Category: Uncategorized

 
Media coverage of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline has been hopelessly myopic. Certainly environmental justice, police brutality and the violation of sacred burial grounds are important topics, but no one has addressed the larger systemic issues at play: Native American treaty rights and how their handling portends dismally for the everyone else. Even the most self-centered and politically apathetic must realize Pastor Martin Niemöller’s warning that it’s only a matter of time before even the most mainstream of society are persecuted.

To truly appreciate the full significance of the face-off at Standng Rock, one has to understand the historical context of this struggle, which has seen supporters from 300 Indian tribes lining up to back the Sioux People.

Every person in the United States has the right to clean water, but for Native Americans, that right is two-fold. The treaties that set up Indian reservations were not simply land ownership agreements. The terms actually dictated a broader set of terms. This includes not just land, but also the obligation to protect tribal property and assets; in other words, natural resources such as clean water.
  
Protectors at Standing Rock

Furthermore, the Snyder Act of 1921 delineated that the federal government is also obligated to provide health care to federally recognized tribes. While this typically takes the form of providing clinics and health insurance through Indian Health Services, ensuring clean water is obviously a basic tenant to providing basic public health care.

So when the Sioux who live on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation demand that their source of clean water is protected, it’s not simply a matter of basic human rights, but also a contractual financial obligation.

But the bigger concept at play here is that the 56.2 million acres of land that are identified as reservation land (totaling about 2% of the United States), are actually held “in trust.”

Most of us don’t know what that means. In life experience of the average American, you either own something or you don’t, but a “trust” is something in between. Some rich children have an idea. It’s similar to the “trust funds” that wealthy people set up for their children. The money is named to them and for their use, but with active management and significant restrictions on its use. Only at least with rich kids, at a certain age, the trust money usually is given to them outright and they can spend it however they see fit. That will never happen for the lands held in trust for Native Americans.

What that means on a practical level is that even if a specific tribe has rights to the land of reservation, it’s only in the setting of the high regulation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

With one week to go in this year’s presidential election — an astonishing and depressing contest in which the two least-liked and least-trusted candidates in history are the two choices put up by our two main political parties — it’s time to look at why left and liberal people should not vote for the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Obviously, nobody on the left or center left is going to vote for Donald Trump, but all too many are falling for the Clinton campaign’s main argument, which boils down to: You probably don’t like her, don’t trust her, and realize that she’s a greedy, entitled rich person, but she’s still better than Trump.

Honestly, is that a good reason to vote for our nation’s president?

I suppose, if we lived in a peaceful world, if the US were a peace-loving country instead of one that is wasting 55% of our federal taxes on military spending, much of it to terrorize or actually blow up people in other parts of the world — usually places where people are living in abject poverty even before they are bombed and invaded — if we weren’t facing an existential crisis of accelerating climate change that could wipe out most of the human race if something urgent isn’t done, and if there weren’t already 45 million people, or roughly 15% of the US population, stuck below the poverty line, perhaps such an argument would make sense. But the reality is that Hillary Clinton won’t change any of that, any more than President Obama did. In fact, she is likely to make these situations worse, if elected — in some cases perhaps worse than even Trump would do.

My biggest concern about Clinton has to do with war and increased military spending.

Clinton is, to put it gently, a confirmed and unapologetic “hawk.” She calls for what is euphemistically in the US called a “muscular” foreign policy. Muscular is a term of art in US government circles that means using the US’s outsized military might to pressure or even terrorize other countries into backing US foreign policy (think Philippines, Pakistan, Spain, etc.), and to invade or subvert those that do not go along (think Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.).

Clinton has made it clear, including in her third national debate against Donald Trump, that she intends to try and impose a “no-fly” zone over Syria if elected. Now recall that Syria is a nation with an internationally recognized government, and that its government, headed by Basher al Assad, while clearly a dictatorship, did what embattled governments do, and invited Russia to send air support to protect it from a terrorist insurgency known as ISIS, funded and trained by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries. A US air campaign to try and bar Syrian aircraft and the aircraft of their Russian ally from conducting military actions against ISIS and other elements like Al Nusra (the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda) fighting to overthrow it, would be an illegal act of war — a supreme war crime. It would also, in the view of top American generals, mean war with Russia.

