Category: Uncategorized

A kudo to President Obama. But just one.

If he manages to pull off an agreement with Iran on limiting that country’s nuclear fuel enrichment program in the fact of determined resistance from Republicans, Neocons, the Israel Lobby and the warmongers in both the GOP and his own Democratic Party, he will have finally earned at least some small portion of the gold in his Nobel Peace medallion.

We could reasonably ask why he thinks it’s cool to negotiate with the “Axis of Evil” nation of Iran over the nuclear issue, but not with Russia over Ukraine. After all, Iran doesn’t even have a nuclear weapon, and on the evidence, isn’t trying to build one, so these negotiations aren’t really even preventing a nuclear war; they’re just calming the nerves of some trigger happy paranoids in Israel and Washington. But Russia does have nuclear weapons, and has made it clear that if the US pushes too hard at putting NATO weapons and forces near the Russian border, or if it tries to undo the annexation of Crimea, it will use them. Shouldn’t that kind of thing call for cool-headed negotiation, instead of aggressive moves like sending offensive armaments to Kiev?

But then we have some other issues too.

If Obama really wants an agreement with Iran on limiting its nuclear fuel enrichment program, why is he being so hard-assed about ending the grinding sanctions that have been imposed on the country? I mean a deal’s a deal. If one side gives you want you want, you have to give something in return. You can’t say, okay you stop enriching uranium, dilute the stuff that you already enriched to 20%, back down to 3.5%, and shut down most of your centrifuges so you can’t make much anymore. But we’re not going to end sanctions until you have done this for a while so we know you mean it.

America's latest presidential "peace" laureate.
 
 

Harold Wanless, a leading climatologist and geologist based at the University of Miami, returns to PRN.fm’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” program to revisit his year-ago claim that global warming and sea level rise are going to be much more severe than the consensus predictions of the UN Climate Committee, NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other official groups.

With recent reports of faster melting on Greenland and in both the Eastern and Western Antarctic, Prof. Wanless tells host Dave Lindorff that humans are now facing a catastrophe — one that could threaten people alive today.

He predicts sea levels rising by more than 20 feet by the end of the century, and adds that if methane begins seriously erupting from the Arctic permafrost and off the seafloor north of Siberia (where it’s already bubbling up), resulting ocean and atmospheric heating could cause a die-off of the sea’s phytoplankton, reducing oxygen in the atmosphere (currently 21%) to a point that could threaten large mammals, including us.

To hear this interview, which was recorded on Wednesday, April 1, just click here or on the image below.

Climatologist Harold Wanless says ice in Greenland and Antarctica is melting far faster than anticipated, in part because it turns out melting ice fractures, speeding the melting process exponentially over time

4/3 UPDATE: Abu-Jamal has reportedly been moved by the Dept. of Prisons back to SCI-Mahoney’s infirmary, where there is no specialist on diabetes, despite his apparently still being in an acute health crisis. Sigificantly, his supporters note that this shift makes it even more difficult for family members, supporters and reporters to monitor his treatment and condition.
 

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical Philadelphia journalist convicted of killing a white Philadelphia police officer in a trial fraught with prosecutorial misconduct, witness coaching and judicial prejudice back in 1981, spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement in the deliberately designed hell of Pennsylvania’s supermax SCI Green prison before a panel of federal Appeals Court judges eventually ruled that he’d been unconstitutionally sentenced to death.

He of course, received no apology for the state’s making him illegally and improperly spend all those years in solitary waiting to be wrongfully executed. Instead, with that ruling (after a few years of legal stalling by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office), he was simply switched over to a sentence of life without possibility of parole and moved to the SCI-Mahanoy prison in central Pennsylvania.

Now, it appears the state, which lost its chance to execute him, may be trying to kill him another way, as word comes that this world-renowned political prisoner had to be rushed to the hospital this week, unconscious from an undiagnosed case of severe diabetes.

Incredibly, despite his having already spent the past two weeks in the prison infirmary, where he was suffering from a severe case of eczema, painful itching all over his body, lethargy, and frequent urination — all well-known side effects signaling possible diabetes — he was never tested for sugar in his blood or urine (or if was tested, nothing was done about the results). He was only finally diagnosed with the disease after his blood glucose level had risen to 779 — a level far above the normal range of 70-120 — at which point, unconscious, he was rushed to the Schuylkill Health Medical Center’s ICU and put on an insulin drip.

