Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
February 25, 2018
Hello All – The numbers are really astonishing. Last year there were 11,000 gun homicides in the United States, and more than 20,000 gun suicides. The Florida massacre was the 18th school shooting this year. Since the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012, 438 people have been killed in 239 school shootings. From the beginning of 2013, there were more than 1,900 "mass shootings" (4 or more victims) leading up to the Las Vegas slaughter last October. Why is this happening? Why is the United States so different from other modern countries, which don't have so much gun violence?
Right now our nation's focus is on limiting the supply of deadly weapons, such as assault weapons, which have no place in civilian life. And this is right and long over due. But what about the demand for deadly weapons? Why do so many American men and boys crave ownership of war weapons? Why do so many men and boys have so many weapons? What is it about American men and boys that make their need to have a gun so much greater than the rest of the world?
As an antiwar organization, we are led to the conclusion that one thing that makes American men different in their romance with deadly weapons is that we have so many wars. We have developed this theme in recent newsletters and our vigil leaflets. To stop gun violence, we must be willing to stop war as well.
But I think that the link between men and boys wanting guns and the fact that we have a militarized national culture is complex. At a minimum, we need to consider how our foundational national stories of Indian extermination and chattel slavery have affected white male character structure and the culture that it has produced. As the leading US historian of our colonial South, Edmund S. Morgan, has shown in his book American Slavery, American Freedom, the creation of the "white race" in the United States, and the relatively large degrees of personal and civil freedoms that white men were to obtain, were based on the cross-class alliance of rich and poor organized – first in late 17th century Virginia – to keep slaves and free blacks in their place. From "Bacon's Rebellion" in 1674 to the slave patrols before the Civil War, from the Ku Klux Klan in the period of Reconstruction to the enormous grown of the Klan in northern mid-western cities in the 1920s, from the White Citizen Councils in the South in the 1960s to the vigilantes that target immigrants today in the American Southwest, white solidarity organized around armed control of people of color has been one of the defining characteristics of being "white" in America.
As historian Jill Lapore writes in an essay linked just below, the history of gun regulations in the United States is intimately bound up with racial conflict. With strident gun advocacy now based to such a great extent among armed white supremacists, it is not surprising that the far right holds a near monopoly on political violence in the United States. There are many directions that a discussion these issues could go from here, but for now I think the important point is that efforts to control access to gun ownership and the kinds of guns that civilians can own challenges a very deep, institutionalized racism that has shaped the lives of white American men and boys for centuries.
News Notes
On March 24th, in response to the Florida school massacre, the student-led March for Our Lives will take place in Washington, DC. The Hastings Recreation Dept. and Project SHARE are organizing buses. To help cover costs, fund raising is underway. To contribute to this righteous cause, go to this GoFundMe site.
The United National Antiwar Coalition has announced plans for national antiwar actions on the weekend of April 14-15. The way things are going, there's a good chance imo that we will have a new war, somewhere, by then. To learn more, go here; and for UNAC's website, go here.
The Rev. Billy Graham died last week. Some decades ago, when he was a "spiritual adviser" to presidents and a major media figure, he found Christian justifications for every war that came along. A highlight of his career was his supporting remarks on the murder of four students at Kent State in May 1970. His spiritual descendents are still in power. Learn some things about his career here.
For those keeping score at home, here is a list of the "20 Companies Profiting the Most From War."
Airwars is a very useful site/program that keeps track of civilian casualties incurred in the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Their report for January 2018 is just out.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – Concerned Families of Westchester holds a rally/vigil each Saturday in Hastings, at the VFW Plaza, from 12 to 1. Please join us.
Ongoing – CFOW stalwart Elisa Zazzera manages Hastings' "Community Supported Agriculture" (CSA). The CSA partners with an upstate farm to provide fresh vegetables each Wednesday. Highly recommended. To learn more about this, and/or to sign up for the next growing season, go here.
