Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
December 31, 2018
Hello All – The year 2018 was a tough one for peace & justice stalwarts, and we say good-bye to it without much regret. The threat of nuclear war (e.g. between the US and Russia) continued to grow, and the world made little progress (and some regress) in addressing the global disaster benignly described as "climate change." Newsletter readers are familiar with the significant role played in these developments by our own government, though it had many supporting players throughout the world.
The last few months, however, have seen some rays of light that warrant hopes for a better New Year. The outcome of the congressional elections in November is/was a bright spot; and whether or not the resulting shift in the balance of power in Congress produces much good, the elections showed that the Trump Agenda could be handily defeated with a strong mobilization around (often) progressive ideas. Similarly, one of the "black swans" that seem to dominate our landscape these days – the gratuitous murder of journalist Jemal Khasshogi by underlings of the Saudi ruling family – has changed the way that the Saudi war in Yemen – and more generally the wars in the Middle East – are seen. It is as if the United States and the lands of its allies were suddenly awakened from collective slumber and, rubbing their eyes, ask "What is going on?!!" Thus, despite the pushback by US political and media elites against President Trump's order to remove troops from Syria and Afghanistan, US public opinion generally supports the idea that it is time for these wars to end. And the promise of congressional action to end US support for the Saudi war in Yemen also has broad support. There is, at last, some hope.
For these reasons, I think that there is even more reason than usual to call on our reserves of energy to protest those forces and actions that will attempt to keep the US war machine active in the Middle East. Republicans in Congress have been meeting with Trump and claiming that he doesn't "really" mean what he said about withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan, and US military commanders on the ground state that withdrawal of troops from Syria could take several months. Democrat leadership in Congress may well conclude that Trump's failure to pursue the wars in the Middle East may be something to investigate, and/or perhaps to include in Articles of Impeachment. As was shown several times during the Obama presidency, the Pentagon's commanders are capable of "dissuading" the Commander-in-Chief when he is neglecting his Imperial Duties. Despite some auspicious signs at the end of 2018, therefore, peace activists in 2019 will have our work cut out for us.
News Notes
To start the New Year off right, show up on New Year's Day for the demonstration in White Plains, at the Federal Courthouse, called In Solidarity with Children's who die and suffer cruelty. It is sponsored by the Hudson Valley Community Coalition and its allies. For more information, go here.
The admirable Project Censored publishes an annual report listing the most important stories suppressed or misreported by the mainstream media. The "missing" stories are generally written by students, and they make for impressive reading/reporting. Here are the top 25 censored stories of 2017-2018.
A news report featuring our congressional representative Eliot Engel proclaims that "Democrats vow new scrub of post-9/11 war powers." Indeed, launching or justifying wars based on the Authorization to Use Military Force passed by Congress days after 9/11 doesn't make sense anymore. So the House of Representatives, led by among others Engel, is planning to draft a new one. This sounds good for about a nanosecond; and then we say, "Why do we need to give the President a new blank check at all?" Why not require Congress to declare war – or not – as described in the Constitution, or use the War Powers Act to require the President to get congressional approval for military action lasting longer than 60 days?
For several years Israel has offered US police departments to participate in training (in Israel) on how to fight terrorism. Two years ago, Jewish Voice for Peace began the Deadly Exchange campaign, protesting the practice of US police "learning" at the feet of military forces who inflict daily terror on Palestinians. The campaign has had some successes, with police forces cancelling their training; and this useful article from The Electronic Intifada asks (and answers), "How did activists accomplish this?"
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 immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We (usually) 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.
Please Support CFOW
CFOW's expenditures are small, but if you would like to support our work financially, please send a 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, I especially recommend the set of articles that review the debate on, and merits of, Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria; the explosive expose ("War & Peace") of the use by Saudi Arabia of child soldiers/slaves from Darfur in its war in Yemen; an in-depth article by Korea expert Leon Sigal that reviews the US-North Korea negotiations since the 1990s; a set of good articles on The Green New Deal, and what the Democrats will/won't do to support this vital program; good articles on the repression of Julian Assange, the weakness of the latest "revelations" about "Russiagate," and some more support for the benefits of "Medicare for All"; and, finally, today's New York Times investigative report on the killing of a Palestinian medic in Gaza a few months ago. Read on!