Supporters of Abu-Jamal say that since January he had been ill, complaining of chronic fatigue, painful itching and erupting skin, which only grew worse when the prison doctors prescribed a topical ointment.

For years, as a prisoner, Abu-Jamal has enraged the state’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, and law-and-order politicians of both parties, first by successfully battling his death sentence and his conviction, and second by using his journalistic skills to expose the horrors of the state’s, and the nation’s brutal prison system, which he has properly labeled a “prison-industrial complex.” Now this high-profile prisoner is shining a bright spotlight on another ugly aspect of that network of organized horror houses: the medical neglect of the incarcerated.

Whether there was a deliberate attempt to “execute” Abu-Jamal slowly through neglect of his diabetes — a disease that can be brought on by poor diet and/or stress, among other things, and that can kill if left untreated — or whether it was just an example of the standard neglect and incompetence faced by all those locked up by the state, Abu-Jamal’s current crisis, and the way it is being handled by prison authorities, should make any person with a shred of humanity furious.

SCI-Mahoney Prison, where Mumia is serving a life sentence, pictured here with two members of his legal team, Johanna Fernandez and Heidi Beghosian
 

In July 2013 Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane made a bold move when she refused to defend a Pennsylvania state law in federal court that banned same-sex marriage. Terming that ban “wholly unconstitutional,” Kane declared that ethical directives applicable to lawyers barred her from defending a “legally indefensible” law.

“If there is a law that I feel that does not conform with the Pennsylvania state constitution and the U.S. Constitution, then I ethically cannot do that as a lawyer,” Kane told a reporter in 2013 a year after her successful campaign to become the state’s first female attorney general. (Kane endorsed gay marriage during her campaign.)

It looks like that self-imposed proscription of Kane’s against acting unconstitutionally has a lot of flexibility built into it, though.

Today, two years after Kane’s bold refusal to defend the indefensible same-sex marriage ban, her office is in federal court defending a law hastily approved by Pennsylvania’s Republican controlled state legislature last fall that clearly does not conform with rights protections in either the Pennsylvania or U.S. constitutions.

The constitutionally-challenged law Kane now defends would cripple press freedom, free speech and other constitutionally protected rights. Unlike the same-sex marriage ban Kane earlier refused to defend, this new law she now is going to bat for in court does not afford her societal kudos or potential campaign contributions.

The law Kane is now fighting to uphold was devised specifically to silence the criticisms and critiques of prison inmates, but beyond that, it will also adversely impact civilians who monitor prison issues, rights activists and journalists, barring them from doing their work on prison-related issues.

Pennsylvania AG Kathleen Kane tries to silence state prisoners by defending a clearly unconstitutional new law
 

The report slammed the Philadelphia Police Department for its historically flawed use of fatal force, directed primarily at non-whites, underscoring a repeated finding that Philadelphia’s Police Department has long owned one of the worst reputations of any police department in the United States.

The “persistence and regularity” of brutality and corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) indicate that “the city and its police force are failing to act to hold police accountable,” that report stated.

The almost total failure of officials in Philadelphia to hold errant police officers accountable, the report noted, solidifies a “culture of impunity” that leads to new generations of police officers learning quickly that “their leadership accepts corruption and excessive force.”

Those tough assessments of “shortcomings” within the Philadelphia Police Department are not contained in the damning report on deadly police practices in Philadelphia released on March 24th by the U.S. Justice Department. Rather, the harsh assessments of PPD failings, which would seem to merit prompt attention and reform, were in a report issued in 1998 by the organization Human Rights Watch.

The stark failure of authorities in Philadelphia –- successive police supervisors and City Hall officials, and three mayors –- to halt the police misconduct identified seventeen years ago by HRW makes the policing problems identified in the latest USJD report entitled the “Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department” all the more damning and appalling.
Philly's finest being cop, judge and gangbangers on an 18-year-old in 2012
 

When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, there was a story going around about a China Airlines flight in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had left the cockpit and then, on their return, found the door locked. They reportedly got a fire ax, and with the whole planeload of freaked out passengers watching in horror, started wailing on the metal door. The co-pilot then turned, and seeing the panic developing, calmly drew the curtain across the aisle, hiding their work from view. The axe’s bashing continued until they broke the latch and got back to the controls.