Monday, February 26 - Port Chester Immigration Defense and Make the Road (Westchester Hispanic Coalition) will be hosting a Free Legal Advice and Training for Immigrants and those who serve them. The program begins at 7 p.m. At St. Peter's Episcoopal Church, 19 Smith St. in Portchester.
Sunday, March 4th – CFOW's monthly meeting will be at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 p.m. At these meetings we review our work of the past month and lay plans for the coming weeks. Everyone is welcome at these meetings; please join us!
Saturday, March 10th – The Westchester Coalition Against Islamophobia and other organizations will present a forum on "Defending Constitutional Rights: Religious Freedom and Police Accountability" at the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester, 7 Saxon Wood Rd., in White Plains, starting at 2 p.m. Speakers will include Omar T. Mohammedi, President of the Association of Muslim American Lawyers, and Jon Moscow, writer and community activist with the NY Coalition against Islamophobia and Jewish Voice for Peace – Northern NJ. [NB The snow date is Sunday, March 11th at 2 p.m.]
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's tax cut legislation are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays" and the selection of articles about guns and gun violence in America, I especially recommend the videos linked just below (in "Rewards!"); a video of Kathy Kelly speaking in Stony Point; some insights on how Mueller's recent indictment of some Russians poses a threat to dissenters in the USA; and an interesting article on how the US "Red Scare" shaped the distinctions in law and practice between who is a "migrant' and who is a "refugee."
Rewards!
The week's rewards for stalwart readers come from our history drawer. Documentary film maker Raoul Peck ("I Am Not Your Negro") has made an imo very interesting film called "The Young Karl Marx." You can see the film online here. Peck was interviewed by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman on Friday [Link]. And you can read a useful assessment of "The Young Karl Marx" by favorite film critic Louis Proyect here. Also as part of your reward package, the activism of US students in response to the Florida school massacre reminds us of another time when young people came to the rescue of a stymied movement – i.e. the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Check out this documentary footage from those heroic days; and for an excellent background story, see this short film.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
GUNS, RACE, AND GENDER
Battleground America: One nation, Under the Gun.
By Jill Lepore, The New Yorker [April 23, 2018]
---- The U.S. Constitution, which was signed in Philadelphia in September of 1787, granted Congress the power "to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions," the power "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress," and the power "to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." Ratification was an uphill battle. The Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in 1789, offered assurance to Anti-Federalists, who feared that there would be no limit to the powers of the newly constituted federal government. Since one of their worries was the prospect of a standing army—a permanent army—Madison drafted an amendment guaranteeing the people the right to form a militia. … One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left. [Read More]
Guns, Boys, And School Shootings
By Sandy Carter, ZNet [February 21, 2018]
---- Coronado Elementary School in Sierra Vista, Arizona, Italy High School in Italy, Texas, NET Charter High School in New Orleans, Louisiana, Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky, Salvador Castro Middle School in Los Angeles, California, Oxon Hill High School in Prince George's County, Maryland, and finally on Valentine's Day, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—eight school shootings, 19 people dead, 37 injured in the first 45 days of 2018. And after the avalanche of tragic images, pleas for prayer and endless media commentaries, what have we learned about the seeds of this horrific violence? Health professionals and politicians offer no easy answers, only the same old litany of problems: easy access to guns, violent pop media, online hate speech, permissive and absentee parenting, ignorance of warning signs, a failing mental health system. But something is missing here. The very glaring reality of the recent school shootings is that they were committed by boys—to be specific, white boys. Genes and biology, of course, do not make boys perpetrate heinous acts of violence. So what is it about American culture that pushes and pressures boys toward a breaking point where mass slaughter becomes acceptable. … Yes we need gun control. But we need it mostly to protect us from the weaponized aggression of boys and men. However, even now, with the images of screaming kids and horrified parents fresh in our eyes, few seem focused on the normalcy of male violence. So the lines between victims and victimizers continue to blur. And you can bet, there is more carnage to come. [Read More]