Rewards
To close out the old year and Welcome the New, here are CFOW favorites, Hudson Valley Sally, with a new (to me) song, "We Need Each Other Now." And to illuminate yet another corner of our neglected history, here is True Story of "Yip Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz," an old favorite rebroadcast by Democracy Now! last week. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Seasons Greetings from France's Yellow Vests: "We are not tired"
By Richard Greeman, ZNet [December 30, 2018]
---- Is the Yellow Vest rebellion, now in its seventh week, "petering out?" Such was the near-unanimous pronouncement of the mainstream media, when I returned home to Montpellier, France, eager to participate and to observe first-hand this popular insurrection which I had been afraid of missing. I needn't have worried. … Then all hell broke loose and continued all day, with marches, countermarches and gas in the air. … So apparently the Yellow Vest movement is not exactly "petering out." After six weeks of daily roadblocks and disruptions in every corner of France, and after six (now seven) successive mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Paris and the provinces, violently repressed, this spontaneous, self-organized rebellion, coordinated via social media, is still seriously challenging the political and economic order in France. Not only has this rebellion persisted despite unprecedented police brutality, media misrepresentation, and rejection by labor union officials, it has retained its grass-roots popularity and deepened its goals – from an initial rejection of a tax increase on Diesel fuel to explicit rejection of the established political/economic system and to near-unanimous call for the resignation of Macron and the creation of a new kind of democracy via referendum or constitutional convention. [Read More}
---- Is the Yellow Vest rebellion, now in its seventh week, "petering out?" Such was the near-unanimous pronouncement of the mainstream media, when I returned home to Montpellier, France, eager to participate and to observe first-hand this popular insurrection which I had been afraid of missing. I needn't have worried. … Then all hell broke loose and continued all day, with marches, countermarches and gas in the air. … So apparently the Yellow Vest movement is not exactly "petering out." After six weeks of daily roadblocks and disruptions in every corner of France, and after six (now seven) successive mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Paris and the provinces, violently repressed, this spontaneous, self-organized rebellion, coordinated via social media, is still seriously challenging the political and economic order in France. Not only has this rebellion persisted despite unprecedented police brutality, media misrepresentation, and rejection by labor union officials, it has retained its grass-roots popularity and deepened its goals – from an initial rejection of a tax increase on Diesel fuel to explicit rejection of the established political/economic system and to near-unanimous call for the resignation of Macron and the creation of a new kind of democracy via referendum or constitutional convention. [Read More}
We Have Entered A Dangerous Moral Universe: What futures can we imagine when we no longer trust our senses?
By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation [December 19, 2018]
---- My inner 10-year-old does not want to get "used to losses." Indeed, the refusal to do so is the very claim that has been made, under "public trust" doctrine, in the pending federal-court case of Juliana v. the United States. The plaintiffs are 21 children ranging from 11 to 22 years old, and they have alleged that the destruction of the earth's atmosphere is a violation of substantive due process and equal protection, because it threatens their very future. The rest of us, meanwhile, seem to have forgotten that government should inspire public trust. Surely this determined sense of a right to exist is the same commitment that Jakelin's father felt as he fled the legacy of a civil war specifically targeting Mayan populations in Guatemala. Surely this insistence on the right to be is what also drives the stateless millions around the globe fleeing displacement by war, toxins, climate change, flood, famine, and drought. [Read More]
Isolationism or Imperialism?