Lucky this was before the 9-11 attacks! Now, because some terrorists forced their way into crew cabins and took over a few planes, virtually all aircraft have reinforced cabin doors that cannot be broken into. Predictably, this panicky response has led to a new kind of risk: mass passenger deaths by pilot suicide. A young Lufthansa pilot, apparently with a death wish but wanting to have his demise make a murderous impact, waited until the pilot had left for the loo, then locked him out and sent the plane into the side of a French Alp.

So what do we do now? Put a toilet in the cabin of every plane so that neither pilot or co-pilot ever has to leave her or his colleague alone in the cabin during a flight?

Of course, we’ve already got a problem since another solution that the FAA came up with to terrorists on planes commandeering a flight was to allow pilots, most of whom are retired military pilots, to bring a gun on board. Of course that is only a good idea if the pilot is mentally stable and a good shot. What if the pilot is the whack job? The gun just makes the job of destroying the plane that much easier. 


It is certainly a tragedy that 149 innocent people including a class of 16-year-olds and a couple of babies, went to their doom along with the deranged Lufthansa co-pilot, but the disaster shows how nuts our societies have become because of overblown fears of terrorism.

Just think about the insane delays, the fraught confrontations, the needless X-rays, the missed flights and the sheer nuttiness of the post-9-11 security screenings — especially in the US. We have to remove our shoes because one guy tried to light up a “shoe bomb” that probably wouldn’t have done anything to the plane anyhow. I remember waiting in line once as a TSA inspector removed the booties from a three-month-old baby in a carrier at Chicago O’Hare because the rules said shoes had to come off and go through the X-ray machine. Never mind that a dedicated bomber could down a plane by bringing in six 3 oz bottles of nitro in a sealed plastic bag without any problem — enough to blow out the side of the plane from his seat. (Thankfully, fears touted by the government two years back of alleged terrorist plans to stuff explosives up their colons for detonation in flight never materialized, or we’d all be getting proctological exams now before boarding!)

Keeping America safe from terrorism: The TSA

A bear saves a crow from drowning.
A baboon and a dog and a deer frolic in a field.
A little girl feeds the crows
And receives gifts from them in exchange.

This is the planet we are living on,
Not that other one that we are beating up.

An Orca lifts up a kayak on its back.
A parrot feeds a puppy its kibble snack.
A raven slides down a snowy roof on a dog dish.

This is the planet we are living on.
Not that other one that we are selling off piecemeal.

A man on death row manages to prove his innocence
Days before his execution.
He leaves his own freedom party,
Walks to the end of the backyard,
Throws his arms around an apple tree
And weeps.

This is the planet we are living on.
Not the one that knows no love.

A deer raises her head to watch me skirting the field.
And as I climb the fence into the orchard
She lowers her head to graze.

This is the planet we live on.
Not the one that we have forgotten.
 
 
  –Gary Lindorff

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know all that much about Yemen, or about the Houthi rebels who have taken control of Sana’a, the ancient Arab country’s capital, leading to the hasty evacuation of all US military forces (some 250 Special Forces personnel and the staff of the US embassy) from that country located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

But I do know that what is being portrayed as a “disaster” for for the US global “counter-terrorism” effort is not being reported honestly to us by this country’s complacent and compliant corporate media.

Nowhere can I find any article in the corporate news media asking what role the US’s massively unpopular campaign of bombings and drone-fired missile attacks on alleged terrorists — attacks that have killed countless civilians, and that have also included wholly erroneous massacres of innocents such as wedding caravans — has played in the creation of a situation that is likely to become a bloody civil war. This in a country that already endured one such catastrophe lasting from roughly 1964 – 1994. We’re talking about a generation’s worth of bloodletting, both between tribes, and between a north dominated by the US-puppet Saudi monarchy, and a south supported by the Soviet Union and, for many years, its alley, Egypt. The idea that the US would casually take actions that could re-ignite such a horror in a place that had to be seen as a tinderbox is simply appalling.

If the goal of President Obama’s global drone wars was to combat and degrade global terrorism, it has been an embarrassing and tragic failure not just in Yemen, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia too.