---- Coronado Elementary School in Sierra Vista, Arizona, Italy High School in Italy, Texas, NET Charter High School in New Orleans, Louisiana, Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky, Salvador Castro Middle School in Los Angeles, California, Oxon Hill High School in Prince George's County, Maryland, and finally on Valentine's Day, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—eight school shootings, 19 people dead, 37 injured in the first 45 days of 2018. And after the avalanche of tragic images, pleas for prayer and endless media commentaries, what have we learned about the seeds of this horrific violence? Health professionals and politicians offer no easy answers, only the same old litany of problems: easy access to guns, violent pop media, online hate speech, permissive and absentee parenting, ignorance of warning signs, a failing mental health system. But something is missing here. The very glaring reality of the recent school shootings is that they were committed by boys—to be specific, white boys. Genes and biology, of course, do not make boys perpetrate heinous acts of violence. So what is it about American culture that pushes and pressures boys toward a breaking point where mass slaughter becomes acceptable. … Yes we need gun control. But we need it mostly to protect us from the weaponized aggression of boys and men. However, even now, with the images of screaming kids and horrified parents fresh in our eyes, few seem focused on the normalcy of male violence. So the lines between victims and victimizers continue to blur. And you can bet, there is more carnage to come. [Read More]
150,000 American Students Have Experienced a School Shooting
By February 15, 2018]
---- It's remarkable how easy it is to relate to the experience of a school shooting. Schools are such familiar, self-similar environments—the awkward chair-desks, the laminated maps—that the one on the news could easily stand in for yours. For parents, each news break threatens the fragile social trust required to leave your kid with strangers all day, even when the violence is thousands of miles away. You can picture it being your child with his hands up, marching through the parking lot. In other words, it is easy to make each tragedy our own. For a staggering number of Americans under 40, however, it doesn't require any leap of the imagination at all. According to an analysis conducted by the Washington Post earlier this month, more than 150,000 Americans have experienced a shooting on campus since Columbine in 1999. After Wednesday's rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, you can add 3,000 more kids to that list. Together, America's school shooting survivors would make up a city the size of Savannah, Georgia or Syracuse, New York. A whole city knowing the trauma of what we still, wrongly, insist on calling the unthinkable. … For years, we thought it would be the escalating horror that might finally prompt bans on semi-automatic weapons or restrictions on selling guns to people with mental illnesses. Maybe it's the opposite. After 150,000 survivors, a school shooting is normal now, and that normalcy makes it fodder for immediate, serious, political discussion. The kids have figured that out. [Read More]
Terror Begins at Home
By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker [June 16, 2016]
---- There is a connection between domestic violence and mass shootings, and in acknowledging that connection there is some hope for helping to prevent both. A recent analysis of mass shootings, conducted by the research-and-advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, found the link to domestic violence "noteworthy." Using the F.B.I.'s definition of mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are murdered by guns, the Everytown researchers were able to document a hundred and thirty-three such shootings between January, 2009, and July, 2015. They found that "in at least 76 of the cases (57%), the shooter killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member, and in at least 21 incidents the shooter had a prior domestic violence charge." The lethal intersection of firearms and intimate-partner violence is actually one of the few gun-safety matters that Congress has acted on. In 1996, it adopted the Lautenberg Amendment, which bans people who have been convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors, or who are subject to restraining orders, from owning firearms. This was sound and compassionate legislation. Guns are the most common method, by far, for killing intimate partners. Not surprisingly, the presence of a firearm in the home makes it much more likely that a woman in an abusive relationship will end up dead. [Read More]
Out of Bloodshed, Hope for Gun Control
By Gary Younge, The Nation [February 21, 2018]
