This Can't Be Happening!

Philadelphia — A number of things converged to make my New Years special this year. Three of them were good, one was not so good — in fact, it had the sense of a nasty omen for the future.

First I had a great dinner with friends, including several veterans, at a Vietnamese restaurant in Upper Darby owned by a good friend whose father was an officer in the Vietnamese ARVN army in Nha Trang. He jokes he was “born in a bunker.” He’s the epitome of the hard-working Asian, with one daughter who is a highly respected physician, another in college. When talking to Edward I always wonder what his life would have been like if the United States had had the sense to take another course than the one they did at the close of World War Two and, later, following the French defeat. We’ll never know these what-ifs.

The Plowshares group with Agnes Bauerlein at the far left; and Agnes in more recent times
 

Today, I attended a memorial for Agnes Bauerlein, a Dutch-born peace-movement giant here in Philadelphia who recently died. She and her deceased husband, Charlie, a member of our Veterans For Peace chapter in Philly, parented 11 children. I always felt I was one of Agnes’ extended family, in a way one of her and Charlie’s “kids” as well. Agnes troubled her husband Charlie, a successful engineer with his own company, and many in her family, by devoting her life to civil disobedience. She poured blood over plans for bombs and used a hammer to dent parts for atomic bombs at an AVCO nuclear weapons plant she and others got into with fake IDs. What most impressed me was Agnes’s determination in 1991 to travel to Baghdad, where she was during the bombing that went on during the First Gulf War. Some said she was foolish and a little mad. For me, she was a courageous person who nurtured nearly a dozen kids and decided she wasn’t going to shut up and go along quietly when she saw US militarism at work. She saw the bodies of her brother and sister killed by bombs in World War Two, so unlike most of us, she well knew what she was protesting.

Agnes was born and raised in Holland and her family’s house was along the front lines at the end of the war. Her mother said opposing US military policy was wrong, because it was the US military that saved the family from the Nazis. That didn’t trouble Agnes. She blew off the criticism from the political right side of her family and followed her heart with courage and conviction, pretty much like no one else I’ve ever known. Her appeal in the AVCO case was delayed indefinitely and she never did real prison time for that offense. Charlie eventually came around and stood up for Agnes’ actions. He had voted for Reagan, but ended up a deeply committed fighter for peace. Some said, as a man and a husband, he’d lost control of his wife. He said that was nonsense: his wife Agnes had a good, honorable mind of her own and he was fine with that. Devoted Catholics, they both had a strong spiritual life, which fed into their peace work, in Charlie’s case that meant working with the VFP chapter in Philadephia.

Following three days of contentious testimony in a courtroom in Scranton, PA late last month, a federal district judge is considering a legal petition by Pennsylvania’s most well-known prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal for a finding that the state’s long-running refusal to treat his active case of Hepatitis-C, a potentially fatal disease, violates his Eighth Amendment right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.

Over the past 16 months Abu-Jamal has suffered an array of symptoms and ailments, from a serious skin condition to diabetes that witnesses at trial testified were symptomatic of and likely caused by an active case of Hep-C. It’s an infection the state has known him to have in his body since a blood screening test taken in 2012 when he was first transferred off of death row and placed into a general population prison following the overturning of his 1982 death sentence.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) tried initially to prevent the hearing, claiming that Abu-Jamal had not “exhausted” the department’s grievance procedures, and that his complaint about non-treatment was defective, for example because he had not explicitly named all of the doctors who had seen him. but Judge Robert Mariani was dismissive of those dilatory arguments and after rejecting them, ordered that the hearing on the injunction go forward.

During subsequent testimony by several DOC witnesses, including executives from Corizon, the controversial private Tennessee-based contracting firm that is supposed to provide medical services to the state’s prisons, and from the DOC itself, it was revealed that for 22 months until last November, the state DOC had no guidelines for treating the raging Hep-C epidemic that afflicts as many as a quarter of the state’s prison inmates (Hep-C is at epidemic proportions in all the nation’s prisons and jails). It was also disclosed that the DOC attorney, Laura Neal, had in her possession at the defense table a copy of a new treatment “protocol” drawn up in November, the existence of which the state had not even informed the court or Abu-Jamal’s attorneys. She said she had planned to use the document in questioning her witness, but had not intended to enter it into evidence.