Yemini fort and tank base, where US Special Forces were stationed before fleeing, and wreckage of a Yemini wedding caravan hit by a US drone strike that killed 15
 

With Republicans now in control of both houses of Congress, the current president already on record as having supported cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and all signs pointing to the likelihood that the 2016 election could bring us either a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative president, and an increasingly Republican-dominated Congress, it’s time for an aggressive mass movement built around defending and expanding both those critical public funding programs.

The first step is getting out the truth that Social Security is not broke or doomed, but simply needs to be better funded by ending the free pass given to the wealthy. Simply eliminating the cap on income subject to the FICA tax, currently set at the first $118,500 of earned income, would make the system fully able to pay all promised benefits for the next century or more. Extending the tax to cover unearned income — basically capital gains (a tax that only impacts the wealthy) would allow for an expansion of benefits.

There is today $2.8 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, a fund that was created by a compromise reform reached by President Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress led by House Speaker Tip O’Neill back in 1983. The idea at the time was to have Baby Boomers and their employers pay more into the system ahead of the time they would be retiring, when their numbers would place a burden on current workers (the Boomers’ kids and grandkids), since the system has always since its inception financed current retirees’ benefits through current workers’ FICA payroll tax payments. (The reform also raised the full retirement gradually from 65 to 66 and later to 67 for people born after 1964.)

That advance funding of Boomer retiree benefits is now starting to be tapped but that is what was supposed to happen to it, a point the doom-sayers and political scare-mongers fail to mention. It turns out, though, that the advance funding was not large enough for several reasons. One, very positive, is that people are living longer than projected because of improved nutrition and medical advances. Another is that a series of recessions and market collapses, especially during the “lost decade” of 2000-2010, caused in large part by corrupt investment banks in 2001 and by Wall Street’s mega-banks turned casinos in 2007-9, cut severely into FICA contributions, as well as into workers’ personal savings and net worth.

Right-wing and corporate propaganda to the effect that the Trust Fund is smoke and mirrors or just “IOU” scrips, is absurd. It’s true that Washington politicians promptly borrowed FICA tax revenues as soon as they came in the door to allow them to fund things like endless wars and Pentagon war-profiteers without raising taxes, but that debt is every bit as real as the federal debt held by investors in the form of treasury bills and notes. It will be covered, whether by rolling it over into new debt or by raising taxes.
Boomers have the political power to remake Social Security and to expand Medicare to all! We just have to use it!
 

In any event, as has been often pointed out, even were the fund to be exhausted in 2033 or 2034 because of inaction by Congress to boost revenue for Social Security, the system would, at the current FICA tax rate of 6.2% for employee and employer, still be able to fund 77-78% of promised benefits out into the distant future beyond the time when the last Baby Boomer has moved off to some Woodstock in the sky.

More importantly, there is no way that will happen. Why? Because the Baby Boom generation, in retirement, will constitute not just the largest block of elderly voters in the nation’s history (almost 78 million people!), but also will represent the largest elderly bloc proportionately, in history, fully 1.5 times as large a segment of the electorate as the already powerful current senior vote.

The report released in early March by a panel President Obama appointed to examine serious shortcomings in police practices across America, including the shooting of unarmed people, mostly non-white, listed problems and proposed solutions that are hauntingly similar to those found in a report on police abuses released 47 years ago by another presidential panel.

The March 1968 report of the presidential panel popularly known as the Kerner Commission noted with dismay that many minorities nationwide regarded police as “an occupying force” – a presence that generated fear not feelings of security.

The March 2015 report from President Obama’s panel made a similar finding, noting that perceptions of police as an “occupying force coming in from the outside to rule and control the community” had sabotaged the ability of law enforcement to build trust in many communities.

Reactions to police brutality, particularly fatal encounters, triggered protests and riots that sparked both President Barack Obama and President Lyndon Johnson almost two generations earlier to appoint these two panels.

Sadly, the recommendations from President Obama’s panel could sink under the weight of the same forces that sank full implementation of the Kerner Commission proposals: systemic recalcitrance from all sectors of American society to reforms devised to remediate festering race-based inequities.

Watts uprising in 1965, Ferguson in 2014: 50 years and still the same police violence and racism