Hillary Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin, whose emails from Clinton could upend the presidential race
 

 
 
It took me all this time
to notice how the plants
in the course of their slow marathon,
pass on the torch of life
from Spring to Fall
 
And how,
when the last bit of green fades away
the landscape relaxes
into deep yoga
and goes into zazen.
 
As I grow older
I am satisfied.
I am sure that I have found a real friend in nature.
The garden is an old friend,
that with my help
 
Will be born again come May.
My aging has been slow
compared to the swiss chard
and the squash.
Look at these hands!
 
So wrinkled and creased
and tough like the kale
that is still feeding us.
But even though it is tough,
the kale is sweeter after a frost.
 
I like to think that I am sweeter
than I was when I was younger.
It’s just the way it is.
Even though sometimes
I feel like flipping off the world
 
For making it so difficult
to just live and be myself,
the world that could so easily
have turned me terminally bitter,
like November kale, I am sweeter!
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

A vivid example of value from decriminalization of possessing small amounts of marijuana occurred at the Philadelphia airport recently, a few days after the release of a report from two prominent organizations that called for the national decriminalization of personal use/possession of marijuana and other illicit drugs.

This example, interestingly, occurred on the day of the second anniversary of Philadelphia’s implementation of decriminalization, the enforcement practice that replaces arrests for marijuana possession with issuance of traffic-ticket like citations. That enforcement change has saved the City of Philadelphia at least $9-million in costs related to arrests and adjudication for marijuana possession, according to calculations by local analysts.

The airport discovery of a small amount of marijuana in the luggage of three-time Philadelphia GOP mayoral candidate Sam Katz resulted in embarrassment for Katz but not his arrest and court proceedings. Authorities issued a $25 citation to Katz that allowed the nationally respected municipal-finance-expert-turned-award-winning-documentary-filmmaker to continue to Florida for a planned fishing trip.

Philly pot activist N.A. Poe (center) at decriminalization anniversary. LBW Photo
 

Before Philadelphia became the largest city in America to implement decriminalization of simple possession of marijuana on October 20, 2014, thousands endured arrest annually — arrests that produced the stain of a life-altering criminal record. During the years 2012-2013 before decriminalization in Philadelphia police arrested 8,580 adults and juveniles. Philadelphia possession arrest figures for 2015 and part of 2016, after implementation of decriminalization, list around 1,500 Philadelphians arrested for marijuana possession – a marked decrease from pre-decriminalization days.

“Decriminalization has been a resounding success for the municipal government and for cannabis consumers in Philadelphia,” PhillyNORML official Chris Goldstein said. Goldstein, an expert on cannabis policy, writes a weekly column on cannabis issue for philly.com, the news website for Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers.

 
The recent Encuentro (or Encounter) At the Border in the middle of Ambos Nogales — the term used to consider Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, as one community — was a wonderful distraction from the Donald and Hillary Show, which may be the most tiresome and preposterous encuentro in American political history.

Pablo Peregrina sings and an acrobat dances at the wall cutting through Ambos Nogales

For two days, from north and south, people trekked to the two Nogaleses to participate in the gatherings and demonstrations critical of the militarized US/Mexico border there. Hundreds of Mexicans and North Americans spoke out for a more humane, more sensible and more constructive border arrangement between the two nations. Citizens of both nations were fed up with the mistrust and paranoia, the growing array of weaponry and police-state surveillance with drones and other mysterious de-humanizing technology — plus the not unusual grisly fact of Mexican corpses encountered in the Arizona desert. The timing for such an encuentro of citizens from both nations was good, given immigration along the border has become a major football in national political scrimmaging.

Donald Trump, of course, is going to build a wall to protect frightened North Americans from the scourge of “rapists” and other brown-skinned demons insinuating themselves from the south by hook or crook into our exceptional, Anglo culture. He’s going to make Mexico pay for this wall, he tells us, by fomenting a trade war with Mexico favorable to the US, thus making Mexico “pay” for his wall. Today, some 580 miles of barriers exist along the entire 1,989 miles of border. There’s currently a very tall and very ugly rusted steel wall running through Ambos Nogales.