---- This fight comes at a moment of heightened consciousness about the nation's political trajectory and with a new critical mass determined to correct it. As a result of Donald Trump's victory, many liberals and progressives have been doing things over the past year—campaigning, marching, phone banking, running for office—that they hadn't done for a long time, if at all. In the course of this activism, many are now realizing that the issues that energize us most—whether it's immigration, sexual harassment, racism, or health care—are not isolated. In the past, campaigning around a tragedy like Parkland would have concentrated solely on gun control. That doesn't go far enough. Avoiding the more enduring American pathologies that allow the gun culture to flourish—the obsessions with conquest, domination, force, power, masculinity, and rugged individualism—means failing to explain why a racist, anti-Semitic teenage boy with a grudge and an easily available weapon of war can go to school and kill others at will, and what might be done to prevent it. It means failing to recognize that America's gun culture is deeply embedded in its general culture. [Read More]
Also useful/insightful on the gun violence issue – From Democracy Now! (Video) "The Time to Act Is Now": Florida School Shooting Survivors Confront Trump, Rubio on Gun Control" [February 22, 2018] [Link]; Peter Dreier, "Who Was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?" The American Prospect [February 20, 2018] [Link]; Katha Pollitt, "Has the NRA Finally Met Its Match?" The Nation [February 21, 2018] [Link]; and Benjamin L. McKean, "'Blood Money' and Mass Membership," Jacobin Magazine [February 2018] [Link].
FEATURED ESSAYS
Iona Craig Won a Polk Award for Her Investigation of a SEAL Team Raid That Killed Women and Children in Yemen. Here's How She Did It.
By Peter Maass, The Intercept [
---- A little more than a year ago, on January 29, 2017, Iona Craig was at the tail end of a month-long reporting trip to Yemen. On that day, special operators from the U.S. Navy's SEAL Team 6 launched a surprise raid in a remote part of Yemen, apparently trying to capture or kill an Al Qaeda leader. This was the first covert assault of the Trump era, and the White House, which was not challenged in the U.S. media, hailed it as "highly successful." Except it wasn't. Craig, who was based in Yemen from 2010-2015 and had continued to make reporting trips to the country since a civil war broke out, quickly learned from local media that the raid killed civilians. As she began planning for an arduous and risky journey to the site of the assault, local sheikhs she knew from her previous work in the country told her that the U.S. was getting the story wrong. A large number of women and children had been killed, and the targeted village did not appear to have had a standing Al Qaeda presence. But these accounts were just words that had yet to be confirmed. Craig had to go there to find out first-hand. [Read More]
Ed Herman's Media Criticism
By Justin Podur, Alternet [February 24, 2018]
---- The story goes that Einstein's theory of relativity began with a simple question: What if a person could sit on a beam of light? A single inquiry led to an entire field of study, and perhaps the world's most famous scientific breakthrough. The late Ed Herman's questions were less playful. They were about war and death, lies and power politics, but they too created entire areas of study. If properly considered, they can even guide us through the perilous age in which we're living. Herman is best known for co-authoring Noam Chomsky's iconic Manufacturing Consent, which explores how U.S. corporate media operates as a system of disinformation. Written during the Cold War, the book challenged readers who understood propaganda to be a tool of the Soviet Union. How could a diverse industry without official censors to monitor what it published or aired, that was neither owned nor controlled by the state, be used for social control? Quite easily, as it turns out. … In their propaganda model, the pair identified five distinct filters: Media ownership, which is concentrated in the hands of a few spectacularly wealthy corporations; ideology, specifically anti-communism, which "helps mobilize the populace against… anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism"; advertising, or the selling of audiences to advertisers, which can lead to any number of distortions and misconceptions; official sourcing, which often leads to self-censorship as media outlets become dependent on their access to members of the government; and finally organized flak, which allows lobbies to lean on journalists and outlets who deviate from the status quo. [Read More]
---- The story goes that Einstein's theory of relativity began with a simple question: What if a person could sit on a beam of light? A single inquiry led to an entire field of study, and perhaps the world's most famous scientific breakthrough. The late Ed Herman's questions were less playful. They were about war and death, lies and power politics, but they too created entire areas of study. If properly considered, they can even guide us through the perilous age in which we're living. Herman is best known for co-authoring Noam Chomsky's iconic Manufacturing Consent, which explores how U.S. corporate media operates as a system of disinformation. Written during the Cold War, the book challenged readers who understood propaganda to be a tool of the Soviet Union. How could a diverse industry without official censors to monitor what it published or aired, that was neither owned nor controlled by the state, be used for social control? Quite easily, as it turns out. … In their propaganda model, the pair identified five distinct filters: Media ownership, which is concentrated in the hands of a few spectacularly wealthy corporations; ideology, specifically anti-communism, which "helps mobilize the populace against… anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism"; advertising, or the selling of audiences to advertisers, which can lead to any number of distortions and misconceptions; official sourcing, which often leads to self-censorship as media outlets become dependent on their access to members of the government; and finally organized flak, which allows lobbies to lean on journalists and outlets who deviate from the status quo. [Read More]
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo
By JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation [February 22, 2018]
---- Amid the chorus of stories that define the #MeToo phenomenon, there remain other, unattended stories. These others do not displace the chorus. They do not say, "You are wrong, shut up." They do not exist in the world of "Keep quiet" or "Be good." They do not deny the reality of men's age-old power over women, or conformity as a silencing force. They say power is cunning, power is a hydra; it has more heads than any story or group of stories can describe. They say history does, too. They invite us to inspect the hydra. What follows is my invitation. … Sex panic reverses the order that governs law, where, formally at least, innocence is presumed. In panic, the stories are all true, and the accused are guilty by default. Law having been declared a flawed tool for achieving justice—as, indeed, it is—"naming and shaming" takes its place. Garbed as justice, accusations become moral lessons of Good's triumph over Evil; they thus become increasingly difficult to question. Their proliferation becomes proof of legitimacy. Victims are encouraged to "Speak your truth." Everyone else is commanded, "Believe." [Read More]
The Light at the End of the Corner: A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [February 2018]
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [February 2018]
---- Here was the problem: every time American troops actually turned that corner, what they found there were insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and other weaponry, sometimes even American-produced arms. In addition, the streets around that corner turned out to be pitted with half-buried improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, those same insurgents could build from instructions on the Internet and that could destroy the most well-armored Humvee for the price of a pizza. (Early on, in fact, some of the places down which American troops had to turn were already being given grimly sardonic names like "RPG Alley.") There were, as it happened, so many corners to turn and yet, from 2003 on, seemingly nowhere to go. I don't doubt that those of you of a certain age preparing for our little walk are already thinking about a somewhat more perilous image from another war: the infamous "light at the end of the tunnel" that will forever be connected with Vietnam. That phrase was repeatedly used by Americans to describe the glide path to victory in that conflict and would long be associated with the commander of U.S. forces, General William Westmoreland. He used it to remarkable effect in 1967, a mere 10 weeks before the enemy launched its devastating Tet Offensive. However, the general was anything but alone in his choice of imagery. That "tunnel" was also occupied by a range of top U.S. officials, from President Lyndon Johnson to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. And it wasn't the newest of images either. After all, General Henri Navarre had used it a decade and a half earlier in the French version of that losing war. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
(Video) Time is Not on Yemen's Side
A talk by Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence [February 20, 2018] [13 minutes]
---- I think the urgency of our gathering tonight is indicated by the words that Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, spoke on a nationalized, televised speech in Saudi Arabia on May 2nd of 2017 when he said a prolonged war is "in our interest" – regarding the war in Yemen. He said, "Time is on our side" regarding the war in Yemen. And I see that as particularly urgent because it's likely that the Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman, who is by all accounts the orchestrator of the Saudi-led coalition's involvement in prolonging the war in Yemen, is going to come to the United States – in Britain they managed to push back his arrival there: there was such a strong movement, led by young Quakers, actually, in the UK – and he probably will come to the United States and most certainly, if that trip happens, to New York, and I think that gives us an opportunity to say to him, and to all of the people focused on him, that time is not on the side of the civilians who suffer desperately; and their situation will be described much further throughout the course of our evening together. [See the Video]
Slaughter in Syria – The Last Round?