By David Swanson, World Beyond War [December 28, 2018]
---- Five years ago, there was a debate over whether to bomb Syria flat, and those opposed to doing so were accused of "isolationism." Now the idea of pulling troops out of Syria or Afghanistan or ceasing to help bomb and starve the people of Yemen is subjected to the same rhetorical assault. That Trump promises to keep the occupation of Iraq going is understood as reassuring "engagement with the world" by people who demanded an end to the occupation of Iraq when George W. Bush was president, and who pretended to celebrate its ending when Barack Obama pretended to end it. This is simple-minded thinking in the extreme, notwithstanding its claims to be just the opposite. "I'm against war but we can't be simplistic about it and just end one of them willy-nilly, abandoning our allies." This is the type of language used to support imperialism in the great debate between isolationism and imperialism, a debate wholly dependent on the ridiculous pretense that these two choices constitute the full range of possible human behaviors. [Read More]
An Appeal to Jewish Women to Support the 2019 Women's March and Its Leaders
By Rosalind P. Petchesky, Solidarity – US [December 25, 2018]
---- For the past nine months, controversy and obfuscation concerning allegations of anti-Semitism and complicity with Louis Farrakhan have surrounded the 2019 Women's March and its Women of Color leaders, especially Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour. The complaints rage on, leaving a trail of divisiveness and malice in their wake. This is an appeal to the white Jewish women who have participated in this barrage, or stood idly by while it happened, to step back, hit pause, and think more clearly about what fears lie behind your anger, or your silence. … In a climate of fear, violence, intimidation and rising fascism, the only way forward for a truly transformative Women's March and movement is to unite the struggles to end violence, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, settler colonialism everywhere, including in Palestine, and the white nationalism that undergirds them all. And this means holding out our hands to the courageous leaders who propel this vision, like Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, saying we stand with you, we have your back. [Read More]
TRUMP'S TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM SYRIA – DISCUSSION
We Know How Trump's War Game Ends
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone [December 2018]
---- Trump dumped on basically every segment of the political establishment en route to Washington, running on a classic authoritarian strategy — bash the elites, pose as a populist. However fake he was, there were portions of the political establishment that deserved abuse, the Pentagon most of all. The Department of Defense has been a money pit for decades. It has trillions in expenditures it can't account for, refused an audit for nearly 30 years and then failed this year (as in failed completely, zero-point-zero, not producing any coherent numbers) when one was finally funded. We have brave and able soldiers, but their leaders are utter tools who've left a legacy of massacres and botched interventions around the world. NATO? That's an organization whose mission stopped making sense the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. We should long ago have repurposed our defense plan to focus on terrorism, cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, commercial espionage, financial security, and other threats. Instead, we continued after the Soviet collapse to maintain a global military alliance fattened with increasingly useless carriers and fighter jets, designed to fight archaic forms of war. [Read More]
Trump Scores, Breaks Generals' 50-Year War Record
By Gareth Porter, The American Conservative [December 28, 2018]
---- The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria. The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state. [Read More]
Ignore the howls of protest – Trump's Syria withdrawal is a simple reflection of foreign policy realities
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent [UK] [December 26, 2018]
---- President Trump's decision to withdraw US troops from Syria is being denounced by an impressive range of critics claiming that it is a surrender to Turkey, Russia, Syria and Iran – as well as a betrayal of the Kurds and a victory for Isis. The pullout may be one or all of these things, but above all it is a recognition of what is really happening on the ground in Syria and the Middle East in general. This point has not come across clearly enough because of the undiluted loathing for Trump among most of the American and British media. They act as a conduit for the views of diverse figures who condemn the withdrawal and include members of the imperially-minded foreign policy establishment in Washington and terrified Kurds living in north-east Syria who fear ethnic cleansing by an invading Turkish army. … It is worth spelling out the state of play in Syria because this is being masked by anti-Trump rhetoric, recommending policies that may sound benign but are far detached from political reality. This reality may be very nasty: it is right to be appalled by the prospects for the Syrian Kurds who are terrified of a Turkish army that is already massing to the north of the Turkish-Syrian frontier. [Read More]
Also useful/insightful on the Syria withdrawal – "Bring the Troops Home, But Also Stop the Bombing," b[Link]; "Democrats and Neocons Are the Biggest Losers of Trump's Syria Withdrawal," by Daniel Lazare, TruthDig [December 28, 2018] [Link]; and "Trump vs Mattis: Watch out when men of war come to the rescue," by Robert Fisk, The Independent [UK] [December 27, 2018] [Link]. This article from 2014, by "Occupy's" David Graeber, is a useful reminder of the significance of the Kurd's self-governing project at Rojava, in Syria, now threatened by a Turkish attack: "Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?" [Link].
