This Can't Be Happening!

Newfane, VT — A classic David vs. Goliath battle is taking shape in the courtroom and in the streets and fields of Vermont as Entergy Nuclear of Louisiana tries to overturn Vermont law in the federal courts.

The state has thoughtfully and repeatedly voted no to the extension of Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor’s license, which is due to expire on March 21, 2012. Results of Town Meeting votes, a 26-4 vote by the Vermont Senate, and a pivotal gubernatorial race all have shown that the state does not see Vermont Yankee as a reliable or economical partner for its energy future. Forty years’ accumulation of radioactive waste on the banks of the Connecticut River is enough.

Entergy was stunned when their corps of high-priced lobbyists failed to prevail at the statehouse, but they are counting on their high-powered legal team to carry the day for them in the favorable atmosphere of the federal court system–packed as it is these days with judges named by Reagan and two Bushes. And even though the Supreme Court claims to support the concept of states’ rights, it is not clear that that bias will over-ride their love for corporate personhood/rights. Meanwhile, their distaste for so many things that Vermont, (as personified by its socialist Senator Bernie Sanders), stands for and represents are likely to override any professed passion for states’ rights, which tend to coincide with right-wing issues. So although the state government has taken all appropriate action (and continues to do so in the courts), it ultimately may have to be the power of the citizens who will have to shut down this leaky, decrepit reactor as scheduled.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu made clear on NPR what it is that citizens need to do, when he explained that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project was abandoned because of “concerted, growing, local opposition”.

Vermonters are not taking a wait-and-see approach. With their neighbors from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, they are organizing a movement. They promise to close down the plant by direct action if it continues to operate past March 21, 2012. Activists are discovering that support for direct citizen action is growing throughout the region. From senior citizens to harried single moms, people are volunteering and vowing to get arrested or whatever else it will take to close down the reactor. Non-violent civil disobedience training sessions are being conducted throughout the region and organizers are working in a variety of ways to build a region-wide movement.
The Vermont Yankee plant, one of America's oldest, is a decrepit, leaking relic, but its owner wants to keep it running anyhow

 
Second in a series: “Rediscovering America”
 

Leading black-skinned representatives of the “hegemon”, as Cynthia McKinney calls President Barak Obama and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, could hardly expect to win any votes from the standing-room-only crowd at her anti-war tour last night at Calvary Church in Philadelphia.

Speaking before nearly 300 people–two-thirds of them black, the remainder white and hispanic–in her T-shirt proclaiming that “war kills”, the former U.S. congresswoman said:

“We need someone in the White House who thinks like us and not just one who looks like us. We have to act like we’re free if we want to be free. We have to liberate ourselves from war-mongering political parties.”

Philadelphia was one of the last cities on McKinney’s International Action Center-sponsored “Report from Libya: Impact of U.S. war in Africa” tour, which hit 21-plus cities. The Philadelphia meeting was co-sponsored by several community groups and left-wing political parties, including the Green Par,ty which ran Mckinney as its candidate during the last presidential campaign.

In addition to McKinney, representatives of the community and Sara Flounders, co-director of the IAC, spoke. Pam Africa of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal said, “This meeting is about action to stop the wars over there and here at home. And Amy Goodman [Democracy Now anchor] needs to stop ignoring the word brought to us by Cynthia McKinney.” A brust of applause reenforced this viewpoint.

A representative of an anti-police brutality group encouraged people to vote for Diop Olugbala for mayor as the only anti-imperialist running against the pro-corporate Mayor Michael Nutter.

McKinney led a delegation to Libya last May-June in opposition to the US-NATO assault on that country, which began in March and destroyed much of Tripoli and other cities that were controlled by the government of Muamar Gadsafy. She witnessed some of the bombing and its destruction of life and of the country’s infrastructure.

“I speak with a heavy heart, knowing that places I visited no longer exist. Migrant workers camped out in tents close to ‘The Door to Africa’ as Gaddafi’s residence, Bab al-Azizia, is known. They are gone now, many split into pieces; only rubble remains,” said McKinney.
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on Libyan state TV displaying anti-personnel weapons dropped by NATO forces..

Journalists from ThisCantBeHappening! took on the Philadelphia Inquirer. the nation’s third-oldest surviving daily, this morning, conducting a leafletting “happening” in front of the paper’s soon-to-be-sold headquarters building on Broad Street.

