Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 12, 2018
Hello All – This afternoon's much-ballyhooed neo-Nazi march was a bust. Only a few dozen people showed up, and they were greatly outnumbered by thousands of counter-protesters, in themselves embodying a very broad coalition. You can see summary reports here from The New York Times and CNN. There was also a large anti-fascist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where last year's violent neo-Nazi march took place and where anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer was killed.
The fizzle of today's neo-Nazi march was in sharp contrast to what happened a year ago in Charlottesville, Virginia. To help us recall that tragedy, on Tuesday PBS Frontline broadcast a powerful documentary about the events and their background. You can see the film here. Also on Tuesday, Democracy Now! had an extended interview with the Charlottesville film's producer, in which he describes not only what happened on the day of the rally, but how he and others tracked down some of the criminals from that day and showed the connections between them and the military and arms manufacturers. And, finally, the same Democracy Now! program interviewed the mother of murdered counter-protester Heather Heyer.
Are there any lessons to draw from today's events in Washington, DC? My own view is that they underscore the relatively insignificant danger of the neo-Nazis, compared to the much larger forces of money and militarism that have already gained power in the USA. The neo-Nazis are like serial killers: truly dangerous to a few people, but mostly dangerous because they capture the media spotlight, generate fear that in turn generates support for more police and suppressing dissent, and help truly dangerous entities like the Koch brothers to hide in the shadows. Unlike in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy, where the fascists/Nazis were useful to business interests in suppressing a militant labor movement, in the United States our labor movement poses little threat to big business, which can advance its agenda simply by issuing executive orders or ignoring regulations on worker safety or environmental regulations. . For the multi-millionaires of the USA, costumed pseudo-Nazis are not a solution to any problem they have. Let us not be distracted from the elephant in the room, and in the White House: the Republican Party and its allied mobsters, whom Noam Chomsky calls "the most dangerous organization in human history."
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Last week's newsletter focused on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but barely mentioned the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9. As argued last week, the use of the atomic bomb not cause Japan to surrender; it was the Soviet declaration of war that did that. Yet even the weak military arguments used by the Truman people to justify bombing Hiroshima have no application to bombing Nagasaki. Negotiations for a surrender – just hours away – were in process. Indeed, according to Truman's statement at the time of the Nagasaki bombing, "Japan" deserved the atomic bomb, because of Pearl Harbor and because of "Japanese cruelty" during the war. The bomb had no military purpose other than revenge and the acting out of the racism that characterized (on both sides) the War in the Pacific.
To finish off this year's round of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembrances, linked here is a 15-minute film put together by a Japanese cameraman in Hiroshima just days after the bombing. At first arrested by the US occupation authorities, the cameraman was soon put back to work as an Army employee; but then his footage was confiscated and did not see light of day until 1968, when Columbia University's documentary film historian Eric Barnouw was alerted to it and pieced it together into the film linked above. Until the end of the US occupation of Japan in 1952, neither film showing nor any writing about the Bomb was allowed in Japan, and most US portrayals of the Pacific War and the atomic bombing were highly patriotic. (For example, the 1952 series "Victory at Sea," all 26 episodes of which my family watched over TV dinners.) For some updated views on the events, check out "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Fictions and Facts"; "Scars of Hiroshima"; and "HIbakusha and Hope in the Nuclear Age."
News Notes
On Veterns Day, November 11th, the Trump administration is planning a yuge military parade in Washington, DC, to celebrate the all-around greatness of the US military establishment. CFOW has joined a coalition of many organizations urging Congress to ban/not fund this dreadful fascist marching about. More generally, on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, it's time to reclaim November 11th as Armistice Day, a day to celebrate peace rather than to glorify war.
The newsletter has frequently linked articles from the excellent website Venezuelanalysis, especially recently, as the Obama and Trump administrations have worked for regime change in Venezuela. Since the presidency of Hugo Chavez, the US mainstream media has fallen into step, pushing an extremely distorted news product. Four days ago Facebook shut down the Venezuelanalysis page, claiming that it had violated the company's terms and conditions. For Venezualanalysis's statement on what this means and why they think Facebook made this move and made it now, go here.
More than a year after Hurricane Maria, the news from Puerto Rico isn't getting better. Indeed, after claiming for a year that only a few dozen Puerto Ricans were killed in the hurricane, the government now acknowledges that the death toll was actually 1,427. (Many analysts believe it is much higher.) Puerto Rico is now effectively governed by what is kindly called La Junta, an unelected federal financial oversight board. In their master plan, the Junta proposes moving one-third of the Island's prisoners - to private prisons in Arizona. (Needless to say, family visits will be limited.) The mental health consequences of the Island's chaos are described in this excellent Guardian article as Puerto Rico's "living emergency."
