This Can't Be Happening!

Back in the late 1980s, when I lived in a little town in rural Upstate New York called Spencer, I joined the local library board, eventually ending up through default becoming president of the board. We ran a dinky one-room library with a dedicated part-time librarian. The back of the library was piled with boxes of books that could not be shelved for lack of space. For years, the board had been trying to raise funds to expand the library, which was an adjunct to the local firehouse. After finally raising most of the cash needed through donations, we decided to approach the local Lions Club to ask for a check. Our vice president, Sharon Haefele, feisty co-owner of a little mom-and-pop cable TV operation in town, offered to make the pitch. She asked for $1000 of the proceeds of the next summer’s little annual Lions Club town picnic. The club president, a local businessman, replied, “What do we need a library for anyhow? I haven’t read a book in years!” Haefle’s response was memorable.

“I’m not surprised to hear you say that Tom,” she said, “but I am surprised to hear you say it in public.”

Let’s face it. Among the business and political elite, education, and anything connected to learning, like a library, is not valued. At best it is viewed as a way to train docile workers, and to regiment children into conformity.

In fact when it comes to education, the popular thing today in American politics is trashing experienced teachers.

Politicians like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin (who never finished college), Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, and myriad members of the House and Senate who were at best B students in high school and in many cases worse, are saying the key to educational “reform” is ending tenure and seniority so that older teachers can be trashed in mid-career to be replaced by supposedly high-performing young replacements.

My high school English Teacher Sandy Taylor offered a reading list of banned books

 
“…get a man greedy enough and he got the guts to go – go, go, …Vietnam, hot damn.”

-Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the program created by Congress to expend over $700 billion of our tax dollars to prevent a “meltdown of the financial system,” is a “colossal failure.” It’s now official. Neil M. Barofsky, the man hired as TARP’s special inspector general, has come clean.

Why is it a colossal failure? Because, Mr Barofsky says, the act passed by Congress “expressly directs” Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department to spend hundreds of billions of the TARP money to aid struggling homeowners with their mortgages.

This has not been done. Instead, as critics have pointed out ad nauseum, all this tax money went to high-wire-act financial institutions so they could regain their balance, “not only to survive but even to flourish.” In essence, the bursting real-estate bubble was re-inflated with ordinary Americans’ tax revenues. The argument went, for those at the bottom, that we did it for your own good.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a US bombing in Libya

Before piloting the Treasury Department, the brilliant Mr. Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates and the International Monetary Fund, and was president of the NY Federal Reserve Bank. He was also a pal of the previous Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had earlier headed Goldman Sachs. Geithner is, of course, very familiar with the financial Ponzi schemers whose institutions he saved, because he’s one of them.

 
The Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan

The prime minister of Japan has said that his government is “not in a position where we can be optimistic” about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Is there any logical conclusion to draw from that statement other than that a large chunk of Japan is going to be uninhabitable?

They’ve got four nuclear reactors right next to each other in various states of disaster and probably meltdown. Two more are damaged. The workers on site are exhausted, sick and dying. The ocean and air around the plant are highly radioactive. The surrounding farms are producing radioactive vegetables. The drinking water in Tokyo is radioactive. If the Fukushima reactors keep exploding and burning and blowing radiation into the reservoirs, how long before Tokyo becomes Jonestown with a population of 13,000,000?

Michio Kaku, the physicist and author, has suggested on CNN that the best option right now is entombment. There’s nothing to salvage, he said, so the Japanese government should get some shielded helicopters and dump sand, boric acid, dolomite and concrete on the reactors and bury them for eternity. This could be done in ten days, he said, if they just got the materials together, which they aren’t doing because the government is not facing the implications of its own declared lack of optimism.

I’m not a physicist, but entombment at Chernobyl was vastly more complicated than Kaku was able to discuss in the time limits of American television. The Chernobyl reactor had to be mostly neutralized before being permanently buried, which meant that 800,000 or so “liquidators” had to run into the plant, perform some menial task in the presence of boiling nuclear waste for a minute or two, and then run out. Most of them are now sick, dying or dead from radiation poisoning.

Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a more complicated process, because it has a lot more waste lying around and four out-of-control reactors while Chernobyl had just one. I don’t know. Either way, there is a moral problem that needs to be discussed.

Who will be the liquidators?

Whether Japan needs a few hundred volunteers to shovel boric acid on burning plutonium, or whether Japan needs 800,000 draftees, as in the Soviet Union, somebody’s got to do it.
Japanese soldiers suit up to help fight the Fukushima meltdown

And we never really face what is in front of us, never face what is inside our gutless language of cartels and drug lords and homeland security, never face that forces are unleashed on the land with names like poverty, a fix, murder, and despair, and our tools cannot master these forces. …Things happen and no one says much. Then after a while, no one admits the thing even happened.

