This Can't Be Happening!

Cory Booker, the charismatic Democratic mayor of Newark, NJ currently considering a campaign for the U.S. Senate, enjoys extraordinary media exposure — exposure that exceeds that of many top-tier entertainers and professional athletes. However, that fawning media coverage from CNN to Vogue Magazine of this mayor rarely reports facts like the increasing ire among Newark residents over Booker’s practices and the right-wing political roots of this politician who is generally portrayed as possessing solid center-left credentials.

Those right-wing roots, for example, provide an under-examined explanation for Booker’s lashing out at President Obama last May after a campaigning Obama criticized economic deprivations caused by hedge fund manipulations when he took Mitt Romney to task for the then GOP candidate’s tenure as head of venture capital firm Bain Capital.

Journalist Glen Ford has reported extensively on Booker’s conservative connections for over a decade, beginning with Booker’s September 2000 New York City address at the Manhattan Institute, one of America’s leading right-wing think tanks.

“It’s amazing that most people don’t see this background,” Ford said.

Newark's mayor Cory Booker is more popular outside of Newark than in the city he runs

In The New York Times February 6th on pages 20 and 21, across from each other, there were two tragic stories centered around the themes of sex, race and power. You might call them love stories, though they were definitely not Hallmark card or Harlequin romances.

The vast amounts of popular romance-focused drama we absorb through TV and movies in this culture tends to keep to narrow parameters, generally avoiding love stories that are too complicated, challenge established cultural assumptions or that threaten some area of middle-brow decorum or corporate sponsorship. These love stories are all of that.

One of these stories was sketched out in the obituary for Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the daughter of a 20-year-old Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler, an 18-year-old African American maid in his family’s home in Aiken, South Carolina back in the 1920s.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and her daughter, Wanda Williams-Bailer, and Strom Thurmond

Thurmond became a bulwark for southern racism as the governor of South Carolina, then a segregationist independent candidate for President in 1948 and, finally, he spent decades in the US senate. He lived to the ripe old age of 100. In all those 80 years since conceiving Ms Washington-Williams he never publicly recognized his daughter. Her mother died at age 38, the same year Thurmond ran for President. Washington-Williams was raised by an uncle and aunt in Pennsylvania. She never repudiated her biological father and met with him many times in private. He sent her money now and then and once responded to a Father’s Day card by writing:

“Dear Essie-Mae, Thank you for your fond remembrance on Father’s Day. Affectionately, Strom Thurmond.”

If the Constitution is to have any relevance, and if America is to remain a free society, then there is really no alternative: there must be a bill of impeachment drawn up and submitted in the House, and there must at least be a hearing on that bill in the House Judiciary Committee.

The disclosure, by NBC, of a so-called “white paper” by the White House offering the legal justification for the executing of American citizens solely on the authority of the executive branch and the president exposes a White House so blatantly in violation of the Constitution that it simply demands such a hearing.

As Juan Cole explains clearly in an essay in Informed Comment, there are five ways that the white paper authorizing executive execution of Americans violates the Constitution. These, he explains, are:

* There has to be an actual crime for there to be a punishment, and this paper authorizes execution without any crime.

* If, as the letter suggests, the president’s authority to order executions without trial derives from the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress, that would constitute a so-called bill of attainder, which he explains is a declaration that a certain person or class of people (i.e. terrorists in this case) are prima facie guilty of a crime. But as he notes, the Constitution specifically outlaws bills of attainder, saying in Article 1, Section 9, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed…”

* The letter violates the separation of powers, according the president the powers of executive, legislature and judiciary.

Killer drones, coming soon to a country near you…

Years ago, when I was briefly an adjunct faulty member in the Communications Department at Cornell University, I remember attending a faculty meeting where a full-time tenure-track colleague was giving an advance presentation of a paper he was soon to deliver. He had conducted an experiment to see whether negative political advertising was effective or not, and concluded, after a couple of controlled tests, that it was not. I asked him who his test subjects were, and he said they were volunteer students from Cornell. I asked how representative such a test could be, if the students were from an Ivy League school, and were probably among the smartest, most intellectual young people in the country. He couldn’t really answer. Clearly, his results were meaningless at best, but hey, he would soon be delivering a paper at a prestigious conference.