A split rally was held for two days at this steel wall, with people coming from the south and from the north. It was sponsored by the School Of the Americas Watch, a group that had has for 25 years held annual demonstrations at the gate of Fort Benning in Georgia. The Friday before the weekend events at the wall, a large, boisterous rally and vigil was held at an immigration detention center in Eloy, north of Tucson. There were also workshops at a Nogales hotel, where all aspects of the militarization of our southern border were addressed.

Social Security got short shrift in the presidential “debates” this year, meriting only a brief mention at the end of the third event, and even then, only by Hillary Clinton, who vowed not to cut benefits in any effort to bolster the system’s funding (a promise she was only grudgingly pushed into by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign).*

But the truth is that benefits have been getting cut, are being cut in 2017, and unless something is done, will continue to be cut in the future. This is because the method used to calculate the annual adjustment for inflation each year is, to borrow a phrase popular with Donald Trump, “rigged.”

Just consider this. The Consumer Price Index or CPI, actually the CPI-U version of the index which is used by nearly all federal agencies, including the IRS (which uses it to recalibrate tax brackets each year), found inflation in the US running at 0.73% in 2015, and at 2.07% year-to-date through September 2016 (it was 1.46% for the 12-month period Oct. 2015 through Sept. 2016, suggesting that the rate has been actually accelerating through the latter part of this year. Yet the modified version of the CPI, called CPI-W, which Congress since 1983 has mandated that the Social Security Administration use to calculate cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits, showed no inflation in 2015, and only 0.3% inflation for 2016.

That’s why Social Security beneficiaries — the elderly, the disabled and dependent children of Social Security beneficiaries — received no increase in their benefits during 2016 over the prior year, and why their benefit checks in 2017 will only increase by a paltry 0.3% (That would be an extra $4.50 a month or $54 for the year for someone receiving a typical Social Security benefit check of $1500 per month!).

Now reasonable people can argue whether the elderly and disabled spend more or less than other Americans on food, on entertainment, on transportation or on health care, but anyone who claims that the elderly have faced no higher costs during 2016 than in 2015, or that 2017 won’t cost them more than $54 extra than they had to pay to survive in 2016 is, to put it simply, lying.

Both parties in Congress have been stiffing seniors and the disabled for decades by insisting on Social Security using a lousy CPI measure to calculate annual benefit inflation adjustments (courtesy the Union of Electrical workers)
 

Anyone but a rich person who doesn’t even look at what she or he is spending knows that groceries are more expensive, that bus and taxi fares are up, and that the cost of cars, car repairs and car insurance have risen. Health care costs are rising too, as well as health insurance costs. So are rents. Basically everything the elderly have to pay for has gone up in price each year, but their mainstay — and for 33% of the elderly, Social Security is their only source of income, while for 61% it represents more than half their income — has stayed essentially flat.

So long
so long
I’ve got to be drifting
 
The dust storm blew
 
It hit
like thunder
 
In the month called Gray
I walked down
to the grocery store
it was crowded
 
One pound of butter
for two pounds of gold
 
Kind friend, kind friend,
I’ve got to be drifting
 
I’ll sing it again
drifting along
so long, it’s been good
so long
 
The old dust storm
blowed
 
So black
so black
 
The telephone rang
 
And rang and rang
and rang and rang
and rang
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

 
Actions and inactions by Philadelphia’s District Attorneys Office that have blocked Sharif Anderson from his day-in-court for an arrest that took place over 1,200-days ago have elevated this Philadelphia police abuse victim into a prime example of what the phrase “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied” means.

During recent months Philadelphia prosecutors have repeatedy presented specious requests in court that have delayed trial dates for Anderson, who endured a brutal May 27, 2013 arrest when Philadelphia police confronted him as he videoed an incident of police brutality with his cell phone.

Those requests by prosecutors for delays in the Anderson case raise issues regarding adherence of prosecutors to a provision in the Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers in Pennsylvania that states it is “not proper for a lawyer to routinely fail to expedite litigation.”

The Philadelphia District Attorneys Office declined requests for comments on issues raised in the case of Sharif Anderson. “Unfortunately, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office cannot comment…because the case is still active,” stated a self-serving email reply from the DAs Office.

Protestors at march against deadly May 1985 bombing by Philadelphia police. LBW Photo
 

Disturbingly, it is not unusual for prosecutors in Philadelphia and elsewhere around America to reflexively pursue obstructionist tactics that shield police in cases that contain documented evidence of improper and/or biased actions by police.