-Charles Bowden on life in Ciudad Juarez
 

US Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual resigned last week after cables he sent were released by WikiLeaks suggesting he thought Mexican police and military forces were crippled by corruption.

Truth was no defense in Pascual’s case.

Since right-wing President Felipe Calderon won a razor thin majority in 2006 and immediately declared a bloody shooting war on drug cartels, some cartel leaders have been killed or arrested. But, then, like mushrooms, as happened in Colombia with the killing of Jose Escobar, the number of cartels has grown from four to seven. In the crossfire, over 34,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered, many in notoriously gruesome fashion without a shred of mercy.

It seems the cartels have calculated that their strong suit in countering Calderon’s bully war – fought in conjunction with US drug warriors and with lots of US money — is extreme and certain violence of the sort that means not only will you be gruesomely tortured, dismembered and killed, but so will your entire family.

In his book Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Field, Charles Bowden paints a horrific picture of a city overwhelmed to the point of mass numbness and the inability to even remotely address the present descent into barbarism. Only two percent of the crimes in the city ever go to court, let alone end in a conviction.

The Supply, center, and left and right, the Cost.

Calderon’s war, most agree, is a dismal failure. He cannot run for re-election, but since he wants his National Action Party (PAN) to win big in next year’s election, some shift or change may be in the air. Security is now in the forefront of people’s minds in Mexico. Naturally, life and death trumps concerns about drug trafficking.

President Obama’s criminal launch of an undeclared and Congressionally unauthorized war against Libya may be compounded by the crime of spreading toxic uranium oxide in populated areas of that country.

This is latest concern of groups like the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, which monitor the military use of so-called depleted-uranium (DU) anti-tank and bunker-penetrating shells.

Images of Libyan civilians and rebels celebrating around the burning hulks of the Libyan army’s tanks and armored personnel carriers, which had been hit by US, French and British aircraft ordnance in the early hours of the US-led assault on the forces of Col. Muammar Gaddafy, could well have been unknowingly inhaling the deadly dust of the uranium weapons favored by Western military forces for anti-tank warfare.

Libyan rebels celebrating on burned-out Gaddafy military vehicle may be unknowingly inhaling toxic uranium oxide

Specifically, the British-built Harrier jets used by British naval air forces and also by US Marine pilots, are often equipped with pod-mounted cannons that fire 20 mm shells–shells that often have uranium projectiles designed to penetrate heavy armor.

So far, the US has not introduced its A-10 Thunderbolts, known also as Warthogs, into the Libyan campaign, probably because these sub-sonic, straight-wing craft, while heavily armored, are vulnerable to shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles which Libyan forces are known to possess in large numbers. Once the air-control situation is improved by continued bombardment, however, these specialized ground-attack aircraft will probably be added to the attacking forces. The A-10 has a particularly large automatic cannon which fires an unusually large 30 mm shell. These shells are often fitted with solid uranium projectiles for attacking tanks, APCs or groups of fighters holed up in concrete bunkers.

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UPDATE (3/31/11)! The US has now begun flying A-10s over Libya, which means it is even more likely that DU shells are being used against Gaddafy’s armor and military emplacements.

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A timely report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, based on data from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), contains troubling news about the state of America’s vast network of nuclear power plants.

The report, which examined serious incidents at 14 U.S. nuclear power plants nationwide from New York to California in 2010, finds fault with both plant operators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which is supposed to oversee them.

“Many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners and even the NRC tolerated known safety problems,” states the report, entitled: “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010: A Brighter Spotlight Needed.”

While none of the 14 safety incidents tagged in the Union’s report as “near misses” produced harm to nuclear plant employees or the public, the report terms the frequency of these incidents, which averaged more than one per month, “high for a mature industry.”

Authored by David Lochbaum, director of the Union’s Nuclear Safety Program, this report comes as Japan is confronting a nuclear catastrophe caused by severe damage to a nuke plant complex 170 miles north of Tokyo, which followed an earthquake and tsunami which hit that area.

That Japanese plant has six reactors of a type–the GE Mark 1–which is identical to 24 of the 104 reactors operating in the US.
The Indian Point nuke plant, just 25 miles from NY City, is a creaking, leaky and dangerous time-bomb sitting on an earthquake fault line

A contingent of 20 right-wing veterans with flags and signs declaring their devotion to “our troops,” marched up to the blocked-off Pennsylvania Avenue area in front of the White House. One of the men wore a blue shirt with Army Security Agency printed on it.

“I was in the ASA,” I said to the man, attempting some cordial dialogue. At 19, I had been an Army Security Agency radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku.

The heavy-set man glowered at me and said: “I’m sorry to hear that.” It was as if he were somehow the arbiter of who was, and who wasn’t, a good American, as if he alone gave a damn about “our troops.”