A one-page flyer, written in Old English and featuring a replica of the masthead of Benjamin Franklin’s original one-page broadsheet, the Pennsylvania Gazette, accused the oft re-sold and steadily downsized and gutted Inquirer of abandoning its Fourth Estate role in favor of entertainment and profits.

Inquirer editors, reporters and other workers entering and leaving the building for the most part willingly accepted the fliers, sometimes reading them on the spot, and sometimes carrying them off to read later. A few stopped to talk with the TCBH! leafleters, who included one activist from the Philadelphia Independent Media Center.
TCBH 'Red Squad' garbed in their new TCBH! T-shirts, challenges the Philly Inquirer: Ron Ridenour, John Grant and Dave Lindorff (from left), (photo by Rich Gardner)

One man, asked if he was an Inquirer worker, laughed wryly, saying, “I am until November 18.” He explained that after working at the paper for nearly three decades, he had received notice two weeks ago that he was being sacked. “28 years,” he said, shaking his head. Reading the short broadsheet, which was published on antique-looking fake parchment, and which listed some of the news stories and issues that the Inquirer has consistently ignored, blacked-out or grossly misreported, he said, “It’s true. Every time this paper has changed hands things have gotten worse.”

Others agreed.

Workers passing by on the way to jobs in Center City or at the neighboring Board of Education building just up the street from the Inquirer were nearly unanimous in agreeing that the Inquirer–and other local media — were doing a poor job of informing the public about many important issues. Only a handful of people refused to accept a copy of the flyer, shown below:

 
Some 35 years ago, when I was just an aspiring journalist settling into life In Los Angeles, a venerable alternative journal, the Free Press, died. This paper, which had chronicled the Beat Era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the ’60s Counter Culture, much like the Village Voice in New York City on the opposite coast, didn’t stop publishing. Rather, the new owner decided that the real money was in massage parlor ads and ads for sex services, and so he eliminated the journalism in favor of pornography.

At the time, I had been freelancing, doing pieces for the “Freep’s” managing editor, Tom Thompson, a hulking former linebacker and veteran TV news reporter with a growl for a voice who ate too much, smoked too much and had an unerring sense for what was really important and needed covering.

When the Freep ceased to be a newspaper, Tom quit. But instead of going off to find another job in some forsaken corner of the corporate media, he did something unusual. He called a meeting at his house of the journalists he had been working with, myself included. Sitting around his living room, a dozen or so of us talked about the crazy idea of starting a new alternative newspaper for Los Angeles. We wanted a weekly. We wanted it to be something people paid for, even if it was just a quarter. And we wanted it to be ours, not some publisher’s property, in which we were just the cogs.

We found a backer, a liberal Democratic activist named Jim Horowitz, who ran a small plumbing supply wholesale operation. Jim, incredibly and generously, if with understandable skepticism, agreed to our terms: 50% ownership in return for his fronting of $50,000, and 50% ownership for those of us who agreed to work for $125 a week to put out the paper, which we decided to call the Los Angeles Vanguard.

This coming week, two of the original journalists from that venture, myself and Ron Ridenour, will gather together with the members of the journalists’ collective that runs this online paper–myself, John Grant and Charles M. Young (Linn Washington will be out of town)–to celebrate and critique what was done in Los Angeles half a lifetime ago, and and what we have done with ThisCantBeHappening! over the 14 months of this new publication’s existence. We will be hosting a forum titled “The LA Vanguard, ThisCantBeHappening! and the Future of Alternative Journalism” this coming Thursday, August 18, at 7 pm at Larry Robin’s Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th Street in Philadelphia. (Everyone is welcome, and refreshments will be available.)
LA Vanguard and TCBH! staffs: Young, Ridenour, Lindorff, Grant, Washington, Thompson and Pleasants

Back in the 50s
We were served up this warm vision
Of sculpted cloud-high bubble-cities
Catered by sloe-eyed robots.

How far that silvery angel has fallen!
Far below
Where Dick and Jane are playing hop-scotch
In the rocket graveyard.

Now a giant bronze plaque proclaims:

The speed of light has been attained!
Prepare! Prepare!
We have straightened the lightning!

What am I saying?
The general himself is shouting —

Prepare!

I am in the streets
Of the City of Sad Thoughts
Where people have become irrelevant
And I have just abused a small white dog.
I press this sweet dog against my face and cry.
The dog sees
That my soul is strapped to a beam of light
Vaulting through space.

I myself was abused
Or deceived
Just like everyone else
In this city.
I can hide nothing
From this dog
Who has become the moon.

Tell me what you see.
Maybe I can be trusted.

