Category: Uncategorized

Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world.
                                                                                - Amy Goodman
 
Since a June 2009 coup in Honduras, violence beneficial to rightist power brokers and international corporations — violence directed against activists for the poor and indigenous — has skyrocketed. News of this rarely reaches mainstream America. The real story is that the US government, as in the past, talks pretty but is an accessory in Honduras’ descent into murder.

Murder victim Berta Caceres, co-founder of COPINH, fought for the rights of the poor. Click hereto hear John Grant and PRN.fm ‘This Can’t Be Happening!’ show host Dave Lindorff discuss Clinton’s role in the Honduran coup and Caceres’s murder.

On March 3rd, Berta Caceres, 44, co-founder of COPINH (the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was assassinated by killers who broke into her home in La Esperanza (in English, Hope) at 1AM. Gustavo Castro Soto, a Mexican environmental activist who witnessed the murder and was himself shot twice, has been refused permission to return to Mexico and is hiding out in the Mexican embassy in Tegucigalpa. The financial officer of COPINH has been interrogated four times at length by police; she told Amy Goodman it’s an effort to suggest the murder was due to internal COPINH politics. A COPINH member was briefly arrested by the police as a suspect, then released. Then, another COPINH activist, Nelson García, was killed last week. Police say Garcia’s killing was an “isolated” act.

“Hundreds of activists have been killed. It’s just a nightmare in Honduras,” says Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, referring to the period since the 2009 coup. “The NGO Global Witness declared Honduras the ‘worst country to be an ecologist,’ having ‘a climate of near total impunity’ that contributed to the killing of 109 environmental activists between 2010 and 2015, the highest per capita rate in the world,” says Andrea Lobo, one of many out-of-the-mainstream observers of Honduras’ decent into oppressive violence. (See Amy Goodman and Democracy Now for more on the story.)

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was President Obama’s secretary of state at the time of the 2009 coup. At dawn on June 28th, a military unit invaded the home of duly elected President Manuel Zelaya, woke him from his bed at gunpoint and flew him to Costa Rica. Ms Clinton and President Obama expressed obligatory regret over the coup, then did absolutely nothing to turn it around. Rumors spread of secret US involvement on a direct or indirect basis. After a brief hiatus, military aid was reinstated in full to the Honduran military. Secretary Clinton publicly called for nations around the world to support the government installed by the coup and pushed preparations for new elections. Ms. Clinton is very skilled at working this kind of political knife-in-the-kidney operation with a bright PR smile, all the time counting on the American people to have little interest in the comings and goings of a place like Honduras. Unlike the SNAFU in Benghazi, her Republican enemies have no interest in criticizing her for running cover for a coup that removed a left-leaning president in Honduras.

I won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic Party nomination for president, and I won’t heed Bernie Sanders if, as he has vowed to do, he calls on his supporters to “come together” after the convention, should he lose, to support Clinton and prevent Donald Trump or another Republican from becoming president.

Here’s why:

Hillary Clinton on her best of days is still a serious menace to both the earth’s continuance as a habitable planet, and to peace. A committed neoliberal who has pursued, both as a senator and as a secretary of state, a policy of economic and military destabilization of sovereign governments, with no regard for the aftermath of such criminality (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Venezuela, Libya, Ukraine and Honduras, but especially Libya, Ukraine and Honduras, which were very much her doing in her last public position as secretary of state), Clinton has made it clear even on the campaign trail that she considers Russia to be an enemy. If elected, she has also made it clear she’ll continue a dangerous policy of brinksmanship, pushing for NATO membership of more nations bordering Russia, and moving offensive weapons and troops there too. The stated neoliberal (and neoconservative) goal is to ultimately destabilize Russia so that a) President Putin is removed, and b) so that Russia further fragments into smaller nation-states. This is a mad recipe for World War III, and Clinton, as a new president out to prove her toughness, is a good bet to push things to a point where that war could become a reality.

She would, as president, also continue the long-time US policy of destabilization of elected governments in Latin America, and, in the Middle East, the abject and unqualified support of the virtually fascist government in Israel, as well as of the islamo-fascist arab regimes like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — all of which she supported as a senator, and helped facilitate as Obama’s first secretary of state.

A supporter of fracking and of oil exploration, and even of the coal industry, all of which industries are funding her campaign, she will not take any consequential action to combat global warming that would threaten those industries. If she took the issue seriously, why would so many of the top “bundlers” of PAC contributions to her campaign be lobbyists from the energy industry?

If the rule is, judge a woman by who her friends are, let’s look at Clinton’s friends. So how about this rogue’s gallery: Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest US war criminals of the post-WWII era, arch-neocon Richard Kagan, a co-founder of the notorious Project for a New American Century (the playbook for the Bush/Cheney administration’s invasion of Iraq and demonization of Syria and Iran), and even G.W. Bush VP Dick Cheney, have all praised Clinton and she herself bragged about praise from Kissinger for her work as Secretary of State.
Hillary and Donald, no degree of separation? Deciding who is the worse candidate is a tough call.
 

Bernie Sanders’ brash campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president took a “Yu-u-u-u-ge” hit on Tuesday, not only losing big as expected in Florida and North Carolina, but also in Ohio, and narrowly losing too in Illinois and Missouri.

But the good news is that at a big rally in Phoenix, Arizona, held (but blacked out by the corporate media) on the night of the ballot counting in those elections in a state that will be holding its Democratic primary next Tuesday, Sanders announced that his now longer-shot campaign for the nomination will continue.

Sanders, early in his campaign, had said that at the end of the day, if Hillary Clinton were to win the nomination, he would support her.

But the reality is that by not conceding at this point in the campaign, with two and a half months of primaries still to go, including in such big states as California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Sanders will continue (as he did in Phoenix) to shame and embarrass his opponent Clinton, calling out her reliance on millions of dollars in corrupt and corrupting campaign contributions from Wall Street banks and hedge funds, military contractors, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies.

Then too, while the corporate media are treating Sanders as if his effort is now quixotic, the other reality is that he can still win. Clinton has run through all the states that she had any real advantage in and Sanders has come painfully close to winning others, like Illinois and Missouri. Now the the focus of the primaries moves west, where Sanders should be at his strongest. He needs to win the rest of the races by 58%. That’s a high bar, but consider that he’s already done that in Kansas, Vermont, Minnesota and New Hampshire, and came close to that landslide figure in Nebraska, it’s doable. The Sanders goal is to win big going forward, and if Clinton starts losing badly in those contests, to then work at prying loose both Super and pledged delegates worried that Clinton will lose against Trump or whoever the Republicans end up nominating.

Late Tuesday night, Sanders continued his campaign with a rally in Phoenix, where he denounced Clinton for her taking of corporate bribes (click on image to go to the actual speech)
 

He will continue to denounce the job-killing trade agreements, from NAFTA to the latest one, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (sic) currently being pushed by President Obama, and promoted by Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

He will continue to call for a country that uses diplomacy, not war, as its default foreign policy approach.

And he will continue to denounce the corrupt and racist justice system and the militarized policing in the US that have together made this country the incarceration capital of the world, and a nation that is more of a domestic war zone than a civilized society.

In continuing his campaign in this manner, Sanders will be undermining Clinton, particularly among the key portions of the electorate that are normally the most supportive of Democratic candidates — progressives, young people, African Americans and Latinos, and working-class people of all colors.

 
The electrodes were pulled,
The thing woke, shaking off its death-trance,
Got up, looked around.
We had a monster.
 
It is ours.
 
We created it
Out of provincialism,
Greed
And our fear of everything.
 
It swam up out of the depths of our
Not taking ourselves seriously,
Evolved out of our choosing war every time.
It grew fat in the nursery of our cultivated indifference,
Descended when we lost our appetite for principles.
It started by devouring our dreams.
It licked its shark teeth
When we let the angry neighbor convert us.
When we let the self-righteous
Do all the praying,
Its shadow crossed the land.
When we gave up on each other,
When we gave up on the land,
That was when we felt its breath on our necks.
When we stopped voting our conscience
And invested all of our naiveté in a virtual future,
That was when we summoned it
To lurch forward.
And when we abandoned the hope of the moment,
That was when it knew it had a home!
You know, that old place
That we used to call home?
Where the door now stands
Wide open to the wind and rain,
Where the windows rattle
When the fracking earthquakes shake the land?
Where the paint peels
On the empty farm stand?
Our monster sits on the leaning porch
Just like a human
Waiting for the world to end,
Except smiling
Like a damn politician.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

London and Philadelphia — Over three thousands miles and more than forty years in age separate anti-violence activists Bilal Qayyum and Noel Williams, yet each advocates a similar solution to ‘the problem’ they seek to solve in their respective cities located on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Qayyum, 69, of Philadelphia, Pa and Williams, 25, of London, UK each see employment as the critical tool needed to counter violence among youth and young adults living in low-income communities.

“In all my years of working to reduce violence, it’s very clear to me that jobs are a major solution to reducing violence in low-income communities,” Qayyum said, speaking about his roots in violence-reduction efforts dating back to the 1970s when he was an anti-gang worker.

“Jobs, well-paying ones, give people a strong feeling of worth. Poverty breeds violence.”

Sadly, Williams and Qayyum each see the same roadblock on violence reduction: the persistent failure of public sector authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to fully engage community-based persons with the front-line experiences required to effectively resolve the “violence problem” that authorities proclaim they want to solve.

Noel Williams (all photos by Linn Washington, jr.)
 

Williams, an ex-gang leader in southwest London turned university student, said, “Who comes to me and asks for advice? I know gangs. I know how it feels to be shot and how it feels to walk down the road feeling oppression from police.”

Williams bristles at the fact that authorities continually employ persons with no life-connection to violence as paid staff to lead violence-reduction initiatives.

“If you want to help people who’ve been to prison, why is it that people who’ve been in prison are never hired?” ex-inmate Williams asked.

Bernie Sanders, whose campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is on a roll following a stunning if narrow win in last Tuesday’s Michigan primary, where he embarrassed pollsters who were predicting a double-digit rout by Hillary Clinton only a day before the voting, has famously said he’s “not interested” in the issue of his opponent’s exclusive use, during her five years as Obama’s Secretary of State, of a private, instead of government email account and server.

He should be. But forget about the right-wing charges of leaked diplomatic cables — the big issue is what kind of diplomatic favors she was selling, and to whom.

Clinton’s achilles’ heel is the widespread feeling even among many of those Democrats voting for her, that she is basically “not trustworthy.” People have good reason to feel that way, and it’s not just the way she changes her tune, her positions, and her accounts of her prior positions faster than an octopus or chameleon changes its color to match its surroundings. She is, to put it bluntly, a serial liar. (In fact, a recent poll shows Hillary is the least trusted candidate for president, Democratic or Republican, and that Sanders is the most trusted.)

Take Clinton’s claim that she opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership, a new NAFTA-like trade pact being pushed by the Obama administration and most members of Congress, which threatens to essentially gut the right of the US and other signatory nations to enforce or even enact worker safety, environmental protection and other laws. The TPP would accomplish this abrogation of national sovereignty by allowing corporations — even foreign subsidiaries of US corporations — to sue over such laws and claiming massive damages, on the grounds that they violate the terms of the TPP. The treaty even allows them to bring their cases to non-governmental arbitration panels, which could overrule national courts. Clinton may claim on the campaign trail that she’s against this horrific treaty, but as Secretary of State, when her office was helping to negotiate it, she was calling it “the gold standard” of trade treaties. Or take her initial claim, when Sanders began calling her out for giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks for which she was paid as much as $225,000 a pop. Initially she made the absurd excuse that these paid speeches were delivered “before I had decided to run for president.” (That’s about as credible as her assertion in one early debate with Sanders that the enormous speaking fees she received from the banks were simply “what they offered me,” and not amounts that were negotiated for her by her agent.)

Actually, she gave three of those speeches, for a total of $675,000, to Goldman Sachs in late 2013, after she had left the Obama State Department precisely in order to prepare for her presidential run. Even the suggestion that she wasn’t planning to run earlier than that is an insult to the intelligence of the voter, but it was in any event widely known that her departure from State was so she could start working — and building up a campaign war chest — for a 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, that’s what she was doing: negotiating and gathering in those fat speaking fees (though because she had not formally announced yet as a candidate, neither she nor the banks had to report the money as campaign swill).

Hillary Clinton has an integrity issue, and it starts at the Clinton Foundation, a $2-billion money-laundering fund-raising machine she was in a position feed as Secretary of State
 

The consequential changes sweeping across Europe, from immigrants impacting demographics to an increasing embrace of right-wing ideologies, are not surprising to Professor Donald Muldrow Griffith, an American who has lived in Berlin, Germany for over three decades.

