This Can't Be Happening!

All the sturm and drang in Washington over the March 1 deadline for a budget deal is an act. Two acts really.

The Republicans are pretending that if we don’t have budget cuts this year, the whole US economy will collapse because of the nation’s enormous indebtedness.

The Democrats are pretending that if no deal is reached, and automatic across-the-board cuts of 8% for the Pentagon and 5% for other programs will not only put the nation’s defense at risk and cause widespread suffering, but that it will derail the nation’s fragile economic “recovery.”

Both claims are, to put it gently, bullshit.

To put it in perspective, remember we’re talking about $86 billion dollars in spending for this current year.

That’s in a federal budget of $3.5 trillion, and a national economy of $16 trillion. A little math is in order. One trillion dollars is $1000 billion dollars. So $86 billion dollars represents just 2.46% of the federal budget. And it represents just 0.5% of GDP.

Even it it ever does make it to operational status, at $166 million a pop and rising, the F-35 boondoggle will be too-expensive-to-risk in actual combat. Cutting the program would save $400 billion overnight (just the planes shown here together cost us taxpayers over $1 billion!).

Class War Films, the brainchild of three filmmakers, Lanny Cotler, and Paul and Jason Edwards, has offered to provide ThisCantBeHappening! with occasional short videos on topics like this, military spending, political fraud, financial crime, etc. They are working on creating a website, which will be called ClassWarriors.org, which should be functioning “soon” we are informed.

We’re happy here at TCBH! to be able to help get their films out to a wider public.
 

Click on the image to play the video

I’m fed up with the trashing of the Baby Boom generation.

Sure you can find plenty of scoundrels, freeloaders, charlatans and thugs who were born between 1946 and 1964, but you can find bad and lazy people in every generation. In fact, the so called “Greatest Generation” who preceded the Boomers abounds in them. That doesn’t prove anything.

What has me ticked, as someone who was born in 1949, is that the right wing has for decades been attacking my generation in particular, and has succeeded, pretty much, in portraying us Baby Boomers as self-centered, spoiled and entitled. The right has then cleverly used that deceptive image to go on and attack important programs like Social Security, Medicare, college loans, etc., by trying to divide the generations against each other, claiming that we Baby Boomers are intent on abusing, even bankrupting, those programs.

The truth is something else entirely.

The generation born after World War II in fact has been admirable and almost unique in its altruism. While our parents were either overt racists and sexists or turned a blind eye to those twin evils, and for the most part uncritically accepted the imperialist policies of the post-war US government, our generation challenged the idea of imperial war, supported the struggle of African-Americans to win voting rights and to end legal segregation and, after a struggle in our own ranks, fought for equal rights for women — with many of the men of our age cohort joining in that struggle.

My generation did more in our personal lives and lifestyles, beginning in the 1960s and continuing on through the decades, to break down walls of religious and racial bigotry, than any before us, and we have raised children who have continued that legacy.

As for Social Security, it was our generation that has had to pay more into the system to anticipate our greater longevity and our greater numbers, paying vastly higher Social Security payroll taxes than our parents ever did. We also strongly supported the creation of Medicare in 1965, at a time when we were still more than 40 years from being able to make use of it.

Antiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon during the Mobilization action in October 1967. Several hundred (the author among them, visible in the lower right, back turned) were arrested, beaten by US Marshals and jailed at the federal prison in Occoquan, VA.

His job is to feed us
And he hasn’t noticed that the walls are dissolving.
Soon he will be free as well.
So please, please
Don’t disappoint us.
When you tell what happened, to your grandchildren
You will say, those white beards came
And the ants, from deep down in the Earth fed us
When we were sleeping,
Dropping little grains of sweetness between our lips.
Dreams came,
Towers fell,
Little children sang
and sang
and sang. . .
 
— Gary Lindorff
 

In the madness of our media-fed consciousness, the greatest threat to an informative news story is time. Given enough time, and the dysfunctional and disinformative way the mainstream media cover news, even the most important and revealing story quickly dies out.

That is, unless we who use alternative media keep that story alive.