 
GARY LINDORFF is an artist, musician, poet and counselor / dream-worker who practices shamanic techniques, and who lives in rural Vermont with his wife and two dogs. (He is also Dave’s brother.) His website is BigDreamsWeb

 
There is a basic concept when it comes to justice that the punishment should fit the crime. It’s a concept that in Law-and-Order America has long vanished. Some states, like California, have done this with brutish “Three-Strikes-You’re-Out” policies that have ended up sentencing young men to life in prison for something like stealing a video, because it was the perpetrator’s third crime. Others, like Florida, have done it by sentencing a pre-teen kid to life in prison for a killing because he was tried as an adult.

The mentality that does these things also operates at a lower level, before sentencing, and involves police who over-react, and over-charge people for minor violations. I was talking to a black man recently who spent four years in prison in Pennsylvania for throwing a brick through a window. “I was drunk,” he says, “and so I tossed the brick, which was stupid, but the police called that a burglary attempt, and so I got four years.”

My own experience with this mentality came with two traffic tickets involving my son. They might seem minor in comparison, but they still speak to this mentality.

The first happened earlier this year in my suburban community of Upper Dublin, PA. Jed and I were in the car early in the morning, headed for an appointment in Philadelphia. Jed, only 17, was driving for the first time in early morning and had never had the experience of driving past a school during the “flashing school zone” period, when cars had to go 15 miles per hour. A careful driver, he was obeying the law meticulously as we passed the town’s high school and elementary school. Then, just past the elementary school, at the intersection where we had to turn to go a few hundred feet to the entrance to a divided highway, Jed made the turn and began accelerating towards the ramp entrance.

I immediately spotted a black unmarked police car parked deceptively on the side of the road, but before I could even tell Jed to slow down, it took off behind us, lights flashing.

Busted!
Jed Lindorff

 
How do you assure the security of a nation of human beings who consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, habitually live beyond their means and are addicted to all forms of fantasy from Bible-based delusion, to patriotism-based arrogance, to movie special effects that make ordinary human drama seem boring?

What is the most powerful nation in the world with the largest, most expensive, most lethal military in the history of mankind to do when the good times turn bad, the money goes funny and class warfare breaks out on the homefront?

How does modern warfare in a nation-state system that evolved out of feudalism continue to evolve as new communication systems increase? What does modern warfare look like as that nation state system breaks down, to be replaced by a confusing, “globalized” world of power centers and power vacuums?

The answer for the United States seems to be a growing concentration on what is known as Special Operations, which includes Special Forces, Seals and a host of other lethal military forces that emphasize mobility, efficiency, secrecy and unaccountability. Navy Seal Team Six is the showcase unit of US Special Ops warfare; it’s the much-touted force that killed Osama bin Laden in May and on August 6th lost 17 men when their Chinook helicopter was shot down. A total of 38 men were killed in the shoot-down, including pilots, crew and eight Afghans — plus a dog.

A Chinook and the August 6 wreckage in Afghanistan

The Seal team was on a mission to aid a Ranger unit trying to capture or kill a Taliban leader. Back in June 2005, a Chinook was similarly shot down, killing 16 special operations soldiers. By now, this kind of focused killing mission by helicopter at night is standard procedure in Afghanistan. Chinooks, I can speak from experience in Vietnam, are loud, lumbering machines that would seem a reasonably vulnerable target for an experienced fighter with a rocket, something the Russians learned. No doubt the Chinooks are accompanied on missions by Apaches and other agile killing machines.

 
Brixton and Peckham, two of the communities in London rocked by the recent riots, are not mere dots on a map to Paul Bower. He’s lived in both communities, including living through a riot in Brixton thirty years ago.

Bower says people need to carefully distinguish between legitimate grievances festering in the now riot-scared areas – things like lack of employment – and the lawlessness of youthful looters.

The fiery and destructive looter rampages, Bower stresses, like inner city riots in the US in the US during the 1960s, have destroyed many small businesses owned by non-whites and the homes of poor people, white and non-white alike.

“These riots were not about unemployment. Yes, there is a lack of opportunity but [the looters] weren’t saying they want to work. They were saying I want what’s in that window,” Bower said during a telephone interview from London.

Bower’s work includes increasing job opportunities for London residents, so he’s well acquainted with the difficulties people have finding jobs in the UK these days.

“In hip-hop terms this is not Public Enemy ‘Fight the Power.’ It is 50-Cent ‘Get Rich or Die Trying,’” explained Bower, who now lives near London’s Camden section, which also experienced some of the rioting.

Rioting in Britain has spread through London and to other cities over several days

(This is the first of a series of impressions of Ron’s return to the Belly of the Beast)
 

“We’re making a killing” read signs held in front of the permanent war profiteer, Lockheed-Martin, overlooking the King of Prussia Mall.

Consumerism and War Making go hand-in-hand at this US bloody flag-infested Philadelphia suburban mall. People casually shop beside the world’s number one weapons corporation.

Sixty-six years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States government dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and murdered 150,000 human beings in an instant. An equal number have since been murdered by after affects of this Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). Three days later it was Nagasaki’s time.

Since the Second World War, the US has invaded 66 countries, under various pretexts, a total of 160 times (See Permanent War) –murdering, handicapping and torturing millions.

Today, the Lockheed Martin Valley Forge facility in Philadelphia–built in the very locale revered for that great battle for freedom, liberation and sovereignty which birthed this Land of Opportunities–produces WMD. It is part of the government-private industry nexus that has killed a million or so in Iraq and Afghanistan–nations where there is a lot of oil and crucial transportation routes–all so that the wealthy get richer, and then even more rich as they don’t have to pay taxes in the good ole’ US of A.

There they stood: 30 human beings. A young couple with babe-in-arms stood out among the mostly gray folks. They bore signs of the usual kind, hoping some would heed their cry for species survival. They recalled 66 years ago when “people ran to the rivers to escape, and soon the rivers became…a stream of drifting dead bodies…” and “birds ignited in air.”

As they read their cry for peace in collective voice, a dozen uniformed armed men stood by their police and security cars ready to protect American Private Property.
Protesters ran crime scene tape across the Lockheed Martin entrance before being busted (photos by Brandywine Peace Community)

News judgment being what it is these days, the corporate media gave more publicity to the Casey Anthony trial than they did to “The High Costs of Wrongful Incarceration,” a report by the Better Government Association and the Center on Wrongful Convictions about the practice of locking up innocent people in Illinois.

Perhaps journalism schools are teaching their students that wrongful convictions are inherently less interesting than wrongful exonerations. Perhaps law schools are teaching their students that wrongful convictions aren’t all that wrong, because their students will want a lot of convictions on their resume when they run for governor or audition for a talk show on cable news.

I can only speculate. But why would the Better Government Association even bother to write such a report if journalists and lawyers in Illinois thought that wrongful convictions should be avoided because they are wrong? The point of their report is that wrongful convictions should be avoided because they cost a lot of money.

Which is undeniable. The BGA did the math on 85 wrongful convictions in Illinois between 1985 and 2010, and found that it cost the state $214 million to incarcerate and compensate the exonerated, while it cost the exonerated 926 years in prison. Meanwhile the actual criminals were on the street committing 14 more murders, 11 more sexual assaults, 10 more kidnappings and 62 other felonies, plus at least 35 murders, 11 rapes and two murder-rapes that remain unsolved.

Another interesting statistic is that of the 85 false convictions, 81 involved “government error or misconduct by police, prosecutors and forensic officials.” Error and misconduct apparently means inducing false confessions from terrorized or mentally ill suspects, encouraging false eyewitness identification, cooked forensics, and “incentivizing witnesses,” which means making deals with prisoners for desired testimony in exchange for reduced sentences.

Shortly before the BGA report was issued in the middle of June, the Supreme Court ruled in Connick v. Thompson that the district attorney of New Orleans had no obligation to “train” his prosecutors not to hide exculpatory evidence, thus overturning a jury award of $14 million for an innocent man who spent 18 years in prison, most of them on death row. So it would be fair to say that the Supreme Court thinks the remedy for the high cost of incarcerating the innocent is disincentivizing defense attorneys, who won’t get paid for years of legal work proving prosecutors wrong.

“With this ruling,” said the New York Times in an editorial, “the court made it even more likely that innocent people will be railroaded by untrained prosecutors–with the terrible prospect of their being put to death for crimes they did not commit.”

Indeed, training. Lets mandate a lecture on ethics at some point in law school and remind everyone that God didn’t leave a lot of wiggle room in the ninth commandment. Bearing false witness against your neighbor is wrong, and that’s all there is to it, even for prosecutors. Then maybe put a question on the bar exam. “True or false: If lying makes me look good, it’s okay that somebody who hasn’t done anything is put to death by the state.”

The "exercise" yard at the California Adjustment Center for solitary-confinement prisoners