The breadth and depth of the moral revulsion against Trump's policies of family separation at our southern border is illustrated in this interesting article from Labor Notes describing "Tech Workers and Flight Attendants Resist Immigrant Family Separation."
More than 900 political candidates have signed on to 350.org's pledge not to take campaign funds from fossil fuel companies. In this mailing just received, 350.org reports that the Democratic National Committee has abandoned its promise to refrain from taking fossil fuel funds, and is now soliciting them. Like President Obama, the DNC reports that it supports an "all of the above" energy strategy. To learn more, and to sign a petition protesting this outrage, go here.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Sunday, August 19th – Aida Touma-Sliman, an Arab Member of [Israel's] Knesset, will speak about "In the Face of Israel's New & Controversial Nation State Law, A Remarkable Opportunity." Ms. Touma-Sliman will be the guest speaker at Temple Israel of New Rochelle (100 Pinebrook Blvd.) The program starts at 7:30 p.m. It's free, open to the public, and will include light refreshment.
Sunday, September 9th - Please join us for the next CFOW monthly meeting. At these meetings we discussed events and our work of the past month and make plans for what's ahead. We meet at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 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 immigration policies 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," I especially recommend the essay by Phyllis Bennis ("War & Peace") outlining a war/peace platform for progressive Democrats; a set of articles that assess the wins/losses from last week's Democratic primary elections; a strong plea for his freedom from the supporters of Julian Assange; an excellent, concise history of the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); an update from Ann Wright about the most recent boat to Gaza; and a film/reminiscence about the tragic fate of another boat to Gaza, the Mavi Marmara, in 2010. Read on!
Rewards!
This week's rewards for stalwart readers remind us that satire can be a mighty weapon in fighting our oppressors. Vice President Pence got to show off recently by announcing an $8 billion program for a Space Patrol. Seniors will recall the moon landing in 1969, an unsuccessful diversion from the slaughter in Vietnam; to which Gil Scott-Heron replied with a little song called "Whitey's On The Moon." Also good satires this week are two cartoons from The Nation that sum up the Trump administration's policies towards children who try to cross our southern border: here and here. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
This Is Not a Time for Civility: White-nationalist rallies are calls for genocide, and must be treated as such.
By Natasha Lennard, The Nation [August 10, 2018]
---- This Sunday, assorted white nationalists will gather at Lafayette Park to rally for "white civil rights" and, metaphorically, to spit on the grave of Heather Heyer, the counterprotester mowed down by a neo-Nazi in a Dodge Charger in Charlottesville last year. Planned speakers include neo-Nazi Patrick Little and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. Kessler is correct that "antifa-affiliated groups" will be present, too, in numbers likely far larger than the less-than-400 expected on the white-supremacist side. In the case of this weekend's mobilization in DC, "antifa-affiliated groups" entails a broad and diverse coalition, coming together from different areas of the anti-racist and social-justice struggle—an alliance that belies the reductive and demonizing image of anti-fascist activism painted by the far right and the civility-fetishizing liberal commentariat. Activists from Black Lives Matter, Jewish Voice for Peace, March for Racial Justice, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many more have been organizing for weeks alongside anarchist groups and seasoned antifa participants from DC, Virginia, Philadelphia, and beyond. Committed to a diversity of tactics, organizers are explicitly rejecting the tired and dangerous "good protester"/"bad protester" binary, which pits "peaceful" forms of protest against more militant antifa street action. [Read More]
The Entropy Wars: Five Financial Uncertainties of 2018 (So Far)
By Nomi Prins, Tom Dispatch [August 2, 2018]
By Nomi Prins, Tom Dispatch [August 2, 2018]
[FB – Nomi Prins is a former Wall St. executive and the author, most recently of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.]