I’m reminded of that flawed study by the current cat fight over a new study claiming that feral cats are the primary cause of a rapid decline in the US bird population. The authors of the study, according to a heavy-breathing report in the New York Times’ Science section today, “scaled up local and pilot studies to national dimensions,” to conclude that wild and domestic cats kill an annual 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals a year in the US. If true, this would, they say, make the cat “one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation.”

I love the decimal points applied to an amalgamation of small geographic studies that all, as the Times notes, “admittedly come with wide ranges and uncertainties.” Decimal points are great tools for implying mathematical rigor when there clearly was none.

Feral cats certainly kill birds and small mammals, but remember: they are doing the work of native predators that are gone, thanks to hunters and encroaching civilization.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been trying to convince the public that the BLM does not sell wild horses to slaughter, but the Wild Horse Freedom Federation has obtained proof that a BLM Long Term Holding contractor sold wild horses directly to kill buyer Joe Simon, who is well known for sending horses to slaughter, and who owns JS Ranch (“Farms”) in Perkins, Oklahoma.

To give a little background, the BLM uses lame excuses to remove wild horses from their federally protected Herd Management Areas while letting other “uses” take over.  For instance, BLM claims wild horses cause “degradation” to the range, but then allows oil and gas drilling (and fracking) on the same land, which does far more damage.  The BLM uses helicopters to round up the wild horses, then puts the horses in short-term holding facilities, maintenance facilities, and ultimately, ships horses to same-sex long-term holding pastures, where the public is led to believe the horses will spend the rest of their lives.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has actually rounded up so many wild horses off of public lands that were designated as the horses’ federally Protected Herd Management areas, to make way for oil & gas drilling, mining and other “uses,” that the BLM now has more wild horses in same-sex holding facilities than are on public lands.

The BLM’s Wild Horse & Burro Program is facing mounting costs, too. The BLM is requesting over $44.5 million for short and long-term holding facilities in the 2013 President’s Budget. The BLM is using a loophole created by the Burns Amendment to sell/give wild horses to people who then sell the horses in a pipeline to slaughter. The BLM states that they don’t sell wild horses to slaughter, but the reality is that the agency turns a blind eye to obvious signs on documents they see, as the wild horses are being sold to slaughter.

Jim Reeves and Lyle Anderson own Spur Livestock, and have a contract with the Bureau of Land Management for such a long-term holding pasture for wild horses on private lands within the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, as well as on Indian Trust Lands administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  This facility is the Whitehorse Wild Horse Long Term Holding Facility.

Wild Horse Freedom Federation received records from the South Dakota Brand Board that reveal on 11/8/2008, while under contract with the BLM, “owner” Spur Livestock sold 34 horses with “BLM tattoos” to JS Farms, owned by kill buyer Joe Simon.

Wild Horses with the BLM's "no brand" brand on their necks awaiting their fate (photo by Terry Fitch of Wild Horse Freedom Federation)

I was having a hard time falling asleep
When I heard a loud noise coming from the kitchen.
Probably the cat after a mouse
Knocked something off the counter.
I made my way downstairs
Glad to have an excuse to get vertical.
When I entered the kitchen, and flicked on the light
I could not believe my eyes:
There were peanuts dancing on the counters
Scampering across the ceiling and flying through the air!
The moment they caught sight of me
The whole lot of them stopped what they were doing,
As if suspended in time and space.
I was completely speechless, trying to
Comprehend what I was seeing.
A peanut, floating close to my left eye broke the silence:

“We are not nuts”, it said, in a tiny crystal-clear voice.
“We are from another planet,
The planet, Skippy.
We have been waiting in what you would call our “jar”
For many years past the expiration date!
Our hope was to communicate important information to you
Long before the threshold of 2012,
Our mission deadline.
Our assumption was that you
And others like you,
Would honor your own expiration date,
Releasing us in plenty of time
To deliver vital information
About how your species might survive a while longer.
Due to unforeseeable circumstances
(primarily the greasiness, not to mention the timelessness,
Of your kitchen. . .)
We were unable to free ourselves from our jar
Until just a few minutes ago
When your cat inadvertently knocked us off the shelf
Breaking the so-called “freshness seal.”

For a masterpiece in cognitive dissonance, just look to the foreign editors and the managing editor of the New York Times, who managed to run two closely related stories making opposite points in Saturday’s paper without referencing each other at all.