WAR & PEACE
The United States is First in War, But Trailing in Crucial Aspects of Modern Civilization
---- Maybe those delirious crowds chanting "USA, USA" have got something. When it comes to military power, the United States reigns supreme. Newsweek reported in March 2018: "The United States has the strongest military in the world," with more than two million military personnel and vast numbers of the most advanced nuclear missiles, military aircraft, warships, tanks, and other modern weapons of war. Furthermore, as the New York Times noted, "the United States also has a global presence unlike any other nation, with about 200,000 active duty troops deployed in more than 170 countries." This presence includes some 800 overseas U.S. military bases. … Maintaining the U.S. status as "No. 1" in war and war preparations comes at a very high price. That price is not only paid in dollars—plus massive death and suffering in warfare ― but in the impoverishment of other key sectors of American life. After all, this lavish outlay on the military now constitutes about two-thirds of the U.S. government's discretionary spending. And these other sectors of American life are in big trouble. [Read More]
Our Poor, Defenseless Military Industrial Complex
By Alan MacLeod, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [December 20, 2018]
---- Even these figures do not include military pensions and veterans' healthcare, or nuclear weapons, and therefore the true total is possibly greater than all other countries combined. Military spending is approaching the highest in recorded history of any country, and the increase in military spending Trump approved last year alone would be enough to make public colleges and universities across the US free to all. Considering the problems of unemployment, poverty, climate change and infrastructure in the US, perhaps tooling up for an intercontinental war against two nuclear-armed superpowers is not the most effective use of trillions of dollars. That reducing a $716 billion war budget can be presented as a threat to the nation, and that "defense" can refer to wars in Taiwan or the Baltic, illustrates the depth of the media's imperial mindset, and goes to show President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the power of the military industrial complex went unheeded. [Read More]
The War in Yemen
A Top 2018 Story: Sudan's Mercenary child-soldiers in Yemen (NYT)
---- David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times caused an international stir by estimating that 20 percent of Sudanese fighters in Yemen may be 13-17, i.e. child soldiers. The percentage may be as high as 40%. That these child soldiers appear to have been paid for by Saudi Arabia at a time when, because of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia is in bad odor anyway, contributed to the sensation. Virtually every Arabic newspaper and news site is leading with the Times story. … Sudan, a country of 40 million with a GDP of only $110 bn., is said to have 10,000 fighters in Yemen, with the first contingent entering at Aden in October of 2015, about six months after the Saudis launched their air war on Yemen. The vast majority of these fighters are not regular army troops but Janjawid mercenaries from Dar Fur ("Rapid Support Forces") whose salaries are paid by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir is said to have demanded from these Gulf countries $2 billion for every 1,000 Sudanese troops deployed in Yemen. [Read More] And please read the original article by David D. Kirkpatrick, "On the Front Line of the Saudi War in Yemen: Child Soldiers From Darfur," New York Times [December 28, 2018] [Link]. Many pictures and maps accompany this useful New York Times article, "Saudi Strikes, American Bombs, Yemeni Suffering" [December 27, 2018] [Link].
The War in Afghanistan
C.I.A.'s Afghan Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger
By Mujib Mashal, New York Times [December 31, 2018]
---- At a time when the conventional Afghan military and police forces are being killed in record numbers across the country, the regional forces overseen by the C.I.A. have managed to hold the line against the most brutal militant groups, including the Haqqani wing of the Taliban and also Islamic State loyalists. But the units have also operated unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity, in a covert campaign that some Afghan and American officials say is undermining the wider American effort to strengthen Afghan institutions. Those abuses are actively pushing people toward the Taliban, the officials say. And with only a relatively small American troop contingent left — and that perhaps set to drop further on President Trump's orders — the strike forces are increasingly the way that a large number of rural Afghans experience the American presence. … For months, The New York Times has investigated the human toll of the C.I.A.-sponsored forces on communities. Times journalists researched frequent complaints — at times almost weekly — that these units had raided and killed civilians, and The Times went to the sites of half a dozen of their raids, often less than 24 hours after the force had left. The investigation found details of a C.I.A. mission with tactical successes that have come at the cost of alienating the Afghan population. One former senior Afghan security official bluntly accused the strike forces of war crimes. [Read More].
War With Iran?
Fear, Hate And Violence: The Human Cost Of US Sanctions On Iran
By Alan Knight and Shahrzad Khayatian, Worldbeyondwar.org [December 24, 2018]
---- In the US, however, this suffering in Iran will be invisible. You won't see it on the screens of the 24/7 mass-market corporate broadcasts. You won't find it on the pages of the newspapers of record. It won't be debated in Congress. And if something does make it onto YouTube, it will be ignored, downplayed, denied or buried in a lifeless statistic. The importance of giving a name and face to suffering cannot be exaggerated. We respond to human experience; we ignore statistics. In this series of articles we will follow the lives of middle class Iranians, that middle class Americans can easily identify with, as they live through US imposed sanctions. The stories begin with the implementation of the first tranche of sanctions in August 2018, but first some context. [Read More]
War With North Korea?
For North Korea, Verifying Requires Reconciling: The Lesson from A Troubled Past
By Leon V. Sigal, 38North [December 14, 2018]
[FB – Leon Sigal is the author of several books and articles on the US-North Korea negotiations of the 1990s. This is a major essay, a useful background study for the evolving Trump negotiations with North Korea.]
---- The usual story going around Washington is that North Korea has no intention to denuclearize or to provide a complete and accurate declaration of all its nuclear facilities and inventory and allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to verify that declaration. According to this story, North Korea reneged on promises to take these steps in the past, and instead, temporarily suspended production of plutonium, impeded unfettered access for IAEA inspectors, secretly sought the means to enrich uranium, expelled the inspectors, and resumed plutonium production when its enrichment activity was challenged. This narrative is incomplete and misleading, because it ignores the crucial link between Pyongyang's willingness to accept US requests for verification and Washington's willingness to take steps to end enmity with North Korea. There is, in short, another way to interpret the troubled history of US-North Korean negotiations on verification. … If there is one takeaway from this history of verification in North Korea, it is that cooperation begets cooperation. The test of that proposition will come prior to a North Korean declaration of its fissile material and nuclear weapons stocks when the United States seeks access to the North's nuclear test sites, uranium mines, facilities to refine the ore into metal and turn it into a gas to run through centrifuges, and enrichment plants and reactors, to determine how much fissile material it could have produced. Any attempt to secure access to its nuclear facilities, not to mention its nuclear materials and weapons, will require a sustained US effort to end enmity with North Korea. The message from Pyongyang seems clear: no verification without reconciliation. [Read More]. And for Part II of this article, go here.
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
The Green New Deal Is Good for the Planet—and the Democratic Party
By Mike Konczal, The Nation [December 19, 2018]
---- We don't have much time to tackle climate change. A new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that we need to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent in the next 12 years to keep the earth from heating up "only" 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. This isn't a problem for future generations; this is an emergency now. Into this crisis comes a demand for a Green New Deal, a call to mobilize the federal government to tackle this threat. Led by the young organizers of the Sunrise Movement, the campaign received a signal boost when Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined its members during a sit-in at Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi's office. The fact that the earth is rapidly warming is reason enough to pay attention. But there are three additional reasons why the Green New Deal should excite Democrats and progressives. First, it proves that the grass roots can drive the Democratic agenda. … Second, a Green New Deal helps solve the Democrats' ideas problem. … Finally, we are not prepared for the next recession. With low interest rates, corporate balance sheets bloated with cash that companies won't spend, and workers without the power to demand higher wages, the next recession will be just as devastating as the previous one and will require an even bigger response. [Read More] The import of the Green New Deal, and the strategic thinking behind it, is explained in this article by Naomi Klein that was in the CFOW newsletter last month, "The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal," The Intercept [[Link]. The Democratic Party leadership, however, has set off in the wrong direction; read "Climate Crisis is "Existential Threat," House Democrats Say — but Protecting Turf Comes First," by Kate Aronoff, The Intercept [[Link].