---- Whether through executive orders, tweets, cable-news interviews, or rallies, he regularly leaves diplomacy in the dust, while allegedly delivering for a faithful base of supporters who voted for him as the ultimate anti-diplomat. And while he's at it, he continues to take a wrecking ball to the countless political institutions that litter the Acela Corridor. Amid all the tweeted sound and fury, however, the rest of us are going to have to face the consequences of Donald Trump getting his hands on the economy According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entropy is "a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder." With that in mind, perhaps the best way to predict President Trump's next action is just to focus on the path of greatest entropy and take it from there. Let me do just that, while exploring five key economic sallies of the Trump White House since he took office and the bleakness and chaos that may lie ahead as the damage to the economy and our financial future comes into greater focus. [Read More]
The Fake-News Fallacy
By Adrian Chen, The New Yorker [September 4, 2017]
---- Donald Trump's victory has been a demonstration, for many people, of how the Internet can be used to achieve those very ends. Trump used Twitter less as a communication device than as a weapon of information warfare, rallying his supporters and attacking opponents with hundred-and-forty-character barrages. "I wouldn't be here without Twitter," he declared on Fox News in March. Yet the Internet didn't just give him a megaphone. It also helped him peddle his lies through a profusion of unreliable media sources that undermined the old providers of established fact. Throughout the campaign, fake-news stories, conspiracy theories, and other forms of propaganda were reported to be flooding social networks. … The problem was not simply that people had been able to spread lies but that the digital platforms were set up in ways that made them especially potent. The "share" button sends lies flying around the Web faster than fact checkers can debunk them. The supposedly neutral platforms use personalized algorithms to feed us information based on precise data models of our preferences, trapping us in "filter bubbles" that cripple critical thinking and increase polarization. The threat of fake news was compounded by this sense that the role of the press had been ceded to an arcane algorithmic system created by private companies that care only about the bottom line. [Read More].
WAR & PEACE
A Bold Foreign Policy Platform for the New Wave of Left Lawmakers
By Phyllis Bennis, In These Times [August 9, 2018]
---- Across the country, a new cohort of progressives is running for—and winning—elections. The stunning victory of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic congressional primary in New York is perhaps the most well-known, but she is far from alone. Most of these candidates are young, more than usual are people of color, many are women, several are Muslims, at least one is a refugee, at least one is transgender—and all are unabashedly left. Most come to electoral politics after years of activism around issues like immigration, climate and racism. They come out of a wide range of social movements and support policy demands that reflect the principles of those movements: labor rights, immigrant and refugee rights, women's and gender rights, equal access to housing and education, environmental justice, and opposition to police violence and racial profiling. Some, though certainly not all, identify not just with the policies of socialism but with the fundamental core values and indeed the name itself, usually in the form of democratic socialism. … But mostly, we're not seeing progressive and socialist candidates clearly link domestic issues with efforts to challenge war, militarism and the war economy. [Read More]
Is Russia an Adversary?
---- Nor was Russia an adversary when, in 2001, under its new president Vladimir Putin, it offered NATO a route through Russia to provision forces in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. The real change only came in 2004, when NATO suddenly expanded to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This brought alliances forces right to the Russian border. It was a clear statement by the U.S. to a friendly country: We are your adversary. But of course the Pentagon and State Department always pooh-poohed Russian concerns, denying that NATO targeted any particular country. Four years later (2008) NATO announced intentions to draw Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. Meanwhile the U.S. recognized Kosovo as an independent state. Kosovo, the historical heart of Serbian civilization, had been wrenched from Serbia in 1999 under the pretext of a "humanitarian" intervention that included the first bombing (by NATO) of a European capital city since 1945. The province had been converted into a vast NATO base. … Now Russia was labeled an aggressive power—by the power that had carved up Yugoslavia, and invaded and occupied Iraq on the basis of lies and killed half a million in the process. Plans to include Georgia in NATO had to be put on hold, in large part due to European allies' opposition (why provoke Russia?) but the U.S. intensified efforts to draw in Ukraine. That meant toppling the anti-NATO elected president Viktor Yanukovych. [Read More] For another view of this dangerous New Cold War, read David Swanson, "Russia Is Our Friend," Popular Resistance [August 8, 2018] [Link].
Four years of war and ISIS is almost defeated – but at what cost?