So it is with the death of the remarkable technologist Aaron Swartz. It’s been only a month since Aaron apparently killed himself in his apartment here in Brooklyn and yet the story has pretty much disappeared from mainstream news. The threat is not only that the legacy of this remarkable young technologist will also disappear but that the analysis of his life and death and the policies they bring into relief will be frustrated.

During the brief spasm of mainstream coverage, the most prominent line being circulated was that he was a casualty of the sloppiness, pettiness and bullying of a federal government that went too far in its prosecution of him. The truth is that Aaron Swartz was a target of a deliberately vicious, sadistic government campaign in which the federal government wanted to make his pain an example to the entire progressive techie community. What’s more, his death was the outcome of a policy that is a threat to human freedom. That’s why we need to keep talking about Aaron Swartz.

To talk that talk, it’s important to be clear about what actually happened.

Aaron Swartz, casualty in the battle to defend freedom of information

Lindorff can also be heard being interviewed by PressTV in Iran on this segment headlined LAPD More Like an Army of Occupation
 
 

“Burn that fuckin’ house down…Fucking burn this motherfucker!!”

–Voices overheard on police radio at the scene of the cabin where Chris Dorner was trapped and burned to death
 

It was clear from the outset when fired LAPD cop Chris Dorner began wreaking his campaign of vengeance and terror against his former employer that the California law enforcement establishment, led by the LAPD itself, had no interest in Dorner surviving to face trial, where he could continue to rat out the racist and corrupt underbelly of the one of the country’s biggest police departments.

Dorner, as I wrote earlier, claimed he had been fired for speaking up during his three years on the force, through channels and to superior officers, about incidents he had witnessed of police brutality and of the rampant racism that permeates the department — not just white on black, but black on Asian, Asian on Latino and Latino on white. His response to being sacked — threatening to kill senior officers he blamed for this law enforcement distopia as well as some of their family members — was criminally insane, but his complaints, made in a 6000-word post on Facebook, had and continue to have the ring of truth.

The LAPD response to his threats was to mobilize the whole 10,000-member department in a manhunt, complete with $1-million reward. Cops exchanged their black uniforms for military fatigues and armed up with semi-automatic weapons. Two Latino women delivering papers in Torrance were attacked from the rear of their pick-up by seven LAPD cops who, with no warning, peppered their truck with bullets, targeting the back of the driver’s head, firing at least 70 rounds and destroying the vehicle (amazingly, neither woman was killed, though one was hospitalized in serious condition). That attack, which looked like the kind of thing US soldiers and Marines routinely did to suspect vehicles in Iraq with such deadly impact, made it clear that the LAPD wanted Dorner badly, but only dead, not alive and talking.

The Big Bear cabin where Chris Dorner made his last stand, burning after SWAT team tear-gas grenates ignited it

On September 10, 2012 the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline: “LAPD to hold meetings on use of force policies.”

Top Los Angeles police officials announced those community meetings to counter growing criticism about videoed brutality incidents involving LA police officers in the preceding months, that article noted.

On November 24, 2012 The Daily Beast posted an article with the headline: “In Los Angeles, Questions of Police Brutality Dog LAPD” reporting abuse incidents by officers of that department placed under federal oversight between 2001 and 2009 after repeated brutality and corruption scandals.

Over two months after that Daily Beast posting about LAPD brutality a fired LAPD officer unleashed a murderous rampage as revenge against his claimed unfair firing by the LAPD.

That former LAPD cop, military veteran Christopher Dorner, claimed his attack campaign was retaliation against retaliation LAPD personnel directed against him for his reporting a 2007 brutality incident he observed while on duty.

Following a controversial hearing, LAPD officials found Dorner’s brutality claim against a policewoman unfounded and fired him for filing false statements. The father of the alleged victim said his mentally ill son confirmed Dorner’s account.

To some, Chris Dorner is a 'Dark Knight' charac battling alone against a corrupt LAPD that has sent an army out to hunt him down

Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner, who is fast becoming something of a folk hero in his one-man challenge to the LAPD, one of the nation’s biggest and baddest police departments.

Dorner, a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of being racist, and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels.

By all media accounts, Dorner “snapped” after his firing, and has vowed to kill police in retaliation. He allegedly has already done so, with several people, including police officers and family members of police already shot dead or wounded.

