobody looking at the evidence to date has tried loading up one of these Fagor pots with the amount of weight that would have been created by a big four or five quarts’ worth of black powder, perhaps two quarts of nails, and perhaps a pound or two of BB shot, to see what it would look like in a basic unstructured book bag of the type the two men were wearing.

I decided to do that…

Note obvious wrinkles on the coat caused by the strap with a fully loaded pot in the book bag in the right picture (worn by a model in a test), compared to the smooth coat under the strap of the book bag carried by Dzohkhar Tsarnaev (lleft image from store surveillance cam). Clearly not much weight in his bag
 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please go to: WhoWhatWhy

Point of No Return, a mixture of novel and autobiography, is an engaging story of an intrepid war correspondent who resembles a saucy crime detective. It is superb story-telling.

Andre Vltchek’s just re-released Point of No Return is a revised third edition. First published in 2005, the French edition was widely praised, with one French critic compared the authors writing with that of Malraux and Hemingway.

The hero is Karel, who has covered dozens of foreign wars and internal liberation struggles. Most of the book concerns Israel-Palestine and Latin America, especially Peru. Indonesia’s aggression against East Timor and Egypt also play important roles. There are also stops in Paris, New York and Japan.

The author Andre has traveled to three-fourths of the world’s countries over two decades, communicating to whomever he can reach about the state of the world. He has written a score of non-fiction, fiction and poetry books. He is also a photographer and documentary film-maker.

The robust story flows rhythmically, sensually, enticingly. It is a sad reality that the veteran war correspondent encounters sometimes sickening things, which are just a reality of living and dying for three-fourths of the world’s seven billion people.

In Andre’s own words:

“Politicians and economists are blurring the whole picture…A small group of historically aggressive nations is still ruling the world. The economic system which it promotes has nothing to do with humanism, with solidarity, compassion, willingness to share. We have billions of people rotting in gutters all over the world; hundreds of millions of people dying from curable or at least controllable diseases. The rich world is still plundering the rest of the planet; stealing raw materials, employing people for a pittance…. If poor nations resist, the rich world stages coups or something worse…. And it is all legitimized through the United Nations, which was sidelined, made truly impotent…”
Author Andre Vitchek

Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice.

This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list – the first female to have that dubious distinction.

Shakur was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a May 1973 incident on the NJ turnpike, where one of her companions was killed and another captured. Once known as JoAnne Chesimard, she escaped from a NJ prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984 where she lives today.

While Shakur,65, occasionally criticizes racist inequities in the U.S. – comparable to that of many politicians including Barack Obama prior to this election of U.S. President – she does not actively advocate or engage in terrorism.

Yet many contend she is a ‘terrorist’ because of her armed resistance decades ago to American racism that included police brutality – a deadly offense Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried twice in his seminal 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. A May 10 editorial in the conservative Washington Times declared Shakur had to “pay for her crimes” suggesting Cuba send her to a cell in Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. torture prison located on land the U.S. illegally occupies in Cuba.

Although federal authorities did double the NJ state reward for the capture of Shakur to $2-million when placing her on their “Most Wanted” terrorist list exactly forty-years after that 1973 incident, the bounty hunter incident referenced above occurred before the widely condemned listing of Shakur.
Assata Shakur as she appeared when arrested (under the name JoAnne Chesimard) and as she looks today in exile in Cuba

“Paranoia,” said Woody Allen, “is knowing all the facts.” By that measure, we’re becoming more and more “paranoid” every day.

This week, we learned that the Obama Justice Department seized two months of records of at least 20 phone lines used by Associated Press reporters. These include phone lines in the AP’s New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn offices as well as the main AP number in the House of Representatives press gallery, the private phones and cell phones belonging to AP reporters and a fax line in one AP office.

The government effected this massive seizure “sometime this year” according to a letter from the Justice Department to AP’s chief counsel this past Friday (May 10). The letter cites relevant “permission” clauses in its “investigative guidelines” and makes clear that it considers the action legal and necessary.

Locking Horns: AP's Gary Pruitt and Attorney General Eric Holder

In many ways, this is the most blatant act of media information seizure in memory. It affects over 100 AP journalists and the countless people those journalists communicated with by phone during those two months. It violates accepted constitutional guarantees, the concept of freedom of the press and the privacy rights of literally thousands of people. Predictably and justifiably, press, politicians and activists have expressed outrage.

But as outrageous as the admitted facts are, the story’s larger implications are even more disturbing. It’s bad enough that the Obama Administration has grossly violated fundamental constitutional rights, acknowledged the violation and defended their legality. Even worse is that likelihood that the intrusion will probably be ruled legal, that it has been ongoing against other targets for some time and that this is only the tip of the intelligence-abuse iceberg.

 
I saw the masked men
throwing truth into a well.
When I began to weep for it
I found it everywhere.
– Claudia Lars (El Salvador)
 

Those of us who have struggled for peace and justice over the past decades don’t have much to celebrate these days. But the news from Guatemala that a female judge — Yasmin Barrios — was able to successfully manage a trial in that benighted nation and convict former President Efrain Rios Montt of genocide is something to rejoice about. It suggests it’s no longer business as usual in Latin America — especially vis-à-vis the United States.

The big stick of North American imperialism from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan appears to be dwindling in size. The sentencing of a Guatemalan president to 80 years in prison for employing scorched earth tactics against native Mayan Indians is an amazing milestone — and an incredible story to boot.

Following a 1954 US-directed coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz for his efforts at agrarian reform, the tiny Central American nation descended into a condition that can only be characterized, for the native Mayan people, as a state of Hell-on-Earth. The fact that President Rios Montt undertook his systematic slaughter of many thousands of Mayan peasants with the endorsement of Ronald Reagan only makes the conviction that much sweeter.

.

In the photograph, at left, Ronald Reagan, “the Great Communicator,” meets with Rios Montt, who is holding a document titled “This government has the commitment to change.” At the time, Reagan said Rios Montt was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment” who wanted to “promote social justice.” At right, is a line of bodies from one of the Guatemalan army’s massacres of people who, no doubt, were deemed “communists” and, therefore, inhuman and justifiably slaughtered like vermin.

Army General Efrain Rios Montt became president of Guatemala thanks to a coup in March 1982. He was, then, deposed by another coup in August 1983. This was a time when Mr. Reagan was hypnotizing the American people with his aw-shucks, soothing Hollywood narcotic speech tones.