This Could be the Last Siege of the Syrian War
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent [UK] [February 20, 2018]
---- The siege of Eastern Ghouta could be the last of the big sieges that have characterised the war in Syria for the last five or six years and has made it such a destructive conflict. Early on in the war, government forces adapted the strategy of abandoning opposition strongholds, surrounding them and concentrating pro-government forces in defence of loyalist areas, essential roads and important urban areas. The rebel enclaves were sealed off with checkpoints and the people inside were subjected to regular bombardment. … The Syrian and – to a lesser extent – the Iraqi wars have been wars of sieges in which limited numbers of ground troops are deployed, but are supported by massive air power. This was true of the Syrian government and Russians against Isis, al-Qaeda linked groups and jihadi rebels. But it was also true of the Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units) backed by US airpower in the four month siege of Raqqa and the Iraqi Army, also backed by the US air force and its own artillery, in the nine-month siege of Mosul. The latter was probably the bloodiest of all these sieges because of the size of the city, the ferocity of the fighting and the refusal of Isis to allow the civilian population to escape from West Mosul and from the close-packed Old City. [Read More]
Stop the Slaughter in Syria's Eastern Ghouta
By Loubna Mrie, The Nation [February 23, 2018]
---- Even if you do not follow Syria closely, you might have come across an article or a picture about a place called Ghouta. So what exactly is happening? According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 403 civilians, including 150 children, were killed in Ghouta between February 18 and 23. More than 2,100 were injured. Twenty-two hospitals and makeshift clinics have been targeted, according to the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), and according to Médecins Sans Frontières, 13 of the hospitals they have supported in Ghouta have been knocked out of service. Only three medical facilities are left. … The end of the Syrian civil war is apparently not on anyone's agenda. The United Nations children's fund, UNICEF, saying, "We no longer have the words to describe children's suffering and our outrage," issued a blank statement—yet another sign of the international community's failure. What is happening today in Ghouta is not new, but the bombing hasn't been this intense in years. This 100-square-kilometer suburb shelters more than 400,000 civilians, most of whom fled there from other parts of Damascus. Only some 100 doctors remain in Ghouta, and since the government siege began in 2013, more than 2,000 people have died. … Calling for the protection of civilians on both sides of the conflict is crucial. Whether or not you support the Syrian opposition, whether or not you support Bashar al-Assad, one simple thing that should never be debated is the sanctity of civilian life, and the fact that collective punishment is always wrong. We should show solidarity with all civilians, on all sides of the conflict. The people who were unable to flee the country are paying the highest price in this war. [Read More]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
Warnings Mount That Trump's Infrastructure Plan Will Make It Harder to Fight Pipelines
By
---- As green groups continue to denounce the Trump administration's recently unveiled infrastructure plan as a "scam" that's designed to keep the nation trapped in its "dirty and destructive past," analysts are also warning the proposal will "make it harder for the next big anti-pipeline movement" to launch successful legal challenges to new fossil fuel projects. The plan aims to not only fast-track the construction of more pipelines across the U.S., but also to limit "the legal options available to lawyers at environmental groups opposed to new fossil fuel infrastructure" in part by changing "the standard under which a pipeline project could be temporarily halted by a judge," as Dino Gradoni explains in a Washington Post piece published Friday. Trump also wants Congress to rewrite long-standing environmental laws that allow for lawsuits challenging permits. Gradoni notes that although the administration's desire for that specific revision by lawmakers may be a bit of a "pipe dream," enacting barriers to launching legal challenges against pipeline projects "could be a significant blow to the slew of protesters who spent years agitating against the Keystone XL pipeline and more recently the Dakota Access one." [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Why Mueller's Indictments Are Hugely Important
