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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

When the human waste of politics gets to piling up so deep you want to run screaming into the night, a good remedy is to fall back to the powerful historical minds and immerse yourself in some great writing. I ran into this dilemma last Sunday, after a morning of reading The New York Times about the continuing blackmail antics of Rep. John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell and their merry band of Teabag Republican cutthroats.

As backdrop to the Boehner/McConnell farce, there were stories in The Times of floods, a religious bombing in Pakistan, persistent corruption in the Shiite-ruled government of US occupied Iraq, and lunatic Islamists in Afghanistan wanting to stone to death a teenage couple out of Romeo and Juliet whose romance crossed ethnic lines and offended arranged marriage customs. Finally, maybe the most sobering story of all, an equally lunatic Hasidic Jew from New York had connived with well-connected, post-9/11 security operatives to disseminate draft legislation for state and local governments across the United States to outlaw anything smacking of Islamic Shariah Law; this man’s legislation is apparently taking root in many localities and will no doubt sweep away a host of civil liberties in its flood waters, as it exacerbates a growing state of religious war in America.

The only bright spot in the Sunday Times was the story from Turkey about how a moderate Muslim government has effectively, slowly castrated an entrenched and corrupt military institution. Now there’s a positive story to keep an eye on. Turkey seems to be on a course of becoming a model for what a moderate Muslim government looks like. Egyptians are, no doubt, taking notes.

The military-civilian relationship in the United States is going the other way and is more like Guatemala or Egypt; like them, we’re a nation with a fig leaf of civilian democratic elections. In the US, the incredible military monster is sacrosanct — a huge sacred cow munching away contentedly on tax resources and driving the debt ever higher and higher as politicians of both parties cravenly kowtow and throw money at it, all the time decrying the debt. President Barack Obama has shown himself to be a number one shining example of this cravenness, a man who has become quite comfortable solidifying his power by resorting to international homicide with flying robots and special operations assassin teams. Meanwhile, he and his VP Joe Biden have pretty much given away the economic store to a rapacious right wing.

Starbucks, Joe Biden, John Boehner and Friedrich Nietzsche

All the above left me in state of the darkest gloom. With all this demoralization splashing around in my mind, I set off on some mundane Sunday missions. First, I stopped off at Target to pick up a sewing kit to repair a belt loop on a pair of jeans. As I walked into the giant box store mobbed with shoppers, I was suddenly plagued with a mysterious, shooting pain in my groin that came and went and made my walking at times quite painful and slow. At 64, this is par for the course, but I dreaded the thought of a doctor’s visit and whatever that might lead to, since all these expenses would fall under the $5,000 deductible in the policy I pay unbelievable gobs of money for to some criminal syndicate. I sometimes almost hope to get hit by the proverbial bus so I might actually get a real health benefit from all the money I hose out to this extortion racket. But, then, I’m sure if I were hit by a bus I’d be made aware of some loophole. Then, like Joseph K at the end of The Trial, maybe they’d just take me out and shoot me.

Next, it was on to the grocery store to pick up some supplies to sustain life. I planned to buy a nice piece of fish and a nice bottle of wine to share with my wife that evening. On the way to the grocery store, since it was such a blazing hot day, I decide to step into Starbucks for an iced coffee.

My wife Joyce and I were renting a car for the week this morning at a Hertz office just outside Philadelphia. There was a line of people either waiting to pick up a vehicle, or to return one.

The harried clerk behind the counter — the only guy in the office — was fielding calls while trying to serve the first guy in line, who was trying to rent a car for a vacation trip with his wife to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. No sooner would the poor clerk sit down at the computer to start typing in the information from the man’s driver’s license than the phone would ring — a phone that was located on a desk in a cubicle behind him, requiring him to get up and run around to the back cubicle.

The man at the counter, and others in the line, sighed audibly.

The clerk rolled his eyes in apology as he explained to the caller that he was backed up in the office, and would have to call her back. There was a pause, and he said into the phone calmly, “Within the hour. I promise.”

Then he came back to the counter, apologizing. The phone rang again. He ran back to the phone and fielded this second call, again saying he’d have to call the person back.

The man at the counter, likely a college professor judging by his baseball cap, which had embossed on the side “Penn Relays Official,” observed to no one in particular, “Here it is: the New American Economy.”

I said, “You got that right!”

Later, after four people had been taken care of and it was our turn, as we were inspecting the vehicle for dents and scratches before signing off on the rental, I asked the guy why the office was so short-staffed. “They cut us back to one person on Saturdays,” he said. “But there’s way too much work for one person.” (He had just had to leave four people in line in the office to run out across the parking lot, wearing his crisp office uniform, with its long pants, in 90-degree heat, to retrieve a sun-roasted black car for us and bring it to the front of the office.)

I asked him if he had some wall that he could beat his fist against when he got home. “I go straight to the gym after work,” he said with a wry laugh.

This incident happened on the same day that the local paper, the Philadlephia Inquirer, reported on its front page that Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, is planning to lay off 13,000 of its employees over the next four years.
US Companies aren't hiring, they're making existing workers work harder

The chief economist at ratings agency Moodys is warning that the U.S. could be headed for a renewed recession.

Calling the current situation “very perilous,” John Lonski adds that the politicians in Washington, where both parties are vying to present budgets featuring massive cuts in spending, could help bring on that recession–just as the new Conservative Party-led government in Great Britain brought on a return to recession this year through its aggressive cutting of public spending. Worse yet, they could create a new shut-down in credit or “liquidity” in the financial industry that “could be more serious even than what caused the collapse of Lehman Brothers” in 2008.

Lonski, in an interview with ThisCantBeHappening!, said, “What scares me is that, because of the weakened condition of the federal government, there is less confidence in the philosophy of `too big to fail’– the idea that the government will come in and back up any financial company that runs into trouble.” He said the government is probably no longer in a position to make trillions of dollars available to prop up failing big banks as it did in 2008 and 2009, and that fearing this, financial institutions may pull back, drying up lending.

Lonski and his colleague Ben Garber, another economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Research Group, today released a new report titled “Double Dip Risk Rises as DC Standoff Continues,” in which they warn that the U.S. “may be closer to a double dip recession than commonly thought.”

The two men note that the US economy “continues to soften,” and say that evidence is “proving elusive” of any recovery in the second half of of this year. And that’s “assuming a reasonable resolution of the debt standoff” between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, and increasingly even among Republicans themselves.

“Even with a market-friendly resolution of the debt standoff,” they write, “a double-dip recession is far from unlikely.”
The Economy (left) is heading south, while joblessness (right) continues to to rise