When Abu-Jamal’s attorneys Bret Grote and Robert Boyle, and the judge, asked for a copy of that document, Neal sought to keep it sealed, ultimately explaining that the DOC didn’t want it to be disclosed publicly for fear that it would be used by another legal team that is currently pursuing a class action suit in a court in Pittsburgh against the DOC on behalf of all inmates in the state with Hep-C.

Again the judge was unsympathetic and ordered the document released immediately.

PA Dept. of Corrections protocol for (non) treatment of prisoners with critical Hep-C infections
 

Dave Lindorff and his guest on PRN.fm’s ‘This Can’t Be Happening!” program, Dr. Jess Guh, talk about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s court battle in federal court in Scranton to force the state’s prison system to provide him with treatment for his active, if left untreated, potentially fatal case of Hepatitis-C. Dr. Guh, a primary car physician from Seattle who has been investigating the shoddy standard of health care in the nation’s prisons, and who has reviewed some 100 pages of Mumia’s medical record, says that what Pennsylvania and many other states are doing to prisoners in their control is nothing short of malpractice and neglegence on a massive scale.

Dave Lindorff, PRN.fm host of ‘This Can’t Be Happening!’, talks with Dr. Jess Guh about Abu-Jamal’s fight for Hep-C treatment (Click here or on image to go to the podcast)

The leaves came off the last trees — a crabapple, a willow and a hardy Norway maple — during the first week of December this year, surely the latest I can remember seeing leaves on trees since we moved to the Philadelphia area 18 years ago. But it’s not just that.

A rhododendron bush beside the house has huge blooms ready to burst open, the white petal tips pushing out of their scaly looking egg-sized buds. And our garden is still boasting a surprisingly fast-growing crop of chard, sweet kale and perhaps most surprisingly, tall fava bean plants that, while they didn’t produce any beans this year, saute up to make a beautiful doumiao — one of my favorite Chinese vegetable dishes.

On a micro level, it is nice to be able to harvest fresh veggies pest-free from our garden a few days before the new year (and, judging by the 10-day forecast, well into 2016!), thanks to our not having had one below-freezing day yet this fall and winter, and only a few nights when the temperature dipped into the high 20s, not enough to kill hardier vegetables like kale and chard. But viewed through a climate-change lens this is pretty scary.

Nobody can tell me that climate change is a hoax.

Oh sure, we could chalk this thus-far winterless winter in the northeastern US to El Niño, but that just dodges the reality that this year’s El Niño is the mother of all El Niños. And why is that? Warming oceans.

It could be that we’ll get some cold weather later this winter — perhaps another “polar vortex” like we had last year, but even that, remember, was easily attributable to even more dramatic warming that has been occurring in the far north, up above the Arctic Circle, where markedly higher temperatures have weakened the force of the Jet Stream, and made its globe-circling course much more erratic, including big loops down into the temperate zone, including the central and eastern US, where it brought us arctic winds and a lot of snow.

In Upstate New York friends say the evidence of climate change is also evident. In the East Branch of the Delaware River, famous among trout anglers, the water has gotten so warm in summer that the trout are dying off. Runs of American eel, which used to also populate the river in summer months before heading off to the Sargasso Sea to breed, are now also in a steep decline. Meanwhile an invasive species, the ash borer, is wiping out the region’s many ash trees — once the favored wood for American baseball bats like the Louisville Slugger, as well as for furniture. Local sawmills are buying up all the trees they can before they’re all killed off. With no severe winters to kill off the bugs, this devastating blight will likely see the ash tree go the way of the American elm and chestnut.

Rhododendron buds opening after Xmas north of Philadelphia, and the 2015 Arctic sea ice minimum in 2015 vs. the historic average minimum extent of sea ice

 
The third in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis-C epidemic in the nation’s prisons. (Click here for Part I or here for Part II)
  
Seattle, WA – Physicians are held to professional expectations dictating that the failure to provide standard healthcare is malpractice. There is no difference between failing to provide a service and performing a liable medical mistake.

A recent study revealed that out of the top three reasons why OBGYN physicians are sued for malpractice, two of them are related to inaction: 1) delays in intervention when there are signs of fetal distress and 2) the improper management of pregnancy including failing to test for fetal abnormalities when indicated, failure to address complications of pregnancy, and the failure to address abnormal findings. As a family medicine physician, I have been warned countless of times that one of the most common lawsuits relates to not identifying cases of skin cancer. In each of the instances, an inaction that results in a patient not receiving standard care is considered malpractice.