The failures of prosecutors to prosecute police misconduct was an underlying element in reports critical of abusive policing issued by the U.S. Department of Justice after high profile examinations of law enforcers in Baltimore, Maryland; Cleveland, Ohio and Ferguson, Missouri — three cities that erupted in protests following incidents of abusive policing.

The “town-meeting”-formatted “debate” between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Sunday night was, as could have been expected, a disappointing affair, with the two moderators generally avoiding any real challenge to the lies and distortions of the two candidates and declining to push them into critical areas that have been ignored throughout this fall’s presidential campaign — like climate change, an increasingly dangerous conflict between nuclear powers that could trigger a likely nuclear world war, and the worsening income gap in the US which, let’s face it, neither candidate has a program or even a desire to combat.

On balance though, while both candidates were awful, I would say the night went worse for Clinton. Trump’s challenge in this second outing, coming right after the release of an 11-year-old video in which he boasted of assaulting women, was firstly to defuse that damaging revelation, and secondly to avoid losing his cool and making outrageous extemporaneous statements that would worsen his standing as a sober “leader.” He largely met both challenges, apologizing for his lewd boasting and his obnoxious and abusive behavior as described in the video, which he dismissed as “locker-room talk” that he wasn’t proud of, and sticking for the most part to criticisms of Clinton’s actual actions (and inaction) and to her words. His performance probably was adequate to at least staunch the stream of defections of Republican candidates and Republican voters from his campaign and support base.

Clinton meanwhile, had the challenge of trying to get the public to trust her. In this she failed miserably. Smirking frequently when she was being accused by Trump of serious crimes and of blatant and repeated lying, she clumsily tried to dodge some serious and valid charges he made against her. These on-screen actions and lame efforts to change the subject will only succeed in making her less trusted by those voters who have still not made up their minds about which candidate, if any, to back on November 8.

For example, when Trump hammered at Clinton for having deleted and then “bleached” from her hard drive over 30,000 emails — actions taken after she had already received subpoenas for them — she tried to dodge the issue by referring, in a complete non-sequitor, to the 50,000 emails that “I did provide.” It was hardly an adequate response, and effectively simply confirmed her crime of obstruction. The two moderators, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, did almost nothing to press her on this failure to respond.

Without Stein's perspective included, presidential 'debate' two was largely devoid of content
 

Word that Yahoo! last year, at the urging of the National Security Agency, secretly developed a program that monitored the mail of all 280 million of its customers and turned over to the NSA all mail from those who used any of the agency’s thousands of keywords, shows that the US has become a total police state in terms of trying to monitor every person in the country (and outside too).

With the courts, especially at the appellate and Supreme Court level, rolling over and supporting this massive evisceration of basic freedoms, including the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure and invasion of privacy, perhaps the best way for us to fight back is to overload the spy system. How to do this? Just copy and paste random fragments of the following list (a bit dated, but useable), provided courtesy of the publication Business Insider, and include them in every communication — email, social media, etc. — that you send out.

The secret Yahoo! assault (reported on here by Alfredo Lopez in yesterday’s lead article), works by searching users’ emails for keywords on an NSA list of suspected words that might be used by alleged terrorists or anti-government activists, and then those suspect communications are forwarded to the NSA, where humans eventually have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Too much chaff (and they surely have too much chaff anyhow!) and they will be buried with work and unable to read anything.

In fact, critics of the government’s metastasizing universal surveillance program, including former FBI agents and other experts, have long criticized the effort to turn the US into a replica of East Germany with its Stazi secret police, cannot work and is actually counter-productive, because with spy agencies’ limited manpower looking at all the false leads provided by keyword monitoring, they are bound to miss the real dangerous messages. In fact, this was also the argument used against the FBI’s program of monitoring mosques and suspecting every Muslim American who expressed criticism of the US. Most are just people saying what a lot of us say: that the US wars in the Middle East are wrong or even criminal, but they are just citizens or immigrants exercising their free speech when they do this, not terrorists, and spying on them is and has been a huge waste or time and resources.

So, to help destroy the continuing and expanding effort to monitor everything we do, here’s a sample of the NSA’s keyword list: