Category: Uncategorized

The pig-headed small-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty of most fundamentalists of whatever religion knows no bounds.

Kudos to the narrow majority of the five Supreme Court justices for today at least blowing one result of that pig-headedness out of the water with their ruling declaring that states cannot abridge or deny gay couples from marrying in a state-sanctioned union, and receiving all the benefits that come from such a union.

The opposition to gay marriage has never made any constitutional sense. It has always been based upon a false conflating of church weddings and the legal marriage that is conferred by local governments in accordance to state laws. The fundamentalists — people like Jerry Falwell or ex-Senator and perennial GOP presidential wannabe Rick Santorum and their ilk — have claimed ad nauseum that sanctioning gay marriage would “weaken” marriage as an institution, citing in support the Bible, which they erroneously claim “defines” marriage as the “union of one man and one woman.” (Hell, it doesn’t even include the number one, as many male characters in the Bible have more than one wife.)

But aside from the obvious point that with divorce rates in the US running at close to 50% for first marriages, the “institution” itself is pretty weak on its own and doesn’t need any help from gay couples, who actually have a pretty good record of staying together, when it comes to that, even when denied the right to marry as has long been the case.

More importantly, nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision would require any church to itself offer marriage services to gay couples. That is a battle that has to be fought religious sect by religious sect — something that has been going on for some time now. What the court has done, and its action is shamelessly long in coming — is say that the civil procedure of registering a marriage cannot be denied to anyone because of sexual orientation, and that with that change, gay couples who marry in accordance with Constitutionally protected state law anywhere in the US (or elsewhere in the world one would assume), have the same rights and legal responsibilities and liabilities as do heterosexual couples.

With this decision, gay couples have the same right to adopt children, to visit each other in the hospital, to have joint bank accounts, to obtain health benefits offered to employee spouses, to file joint income taxes and to share in driving a rental car. They also will enjoy the protection of divorce law, will be liable where appropriate, for paying child support and sometimes alimony in the event of a divorce, and will have the protection of shared ownership of property except where there are pre-nuptial agreements signed.

If any of that weakens what’s left of religious marriage vows (which I sincerely doubt), then tough.

The SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage strikes a small blow against fundamentalist bigotry, but there’s plenty left to combat
 

 
Our ancestors were literally fighting to keep human beings as slaves and to continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will. I am not proud of this heritage.
      - S.C. State Senator Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond,
       explaining why he will vote to take down the Confederate flag

This is the beginning of communism.
      - Robert Lampley protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds
 
 
A young man gets hooked on a volatile political website, obtains a modern weapon, pumps up his sense of vengeful zealotry, latches onto a symbolic target and kills a handful of people. Why does this “radicalized” young man do this? To advance what he feels in his tumultuous, troubled inner life is an important goal, a greater conflagration — all to satisfy his youthful, lone-wolf feelings of dissatisfaction with the status-quo.

In America, if that young man is a Muslim and the website is focused on attacking the globalized, consumer culture of the National Security State — let’s say he sets off a bomb at a public marathon race — it’s terrorism. If the young man is a white American attacking African Americans … well, if you listen to Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, he’s an individual, Godless lunatic and the real problem is “far-left race-hustlers” who hate America and want to destroy it.

"You talkin' to me!" Dylann Roof posturing with his new Glock and the Council of Conservative Citizens website

Since the first moments following Dylann Storm Roof’s shooting of nine African American Christians in Charleston, I’ve been watching a lot of Fox News and MSNBC. Even before rigor mortis set in on the nine bodies, after expressing his condolences, O’Reilly began flogging the individual maniac line hard. Race problems in America, he insisted over and over, have been solved and any other explanation was far-left race-hustling. MSNBC conceded Roof was likely not mentally well, but it quickly assumed what might be called a social-dysfunction line focused on the persistence of racism in America.

Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer-prize winning, African American columnist at The Washington Post, was the spiritual center of MSNBC’s coverage, since he was raised as a black kid in Charleston; his grandfather had a blacksmith shop near the murder site, the famous AME church known affectionately as Mother Emanuel. Robinson is a moderate, easy-going man, and you felt in his heart he understood only too well what this was all about. He was not shy in calling it race-based, white nationalist terrorism.

Does the intense news coverage examining the tragic massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. and coverage exposing the travesty of the white woman who claims she’s actually black mean the mainstream media has finally ‘got it right’ regarding reporting on race and racism?

Short answer, an emphatic No!

Yes, the mainstream media has provided detailed coverage of the carnage inside Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church where a 21-year-old professed white racist slaughtered nine blacks – six women and three men – including the South Carolina state senator who pastored that church and three elderly congregants aged 70 to 87.

And, yes, the mainstream media exposed the litany of fraudulent behaviors of Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane, Wash. resident who one London newspaper labeled a “serial liar” and whose white biological parents have rejected her proclaimed born-blackness.

But this news coverage of the Charleston church shooting and Dolezal shooting off her mouth does not mitigate deficiencies in mainstream news coverage identified decades ago in the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on racial strife in the United States.

The media still don't do a great job of covering race issues
 

A few weeks ago, I got a vivid comparative look at how far this country has moved towards becoming a police state. The occasion was a brief visit to Montreal, where my wife was to give a harpsichord recital at an early keyboard music conference.

At the Canadian border crossing, just above Lake Champlain, the Canadian official politely asked us our purpose in coming to Canada. Informed it was to perform harpsichord music at a music conference, he actually asked my wife what composers she was playing! (It was Gaspard le Roux) I tried to imagining even being asked such a question by an American border official and simply couldn’t. The Canadian officer also asked us if were were bringing anything in with us. Told that we had a keyboard, he asked if we planned to sell it — a fair question for a customs official. Then, assured we’d be bringing it back home with us, he waved us through with a smile.

On our way back into the US, we found ourselves being questioned by a grim-faced, beefy, cop-like guy, complete with sidearm, about where we’d been and what we’d done in Canada. Now this is getting draconian. We are both US citizens traveling back from home from a visit to a country that is about as close an ally to the US as a country can be. There is no reason why an immigration official, having looked at our passports, should be asking us about our activities while in Canada. Hell, I could have said I was attending a conference on promoting world socialist revolution, or a global meeting of some white supremacist organization. It wouldn’t matter. He’d still have to grant us entry. I have every right to attend such political meetings in the US with impunity if I want to, and I have the same right as a US citizen to attend them abroad too.

The stupid thing, of course, about such questions, is that if I actually were doing something illegal — say passing stolen state secrets to a spy connection in Canada, or meeting with some terrorist organization to plot a bombing in the US — I certainly wouldn’t offer that information to a border patrol officer.

So why would we be asked by a border patrol official to report what we had been doing in Canada?

Lines of cars carrying US terrorists returning from training in Canada wait to cross the US border just south of Montreal, so they can head down to New York City. Luckily, alert border guards ask each driver what they did in Canada before letting them back into the country.

Attorneys from the Abolitionis Law Center in Pennsylvania, an organization defending prisoner rights and challenging the state’s penal system, have filed suit in federal court demanding that Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections stop preventing them from even seeing their client, journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on occasions when he has to be hospitalized for a critical diabetes condition.

In an hour-long interview with Dave Lindorff on ThisCantBeHappening’s radio show “This Can’t Be Happening!” that aired last Wednesday on PRN.fm, Abolitionist Law Center founder and legal director Bret Grote says that Abu-Jamal, who is serving a term of life imprisonment without possibility of parole, was allowed to develop a case of diabetes through poor diet and medical neglect in the SCI_Mahanoy prison where he is incarcerated, and then, when finally rushed to a hospital after he had collapsed in diabetic shock, was barred from seeing supporters and relatives (even his wife and brother!) or even his attorneys, on orders of the DOC.

Grote says that intense pressure from local and international supporters, who demonstrated outside the hospital and deluged the DOC and the Governor’s Office with calls and emails, led the DOC to relent and allow some brief visits, but then began denying Abu-Jamal’s attorneys access to his medical records.

Grote, who earllier won a major victory in the same federal court district, overturning a recently passed “anti-Mumia” law passed unanimously by the state legislator barring state prison inmates from talking or writing about their cases, talks about this latest attack on Abu-Jamal and all prisoners, and about the intentionally inadequate and punitive medical support provided to state inmates on the program, which can be heard by clicking here

Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI-Mahanoy prison before his diabetes crisis (l), after losing 80 1bs. due to the undiagnosed condition (center), and his attorney, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center (r)

 
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
                             - Quote attributed to George Orwell
 

Everybody loves a good killer. American pop culture is saturated with the love of killers. The more sexy and elite the killer, the more reverence he or she receives and the more the obvious moral questions are parried away. As the Orwell quote, above, suggests, all societies revere “rough men” with the capacity to ruthlessly kill members of threatening nations or outlaw bands.

Nowadays, official killing demands the nurturing of an elite esprit-de-corps among the killers. Their work must be done in strict secrecy so we, the public, can remain ignorant and “safe in our beds” while the killer elite remain aloof and unaccountable. Furthermore, it’s important to be able to easily marginalize those of us deemed by the killer elite and their promoters to be overly-delicate, moral scolds.

"Rough men" from Seal Team Six and a local police force. When do they become the problem?

This sense of embattled esprit-de-corps in conjunction with unaccountability is even seeping into our domestic police departments. In some cases, cops are too quick to shoot when things don’t go right for them or they are dis’ed; in other cases, the connection to elite special-ops killers seems aspirational. Since 9/11 we’ve witnessed many linkages (like regional Fusion Centers and the distribution of surplus war weaponry) between the military and local police departments. In analytic stories focused on the “black lives matter” movement and policing, we’re told our local police forces have moved from a Community Policing model to a Broken Windows model and now to something called an Intelligence-Based model. This sounds ominously close to the special-ops, manhunter formula.

Like the frog in a pot of slowly heating water who doesn’t realize he’s being boiled to death, whether it’s fear of attacks from outside or fear of violence and crime from inside, it seems time for the public to ask whether Orwell’s “rough men” idea is applicable in today’s confusing world or whether the sense of unaccountable, elite institutions focused on violence can become a threat in and of themselves.

Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a big front-page story that makes the case that lethal special-operations have become the military’s “new way of war,” what The Times calls a “global manhunting machine.” Seal Team Six is the unquestioned top-of-the-line elite unit. Think Chris Kyle and the hagiographic film bio American Sniper. Seal Team Six is expanding with The Omega Program, which undertakes what The Times calls “deniable operations … modeled after the Vietnam Phoenix Program.” Then there’s the team’s global intelligence gathering force called The Black Squadron. Both have been given hip, pop-culture-friendly names. All this is part and parcel of the rise of the Pentagon as an unaccountable intelligence and covert operating force of its own parallel to the CIA.

To get to the point: there is nothing — nothing at all — in any recent law or legislative action that will in any way weaken the police state structure our government has put into place for rapid deployment. You are not any more free than you were last week and, no matter what the Congress has done with the expired provisions of the Patriot Act or the newly developed and Orwellian-named “USA Freedom Act”, you are not going to be any more free next week.

This week’s big news is the expiration of the Patriot Act or actually a few of its provisions, since this humongous illustration of a fascist’s wet dream is comprised of hundreds of laws that expire at different times. The provisions that have expired are, however, significant because they involve phone data capture that affects every U.S. citizen. The Congress had to renew those measures and they didn’t, so the provisions are dead. In his most recent contribution to TCBH, my colleague Dave Lindorff presents a fuller picture of what those expirations really mean (and don’t).

They're Still Going to Watch Us!
 

The expirations make the USA Freedom Act, which the Congress has now passed in apparent lieu of the expired Patriot Act provisions, apparently important. In fact, reading the commercial media, one would think that democracy lost had now been found and reinstalled. Reflecting that buzz, Business Insider said the vote “significantly reigns in the federal government’s ability to spy on citizens”.

But the USA Freedom Act is basically a public relations and discourse-control maneuver that changes almost nothing about surveillance or repression. It is the culmination of a cleverly orchestrated campaign of diversion which positioned the spying as an intrusion into the lives of the average citizen. It’s certainly that but its true purpose is to gather information on opposition movements. So, while the law takes a small step back on general spying, it actually entrenches the data-collection on movements of protest and change by maintaining it and making it permanent.

Rather than a cause for celebration, this is a blaring alarm.

Omigod! We’re all gonna die!

Three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act were allowed to expire (at least briefly) on June 1 thanks to a Senate disagreement over how to “fix” them (and thanks to Sen. Rand Paul’s outspoken opposition to renewal), and now we’re vulnerable to terrorism!

That at least is what President Obama and other fear-mongering advocates of ever-increased surveillance and draconian laws in Washington are saying.

As the president (who in one of his first televised debate with Mitt Romney, famously declared that his “number one” responsibility as President of the United States was “keeping Americans safe,” rather than upholding and defending the Constitution), said of the USA PATRIOT Act expiration: “Heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could’ve prevented a terrorist attack or could’ve apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity but we didn’t do so.”

Is your pulse racing? Are you stocking up on gas masks, canned food, bottled water and guns?

You’re not?

Maybe that’s because you realize now that this terrorism schtick is all a crock.

Not one alleged terrorism plot has been detected, disrupted, or foiled in the US since 2001 as a result of the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act — that fascistic law passed by Congress in a deliberately induced panic back on October 26, 2001. In fact, all the known so-called terror plots that have been busted by federal authorities turn out to have been instigated by those same federal authorities, though the creative use of paid informants and under-cover officers posing as terrorists — informants who often themselves came up with the plots and provided the equipment, too, usually to unsophisticated and mentally challenged suckers.

The USA PATRIOT Act, actually called, in a particularly ridiculous example of the Republican penchant for creating acronyms for their bills, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, was simply a collection of many civil-liberties violating measures long sought by authoritarian Washington officials, but never before successfully passed through Congress. This huge wish list of police-state laws were quickly dusted off by the Bush/Cheney White House and piled into one bill, and then rammed through Congress in a night session with no discussion in the wake of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Philadelphia–Fatal shootings and severe beatings by police are grabbing headlines nationwide, but the far more frequent forms of police abuse are – the use of foul language, conducting improper stops and frisks and the making of false arrests — abuses that remain below the public’s and the media’s proverbial ‘radar.’

Those forms of abuse comprise the daily indignities endured by thousands of mostly minority people across America.

And, it is those forms of abuse that ignite intense ire against police, particularly in poor and/or non-white communities. Citizens in minority communities feel besieged by the police who are supposed to be serving and protecting them. Too many feel that too many cops do not treat them with either the dignity or respect that is essential for effective policing, according to the report from President Obama’s task force on policing released months ago.

Abuses by police often arise from deliberate police practices, especially overly aggressive law enforcement strategies that the Obama task force noted can “do lasting damage” to public trust. That presidential task force is co-chaired by Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey of Philadelphia who ironically leads a department long assailed for its persistent brutality and corruption.

An example of that aggressive behavior is about to play out in a Philadelphia courtroom as the Philadelphia Police Department was recently hit with yet another lawsuit – this one arising from yet another incident of alleged police abuse. The victim in this case claims Philadelphia police beat, kicked and shot him twice with a Taser in May 2013 simply because he was videotaping them engaging in abusive behavior.

That police assault on Sharif Anderson provides a chilling case study of so much that is wrong with the criminal justice system in Philadelphia and too many places across America.

“I was in disbelief,” Sharif Anderson said about the police attack that occurred when officers rushed him while he was on his own front porch using his smart phone to video other police roughing-up some of his colleagues out on the sidewalk.

You have the right to videotape cops making arrests…even if you're black
 

 
      Anthropologists have found that in traditional societies, memory becomes attached to places.
                  T.M. Luhrmann, New York Times Op-ed May 25, 2015
 
Members of Veterans For Peace came from as far away as San Diego to be part of the annual Memorial Day ceremonies at the Vietnam War Memorial on the mall in Washington DC. A wide range of Americans were in attendance on a beautiful, sunny day. Some rubbed names of loved ones with pencils onto pieces of paper; others left significant items at the base of the Wall. These are collected and warehoused.

Doug Rawlings, left, and the author leaving a wreath at the Wall on Memorial Day. Photo by Ellen Davidson

Vietnam veteran poet Doug Rawlings from Maine devised a program called Letters to the Wall. It’s an on-going project of Full Disclosure, which is connected to Veterans For Peace. Full Disclosure was created to counter the current US government and Pentagon propaganda campaign commemorating the Vietnam War. The project, operated with $15 million-a-year in tax-payer funds, was begun on the 50th anniversary of the Marine landing in DaNang in March 1965.

Full Disclosure members attempted unsuccessfully to meet with Pentagon managers of the program to discuss the limitations of its website, especially a timeline of events concerning the war. The timeline emphasizes things like Medals of Honor awarded to US soldiers, but it leaves out much of the complexity and the unpleasant realities of a war that began at the close of World War Two in 1945 when US leaders chose to support French re-colonization of Vietnam. Vietnamese guerrillas were US allies against the Japanese and admired their American comrades-in-arms. After the French capitulated, the war went on until 1975, when the US left Vietnam. Going through the website and reading the timeline, it’s easy to get confused and think that the Vietnamese somehow attacked us and that our soldiers were responding bravely to being attacked. Indisputable historic facts such as how the agreed-upon unification elections designated for 1956 were scotched by US leaders (who knew Ho Chi Minh would win by up to 80% of the vote) are altogether missing on the Commemoration website. The overwhelming reality that US soldiers were sent halfway around the world as an occupying army is lost in the interest of honoring the courage and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans.

Here’s how Rawlings described the letter project for those interested in writing a letter:

“Let those American soldiers who died know how you feel about the war that took their lives. If you have been seared by the experience of the American war in Vietnam, then tell them your story. Veterans, conscientious objectors, veterans’ family members, war resistors, anyone whose life was touched by the war — all of us need to speak. All of our experiences matter.”

One hundred and fifty letters were collected, and at 11 AM on Memorial Day, VFP members walked to the Wall and dropped them at the base of the panels, along with all the other items left there. On the envelope, written by hand, each letter said: “Please Read Me.” The letters are all collected on-line.