Now there’s a record huge “manhunt” involving police departments across California, focussing on the mountains around Big Bear, featuring cops dressed in full military gear and armed with semi-automatic weapons. (Some 40-50 senior LAPD officers specifically threatened by Dorner are also being heavily guarded by LAPD cops.) Dorner has so far skilfully eluded his pursuers, despite a $1-million bounty on his head and thousands of people in the posse hunting for him. He has meanwhile developed a large and growing following of people who are actually rooting for him, with some comparing him to the Batman of “Dark Knight,” striking terror into, and wreaking vengeance on a corrupt police culture.

Few would argue that randomly killing police officers and their family members or friends is justified, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that the things that Dorner claims set him off, such as being fired for reporting police brutality, and then going through a rigged hearing, deserve serious consideration and investigation.

The LAPD has a long history of abuse of minorities (actually the majority in Los Angeles, where whites are now a minority). It has long been a kind of paramilitary force — one which pioneered the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.”

If you wanted a good example to prove that nothing has changed over the years, just look at the outrageous incident involving LAPD cops tasked with capturing Dorner, who instead shot up two innocent women who were delivering newspapers in a residential area of Los Angeles. The women, Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71 (now in serious condition in the hospital), were not issued any warning. Police just opened fire from behind them, destroying their truck with heavy semi-automatic fire to the point that it will have to be scrapped and replaced. The two women are lucky to be alive (check out the pattern of bullet holes in the rear window behind the driver’s position in the accompanying photo). What they experienced was the tactics used by US troops on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the tactics that one expects of police. Their truck wasn’t even the right make or color, but LAPD’s “finest” decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so instead of acting like cops, they followed Pentagon “rules of engagement”: They attempted to waste the target.

LAPD officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the bullet holes behind the driver-seat position). Trouble was, it was the wrong make and wrong color, and instead of Dorner, it was two Latino women, one of whom is now in serious condition from her wounds. No warning was given before the barrage.

The US government doesn’t like Iran. I get that. It claims, on pretty dubious grounds, that Iran might be planning, at some point down the road, to take some of the uranium it is processing into nuclear fuel to a higher level of purity and make it into an atomic bomb.

Because of that possibility, which Iran denies, and for which there is no hard evidence, the US has been tightening an embargo against Iran, blocking countries from buying Iranian oil, blocking banks from doing business with Iran, blocking Iranian banks from doing business with the US, and blocking certain products from being exported to Iran.

Many of these actions are, in and of themselves, hostile acts that could, under international law, be considered acts of war given that there is no UN authorization. In fact, some of them are exactly the type of thing that drove militarists in Japan, fearful of their country being cut off from access to iron ore and to oil, neither of which are available in Japan, to go to war against the US back in 1941.

But for all that, the US is not at war with Iran. Got that? There is no state of war between Iran and the USA. You can travel there as a tourist if you like–actually more easily than you can go to Cuba. Iranians can visit the US too, though they probably will get a pretty serious going over by the ICE crew at their port of entry.

Now, however, the US has taken a really stupid step. It has blocked the carrying of Iran’s state-owned English-language PressTV television broadcast on the Galaxy 19 satellite that was allowing the 24-hour newscast to be viewed, at least by some people, in the US. Galaxy 19 is operated by Intelsat, which is domiciled in Luxembourg for tax purposes but is actually a US-run firm, founded here in 1964, and run currently by a crew of US executives who hail from such firms as Dish TV, Sprint, GTE and the powerful NY and Washington law firm of Paul, Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison.

Full disclosure: For several years, I have been frequently interviewed by Iranian Press TV reporters for commentary on such matters as the US election campaign, the US economy, various issues before the Congress, the state of civil liberties in the US, police repression of the Occupy movement, and also international issues such as the US drone warfare campaign and the war in Afghanistan. For six months, I was also paid to write a weekly column for the Press TV website, until that arrangement was ended for financial reasons on Jan. 3 of this year.

Keeping Americans safe (and in the dark): Intelsat's satellite has cut the signal for Iran's PressTV broadcasts to North America