This Can't Be Happening!

 
 
My brother and I learned to shoot
At summer camp.
That is where gunpowder
Became my favorite smell;
It had a tangy burned pungency
That hung in the air after each shot,
Better than Christmas.
After five or six shots
We would all run up
To inspect our targets
Even though our acute vision
Had already reported back our score.
With our guns
We were all rebel-princes,
Hooded heroes and highwaymen,
Plotting ways to defend the commoner
From our hideaway
In the king’s forest.
 
And then there was the boy
Who shot his whole family
In the same town as our camp.
They knocked down the house,
Bulldozed it flat and planted pine trees
Over the spot.
The name of the boy
And the family was never uttered again.
It was like they were whited out.
But the trees are still there
Serving vigil

It’s appropriate that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at a luxury resort while freeloading as the guest of wealthy sponsors as one of 40 participants at a private quail-hunting vacation party.

The resort where he died, Cibolo Ranch Resort, located on land stolen by its founder from the Apache and Comanche people in the Big Bend region of west Texas, is a posh retreat favored by the ultra rich, offering rooms priced from $350 to $800 a night — and the bed Scalia died in was the top-priced presidential suite, as he was the guest of honor. He needed no credit card to check in either, since he and the other guests at the gathering reportedly had their bills covered by the resort’s owner, John Poindexter, a mullti-millionaire real estate owner, rancher and former investment banker.

The acerbic, blunt-speaking Scalia made his name as a High Court judge accepting freebies from wealthy businesspeople and right-wing outfits like the Federalist Society, even accepting free trips and vacation junkets from the likes of the aptly-titled “Vice” President Dick Cheney back in 2004 when Cheney had a case pending before the court involving an effort to force the VP to disclose what oil company executives had attended a closed meeting in his office on energy policy early in the first term of the Bush-Cheney administration. (Scalia, notably, did not recuse himself from hearing that case.)

We don’t at this point know what Scalia’s final junket was about — Poindexter makes a point of saying it “wasn’t about politics or law” — but it’s no surprise he wasn’t there on his own dime. That wasn’t the way Scalia operated. Indeed, so egregious and frequent were Scalia’s junkets that in October 2015 the New York Times wrote an editorial condemning them and calling for a reform to make such legalized bribery illegal.

Supreme Court justices, unlike members of Congress, don’t need to report such things as who takes them on luxury hunting trips. They are simply required under a vague judicial ethics standard to recuse themselves when they themselves feel they have a conflict of interest. Scalia made it abundantly clear, during his record 30-year tenure on the Supreme Court bench, that he did not feel getting freebies from the wealthy, affect his his judicial judgement even when his benefactor had a case pending before him.

Now that Scalia is gone, it will be interesting to see what Justice Clarence Thomas will do. Thomas, who slavishly emulated his mentor Scalia both in his voting on almost all cases brought to the High Court during his 25 years on the bench, and in taking every advantage of free vacations offered by wealthy right-wing businesspeople like the Koch brothers and others. How will Thomas vote now on cases, without Scalia to guide him? Will he glom on to another surviving right-wing jurist — perhaps Samuel Alito?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia takes his leave of the Supreme Court
 

Mohamed Yeslem Beisat, an ambassador for the Western Sahara, knew he faced a serious uphill struggle when he began his position in Washington, D.C. years ago as the representative for his country that is located on the northwest coast of Africa.

Beisat knew that most Americans knew nothing about the volatile circumstance that engulfs the Western Sahara, the nation that holds the undesirable distinction of being the ‘Last Colony’ on the African continent.

The little known Western Sahara sits on the Atlantic Ocean coast of Africa located south of Morocco, north of Mauritania and east of Algeria.

Beisat also knew that Morocco, the monarchy-ruled African nation that has illegally occupied the Western Sahara for four decades, spends millions of dollars annually lobbying U.S. legislators, top policy makers and influential journalists to turn blind-eyes toward Morocco’s colonization — an occupation that is fraught with human rights violations and economic exploitation.

Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara features rampant brutality and discrimination directed against the indigenous population –- the Saharawi –- according to multiple reports from entities as diverse Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.
Beisat explains Morocco's Wall (in background) during 2014 visit to Western Sahara
Morocco, since its 1975 invasion of the Western Sahara, has been able to defy agreements it made with the United Nations and other bodies requiring Morocco to conduct a referendum where the Saharawi could vote for either independence or alignment with Morocco. The ability of Morocco to defy that long series of official agreements to hold the referendum and/or withdraw from the Western Sahara is the result of strong support from France and tacit support from the United States.

Activist Alfredo Lopez discusses Bernie Sanders and how the left should respond to his campaign for president
 

Dave Lindorff, host of PRN FM’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” weekly radio program, talks with long time internet and Latino political activist Alfredo Lopez, about Tuesday night’s dramatic New Hampshire Democratic primary blowout win by Bernie Sanders, the independent and self-described democratic socialist junior senator from Vermont, who trounced opponent Hillary Sanders winning 60% of the vote to her 38% showing.