Griffith, born in Chicago and respected in Berlin for his achievements as a cultural impresario, feels “tensions” are afoot in Germany and other European countries.

“Many years ago, we knew the demographics of Europe would change,” Griffith said.

“As Europeans had partaken and continue to partake in the resources of many places in the world…those persons from the ‘contributing countries’ [will] seek to come to European countries for a return on their ‘investments’ and renewed hope, as a result of the past and recent political, economic and social chaos in their countries.”

Donald Griffith
 

When Griffith first settled in Berlin decades ago, that city was in the Cold War cauldron. While West Berlin was a city aligned with ‘The West’ it was located deep inside of what was then East Germany –- officially the German Democratic Republic –- a Communist ruled country that was an ally of the Soviet Union.

That East-West political divide inside Berlin had a literal reality because the city itself was split into east and west sectors since the war, and eventually by a wall built by the East German government. That barrier inside Berlin, constructed in 1961, was demolished beginning in 1990, just before the reunification of the two halves of Germany.

Griffith is an Afro-American living in a city quickly associated in the minds of most Americans with Cold War intrigues and/or World War II Nazi-era excesses. However, Griffith said race-based ugliness has not proved a major problem in either his professional or personal experiences.

“I have been fortunate to avoid unpleasantness in Europe, although one senses a change in attitude in the atmosphere, with declining economies and newcomers from various countries seeking to become a part of Europe,” Griffith said.

 
Much like expensive red wines, many Facebook relationships, and Kanye West’s psychological state, the case of Texas House Bill No. 2 is complicated.

Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, one of the most pivotal cases in abortion law in decades. The plaintiff seeks to strike down Texas House Bill No 2, commonly referred to as HB2, legislation that was passed in 2013. It’s legislation that, under the guise of protecting the health of Texan women, has actually endangered their well being by restricting access to abortion services in Texas.

It will set a dangerous legal precedent if found constitutional. Not only will it impact abortion access, it could change the way we practice all of medicine.

HB2 is the most medically intrusive legislation that has ever been written. It placed several restrictions:

• Limits the gestational age of procedures to 21 weeks
• Requires that abortion centers must meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers
• Requires that all abortion providers must have admitting privileges at a local hospital
• Requires that the medications that are used for medical abortion are given exactly as the FDA approved

HB2 is like Mylie Cyrus talking about race in America. At first blush her statements don’t seem completely unreasonable, but then you realize that she’s simply hiding her own sanctioning of a racist musical industry underneath a thin veneer of false caring, rainbows, and appropriated yoga mantras.

Similar nonsense is generated when legislators regulate abortion. The areas of expertise that most legislators have are writing rambling documents, shaking hands, and distributing little signs with their names on them. Nowhere in that list is medical care. HB2 is an attack on the rights of women under a thin veneer of false caring and flawed medical reasoning.

Supporters of HB2 say it’s meant to protect the well being of women, but the language of the bill demonstrates its true intent. The number of times the bill uses the word fetus, zygote, or embryo? Zero. The number of times it uses the phrase “unborn child” or “unborn children?” Twenty-seven. The number of times I heard a lecturer in medical school say the phrase “unborn child/ren?” Zero. The number of times I heard a lecturer in medical school say fetus, zygote, or embryo? Countless.

  
Furthermore, it is an attack on every American’s right to high quality healthcare.

Nowhere else in medicine are doctors told by the law exactly how to practice in such detail, and for good reason. Certainly there are quality measures that must be met such as standards around sterility, safety, and first aid, but there are no laws that get into the minutiae of when and how to prescribe a medication. Even when it comes to potentially lethal controlled substances such as methadone, the details of dose and timing is left up to a provider’s judgement.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR BOOMERS “OF A CERTAIN AGE”
 

We don’t usually write about money on this site, but this is important.

Last November, as has become standard Washington politics, the Republican party held the federal budget submitted by President Obama and the Democrats hostage, demanding all sorts of non-budgetary concessions and cuts in social spending. Ultimately, the president and the Democrats caved in to get the budget passed. One of the things they did was agree to some cuts in Social Security benefits.

One of those cuts was to eliminate a measure that for years has allowed married couples who both reach 66 (or someone who had divorced a spouse of more than 10 years, but more on that later) to collect some money as a “spousal benefit” without either spouse actually starting to collect their own benefits. The advantage of this arrangement was that if both spouses could continue to hold off on collecting benefits on their own accounts, waiting four more years until reaching 70, their ultimate benefit checks would be 32% greater for life in real dollars than if they started collecting benefits at age 66.