I shot back at him: “So, what the hell does that mean?” He turned away, and I moved on. So much for dialogue.

It was a beautiful, sunny Saturday. By 10 AM a crowd had begun to gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House to hear a host of speakers. By the time Daniel Ellsberg, Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges had spoken, there were 1000 people in the park, many of them veterans. The rally had been called by Veterans For Peace.

A young woman who had served as a nurse in Iraq told the crowd a moving story of water shortages in Iraq and of having to live for days in clothes soaked with a wounded soldier’s blood. Ryan Endicott, a young Marine combat veteran and Winter Soldier spoke emotionally about refusing to re-deploy to Iraq and participate any more in a war he had concluded was immoral. A Vietnam veteran known as Watermelon Slim faced the Obama White House and chastised its resident (who was in Brazil) for assuming, and in cases like drone attacks, escalating the disastrous Bush war agenda.

Iraq Marine combat veteran Ryan Endicott and a mock drone over the White House (Photos: John Grant)

It was March 19th, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and, amazingly, the day the US began its aerial intervention into Libya – our third or fourth war, depending if you count Pakistan as a separate war from Afghanistan. The New York Times reported that the March 19 Libyan attacks were “on a scale not seen since the Iraq War.” It was eerily circular.

By the end of the day, DC park police had arrested 113 people.

Isabel Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, couldn’t have come out at a better time for black New Orleanians, who as 2010 statistics confirmed, but our own hearts knew, lost more than a third of our community in the last decade. As we reassess what we had – good and bad – what we miss and what matters, we may find instruction and solace in this book about a previous era of departures, comparing its lessons to our Diaspora.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautiful book. It opens with a quote from author Richard Wright: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown…respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.”

The Warmth of Other Suns takes place from 1915-1970 and contains facts that New Orleanians may have forgotten or may not have experienced, as we were insulated, somewhat, in an urban setting. But Wilkerson points to Monroe, La., to explain why one type of migrant left, exemplified by Robert Foster. Coming from a family of educators, Foster wanted more than his small town offered – a segregated school system and a hospital which didn’t allow black doctors to operate, as well as a white establishment which had specific roles for blacks.

Foster leaves to become a surgeon, settling in Los Angles after a long, arduous journey, which Wilkerson describes perfectly: “Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, father than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas.” The distance is also emotional as the book later shows. “He stayed awake at night weighing the options. All this education and no place to practice and live out his life as he imagined it to be.. a citizen of the United States like the passport said.”

Many of us may recall the trials of the South in the years of segregation and the frustrations experienced by professional people who could not work to their capability or get the same respect as whites in New Orleans. Segregation, its insults and its threats, affected everyone – men who were called boys on their jobs, and people who received less pay for the same work, for example. There were also the obvious stares, muttered curses and measured distances that characterized whites’ relations with us.
Author Isabel Wilkerson

 
Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor indicted for the murder of two young Pakistani motorcyclists, whom he gunned down in the back in broad daylight through his car windshield in a busy section of Lahore, Pakistan, has been freed, after the payment of $2.34 million in “blood money,” called diyya, to relatives of the two slain men.

The surprise “deal,” which Pakistani news reports are saying appears to have been forced on the relatives of the two men, who up to March 15 had insisted they wanted no blood money but only justice, was announced in a court session March 16 in Lahore, at which the prosecution’s case of murder was to have been presented.
There were angry protests in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad on word of the pardon of Davis
 

Both the US Ambassador, who expressed regret for the killings and gratitude to the victims’ families for their “generosity” in agreeing to the pardon, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, denied that they had paid any blood money for a deal, but that did not mean the CIA didn’t put up the cash. The New York Times (which withheld for two weeks at the behest of the White House information it had that Davis was a CIA contractor, even as it reported the official US lie that he was a “diplomat”) is reporting that a “new” counsel” representing the families of Davis’s victims, Raja Irshad, is saying the blood money was paid by the Pakistani government, but it, and the Wall Street Journal, are both also reporting that the US is reimbursing Pakistan. A more likely ultimate source of the funds is the CIA, which operates with a “black budget,” free of outside scrutiny.

The integrity of this “deal” is in question, though, with Pakistani media reporting that the two families suspiciously “went missing” several days before the hearing, with some having been seen taken away by unidentified men. They were delivered, also by unidentified men, to the court the day of the hearing, where each was asked by the judge if they pardoned Davis, and if they had received the blood money required under the country’s Sharia Law. Each reportedly replied affirmatively to both questions.

The 19 have subsequently vanished, leading to charges in Pakistan that they were compelled to accept a deal, and have subsequently left the country, fearing retaliation from groups that were demanding that Davis face trial for murder.