Lindorff and Lopez, both members of the ThisCantBeHappening! collective, discuss how the left should respond to Sanders’ surge in the polls (he’s now running neck-and-neck against Clinton nationally), and to the possibility that he could win the Democratic presidential nomination, and even the presidency in November. Sanders, they agree, is something new in modern US national politics — something not seen the early part of the 20th Century when Eugene Debs was running for president on the Socialist Party ticket. But because he’s running as a Democrat, they speculate about how he can be held, if elected, to his promise of a “political revolution,” and to the bold promises he is making.

To hear this conversation, click on the image, or go to the podcast at PRN.fm.

 
 
OK, just stand there behind the blind,
Get ready,
Watch the bait. . .Keep watching, keep watching.
There! Shoot!
Wait!
That’s the Lion King! Don’t shoot.
 
OK, whew! Ready, big guy?
Watch the bait.
Keep watching, keep watching.
There! Shoot!
Wait! Don’t shoot.
That’s King Leonardo!
 
OK, whew, ready tiger?
Watch the bait. . .Keep watching.
There! Shoot!
Wait! Don’t shoot.
That’s the Friendly Lion.
(Oh, look, he’s waving his tail
To thank you.)
 
OK, whew, ready Bud?
Watch the bait. . .Keep watching.
There! Shoot!
Wait! Don’t shoot.
That’s Aslan of Narnia. (Man, that’s creepy
The way he looked at you.)
 
Hey, stay where you are, pal.
What are you doing!
Don’t leave the blind!
Those may not be “real” lions
But fantasy is powerful.
You of all people should know that,
son.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

Bernie Sanders’ stunning success in the campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, highlighted by what is effectively a victory in the Iowa caucuses this past Monday, provokes serious thinking about what a Sanders presidency would look like.

Were he to take office, he would be doing so at a moment where the human race is considering the possibility of its extermination and thinking about ways to survive. In that conversation about survival, the Internet takes part of the center stage. It is not only a critical tool for education and information on our present and future but the communications tool in the struggle to have a future.

It is here that Sanders can mark his progressive territory because the Internet is so important to people’s lives and our movements of struggle. If Sanders is serious about this “political revolution” he talks about and has yet to really define, we’re going to need the Internet to make it happen.

Bernie Sanders: What are those possibles?
 

So the question is how good are Bernie’s politics on Internet issues. The answer is better than any other candidate’s. On issues of the Internet, Bernie is a vocal and public supporter of the Internet’s progressive movement but he’s not yet a leader. Whether he becomes a leader may impact the Internet’s freedom and, in the process, his own presidential aspirations.

 
A new thought occurred to Rami. It soothed him like a gentle caress. Not all men are born to be heroes. Maybe I wasn’t born to be a hero. But in every man there’s something special, something that isn’t in other men. In my nature, for instance, there’s a certain sensitivity. A capacity to suffer and feel pain. Perhaps I was born to be an artist.
                                                                – Amoz Oz, Elsewhere, Perhaps, a 1966 novel of kibbutz life
 

As a writer/photographer and a tax-paying American citizen, a story in the New York Times about Israel’s culture wars made me cringe. It seems the powerful, militarist right in Israel — so committed to expansion and settlements in the West Bank — is now trying to suppress ideas among the nation’s artistic and literary minds.

Albert Camus; the banned novel Borderlife and Amos Oz

Human creativity amounts to an individual human mind with its rich, active sub-conscious engaging in a dialogue with the outer realities of life. The mash-up that results is called Art. It’s a process that’s often infused with a subversive sensibility at odds with established power. In his perfect republic, Plato banned poets. Tyrants throughout history have been threatened by artists and writers. Hitler, of course, gave up on an artistic career in order to rule Germany and the world as his own personal work of art; he had men like Joseph Goebbels to assure artists and writers weren’t a threat. Art that didn’t promote Aryan purity and German superiority was “decadent” and banned; careers were destroyed. The impulse to attack artists and to cut off their patronage and funding is as old as tyranny itself.

It’s the perennial struggle between Power and Truth. In the short-term, Power can, and often does, run over Truth like a tank in the streets; while in the long run, Truth has the tendency to eat away at, and undermine, that Power. It’s at this juncture — when Power has made its play and relegated Truth to writhing in the dust — that the book burners and the state culture warriors begin to attack the arts for disloyalty, a failure of patriotism or in the end with trying to destroy the state.

In the novel Elsewhere, Perhaps, Amos Oz uses a mixture of third person and first person narration that ends up making the kibbutz called Metsudat Ram a character in his story. The character Rami, referenced in the quote at the top, is a sensitive young man. His father is dead and his older brother Yoash was killed in the Suez action. Part of him wants to be a hero like Yoash. He doesn’t want to be a mama’s boy. So he joins the infantry to fight Israel’s enemies. While away, his girlfriend Noga takes up with an older man. Rami’s artistic sensibilities haunt him. In the end, he becomes a synthesis of tough and sensitive and marries Noga.