The process was called “file-and-suspend,” and here’s how it works. The higher-earning spouse on reaching 66, goes into a local Social Security office and asks to make a “restricted application” for Social Security benefits, filing for those benefits but then immediately at the same time saying he or she doesn’t want to receive any checks until age 70 (this cannot be done on line — only in person). The lower-earning spouse, also 66, then files for spousal benefits on the first spouse’s account, and immediately starts receiving monthly checks equal to one-half of the benefit the first spouse would have received had that spouse not suspended benefits. Such spousal benefits can range from a low of around $6000/year to $14,500/year, or a total of $24,000 – $58,000 over four years!

The urgent news is that although this benefit was eliminated in the November budget deal, it is still available until the end of federal office hours at the Social Security office on April 30.

So if you and a spouse will be 66 by that date, you should immediately make that appointment (it can take as long as a month to get one because of cuts in Social Security office staffing, so don’t wait!), and go in to make that file-and-suspend and that spousal benefit request.

My wife and I were lucky enough to be able to take advantage of this option, getting in under the wire of the April deadline and I as the lower earner started receiving my spousal benefit check of $983.00 beginning this January. It will amount to a total of almost $40,000 for us by the time I reach 70 and switch over to receiving maximum benefits on my own account.

If you didn’t know about this option, you’re not alone. The Social Security Administration has long been barred by Congress from advertising and promoting its benefits and staff are not supposed to offer beneficiaries any advice or recommendations. They will answer whatever question you ask them (usually accurately), but they won’t offer advice or tell you if you’re making a bad decision. For example, if you turn 62 and immediately file for your Social Security benefits (as most Americans still do), nobody will say, “Um, you know, for each year you hold off on filing until you reach age 66, you’ll get a 7.5% higher benefit check for the rest of your life, and for each year you hold off between age 66 and 70, you’ll get an 8% higher benefit check.” And they won’t inform you about the availability of spousal benefits either.

Republicans & Democrats cut some Social Security benefits in a budget deal last fall — but if you’re 66+ you can still get one major benefit if you act before April 30
 

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren just had a chance to turn the tide in this rigged Democratic primary season last Tuesday, and she ran away from it.

As most people know, the Democratic Party leadership, decades ago following the primary victory of Sen. George McGovern that gave him the party’s 1972 nomination for president despite the opposition of the whole ruling party elite, tried to make such an upstart left candidate impossible in the future by front-running primaries and caucuses in a bunch of deeply conservative Southern states. The idea was to crush any liberal candidate in those states (where no Democrat would stand a chance in the general election), so their funding would dry up and their campaigns would die early in the primary season.

This ugly strategy worked like a charm for decades and it even worked this year to the extent that the Establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, was able to win big in those Southern states. But her upstart opponent Bernie Sanders to some extent blunted the effort this year by winning handily in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota and in his home state of Vermont — four of the five non-Southern states also holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday. Sanders really would have actually defeated the DNC’s sabotage efforts though, had he won Massachusetts, a significantly larger state in terms of delegates, instead of just managing to come within 1.5% of doing so — and without any major endorsers backing him.

Imagine if Warren, the wildly popular senior senator from Massachusetts, in the days or weeks ahead of the primary, had endorsed Sanders, who after all is attacking the same corrupt big banks that Warren built her whole political career by denouncing. There’s no way having a popular anti-bankster, feminist senator endorsing Sanders wouldn’t have won him at least another 10% of the primary vote in Massachusetts — enough to have really damaged Clinton. Instead, Clinton was allowed to eke out a narrow victory there by picking up the support of identity-voting women who didn’t bother to examine her bogus feminism.

The Sanders campaign can still push forward in future primaries, because unlike prior liberal insurgents who were relying on big donors, his campaign is funded entirely by small donors, and those doners are proving to be resilient and energized, not easily demoralized, by evidence that the game is rigged (in February, the Sanders campaign took in a record $42 million in new small donations, and continues to build its campaign war-chest despite Clinton’s wins in the South on Tuesday). But how much better it would have been had he won Massachusetts.

A Warren endorsement would have made all the difference.

Now she stands exposed as a fraud posing as a radical reformer.

Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a joke. Is it on progressives?