By Oliver Imhof, Airwars [August 8, 2018]
---- The fourth anniversary of the international war against so-called Islamic State sees the terror group nearly ousted as a territorial entity from both Iraq and Syria, according to US-led Coalition forces and local monitors. The removal of the group has helped lead to significant recovery in some areas, particularly in Iraq. However the cost for civilians of ISIS's defeat has also been high. The conflict – which has drawn 14 international powers into a major fighting alliance since August 8th 2014 – has seen almost 30,000 Coalition air and artillery strikes and more than 108,000 munitions dropped from the air on ISIS forces. Those combat partners known to be still active are the United States, the UK, France and the Netherlands. International airpower has played a huge role in defeating ISIS. The first US airstrike took place near Erbil in Iraq, on August 8th 2014. Exactly 1,462 days of war later, and Washington's intervention has now lasted longer than the American Civil War, and the US's participation in both the First and Second World Wars. The present best estimate by Airwars is that between 6,500 and 10,000 civilians have likely been killed in Coalition actions in four years of fighting – with the alliance itself presently conceding more than 1,000 non-combatants deaths from its air and artillery strikes. [Read More]
$717 Billion Defense Bill That Just Breezed Through The Senate Should Be A National Scandal
By Lindsay Koshgarian, In These Times [August 3, 2018]
---- As is usually the case, the bill passed with wide bipartisan majorities in both the House (359-54) and the Senate (87-10). If there is one thing sacred in U.S. federal budgeting, it is the military budget. But, while the politics may pave the way for seemingly unending military spending, one interesting pattern emerged from the votes. Among the 10 "no" votes in the Senate were four of the five most-often mentioned Democratic presidential mentions: Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass), Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Senator Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.). Senators Sanders and Gillibrand both voted no on the bill last year, but the others are new converts. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is also often mentioned as a possible candidate, voted yes. Could the politics of a presidential race help focus questions about the United States' runaway military spending and dangerous new weapons programs? [Read More] For a fair-and-balanced account of the Senate's support for the military budget, read Dave Lindorff, "Senate Democrats, with Few Exceptions, are a Gang of War-Mongers," [Link]
WHAT DO LAST WEEK'S PRIMARY ELECTIONS TELL US?
The Pragmatic Left Is Winning
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times [August 9, 2018]
---- On Tuesday, Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won her primary in Michigan, and she is now overwhelmingly likely to become the first Muslim woman in Congress. In a referendum, people in Missouri voted 2 to 1 to overturn an anti-union "right to work" law passed by the Republican legislature. In an upset, Wesley Bell, a progressive city councilman from Ferguson, Mo., effectively ousted the longtime St. Louis County prosecutor, whom many civil rights activists say mishandled the investigation into the police shooting of Michael Brown, the African-American teenager whose 2014 killing set off riots. So it was strange to see headlines in the following days arguing that the left wing of the Democratic Party had hit a wall. …In truth, there's nothing surprising about left-wing candidates losing their primaries. The happy surprise is how many are winning. Unsexy as it sounds, the real story of progressive politics right now is the steady accumulation of victories — some small, some major — thanks to a welcome and unaccustomed outbreak of left-wing pragmatism. [Read More]
What should Democrats do to win? It's time for them to bet on radicalism.
By Larry Beinhart, Aljazeera [August 2, 2018]
---- The pundits and analysts come forth on TV, in print, on the internet: Will there be a "blue wave" in November, or will the Democrats blow it? If there were a poll of pundits, it would show a vast majority believe the best way forward is "middle muddled moderation". The goal, according to them, is to move the "purple people". The politically androgynous folks in red districts who have a bluish side. Trump voters who might be disillusioned or disgusted enough to switch. They warn that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are radical! Too radical. … This sounds like Hillary redux. It's a triple-loser. It fails to recognise that things had gone wrong before Trump and aside from Trump. [Read More]
For even more opinions – Thomas B. Edsall, "The Democratic Party Has Two Futures," New York Times [August 9, 2018] [Link]; Kevin Gosztola, "Clinton Democrats vs Sanders Socialism," Shadowproof [July 28, 2018] [Link]; Joan Walsh, "Ignore the Media Hype: Progressives Won Big Tuesday Night," The Nation [August 9, 2018] [Link]; and Patrick Martin, "Primary Results Show Rightward Shift Of Both Republican And Democratic Parties," World Socialist Web Site [August 9, 2018] [Link].
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
The Latest Pipeline Battle Is Ramping Up in New York
By Arvind Dilawar, The Nation [August 10, 2018]
---- When Hurricane Sandy tore through New York City in 2012, flooding entire neighborhoods, knocking out electricity, and decimating the shores of Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn, few New Yorkers were downplaying the significance of climate change. They had already lived through what they hoped was the worst of it. It's understandable, then, that New Yorkers are not looking kindly upon a new fracked-gas pipeline that's proposed to snake its way mere miles from the same areas hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy. Banding together in a coalition of environmental groups and local communities, they are now organizing to prevent the construction of the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline. Developed by Williams, a publicly traded, Fortune 500 company, the NESE is proposed to span Lower New York Bay, from Sayreville, New Jersey, to the Rockaways in Queens. The project would be an extension of the existing Transco pipeline, which stretches from Texas to New York. There is already one segment of the Transco that crosses Lower New York Bay, just south of where the NESE is slated. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
A Plea for Humanitarian Asylum for Julian Assange
From the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) [August 6, 2018]
---- For six years, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has been effectively imprisoned without charges at Ecuador's London embassy. In that time, two international courts and dozens of respected legal and human rights organizations have decried actions of the UK, US and Swedish governments that confine the journalist in what now amounts to torturous isolation, deprived of space, sunlight, visitors, communication with the outside and necessary medical care. … On July 12, 2018, the Organization of American States' (OAS) Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) sent out a ruling11 that was virtually unnoticed by US news media. The IACHR found "it is the duty of nations to allow for the passage of successful asylum seekers from embassies to the mainland territory of the state that has granted an individual asylum." For Julian Assange, this would mean that, according to the Court's decision, Britain has a legal obligation to allow Julian Assange to exit the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in peace and allow for his safe transit to an airport from which he would be able to fly to Ecuador, the country that has granted Assange asylum and where he now also holds formal citizenship. [Read More] For an update, from a conservative source, about the role of WikiLeaks and "Russian hacking," read "Julian Assange, CrowdStrike, and the Russian Hack That Wasn't," by Michael Thaul, American Greatness [July 13, 2018]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Why the Democratic Socialists of America Won't Stop Growing: The inside story of DSA's dramatic ascent.
By Kate Aronoff, In These Times [August 9, 2018]
---- Visiting Julia Salazar's north Brooklyn campaign office one warm July weekend, I'm greeted by a volunteer with a spreadsheet. Like nearly everyone else in the converted coffee shop, she's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and she asks me cheerily if I'm there to canvass. I'm not, but if I were, I would be instructed to make my way to a training session on the sunbathed patio out back that is scattered with half-full bottles of sunscreen. After that—in the span of just a half-hour—I would know everything I need to know about how to help elect a card-carrying socialist to the New York state Senate. If Salazar makes it to Albany, she will join the ranks of 42 DSA-endorsed candidates who are now or will soon be serving in offices from the Moorhead, Minn., school board to Capitol Hill (that is, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the general election as handily as she did her primary in New York's 14th Congressional District). So far this year, local chapters have endorsed at least 110 candidates. DSA may soon have 50,000 members across 200 local groups in all 50 states—up from 6,000 members in 2015. The surge in freshly minted socialists came in three waves: First, those energized by Bernie Sanders' primary run; second, those brought in by Donald Trump's election and the Women's March; and third, those inspired by 27-year-old DSA member Ocasio-Cortez's primary victory in May over incumbent—and Democratic heavyweight—Joe Crowley. So what is DSA, exactly, and what is it doing with this growing army? [Read More] For more about DSA, read "These Democratic Socialists are going after slumlords and real-estate speculators," by Jimmy Tobias, The Nation [August 10, 2018] [Link].
Single Payer Is Actually a Huge Bargain: It would save both dollars and lives compared to our current system.
By Steffie Woolhandler, et al., The Nation [August 10, 2018]
---- Medicare for All would save the average American about $6,000 over a decade. Single payer, in other words, shifts how we pay for health care, but it doesn't actually increase overall costs—even while providing first-dollar comprehensive coverage to everyone in the nation. Single-payer supporters can and should trumpet this important fact. … No matter what injury or illness we faced, we would be forever freed from one great worry: the cost of our care. It's hard to put a price tag on that kind of freedom. [Read More]. And a recent Koch Brothers PR effort to debunk single-payer and other progressive reforms backfired nicely. Read "The Koch Brothers Commissioned a Survey of Americans and Found Most Like a $15 Minimum Wage, Free College, and Universal Health Care" 'by Nick Surgey and Zaid Jilani, The Intercept [[Link].