The Infiltrator: How an Undercover Oil Industry Mercenary Tricked Pipeline Opponents Into Believing He Was One of Them
By Alleen Brown, The Intercept [December 30, 2018]
---- For months, a man calling himself Joel Edwards had posed as a pipeline opponent, attending protests, befriending water protectors, and paying for hotel rooms, supplies, and booze. He told some people he had a job with a hotel that allowed him to travel, others that he was a freelance journalist reporting on the pipeline resistance. But five former contractors for TigerSwan, the secretive security firm hired by Energy Transfer to guard the pipeline, confirmed to The Intercept that Joel was an undercover intelligence operative. His real name was Joel Edward McCollough, and he had been sent to collect information on the protesters, [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
Justice for Julian Assange, Test of Western Democracy
---- This has been the 7th year that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spent Christmas in confinement inside Ecuador's London embassy. … In December 2015, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange was being "arbitrarily deprived of his freedom and demanded that he be released". Yet the UK government's refusal to comply with the UN finding has allowed this unlawful detention to continue. This cruel persecution of Assange represents a deep crisis of Western democracy. As injustice against this Western journalist prevails, the legitimacy of traditional institutions has weakened. The benevolent Democracy that many were taught to believe in has been shown to be an illusion. It has been revealed as a system of control, lacking enforcement mechanisms in law to deal with real offenders of human rights violations, who for example illegally invade countries under the pretext of fighting terrorism. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics
By Aaron Maté, The Nation [December 27, 2018]
---- The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit "assets," and "sow discord" or "hack the 2016 election" via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. The reports, from the University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. … There is no indication that the disinformation spread by employees of a St. Petersburg troll farm has had a discernible impact on the US electorate. The barrage of claims to the contrary is but one element of an infinitely larger chorus from failed political elites, sketchy private firms, shadowy intelligence officials, and credulous media outlets that inculcates the Western public with fears of a Kremlin "sowing discord." Given how divorced the prevailing alarm is from the actual facts—and the influence of those fueling it—we might ask ourselves whose disinformation is most worthy of concern. [Read More]
25 Ways The Canadian Health Care System Is Better Than Obamacare
By Ralph Nader, Nader.org [December 27, 2018]
---- Dear America: Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer— full Medicare for all— is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal. In the early 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards! Below please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system is better than the chaotic U.S. system. Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Love, Canada. [Read More] For some discussion of the proposed USA single-payer healthcare ideas, read "Medicare Will Be Good for Everyone — Except CEOs," an interview with Robert Pollin, in Jacobin Magazine [December 2018] [Link]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Biggest Stories of 2018: Israel announced Apartheid, Shot Thousands of Civilians
---- 2018 was in many ways a turning point for the position of Israel in the system of Western, liberal, capitalist democracies. It had long sat uneasily among France, Britain, and the United States, inasmuch as it was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state. Racism is important in the other democracies, as well, but it is not typically enshrined in the constitution. The French Rights of Man mentioned nothing about race. … Somewhat astonishingly, the assemblage of far-right Israeli parties that rules Israel has managed to worsen its wretched human rights record in 2018 and to depart from liberal capitalist democracy almost entirely. Not only is Israel not the only democracy in the Middle East (that distinction now belongs to Tunisia), it isn't a democracy at all in the sense of a state of equal citizens able to vote for the government that rules them. [Read More] For more on the state of Israel's democracy and the forthcoming election, read Ariel Gold (Code Pink), "Elections Don't Make Israel a Democracy" [Link]
Nearly 300 Palestinians killed, 29,000 injured in 2018
By Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada [December 27, 2018]
---- Israeli occupation forces and settlers have killed 295 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since the beginning of the year, according to a UN monitoring group. Fourteen Israelis were killed by Palestinians during the same period, in addition to a baby who died days after his premature birth following the shooting and critical injury of his mother. More than 29,000 Palestinians were injured during 2018 – the highest number of injuries in a single year since the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs began collecting data in 2005. Nearly 60 of those Palestinians killed and 7,000 of those injured were children. Twenty-eight members of armed groups were among the fatalities, as were 15 perpetrators or alleged perpetrators of attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, according to OCHA. More than 60 percent of the fatalities and nearly 80 percent of the injuries took place in the context of the Great March of Return – mass protests held regularly along Gaza's eastern and northern perimeter since 30 March. [Read More]
A Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?
By David M. Halbfinger, New York Times [December 30, 2018]
---- A young medic in a head scarf runs into danger, her only protection a white lab coat. Through a haze of tear gas and black smoke, she tries to reach a man sprawled on the ground along the Gaza border. Israeli soldiers, their weapons leveled, watch warily from the other side. Minutes later, a rifle shot rips through the din, and the Israeli-Palestinian drama has its newest tragic figure. For a few days in June, the world took notice of the death of 20-year-old Rouzan al-Najjar, killed while treating the wounded at protests against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip. Even as she was buried, she became a symbol of the conflict, with both sides staking out competing and mutually exclusive narratives. To the Palestinians, she was an innocent martyr killed in cold blood, an example of Israel's disregard for Palestinian life. To the Israelis, she was part of a violent protest aimed at destroying their country, to which lethal force is a legitimate response as a last resort. Read More]