London, UK — Police and prosecutors scheme to secure convictions of persons who did not participate in any crime. Racial minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of this improper practice.

Sounds like too many cities across the United States.

However, this practice of racist law enforcement is also rampant in three of the largest cities in England, including the capital city of London, according to a report released recently by the Centre For Crime and Justice Studies of Manchester Metropolitan University.

“The key findings [indicate] the criminal justice system is more flawed than we might imagine,” states the conclusion of the report entitled “Dangerous associations: joint enterprise, gangs and racism.”

The study documents that claims by police in Britain that young blacks dominate gang membership and thus are demonstrably the most violent are incorrect. Police and court data cited in the report document that black youth were not those who committed the most serious youth violence. In London for example, police list blacks as 72 percent of that city’s gang members. But official data collected for the report stated non-blacks committed 73 percent of the serious youth violence in London.
Tottenham rights activist Scott with report co-authors Clarke (left) and Williams (right) -LBWPhoto
The report found that prosecutors during trials of youthful suspects seize upon on the gang label levied by police to create a sinister perception of criminality that boost prosecutors chances of obtaining convictions. Prosecutors often push non-crime related ‘evidence’ such as listening to rap music and texting friends, particularly in cases where the defendant was not at the scene of the crime…or even where the defendant may not have known a crime would ever occur.

 
 
The Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major,
The Great Bear constellation
That presides over the Arctic.
Ursa shows the way to the North Star
Which has been helping people navigate
For thousands of years.
It’s hard to conceive of what that meant
For people on the North American continent,
To have that star, Polaris, up there
To depend on for orientation.
The Arctic is named for Arktos – Bear.
Is it really so strange
That Bear and her land share the same great spirit?
We aren’t used to making whole places disappear,
Only the souls and vitality of places.
Ursus, however, will not go away,
Being made of stars.
But Arktos has nowhere to go and
She can’t go to live in the sky,
Or can she?
I wonder how our distant descendants
Will explain these times.
Will they tell of a race of small-headed, one-eyed giants
Who chased Arktos into the sky
Where she found protection behind Ursus?
The Antarctic, on the other hand, is appearing
As the ice melts,
But no bears live there.
Antarctic means the opposite of Arctic;
It is the Land of No Bear.
If only we could find our way
To learning from our mistakes
Instead of making a religion of disproving our worth
Before all the eyes of the heavens.
 
 —Gary Lindorff

Even as Bernie Sanders’ insurgent “democratic socialist” campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is really starting to look like it might actually succeed, with polls now showing him ahead of Hillary Clinton in both the earliest primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and with Republicans engaged in a circular firing squad where all the people with guns are nut-jobs of one kind or another, making a Sanders presidency even seem possible, we read that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is contemplating running for the White House as an independent candidate.

Now while the idea of a mega-billionaire as president may be a sick joke, Bloomberg’s running for president on his own tab (he’s ready to spend $1 billion of his own money) is no joke at all. With Forbes magazine listing his current worth as $36.8 billion at the start of this year, he is the eighth richest man in America, just behind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and just ahead of Jim Walton.

It is hard to think of a worse idea than having a smug, self-congratulatory billionaire – someone not just from the top 1% of the population but the top 0.01% — sitting at the top of government telling us all what to do, but I suppose in the interest of fairness we should tote up his pros and cons. So in memory of the departed but not forgotten TCBH! co-founder Chuck Young (see his 2010 article Where Mayor Mike Can Push His Poll), here’s my list of five good and five bad things about having Bloomberg join the race for president as an obscenely wealthy independent candidate:
 

5. Good: Donald Trump, the likely GOP candidate at this point, will no longer be able to boast about his supposed business acumen. Forbes says Trump, no a self-made man but rather a trust-fund baby who got staked $1 million by his old man, is now worth $4.5 billion, making him only the 72nd richest man in America. That might seem a decent sum, but it’s just lunch money for Bloomberg ,who added more than that amount to his assets just over the past year, according to Forbes. And Bloomberg, who hails from an ordinary working family, made all his money himself (or rather, his employees made it for him), first in the securities industry and then with his Bloomberg financial information network.

Bad: Bloomberg is a tight bastard. During his three terms as mayor of New York, he allowed the New York public school system to sink into a funding black hole, as he tried to squeeze teacher salaries and pensions and to both close some schools and convert others to charter schools. The worst year was the Great Recession year of 2010-11, when revenues from the city budget for the city’s schools fell by 10.4% and from the state government, by 24.1%. Federal aid to New York City public schools was boosted that year by 1%, leaving the schools system short by 17%, or about $4.5 billion. Now maybe it wouldn’t be fair to have expected private real estate magnate Trump to turn over his whole nest egg to get the schools in his hometown through that one-year crisis, but Bloomberg in 2012 was worth a cool $25 billion according to Forbes. He could have funded the schools for the mostly impoverished kids of his city fully that school year and wouldn’t have evennoticed the difference.

Former Mayor Bloomberg's police goons defend Wall Street's tycoons from Occupy Movement protesters