---- There are at least three key reasons why Robert Mueller's mid-February indictments of 13 Russians and three private Russian companies are hugely important. In fact, Mueller has significantly advanced Cold War 2.0 onto highly dangerous ground., even though the published indictments provided no connection of the alleged "troll farm" to Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin. First, the indictments "target domestic dissent" by "smearing" Black Lives Matters, Bernie Sanders, and Green Party leader Jill Stein (all mentioned in the indictments) "as unwitting collaborators with the Russians". … Second, as Rob Urie has noted, Mueller's indictments suggest that the Russians "are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent." Mueller is the former director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, and as Urie writes, "It is the FBI's legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr. Mueller's indictment most insidiously perpetuates." Third, the charges of Russian "meddling" were soon neatly translated in the MSM into something more sinister. … This change of wording from "meddling" to "attack" and "cyber-attack" is not a mere semantic difference. It is chillingly critical, given the February release of the Pentagon's 2018 Nuclear Posture Review – which would allow a "first-strike" use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for a cyber-attack. [Read More] For more skepticism about Mueller's indictments, read Aaron Maté, "Hyping the Mueller Indictment," The Nation [February 21, 2018] [Link].
Capitalism as Obstacle to Equality and Democracy: the US Story
---- The Cold War displaced the legacies of the New Deal. Time and Trump are now displacing Cold War legacies. Where capitalism was questioned and challenged in the 1930s and into the 1940s, doing that became taboo after 1948. Yet in the wake of the 2008 crash, critical thought about capitalism resumed. In particular one argument is gaining traction: capitalism is not the means to realize economic equality and democracy, it is rather the great obstacle to their realization. … The conclusion to be drawn from the US story is not that efforts to reverse deepening inequality are foredoomed to failure. It is to face the fact that mere reforms such as tax law changes are inadequate to the task. To make reforms stick – to overcome temporariness across so many histories – requires going further to basic system change. Because capitalism tends toward deepening inequality and can defeat reversals by keeping them temporary, it is capitalism that must be overcome to solve its inherent inequality problem. [Read More]
Also interesting/useful about the Trump economy – Peter Bohmer, "Trump's Tax Scam," ZNet [February 25, 2018] [Link]; and Kate Aronoff, "Citigroup Drove Puerto Rico Into Debt. Now It Will Profit From Privatization on the Island," The Intercept [[Link].
OUR HISTORY
How the Red Scare Shaped the Artificial Distinction Between Migrants and Refugees
BY Sarah Lazare, In These Times [February 5, 2018]
---- Trump is transparent about his racist and geopolitical motives for dividing people who migrate across borders into categories of "good" and "bad"—but his aims are far from original. The distinction between political refugees who are "deserving" of protection, and economic migrants who are not, has been formally enshrined in U.S. law and international norms since the beginning of the Cold War. This binary is neither abstract nor trivial: Denial of refugee status can spell out precarious undocumented existence, indefinite detention, coerced repatriation and even death. While sometimes draped in Trump-style inflammatory rhetoric, these categories are often vaunted by policymakers and technocrats as natural and neutral—far above the political fray. However, the legal distinction between refugees and migrants has been ideological from the outset, formally emerging in the early 1950s as an anti-communist tool wielded by U.S. and Western European governments. Under U.S. law, the concept of a "refugee" first emerged to describe individuals seeking sanctuary in non-communist countries. On the international level, the United States played a key role in developing norms that emphasize the liberties of political dissidents, while denying the right to live free from poverty. By extending open arms to people escaping the "red menace," the burgeoning U.S. empire sought to position itself as the leader of the free world. In the process, the U.S. government treated the dispossessed and displaced as pawns to undercut geopolitical foes and advance reactionary policies while fanning the flames of further displacement. [Read More]