Given that not providing standard of care is malpractice, Mumia has been a victim of malpractice at the hands of the prison health system in two major areas:
• Even though Hepatitis C treatment is not always required, the failure to provide it for Mr. Abu-Jamal would be medical negligence. By even the most conservative standards, he meets criteria for treatment.
• Failing to treat his elevated blood sugars until he was unconscious is clear malpractice and gross negligence.

Unfortunately, Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case is not an isolated incident. Across the country inmates are not only being denied necessary Hepatitis C treatment, but they are also being denied other basic healthcare needs.  

My special gun cannot sleep.
My gun is black steel and cold as a stone.
My gun talks to itself in the wee hours.
It has a soul.
It is lonely.
It dreams about hitting the bull’s eye,
Never missing.
Bam-bam-bam-bam, rapid fire.
The smell of gunpowder
Lingers over the dusty street
After a Western shootout.
One bullet through the heart of a terrorist.
Mother approves.
My special gun is Mama’s hero every time.
The third eye of the moon
Opens in my gun’s hypnagogic vision.
The moon is smiling down on the planet.
Smiling tenderly into a little pond.
A wave silently crossing the pond
Lifts the face of the moon.
Something sliding under the surface
Is pushing the water up.
Turbulence followed by stillness.
My gun sleeps.
Goodnight my special gun.

–Gary Lindorff

The second in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis-C epidemic in the nation’s prisons. (Click here for Part I)
 

Scranton — It’s always risky to try to second-guess how a judge will ultimately rule, simply based on that judge’s comments during a court hearing, or on which side’s attorney has objections over-ruled more frequently.

Having said that, Federal District Judge Robert Mariani, during a hearing Friday to consider a request by state prison inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal for a preliminary injunction ordering the state to provide appropriate treatment for his active case of a potentially fatal Hepatitis-C viral infection, showed impatience and even annoyance with the state’s efforts, both at the prison and including in court, to continue refusing treatment and to delay any legal hearing on the issue.

The proceeding began in a packed courtroom in the William J. Nealon Federal Building and US Courthouse here with consideration of a motion by Laura Neal, an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) to have Abu-Jamal’s appeal summarily rejected on the grounds that he had allegedly “not fully exhausted” administrative grievance remedies concerning his lack of medical treatment by the DOC and that he had specifically not asked in his initial complaint for treatment for Hep C.

Judge Mariani pointed out from the bench that the DOC, despite Abu-Jamal’s displaying grave signs of a mystery skin ailment that had turned the skin on most of his body into what prison doctors described as “elephant skin,” and despite his sudden development of type-2 diabetes, which within a few weeks of onset had raised his blood glucose to a life-threatening level, causing him to collapse into unconsciousness, and despite having known since a prison screening blood test in 2012 that he had contracted Hep C, had not, at that point, even conducted a test to look for signs of the active virus in his blood until May of 2015. That was well after he had already filed his initial complaint.

When attorney Neal continued to insist the Abu-Jamal had not exhausted his grievance option, and later that he had not named the specific doctors involved in his care at the prison, the judge said, “What he (Abu-Jamal) asserts is a lack of diagnosis and an absence of medical care. If you say that to exhaust (his grievance remedy option) he has to name every doctor involved, that’s a tortured argument.”

Photo showing part of the serious skin rash suffered by Mumia Abu-Jamal, traced to his untreated Hep-C infection. Prison lawyers sought unsuccessfully to have it barred as evidence at his hearing, claiming it was ‘inflammatory’
 

Philly City Hall Protest
 

The first in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis C epidemic in the nation’s prisons. (Click here for Part II)
 

The big courthouse news in Pennsylvania this week does not involve yet another sordid revelation in the sleazy racist-pornographic email scandal now soiling top justice system officials in the Keystone State that include a state supreme court justice and ranking prosecutors.

This big news is rare courtroom testimony from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the renowned jailhouse journalist considered by many around the world as an authentic political prisoner in America.