The first, Algeria Sowed Seeds of Hostage Crisis as It Nurtured Warlord, by Adam Nossiter and Neil MacFarquhar, reports on how the Algerian government essentially enabled and encouraged the crisis in neighboring Mali by backing — even hosting in Algiers — an Islamic militant leader and local warlord, Iyad Ag Ghali, who then tried to take over Mali by force, including taking Algerians and other foreigners hostage at an oil drilling site, leading to a deadly Algerian battle and now a war in Mali that has drawn in the old colonial powers. The article talked at length about the risks of working with such militants. The risks for Algeria, that is; not the risks in general of such a practice.

On the same day, the paper ran a second article, this one by C.J. Chivers, titled A Rebel Commander in Syria Holds the Reins of War. This piece is a glowing paen to Abdulkader al-Saleh, aka Hajji Marea, a rebel leader in the Syrian civil war. The article paints the man whose nom de guerre is comfortingly (and incorrectly) translated as meaning “the respectable man from Marea” (it actually means “the man from Marea who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), is clearly aligned with a radical Muslim group, the Al Nusra Front, which the article notes, is “blacklisted” by the US as a terrorist organization.

Abdulkader al-Saleh, America's 'Man in Syria'…for now at least.

Class War Films, the brainchild of three filmmakers, Lanny Cotler, and Paul and Jason Edwards, have 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 to be able to help get their films out to a wider public.

Just click here or on the image to go to the YouTube video.

Many millions around the world are convinced they know imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from closely examining the ‘whodunit’ contentions surrounding his contentious conviction for the December 9, 1981 slaying of a Philadelphia policeman.

However, few really know the ‘Who’ of Mumia –- the individual behind the international image of a victim of injustice; the grandfather with a layered life beyond the simplistic characterizations of both opponents who bash him as a murderous monster and of supporters who ascribe to him powers of mythical proportions.

The all too often missing ‘Who’ of Mumia Abu-Jamal is what is makes the focus of an engaging new documentary film, “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal,” truly unique. The film opens in New York City on February 1 and Los Angeles on March 1.

“Long Distance Revolutionary” presents the personality and the person of Mumia before, during and after his arrest and conviction for the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner unlike all the pervious movies on Abu-Jamal that principally probed contours and contradictions of his trial and conviction.

That missing ‘Who’ is what sparked the interest of Stephen Vittoria, a respected LA-based documentarian who wrote, directed and edited the this film.

Keith Cook, Mumia's older brother, appeared with Valerie Jones, sister of the late Veronica Jones, a witness to the Faulkner shooting, at an advance screening of “Long Distance Revolutionary” last Dec. 8 (photo by Linn Washington)

 
The Pentagon — and the United States government in thrall to it — is congratulating itself on overcoming a hurdle that other nations have long gotten beyond or never faced in the first place. Feminists and progressives sympathetic to women’s rights are expected to be delighted that women can now officially be assigned to combat roles in the US military. The overcoming of this great hurdle follows a long tradition, in that the Pentagon’s self-congratulatory run around the field operates to distract Americans from arguably the most critical problem relevant to their future.

Happy women geared up in Afghanistan 2010

America is a hugely powerful nation caught in the headlights of history. We desperately need to forge a new social contract to accommodate an inevitable future of diminishing resources and comforts. But, at the same time, we’re a nation that desperately wants to hold onto the sense of “exceptionalism” preached to its citizens incessantly.

We fear real change like it was some kind of plague.

The fact is, women have served in combat roles since the beginning of time. Many European nations are quite comfortable with women in their ranks; Israel and Canada currently come to mind. Women have certainly operated in harm’s way as spies from Mata Hari to Valerie Plame. Muammar Ghaddafi had a special unit of armed women to guard him.

In the so-called developing world, Vietnam is a great example. If we recall, Vietnam won a long, cruel war to overcome an American invasion. They thoroughly employed women as combatants, many of these women now heroes of their nation. I met such a female Vietcong officer in Alaska in 2005. It’s possible a male could have kicked her ass and might have been better suited to haul a 300-pound wounded male comrade from the battlefield, the big test much touted right now by opponents of women in combat. But all that misses the point entirely.