Busting the Myth of Immigrant Crime
By Mike Males, Yes! Magazine [July 27, 2018]
---- President Donald Trump's core supporters consist of 60 million to 80 million American adults, 90 percent of them White and four-fifths age 40 and older. They score high on unofficial measures of "racial resentment," anger at perceived "loss of status" and victimization of White Christians, fearfulness, and support for authoritarianism. Are these psychological tendencies the cause or consequence of alarming social trends that are only just now getting attention? Trump and right-wing pundits accuse immigrants, urban gangs, and their liberal "abettors" of inflicting epidemics of violence, drugs, violent killings, and "crime, crime, crime" on Americans. Reality is the opposite. It's Trump's own mostly-older, White constituencies who are suffering and perpetrating surging crises of lethal self-destruction, crime, and violence. My national analysis last year detailed the startling fact that Whites living in suburban, small-town, and rural areas surrounded by other Whites are in much more danger of violent and premature death, including suicide, homicide, gun fatality, drug overdose, and related "deaths of despair" than Whites living in or around multiracial cities. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
The Freedom Flotilla Passengers Released By Israel
By Ann Wright, Mintpressnews.com [August 11, 2018]
---- Defending their illegal blockade of Gaza against what they see as infiltrators rather than activists bringing aid and making a point, Israeli soldiers physically assaulted a number of delegates and arrested them, including a USS Liberty survivor. U.S. Navy Signalman Joe Meadors was standing watch on deck of the USS Liberty off the coast of Gaza on June 8, 1967 when a 90-minute aerial and sea attack by Israel against the ship killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 174. Meadors watched as the Israeli military almost sank the Liberty and began machine-gunning the lifeboats. A 2003 U.S. commission led by Admiral Thomas Moorer found Israel guilty of the attack. But the motive is still shrouded in mystery. Fifty-one years later, on July 29, Meadors was again on board a ship in international waters, again off the coast of Gaza. And once again Israel brutally attacked his ve. But this time Israel's motive was clear. Meadors was aboard an unarmed civilian boat named Al Awda that was trying to break Israel's seven-year old illegal blockade of Gaza. [Read More]
Can the US Keep Lying About Israel's Nukes?
By Grant Smith, Anatiwar.com [August 10, 2018]
---- Governmental lying by omission involves intentionally leaving out important facts to foster broad popular misconceptions. In 2012 the Obama administration promulgated a gag order in the form of a secrecy classification guideline – WNP-136 (PDF) – banning all federal agency employees and contractors from discussing, writing about, or releasing government information about Israel's nuclear weapons program. … Since the Symington & Glenn Amendments became law in the mid-1970s, all administrations have faced public pressure to explain why the US gives away the lion's share of the foreign aid budget to a country has long been known to have a disqualifying secret nuclear weapons program. … The public record is clear that President Obama came under enormous pressure by reporters to admit Israel had nuclear weapons, but finally buckled and signed a fourth secret letter at the insistence of the Israelis never to talk about it before finally issuing WNP-136. The fact that the Israeli government was the primary force calling for the secret letters indicates how little the gag order has to do with US "national security," as opposed to maintaining a massive flow of illegal aid payouts that Israel and its US lobby take for granted. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
How Medicare Was Won
By Natalie Shure, The Nation [August 6, 2018]
---- Medicare was signed into law in July of 1965 in Independence, Missouri, at a ceremony attended by former president Harry S. Truman, whose push for national health insurance (NHI) had collapsed nearly two decades before. The landmark law created a public-sector insurance pool for Americans 65 and over, which remains today the closest thing to a robust universal entitlement in the US health-care system. Its successful passage (which also passed Medicaid, to insure the very poor) stands in sharp contrast to multiple failed efforts to install a universal single-payer system. A half-century later, we're witnessing the early stages of yet another popular thrust toward single payer, increasingly billed as "Medicare for All." The nomenclature intends to evoke associations with the popular, trusted program, and is perhaps easier for Americans to latch onto than a phraseology that threatens to trigger a tedious lesson in comparative health policy. But if the conceptual jump from Medicare to Medicare for All can serve as a rough model for achieving universal health care in the United States, we should also look to the history of the social movements that achieved something that then, too, seemed impossible. [Read More]
Remembering Mavi Marmara: 'We really believed we would reach Gaza'
By Charlie Faulkner, Middle East Eye [August 4, 2018]
---- In an outdoor restaurant on a warm evening in Amman, Jordan, Palestinian-Canadian activist and filmmaker Rifat Audeh talks to Middle East Eye about how he came to be a survivor of the deadly attack on the Mavi Marmara aid flotilla that was headed for Gaza in 2010. The life-changing event led him to produce his award-winning documentary, The Truth: Lost at Sea, which tells the story of a fateful journey that began as a mission to help people in Gaza but ended in the death of 10 activists killed by Israeli forces. The story is more than recent history: the infamous assault by Israeli forces on the flotilla did not deter future efforts by human rights activists to reach Gaza by sea in the face of Israel's naval siege, including a flotilla that has set out in recent weeks. During a dinner of traditional Middle Eastern dishes such as hummus, foul and tabbouleh, Audeh, who is softly spoken yet animated, becomes more serious as he recounts the details of what happened that night. [Read More] And you can see the trailer for the film here.