On December 18th Abu-Jamal is scheduled to testify during a federal court hearing on his lawsuit attacking medical mistreatment from Pennsylvania prison authorities, and demanding –- negligent treatment that almost ended his life earlier this year. The lawsuit also seeks a court order mandating that he and other Pennsylvania inmates diagnosed with Hep C, a potentially deadly diseased, get treated with medications that, while costly, have a proven cure rate that is quite impressive

Abu-Jamal has rarely testified in court during the thirty-plus-years he’s waged legal battles in criminal and civil courtrooms at state and federal levels. Abu-Jamal spent nearly thirty-years on death row improperly due to calculated error by the judge at his 1982 trial for killing a Philadelphia policeman. Pennsylvania appellate courts cavalierly upheld that trial judge’s error but that error was eventually overturned in federal court leading to Abu-Jamal’s current life-without-parole sentence. Pennsylvania is the state with America’s second largest number of inmates with life-without-parole sentences

This federal court hearing arises from a lawsuit filed over failures of Pennsylvania prison personnel to properly treat medical problems that produced painful rashes and open sores all over Abu-Jamal’s body. Medication given to Abu-Jamal during the mistreatment of those rashes produced dangerous side effects including diabetes, a serious condition that went untreated by the prison medical personnel that also refused to inform Abu-Jamal about the diabetes. Earlier this year that untreated diabetes caused Abu-Jamal to blackout. Prison officials reluctantly rushed him to a hospital emergency room in diabetic shock close to death.

When I was very young, my parents used to tell me why having “lots of toys” wasn’t a good idea. “The more you have, the more you want,” they would say. I didn’t have many toys — we were poor — so the idea of possessions feeding greed didn’t make much sense to me then.

But I’ve learned the truth of that statement from observation over the years and lately I’ve been observing Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg is a 31-year-old computer programmer who did two things that made him famous: he founded Facebook, the social networking super service, and, as a result, he amassed a fortune worth about $46 billion. His bank account is as large as the capitalization of many countries.

The Zuckerberg Family

How he got to these lofty heights of wealth and cultural impact is a matter of often fierce debate — he’s been sued by former “partners” several times. But what’s more important than how he got control of Facebook is what he’s constructed with it: a ubiquitous presence in the lives of a billion people with the potential to frame and manipulate their communications, their relationships and, to a frighteningly large extent, their lives.

So last month, when Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced in a letter to their new baby — a rather novel way to package a press release — that, over the course of their lives, they will give almost all their Facebook shares to a project called the Chan Zuckerberg Iniative, the world took note.

The Initiative, they explained, would “advance human potential and promote equality” in health, education, scientific research, and energy. In short, change the world: on its face, a worthy cause. But, like many of Zuckerberg’s plans and projects, this one has another side that is darker, more cynical and, even if only partially successful, a potential nightmare for the human race.

 
 
Mouse (who never had an evil thought)
Asked penguin (who never raped or pillaged),
Have you seen caterpillar
(that one who never held anyone at gunpoint)?
Oh, you mean butterfly, said penguin,
Now he is butterfly (but, just like caterpillar,
He never held anyone at gunpoint either).
Crow (who never stabbed anyone in the back),
Who happened to overhear this conversation,
Said he just saw butterfly
Flying over the garden.
Should I tell him you want him? asked crow.
 
Just then up crept lion (who never bought or sold sex).
What’s going on around here? he asked
He was looking at mouse, who seemed to be in charge.
And mouse (who never had an evil thought)
Was looking back at lion wide-eyed.
I thought you were poisoned! said mouse.
I was poisoned, said lion, but I rallied.
I’m still not feeling tiptop.
 
Those humans. . .
Said worm (who never cheated at cards).
Sticking his head out of a hole in the ground,
They’ll put you on a hook and throw you in the river.
Yeah, why do they do that shit, said crow.
Sometimes they just want to look around
And sometimes they just want to kill you.
Why, they’ll stab you in the back!
 
A lot of them think evil thoughts, said mouse.
Some rape and pillage, chimed in penguin.
They buy and sell sex too, said lion.
I don’t know how I know that, but it’s true.
Here comes butterfly, cawed crow.
Butterfly landed on lion’s mane sedately.
What are we talking about?
Humans, squeaked mouse dismally.
 
I had one hold me at gunpoint, said butterfly
(Who used to be caterpillar).
Everyone looked genuinely surprised.
But only for a second because
That’s when mouse
Invited everyone to a party.
Where did worm go?
Oh, I think he went to get his cards.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff