The Chicago Police clearly realized that it would be hard to convince a jury that the homemade beer-making equipment in the house was some dreaded bio-terror weapon, so for good measure they apparently dropped off some glass jars with gas in them and tried to make out that the kids were preparing molotov cocktails. That’s the word from National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing the men. They say their clients and others like them coming into Chicago from out of town to join in protests against the NATO summit were “befriended” by police informants and undercover Chicago Police, who then offered to obtain gasoline or explosive materials like toy rocket motors, and who proposed actions like firebombing police stations.

This kind of entrapment and official deceit by police should alarm every American. It’s bad enough when police plant evidence and lie about evidence in order to win convictions, since it means innocent people will be sent to prison or worse. But with the new post 9-11 terrorism laws, like the state terrorism statutes in Illinois being applied in these cases, it becomes far more difficult for a victim of such police and

prosecutorial misconduct to challenge the case against her or him. In terror cases, the government can claim “national security” to hide the evidence and even the identity of the witnesses from the defendants and the courts, the jury and the public, and can avoid ever being questioned about it publicly. In a worst case, the federal government doesn’t even need to bring the case to trial. If the victim is accused of being a terrorist, under the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and various executive orders, that person can be locked away indefinitely without trial — exactly the kind of abuse that led American colonists to rise up against their British colonial overlords 237 years ago.

Residents like me from Philadelphia know all about this stuff. Planting evidence on people you want to lock away has a venerable history in this once revolutionary town.

In 1995, six Philly cops were convicted of presenting false testimony and of framing over a hundred people with planted evidence that sent the victims to jail with long
prison terms. In the end, two of those cops ended up serving jail terms themselves as the result of a federal corruption probe.  A bigger federal investigation of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Center City division in the 1980s led to the conviction of several dozen cops, including a captain, four lieutenants, and the deputy chief of police, on charges of extortion and evidence tampering, including the planting of false evidence.  Dozens of convicted prisoners were released from jail when it became clear their convictions had been based upon faked evidence by these uniformed miscreants.

The practice of planting evidence and of police lying to win convictions has continued in Philadelphia, which has paid out over $27 million in damages to people victimized by police corruption and false evidence planting since the mid-’90s. In 2009 the Philadelphia Daily News broke a story that a narcotics division cop on the force had planted drugs (a tactic known as “flaking” among dirty cops) in order to lock up
dozens of people and to rack up a seemingly stellar record of drug-busting.

And across the river in Camden, NJ, over 75 people jailed for drug offenses are having their cases reviewed and overturned now because of evidence that police in that city were planting evidence on the people they arrested.

So common was the knowledge that police in Philadelphia keep stolen unlicensed handguns and bags of drugs in their cars for the purpose of framing citizens, that after I published my book Killing Time on the case of Pennsylvania death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Afro-American journalist convicted in 1982 of killing a white Philadelphia police officer in a trial fraught with police and prosecutor perjury and faked evidence, that I was loath to drive through the city. And when I did, was extremely careful to follow traffic rules to the letter. With white police officers publicly pressing, through their union and lobbying arm, the Fraternal Order of Police, for Abu-Jamal’s execution, it seemed all to easy for them to stop me, run a make, ID me as the author of a book exposing the wrongness of his conviction, and to then plant a gun or a stash of illicit drugs in my vehicle, and lock me away. At least back then, though, you’d just be facing ordinary criminal charges, and hopefully a good attorney would be able to prove the charges were bogus. Terrorism charges make it much harder to do that.

The faking of terrorism crimes is abetted by a lazy corporate media, where reporters and editors just run their stories based upon the wild claims made by police and prosecutors, without bothering to consider how ludicrous those claims me be. Often, they don’t even bother to go to the victims’ defense attorneys for rebuttal.

Plus, the general scare-mongering by government and media, and the media  propaganda glorifying of “tough” cops and prosecutors who cut corners, makes it likely that most juries will continue to believe the false statements and evidence presented by the prosecution at trials.

It’s ironic that the same public that is so ready to believe all manner of wild conspiracies about the president’s being a secret Kenyan Muslim or about the government deliberately trying to turn control of the US military over to the United Nations, or about a government plan to kill off old people with “death panels,” will prove completely gullible and ready to suspend any disbelief when a police officer or a prosecutor makes some outlandish claim about three kids with beer fermenting equipment in their basement.

Dave Lindorff is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He lives in Philadelphia. 

This inequality trend is particularly acute in India, where life expectancy is low, infant mortality high, education spotty, and illiteracy widespread, in spite of that country’s status as the third largest economy in Asia, behind China and Japan. According to an independent charity, the Naandi Foundation, some 42 percent of India’s children are malnourished. Bangladesh, a far poorer country, does considerably better in all these areas.

And yet last year India was the world’s leading arms purchaser, including a deal that will spend $20 billion dollars on high performance French fighter planes. India is also developing a long-range ballistic missile capable of carrying  multiple nuclear warheads, and buying submarines and surface craft. Its military budget is set to rise 17 percent this year to $42 billion.

“It is ridiculous. We are getting into a useless arms race at the expense of fulfilling the needs of poor people,” Praful Bidwai of the Coalition of Nuclear Disarmament and Peace told the New York Times.

China, too, is in the middle of an arms boom that includes beefing up its navy,
constructing a new generation of stealth aircraft, and developing a ballistic missile that is potentially capable of neutralizing U.S. carriers near its coast. Beijing’s arms budget has grown at a rate of some 12 percent a year and, at $106.41 billion, is now the second largest on the planet. The U.S. budget—not counting the various wars Washington is embroiled in—runs a little over $800 billion, although some have estimated that it is over $1 trillion.

While China has made enormous strides in overcoming poverty, there are some 250 million Chinese officially still considered poor, and the country’s formerly red-hot economy is cooling. “Data on April spending and output put another nail into hopes that China’s economy is bottoming out,” Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics told the Financial Times.

The same is true for most of Asia. For instance, India’s annual economic growth rate has fallen from 9 percent to 6.1 percent over the past two and a half years.

Tensions between China and other nations in the region have set off a local arms race. Taiwan is buying four U.S.-made Perry-class guided missile frigates, and Japan has shifted much of its military from its northern islands to face southward toward China.

The Philippines are spending almost $1 billion on new aircraft and radar, and recently held joint war games with the U.S.  South Korea has just successfully tested a long-range cruise missile. Washington is reviving ties with Indonesia’s brutal military because the island nation controls the strategic seaways through which pass most of the region’s trade and energy supplies.

Australia is also re-orientating its defense to face China, and Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith has urged “that India play the role it could and should as an emerging great power in the security and stability of the region.”

But that “role” is by no means clear, and some have read Smith’s statement as an attempt to rope New Delhi into a united front against Beijing. The recent test of India’s Agni V nuclear-capable ballistic missile is largely seen as directed at China.

India and China fought a brief but nasty border war in 1962, and India claims China is currently occupying some 15,000 square miles in Indian territory. The Chinese, in turn, claim almost 40,000 square miles of the Indian state of Arunachai Pradesh. While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says that “overall our relations [with China] are quite good,” he also admits “the border problem is a long-standing problem.”

India and China also had a short dust up last year when a Chinese warship demanded that the Indian amphibious assault vessel Airavat identify itself shortly after the ship left the port of Hanoi, Vietnam. Nothing came of the incident but Indian President Pratibha Patil has since stressed the need for “maritime security,” and “the protection of our coasts, our ‘sea lines of communications’ and the offshore development areas.”

China’s forceful stance in the South China Sea has stirred up tensions with Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei, and Malaysia as well. A standoff this past April between a Philippine war ship and several Chinese surveillance ships at Scarborough Shoal is still on a low simmer.

China’s more assertive posture in the region stems largely from the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits crisis that saw two U.S. carriers humiliate Beijing in its home waters. There was little serious danger of war during the crisis—China does not have the capability to invade Taiwan—but the Clinton Administration took the opportunity to demonstrate U.S. naval power. China’s naval build-up dates from that incident.

The recent “pivot” by Obama administration toward Asia, including a military buildup on Wake and Guam and the deployment of 2,500 Marines in Australia, has heightened tensions in the region, and Beijing’s heavy-handedness in the South China Sea has given Washington an opening to insert itself into the dispute.

China is prickly about its home waters—one can hardly blame it, given the history of the past 100 years—but there is no evidence that it is expansionist. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said in February “No country, including China, has claimed sovereignty over the entire South China Sea.” Nor does Beijing seem eager to use military force. Beijing has drawn some lessons from its disastrous 1979 invasion of Vietnam.

On the other hand, Beijing is seriously concerned about who controls the region’s seas, in part because some 80 percent of China’s energy supplies pass through maritime choke points controlled by the U.S. and its allies.

The tensions in Asia are real, if not as sharp or deep as they have been portrayed in the U.S. media. China and India do, indeed, have border “problems,” but China also describes New Delhi as “not competitors but partners,” and has even offered an alliance to keep “foreign powers”—read the U.S. and NATO—from meddling in the region.

The real question is, can Asia embark on an arms race without increasing the growing gulf between rich and poor and the resulting political instability that is likely to follow in its wake? “Widening inequality threatens the sustainability of Asian growth,” says Asian Development Bank economist Rhee. “A divided and unequal nation cannot prosper.”

More than half a century ago former General and President Dwight Eisenhower noted that “Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…this is not a way of life at all…it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.”

Americans have ignored Eisenhower’s warning. Asian nations would do well to pay attention.

CONN HALLINAN can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

From South Africa, the African continent and everywhere else, it is a critical time to step up pressure against the rogue regime in Tel Aviv. Israel’s hard-right leader, Benyamin Netanyahu, is in a dangerous career phase, preparing to bomb Iran; illegitimately holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners in worsening conditions; expanding settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank; terrorizing Gaza; and tightening his militaristic hold over the region.

Netanyahu’s approach to protecting his core constituency was unveiled at a recent cabinet meeting, in his paranoid description of African refugee immigration (mainly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Sudan) last week: “if we don’t stop the problem (sic), 60,000 infiltrators (sic) are liable to become 600,000, and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic (sic) state.”

Interior Minister Eli Yishai picked up the same theme: “They [African immigrants] should be put into holding cells or jails… and then given a grant and sent back.” In spite of police data confirming that Israelis commit more than twice as many crimes per person as African immigrants, Yishai claimed, “most African infiltrators are involved in crime.”

According to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, “In the last month, the number of hate crimes carried out by Israelis against Africans has risen tremendously. Multiple Molotov cocktails were thrown into houses of Africans in southern Tel Aviv on two separate occasions, a week apart.”

Then on Wednesday night, the logic of Netanyahu/Yishai unfolded at street level when hundreds of their followers attacked Africans in what was widely described as a race riot, leaving many injured, with a dozen Israelis arrested for violence.

In this context, the Israeli embassy had suggested an input to a UKZN audience about Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. The Wall is the topic of current controversy since Gush Shalom, a Tel Aviv-based human rights group opposed to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, has just demanded that last Saturday’s ‘Jerusalem Day’ in future be removed from Israel’s calendar of holidays.

As a celebration of the 1967 War and Occupation of Palestine, it involves a provocative march to the Wall through East Jerusalem. Political scientist, Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism, remarked last week, “I am disturbed that Yom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Day] has become a nationalistic holiday, observed most publicly by the religious right. Too often, Yom Yerushalayim celebrations turn violent… most celebrations glorify the violent abuse of power by cruel extremists.”

As Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network reported from Jerusalem on the weekend, “The celebrators marched through Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter chanting ‘Muhammed is Dead’ and celebrating a 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron. Across the road roughly 600 Palestinians protested the celebration and the occupation of East Jerusalem. They were joined by Israeli peace activists.”

Pretoria-based Israeli official Yaa’kov Finkelstein had informed UKZN’s Social Sciences Dean Nwabufo Okeke-Uzodike that he “would like to give a lecture to staff and students on the Western Wall in Jerusalem” two days after this incident, but with less than 24 hours to go, UKZN Deputy Vice Chancellor Joseph Ayee emailed staff: “I have re-considered the sensitivities that the visit of the Israeli Deputy Ambassador has generated. Given the negative publicity that the visit will give UKZN, I hereby cancel the visit and the lecture.”

That the talk would “be held under a cloud with likely reputational damage for the institution is not in the interests of all of us,” observed Ayee. This resulted from a flurry of letters by senior academics including Lubna Nadvi, Rozeena Maart and Jerry Coovadia, as well as a vibrant protest planned by hip-hop artist, Iain ‘Ewok’ Robinson, who generated similar opposition to Finkelstein’s co-sponsorship of the Hilton Arts Festival near Durban last year. Said Robinson, “Hosting the ambassador under the auspices of creating some kind of neutral space for dialogue is another blatant legitimization of Israel’s policies of oppression.”

A time for dialogue with Israel’s official representatives should wait until nonviolent public pressure against the regime mounts and the extreme power imbalance is lessened. As the Palestinian solidarity movement argues, this time will come – just as three-decade long sanctions were lifted against South Africa when in the early 1990s there was irreversible progress towards one-person one-vote democracy (implemented in April 1994) – only when Israel recognises the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self determination and:

1. ends its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. guarantees the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinians citizens of Israel to full equity; and
3. respects, protects and promotes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

Accepting these three conditions as comparable to the demand for democracy in South Africa, our local movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel got a boost in 2010 when South African Artists Against Apartheid formed with the announcement, “Collaborating with institutions linked to the state of Israel cannot be regarded as a neutral act in the name of cultural exchange.”

In this context, severe reputational damage for UKZN would have surely followed had the event gone ahead. Upon hearing of Finkelstein’s talk, Ramallah-based BDS strategist Omar Barghouti exclaimed, “Why would they invite an Israeli diplomat to UKZN at a time when even the SA government is advising its own ministers not to visit Israel, unless for absolute necessity? This is what complicity looks like!”

Barghouti continued, “Imagine in the 1980s if a Cuban or Palestinian university had invited a South African official to give a lecture? Wouldn’t the ANC and the great majority of South Africans have felt betrayed by their best friends in the world? Well, this is how Palestinians feel now if a South African institution is complicit with Israel.”

Universities should be at the forefront of the BDS movement – and thanks to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israelthis has been the case since 2004 – because by making Israeli officials unwelcome, these opportunities actually open wide the door for learning political ethics, as at UKZN. Three years the same controversy arose at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, whose officials mandated a leading lawyer, Advocate Geoff Budlender, to investigate. Budlender concluded in favour of the BDS activists, saying that Wits University “could legitimately decide to make its facilities available to outside organisations only for certain purposes, and not to make them available for other purposes… [if] a speaker or activity might be so offensive.”

Likewise, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) was requested by over 450 leading South African academics – including nine vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors – to end its institutional relationship with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University (BGU) last year. UJ did terminate the relationship and, in effect, became the world’s first university to impose an academic boycott on Israel. Then, according to Nina Butler of the Rhodes University Palestinian Solidarity Forum, writing for the Mail & Guardian last week, another local university “was approached by BGU with a large amount of funding for water research, only to be told explicitly that their association and money was not desirable.”

At BGU itself, this week also an important moment for the academic boycott when a conference on Monday promoting ‘African Entrepreneurs’ was the subject of criticism, given the university’s ongoing collaboration with the Israeli military and the occupation of Palestine. Laudably, Zimbabwean historian Musiwaro Ndakaripa withdrew as a result of BDS commitments, but some Africans went ahead to violate the Palestinians’ boycott call, including the Angolan ambassador.

But elsewhere on the Israel-boycott front, matters are slowly improving. Last week, Pretoria’s Ambassador in Tel Aviv was summoned by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a formal reprimand because the SA Department of Trade and Industry ruled against ‘Made in Israel’ label in the marketing of Ahava Cosmetics, Soda Stream and other products from the illegal West Bank settlements. This extends existing labeling requirements of the European Union and Britain in a way that will facilitate the boycott of Israeli Settlement products, so Israel’s Foreign Ministry complained that it is “negatively tagging a state through a special marking, according to national-political criteria. Accordingly, this is a racist (sic) measure.” In reply: was it racist to oppose SA apartheid by boycotting the state institutions and the companies which made it tick, thus hastening the end of official racism?

Likewise, Israel’s Pretoria embassy spokesperson Hila Stern ratcheted up the rhetoric upon learning of UKZN’s about-face, describing it as a “campaign of intellectual terror.”

Quite right.  When in 2010 US Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a terrorist for revealing imperialism’s horrid secrets, and when the US State Department kept Nelson Mandela on its books as a terrorist from the early 1960s right through 2008 (when Congress forced a change), there was much these two men could be proud of. The UKZN academic activists who raised the stakes by further educating South Africa about solidarity ethics will hopefully continue to ‘terrorise’ the Israeli apartheid regime, just as did BDS ‘terrorise’ those on the side of South African apartheid decades ago.

Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Muhammed Desai coordinates BDS South Africa.

In the few days since its IPO, Facebook’s stock price has fallen almost 20 percent amidst news that underwriters led by Morgan Stanley and perhaps Facebook itself shared negative assessments of the company only with big, institutional investors — not with the broader investing public.

It’s going to take some time to suss out exactly what happened with the Facebook IPO, but step back and consider the broader implications. They are staggering.

The most hyped IPO in history has turned into a debacle marred by insider dealing. It’s no exaggeration to say the whole world was watching — and still the decks were stacked against average investors.

This is remarkable commentary on the untrustworthiness of Wall Street. If anyone had any doubts, it shows the utter folly in relying on Wall Street to police itself.

What’s that you say? Oh yes, that’s right, Congress did just pass and President Obama eagerly signed legislation — the misnamed JOBS Act — to reduce regulatory oversight of Wall Street and the launch of IPOs. It aims to make it easier for new companies to launch IPOs without providing detailed information about their operations to investors. Whoops.

At the time the bill was under consideration, critics (including Public Citizen) suggested the JOBS Act was basically pro-fraud legislation. “The legislation is premised on the dangerous and discredited notion that the way to create jobs is to weaken regulatory protections,” wrote a public interest coalition headed by the Consumer Federation of America and Americans for Financial Reform. The legislation would “roll back regulations that are essential to protecting investors from fraud and abuse, promoting the transparency on which well-functioning markets depend, and ensuring the fair and efficient allocation of capital.”

The JOBS Act was an assault on common sense at the time it was passed — has the Obama administration and Congress really forgotten that the Wall Street crash that threw us into the Great Recession was caused in significant part by regulatory failures? — but it looks even worse this week than it did at time of passage.

It’s not too much to take from the Facebook debacle — along with other smoldering scandals, like the JPMorgan Chase multi-billion dollar derivatives loss and the accounting mess at Groupon — broader lessons than just that the JOBS Act was a horrendous mistake.

First, we need tougher not weaker controls on Wall Street activity. That means, at minimum, that we need aggressive and rapid implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation, including the Volcker Rule that aims to limit the speculative betting of big banks.

Second, and more generally, Big Business cannot be trusted to police itself. We need strong health, safety, environmental, financial and other regulatory protections, with well-resourced regulatory cops on the beat and citizens empowered to enforce the rules that regulators fail to apply.

These are simple lessons that you’d expect a child to understand. In Washington, though, these lessons are willfully forgotten and require constant reaffirmation. Well, the Facebook episode has done that once again.

Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen.

More than Nicolas Sarkozy’s unsurprising defeat in France, the remarkable and entirely unforeseen ascent of SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, in Greece, which seems poised for an even stronger performance in the June round of elections, has captivated progressives on both sides of the Atlantic. Their boldness in denouncing the barbaric cuts to social programs and public payrolls forced upon them by a capital regime which obsesses over inflation rather than unemployment, prioritizing bond traders’ rate-of-return over the living standards of millions of ordinary people, is indeed inspiring. Notwithstanding the relatively small size of the Greek economy within the EU – measured as a percentage of GDP it is comparable to the state of Kentucky in the United States – SYRIZA’s assertive posture has sent investors into a panic, fearful of the reverberations a Greek secession could have on the precarious Spanish and Italian financial systems. This collective anxiety in the world of finance should serve as a reminder that even if the Greek left does successfully form a government, they are certain to encounter a very difficult road ahead. The alarming rate at which deposits have been withdrawn from Greek banks in recent weeks may be a harbinger of the economic grind awaiting the country.

However encouraging these European political developments may be, the enthusiasm with which many on the American left have received them also reflects a grim reality at home: how far progressive forces in this country are from achieving anything comparable. In spite of the impressive and ambitious initiative taken by Occupy encampments across the country, we have been unable to slow the relentless bi-partisan austerity measures devastating every state, much less offer a coherent alternative program around which a mass base might be built and eventually contend for power. In Philadelphia, the municipal school district recently announced its dissolution, marking what may be the end of public education in that city; in California, Governor Jerry Brown is seeking to slash $8.3 billion from healthcare and welfare programs in his annual budget; and at the federal level, the ticking time-bomb of more than $2 trillion in cuts looms on the horizon, set to implode early next year. Given the crippling effects the decline in public sector employment have already had on the U.S. economic recovery, these draconian policies almost guarantee a long, painful stagnation, the costs of which, of course, will fall most acutely on those least able to bear them. It speaks volumes that on the 75^th year anniversary of the original occupy movement, the sit-down strikes of 1937, legendary battles through which autoworkers in Flint, Detroit and elsewhere first won union recognition, unelected “emergency managers” and “financial review teams” in those very cities are now gutting municipal budgets and decimating public employee union contracts in secretive, closed door meetings.

It is thus clear that in spite of Occupy’s success at introducing the mainstream political discourse to the inequalities that define contemporary American society, this alone is no substitute for the level of mass organization – rooted in workplaces and communities across the country and endowed with material capacity and programmatic clarity – required to effectively respond to the crisis we face. Such a force is inconceivable in isolation from a dynamic labor movement, and consequently trade unions must be central to any such project. First and foremost, this involves defending public employee unions against the assault led by reactionary Republican governors and state legislatures across the country, following the lead of activists in Ohio and Wisconsin. As a consequence of several decades of deindustrialization and rabid employer hostility to trade unions, public employees now account for more than half of all union members, though nationwide almost eighty-five percent of the workforce labors in the private sector. Government is truly the last bastion of organized labor strength, and it is no stretch to conclude that, for generations to come, workers’ right and ability to organize and collectively bargain for a better livelihood hinges on these campaigns (support the effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker). Beyond the immediate struggles, however, a longer-term organization building strategy requires frankly assessing the abysmal state of the broader labor movement, confined by an authoritarian legal apparatus and faced with a massive unorganized workforce stricken with insecurity after more than three decades of neoliberal discipline.

Moreover, as Reaganism approaches its mid-thirties, an entire generational cohort has come of age with the commonsense assumption that there is no alternative to free market capitalism (TINA, as Thatcher succinctly put it). To many of these children of neoliberalism, trade unions, if not dismissed out of hand as parasitic and uncompetitive, are viewed as sclerotic or self-serving. Corporate media driven electoral extravaganzas have rendered an organizing approach to politics a foreign concept. And, perhaps most distressing, organizational structures deemed to at all infringe on individual agency are instinctively distrusted, a default orientation that neglects the simple fact that all real politics requires at least some level of personal discipline (a lesson the right knows all too well). Even among those serious about alternative political approaches, having such little exposure to and so few opportunities to engage in focused organizing activity, much of this generation (myself included) understandably lacks the practical skills needed to cultivate, sustain, and expand a base, know how that only comes with formal guidance, material support, and direct experience. Understood in this context, it is altogether unsurprising that anarchist tendencies, which often, though by no means always, reflect ideological underpinnings curiously similar to those of market utopianism, are so prevalent in younger radical circles.

This is the bleak reality that we must accept. While neoliberalism has gained momentum for more than thirty years, the institutions and organizations most capable of challenging its rule have decayed, as has our collective knowledge about their strategic role. Ignoring this basic fact and deluding ourselves with fantasies of our nonexistent power only leaves us weaker, allowing the level of social immiseration to deepen and providing fertile ground on which even more reactionary forces might thrive. Without an organized mass constituency, something we simply do not have and which we seem incapable of realistically imagining, protest after protest will rehearse the same tired platitudes while the political center-of-gravity continues its rightward drift. Such sober assessment of our dire situation isn’t defeatist; it is the necessary point of departure for any effort that is serious about winning.

Entering the last great economic crisis of this magnitude in the early-1930s, the labor movement was in shambles and a fundamentalist market ideology triumphant. Unregulated financial institutions wreaked havoc through their speculative practices, socializing much of their risk and in the process accumulating more capital than they knew what to do with. Beyond a few enclaves of skilled workers, the mass production industries were deemed impossible to organize. And in every city, hordes of the unemployed instilled fear among the working masses, constantly reminding those daring enough to challenge the tyranny of corporate rule just how disposable they were.

The parallels with the present day are striking, of course. Finance is again almighty, running the world and uprooting the lives of millions through the rhythms of its markets. Instead of producing electronics, automobiles and steel, our enormous unorganized population now slaves away providing services in retail chains, hospitals, and office buildings. Many of their employers seem immune to worker organization, but so too for many years did General Motors, and unlike their industrial cousins these service-driven firms cannot so easily wield the threat of relocation, leaving a community with the eternal scar of a vacant, idle factory and its chronic symptom of unemployment. In the face of comparably dismal prospects, we should remember, our predecessors used aggressive collective action to win a social safety net, however meager, that we until recently took for granted. Yet we should also remember that those struggles didn’t emerge from nowhere. They grew from and were given form by, among other organizations, the CIO, which owed its beginnings in no small part to material support from the United Mine Workers and other unions.

“The challenge of modernity,” Antonio Gramsci once noted, “is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” It is certainly healthy and productive to draw inspiration from ordinary people’s struggles around the world, celebrating their successes and learning from their setbacks, but we cannot live vicariously through them. If we hope to stand any chance at overcoming the merciless exploitation and environmental degradation that is the now the norm in this country, we first need to sweep away our illusions, recognize where we stand, and accept just how far we have to go.

Samir Sonti is a graduate student at Cornell and has been a union organizer. He can be reached at sonti7@gmail.com.

You see, I am a consumerist.

I didn’t intend to become one; it just sort of happened. My parents were ones too, so I guess it must have started there. All my teachers were ones, and my role models as well. Looking back, pretty much all of my friends and family, and just about everyone I’ve ever known, were also consumerists. My recruitment started early on and was reinforced at every turn by those around me — and likewise by every highway billboard, television commercial, and eye-level point-of-purchase display to which I was exposed.

I remember once when I was younger and more impressionable, a guy came around, a real flashy type who talked a big game and always had all the coolest new gadgets and devices. He exhorted me and my friends to “amp it up,” telling us that we needed to learn how to “game the system” or we would just become pawns in it like the “mindless masses.” He plied us with expensive gifts and said he was recruiting us to become the next generation of “movers and shakers” who would remake society in our vision rather than go along with the mainstream. “It’s good to be the king,” he always reminded us.

A few of my friends succumbed to his overtures, skirting the boundaries of ethicality and legality in pursuit of wealth and privilege. They started to pick up the jargon about “low-hanging fruit” being there for the taking, “hostile takeovers” promising “quick and dirty” rewards, having access to “inside information” that would enable them to acquire “strategic targets” with accuracy and almost no risk to themselves. Everything with them began to focus on how to get the most “bang for the buck,” and their scorn for the rules of the game and structures of authority was evident at every turn.

I suppose I was lucky that I didn’t have the constitution for these sorts of mercenary behaviors. It wasn’t so much that I feared the laws or authorities, but more so that I recognized the potential dangers of failing to accept any social responsibility for the welfare of others whatsoever. It wasn’t about just “sticking it to the man” or “getting ours while the getting is good,” but this cavalier courtship with conspicuous consumption was also about showing disdain for working-class people (like myself, even though I tried to hide it) and using power to coerce others to do one’s bidding. I didn’t like it.

Still, the influence of these teachings stayed with me, and I could increasingly see them everywhere in society to greater or lesser degrees. I hadn’t joined the cabal full-on, but watered-down versions of its “power and profit” conspiracy were everywhere to be found. From the corner-grocery lottery to the gambler’s rush of online trading, the essence of “casino capitalism” has imbued a populace eternally in search of megabucks and the accoutrements of opulence that are the hallmarks of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” that hold so much fascination for so many people. Everywhere, everyday, people are plotting how to climb over others on the ladder of success.

A friend recently showed me their new handheld device and all of its cool apps. “It’s the bomb,” they said, in that “so fifteen minutes ago” vernacular. Indeed, I thought, it is an incendiary device. How many dead Congolese or Afghans were in that innocuous-looking gadget? How many ecosystems had been destroyed in the process of making it, and how many more would be done in when it wound up in the garbage dump as forced obsolescence set in around six months from now? How many exploited workers in Asian and Mexican factories were required to assemble this consumer item, and how much of their own health and wellbeing will they be compelled to sacrifice in order to produce nonessential creature comforts for our usage?

The supermarket mantra of “paper or plastic” might as well be a reference to explosive devices rather than just what sort of bag one prefers to haul their wares around in. We may try to mask it by calling them “consumer goods,” but they are in large measure undeniably bad, for people and the environment alike. The innocent, mundane purchases we make are like faintly ticking time-bombs, spin-offs of the same forces that produce military hardware, embedded with the nonrenewable resources that drive global conflict and climate change, taxing our health into skyrocketing maintenance costs, and in the process rendering us utterly dependent on and essentially complicit with the forces of destruction.

There are words to describe such behaviors: sociopathic, nihilistic, violent, terroristic. Despite this, groups of shoppers go about their business without infiltration or provocation, descending on cities and towns everywhere en masse to wreak havoc without penalty or prejudice. In the standard parlance, these are not the enemies, they are the “good people” going about their business; those who want to hold a mirror up to them or wake them out of their doldrums are coded as the real enemies, the ones who want to destroy “our way of life,” and they will accordingly be dealt with as such. In the end, there is really only one high crime in our lockstep world of conformity: Incitement to Alternatives.

I make this nascent confession today so as to alert the appropriate authorities of this ongoing plot to undermine the fabric of society, and to take a mea culpa for my part in all of it over the years. The wanted posters and enforcement bulletins may not yet be warning us to be on the lookout for the “violent consumerist” in our midst, and there aren’t really any news articles yet where neighbors are quoted as saying “gee, he seemed like such a nice guy” after someone goes on an unabashed shopping spree. Trust me, folks — the violent consumerist is hard to spot, and indeed probably looks just like you and me.

Now that the word is getting out, perhaps we can all begin to disavow any participation in violence as a way of getting what we need in this world. Most of us really are in fact “good people” looking to go about our lives without harming anyone or anything else. Unfortunately, we have become unwitting participants in the biggest criminal conspiracy in human history, and in the process have become the greatest purveyors of violence that the world has ever seen. The blood on our hands is like invisible ink, obvious only under ultraviolet scrutiny but displaying no indicia in normal light. It is past time to wash our hands of these inscribed behaviors, reduce the damage being done in our wake, and start to clean up our collective act.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is the Graduate Chair of Humanities at Prescott College. He serves as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and is the publisher and editor of New Clear Vision. Among his recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly, 2008).

I wrote him a letter asking why? No answer.

The last time I wrote him at least the Times had a black guy reply, vouching for

his character.

House Republicans are balking over whether Tribal courts can bring these “outsiders” to justice. Why are Republicans and the Times (NYT, May 23, 2012) protecting these outsiders by not identifying these “non-Indians”?

I visited Sitka, Alaska in October. I was the only black guy in town. So maybe it’s not the brothers, your typical media, literary, Broadway show and Ms.Magazine rapist. Maybe Kristof can tell us who these mystery “non-Indians”are?

Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch.The latest issue includes a brilliant take on the post-black entrepreneurs by Houston Baker, Jr. His latest collection of essays, ”Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown,” is forthcoming from Baraka Press.

Over 30 years ago, activist Russell Smith founded People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons, which later, under the leadership of Stephen Donaldson, became the organization Stop Prisoner Rape. Donaldson, who had been gang-raped in the 1970s when he was jailed for protesting the Vietnam War, was a tireless campaigner on behalf of abused prisoners.  His courage in recounting his own story of victimization brought unprecedented media attention to the subject.

In the 1980s and 1990s, several academic studies were published documenting high rates of both prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assault and staff-on-prisoner abuse.  As the empirical research mounted, evidence of unaddressed rape in prison could no longer be dismissed as anecdotal.

Human Rights Watch published a landmark report on prison rape in 2001 that received front-page coverage in The New York Times. Titled “No Escape,” it was based on firsthand testimony from over 200 prisoners, as well as a state-by-state survey of prison authorities, and it led both The New York Times and The Washington Post to run editorials calling for reform.  Congressman Frank R. Wolf quoted from the report during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was in 2003 that reform efforts seemed finally to come to fruition.  The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), sponsored by a bipartisan congressional coalition, was passed unanimously by both the House and Senate.  When President George W. Bush signed the bill, on September 4, 2003, anti-rape advocates believed that an important milestone had been passed.

Rape Prevention Standards, Finally

Fast-forward six years.  After holding public hearings, collecting numerous testimonies, and undertaking extensive research, the commission established under PREA proposed a set of national standards to eliminate sexual abuse in prison.  Although the standards were both feasible and fair, the Justice Department, granted final responsibility for the law’s implementation, failed to adopt them.  Instead, it spent more than two years doing additional research, rewriting the proposed standards, and then revising its own draft.

Last Thursday—nearly nine years after PREA’s passage—the Justice Department finally issued national standards on prison rape.  The new standards are not perfect, but, as Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press release that was issued along with them, they “represent a critical step forward.”

The new standards focus on preventing, detecting, and responding to the sexual abuse of prisoners.  They require prisons, jails, and other detention facilities to maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual abuse, which includes screening prisoners for the risk of abuse, using the resulting information to inform decisions about housing and programs, and training correctional staff regarding their responsibility to prevent, recognize, and respond to sexual abuse.

The new standards also require facilities to make prisoners aware of how to report sexual abuse, and to develop policies to ensure that prisoners who report abuse do not face retaliation.

Importantly, the standards mandate that facilities provide timely medical and mental- health care to victims of sexual abuse, and establish protocols for preserving evidence after incidents of abuse.  They also ensure that facilities will maintain records of abuse and use those records to inform future prevention efforts.

The standards are immediately binding in all federal prison facilities.  While they are not mandatory in state prisons and jails, states that do not implement them will lose a portion of their federal funding.

Real Progress, Hopefully

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, released the same day as the federal prison standards, underscores why the standards are so important.  Based on a 2008 survey of 17,738 former state prisoners, the report said that one in ten prisoners had described at least one incident of sexual abuse while incarcerated.  The report also found that more than a quarter of victims of prisoner-on-prisoner abuse had been physically injured, and approximately 46 percent had been victimized by more than one perpetrator.

Rates of victimization were especially high for gay and bisexual prisoners: over a third of them had suffered sexual abuse while incarcerated.

These statistics are profoundly disturbing.  While the poor conditions that prevail in U.S. prisons and jails undercut the promise of rehabilitation, the likelihood of rape makes a mockery of the idea.  It is long past time for prisoners to be able to serve their time behind bars without fear of sexual abuse.

The elimination of prison rape, the stated purpose of the 2003 law, is a worthy and necessary goal. If the Justice Department’s new standards bring the country substantially closer to reaching that goal, they may even be worth the wait.

Joanne Mariner is the director of Hunter College’s Human Rights Program.  She is an expert on human rights, counterterrorism, and international humanitarian law. She is the author of the Human Rights Watch report, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons. 

This column previously appeared on Justia’s Verdict.

The enormous power of the ultra-conservatives forces and the weakness of the political leadership of the left-leaning democratic movement prevented the establishment of a full democracy and, as a consequence, those conservative forces maintained an enormous influence in the political and cultural lives of Spain.  That explains the difficulties that the progressive forces in Spain have had in correcting the official history promoted by the post-Francoist conservative forces in the country.

One example of this inability to change the “official” history is how Dali is presented to the public.  There is a whole industry aimed at promoting his paintings and his life.  And Dali is a major figure celebrated in Spain.  Recently, the major opera house of Barcelona – el Liceu – showed an opera dedicated to Dali.  And Cadaques, one of the places on the Mediterranean Catalan coast where the Catalan bourgeoisie spends their vacations, has a monument in the major square of the town with his figure.

Dali was, however, a person with clear fascist positions.   The media has kept a complicit silence about it.  On the rare occasions that politics appear in the official biography of Dali, his support for the dictatorship is explained as his intent to be on good terms with the­­­­­­­­­­­­­ apparatus of that state in order to avoid paying taxes, a perception usually held in Catalonia and Spain, where tax fraud has always been a general practice among the wealthy.  This collaboration with the dictatorship is trivialized because in the community of the rich (among which Dali was a prominent figure)

everyone practiced tax fraud.  Except for this piece of information which usually appeared as a footnote, nothing is said about Dali’s heavy involvement with fascism.  This is how the dominance of conservative forces appears in the shaping of perception in the art world.  The equivalent of this situation in the United States would be if Washington’s Kennedy Center were to dedicate an entire musical to the figure of Ezra Pound, the American supporter of Mussolini, who has properly been ostracized in the writers community of the US.

In his detailed and excellent book on Dali, Ian Gibson has documented Dali’s identification with fascism in Spain from the very beginning.  (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali.  Faber and Faber, 1997).  During the civil war, Dali never came out in support of the Republic.  He did not collaborate, for example, in the Paris Fair in 1937, where Picasso presented his Guernica, aimed at raising funds for the Republican cause.  And he soon made explicit his sympathies for the fascist coup of 1936 and for the dictatorship that it established in a letter to Buñuel, a well-known filmmaker in Spain.  He made explicit and known his admiration for the figure and writing of the founder of the Spanish fascist party (La Falange), José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and used in his speeches and writings the fascist narrative and expressions (such as the fascist call “Arriba España”), referring to the special role Spain had in promoting the imperial dreams over other nations.  He sympathized with the anti-Semitic views of Hitler and celebrated Franco’s alliance with Hitler and Mussolini against France, Great Britain and the United States.  He also welcomed the “solution to the national problem” in vogue in Nazi and fascist circles at that time.

Dali became the major defender of the Franco dictatorship in the artistic world.  He was also, as Spanish fascism was, very close to the Church and to the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, indicating that modern art needed to be based on Christianity.  His loyalty to the fascist dictatorship continued to the very end, defending the state terrorist policies that included political assassinations, even in the last moments of that dictatorship.  A few months before dying, Franco signed death warrants of five political prisoners, which created an international uproar of protest.  Dali defended Franco’s execution orders, indicating that many more death sentences should have been signed by the generalissimo, to whom he referred as “the greatest hero of Spain”.  Franco is the Spanish figure who has killed more Spaniards in Spanish history, (120,000 of them are still disappeared with no knowledge of where they are buried).

All the facts are well documented in Ian Gibson’s book, but rarely, if ever, do they appear in the Spanish press.  Actually, La Vanguardia, which belongs to the Godo family, (a major supporter of the fascist coup and which used to be the major defender of the Spanish dictatorship and now has become the major conservative paper of Catalonia), keeps publishing articles about the life of Dali, without ever referring to these events.

The popular classes, however, have a memory.  Dali was hated by the democratic forces.  When Franco died, Dali fled from Cadaques, afraid for his life.  In 1976, during the last years of the dictatorship, a bomb was discovered under his usual seat in a major restaurant in Barcelona.  And he soon became aware that his life and patrimony could be endangered if the democratic forces were to win.  But he underestimated the power of those ultra-conservative forces who were loyal to him.  The King, Juan Carlos I, appointed by General Franco, became the head of state and of the armed forces in the newly established democracy and extended his protection to all the major figures of the fascist establishment including Dali.  And, a monument with his statue was raised in Cadaques.

Vicente Navarro is Professor of Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press and now available in Kindle format. 

“Austerity has failed because Greek society has been destroyed, the production base has been dissolved. Our country has been in a deep recession for five consecutive years. This has never happened in Europe in peacetime.”

–Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA)

Europe is a trainwreck. The signs of a credit crunch are popping up in countries on the periphery, a slow-motion bank run is underway in Greece and Spain, the ratings agencies have slashed the ratings on banks in Italy and Spain, and the British money printer, De La Rue, has been contacted to “draw up contingency plans to print drachma banknotes should Greece exit the euro.” Also, unemployment is at a 10-year high, defaults, delinquencies and bankruptcies are soaring, and nearly half of the countries in the EZ are mired in a severe recession. The grim situation is getting grimmer, and yet, after 3 years of emergency meetings, summits, and myriad other can-kicking confabs, EU managers are no closer to creating a viable fiscal and political union than they were on Day 1. Here’s more from the Financial Times via CNBC:

“Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis…. (The ECB’s) weekly financial statement published on April 24, showed an unexpected €121 billion increase in the innocently titled heading “other claims on euro area credit institutions,” the result of putting all ELA under the same item. By definition, €121 billion was the minimum amount of ELA being provided by the “eurosystem” — the network of eurozone central banks.” (“Secret Central Bank Aid Props Up Greek Banks”, CNBC)

Can you believe it? The ECB provided 1 trillion euros to EZ banks just 3 months ago, and already they’re back at the trough. The so-called Long-Term Refinancing Operation or LTRO was supposed to fix everything. As it turns out, it fixed nothing. The banks are still rat-holing hundreds of billions of euros at the ECB’s overnight
facility, while lending to businesses and consumers has fallen off a cliff. Perhaps, the ruling bureaucracy should have pursued a different strategy altogether, like marking down bank assets to their current value and nationalizing institutions that are insolvent. But that would have meant applying the same standard to banks that’s applied to everyone else which, of course, just won’t do. When a bank is upside down, it’s the market’s fault, not the bank’s. To imply otherwise, would be to suggest that banks have made horrific errors in judgement, which we know cannot be true.

President Barack Obama thinks that the way forward for Europe is to give the banks more money. Here’s what he said at the G-8 meetings:

“We’ve got to make sure that banks are recapitalised in Europe so that investors have confidence. And we’ve got to make sure that there is a growth strategy to go alongside the need for fiscal discipline, as well as a monetary policy that is promoting the capacity of countries like a Spain or an Italy to put in place very tough targets and some very tough policies….We’ve got to put in place firewalls that ensure that countries outside of Greece that are doing the right thing aren’t harmed just because markets are skittish and nervous.”

Obama is wrong on all counts. In the US, the TARP was implemented to recapitalize the nation’s largest banks. Did that vastly unpopular program build “investor confidence”?

No. And what about the idea of “a growth strategy alongside fiscal discipline”?

Absurd. Stronger growth requires more spending. Fiscal discipline requires less spending. One policy cancels out the other. This is just more political gibberish like Obama’s opining on “firewalls”, another meaningless buzzword. Why would you need a firewall if bank deposits and government debt (bonds) were insured by the “full faith and credit” of the ECB as they are in the US by the FDIC and the US Treasury. You wouldn’t. A firewall–which is nothing more than a big pile of cash that’s supposed to calm investors–is a poor substitute for blanket guarantees on government bonds, which is how every other country in the world backstops its debt.

Not so, in Europe. The Eurocrats would rather reinvent the wheel than follow that well-trod path. Besides blanket guarantees mean that Germany might have to dig a little deeper into its surplus windfall and pay more of its fair share. Lord knows, they don’t want that. Oh, no. They’d rather see the Club Med states plunged into a decades-long slump instead of trying to level the playing field by making a bigger contribution or by collectivizing the EZ’s debts. (Merkel rejected the idea of eurobonds just yesterday) And what is the result of this idiocy? Well, for one thing, capital is fleeing Greece and Spain while the ECB is desperately trying to plug the hole with billions in emergency funding. The situation will only get worse as more depositors wake up to the fact that EU leaders are not really interested in fiscal union, but just want to nibble at the edges.

Considering the glaring flaws in the monetary union’s architecture and the rise of anti-austerity parties in Greece, it’s surprising the eurozone didn’t split up long ago. As it stands, things are just coming to a head now. The popular Radical Coalition of the Left or Syriza party has called for an end to the bailout memorandum and a repeal of it’s belt tightening provisions. Despite the happy talk at the G-8 meetings, the German magazine Der Speigel says that the knives are already out for Greece. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Officially, euro zone governments say they’re not talking about a Greek exit from the euro zone. But it’s a different story behind closed doors. Finance ministers meeting in Brussels last Monday threatened to evict Greece…Despite official claims to the contrary, the governments of the euro zone are threatening to kick Greece out of the currency union….

“If we now held a secret vote about Greece staying in the euro zone,” Euro Group Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker warned his Greek colleague, “there would be an overwhelming majority against it.” (“An Ultimatum for Greece–Europe Raises Threat Level against Athens”, Der Speigel)

While the majority of Greeks want to remain in the eurozone, a clear majority also wants to see an end to austerity. If the anti-memorandum parties win the June elections , the other EZ members will assume that Greece will refuse to meet the terms of its bailout agreements. That will set the wheels in motion and the eurogroup will begin the process of removing Greece from the union. And while that scenario seems more likely now than ever, it will certainly exacerbate the downturn and send tremors through the global economy. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal that helps to explain:

“Nobody believes the current bailout funds—capped at €700 billion ($891.1 billion)—are anywhere near big enough to impress the markets, so the decisive crisis response will fall upon the European Central Bank. To head off a possible run on peripheral European banks, it would need to offer to provide unlimited liquidity—and since many banks are already short of eligible collateral, it would have to do so with very little security. That will expose the ECB—and by extension, European taxpayers—to credit risk.

The ECB will also need to deploy its unlimited firepower to stabilize government bond markets. But simply reactivating the Securities Markets Program in its current format is no solution. The ECB’s insistence on being ranked senior to other creditors in Greece means the more bonds the ECB buys, the more likely a country will be permanently shut out of markets. The only way around this problem is for member states to commit to fully indemnify the ECB against losses, putting taxpayers further on the hook…. Given the added strain from a Greek exit on peripheral banking systems, major bank bailouts are inevitable.” (“Europe’s Missing Contingency Plan as Greek Exit Fears Rise”, Wall Street Journal)

The WSJ believes that a Greek exit will trigger a Lehman-type meltdown, but others–particularly in Germany–are not so sure. Merkel and Co. seem to believe that the rift will be manageable and that it will send a powerful message to other deficit-stricken countries that they need to play by the rules. Whatever the outcome, it looks as though the matter will be settled on June 17 when Greeks go to the polls and decide whether to throw their support behind the pro-bailout or anti-bailout parties. The results of the balloting will decide whether Greece has a future in the eurozone or not.

There are significant discrepancies in the media coverage of leftist Syriza party and it’s 37-year leader, Alexis Tsipras. Tsipras has led the charge against austerity saying it’s turned a slump into a humanitarian crisis increasing homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, and severe poverty by many orders of magnitude. But while Tsipras opposes austerity, he does not want Greece to leave the euro, so his position is not really radical at all, merely left-of-center.

“We are proposing a way to save the euro,” Tsipras said. “If Syriza wins the election on June 17, it won’t mean we will leave the euro, on the contrary it offers a big chance for us to save the euro. If the austerity continues, Greece will need a third bailout in a few months, and a further debt restructuring, and that could enforce a return to the national currency.”

Other members of Syriza have denounced austerity, too, (but still support staying in the EZ) like MP Panayiotis Lafazanis who recently gave an interview Athens News where he said the following:

“The memorandum (aka–austerity measures) will be annulled. ….. the treaties do not say Greece must have a memorandum or perpetual austerity policies. All of that throws us into a vicious circle of recession, which leads to an abyss….

We will seek to negotiate the writedown of most of the debt. If we do not succeed, we will proceed with a moratorium, stopping debt repayment. Certainly, the Greek governments and politico-economic elite are to blame for saddling the country with a nearly 400bn euro debt that did not serve the genuine developmental and social needs of the country and the Greek people.

The creditors have a huge responsibility. They should first look at the ability of the borrower. Would you lend to someone who you know is over-indebted? No. We had a frenzied lending spree by banks that sought and received excessive benefits. The debt cannot be paid off unless the Greek people are annihilated. No government has the right to do that to the Greek people.” (“Panayiotis Lafazanis: Farewell to the memorandum”, The Athens News)

So, Syriza’s position on the issues is pretty straightforward, right?

Not exactly. There are conflicting reports that indicate that Tsipras may not the man he appears to be. According to the World Socialist Web Site, Tsipras has embarked on a tour of Europe “to reassure the banks and the major imperialist powers that, despite his criticisms of the bailouts, he …. intends both to repay the banks and to continue “reforms” begun by PASOK.”

The article continues:

“Tsipras discussed the Obama administration’s economic policies with Reuters, praising them for making “recession less severe than in Europe.”….(and) that Europe has to adopt the policies the Obama administration adopted in response to the economic crisis. In a May 18 New York Times interview, he explained that his message for the G8 is that “we have to press Merkel to follow the example of America, where the debt crisis wasn’t tackled with austerity measures but with an expansionist approach.”

The New York Times commented, “Mr. Tsipras’ arguments are not so different from those of some of the leaders gathered at the Group of 8 summit at Camp David.” (“Greek SYRIZA leader Tsipras pledges to repay banks in European tour”, World Socialist Web Site)

So, is Tsipras a radical leftist, a Greek Obama, or something in-between? There’s no way of knowing for sure, not yet at least.

One way or another, Greece will survive, but given the troika’s (The European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF) abysmal track record, one would have to conclude that the quickest way to recovery –involving the least amount of pain for the Greek people–would be a clean break with the EZ, a return to the drachma, and a reestablishing of national sovereignty. The euro experiment has failed, now it’s time to move on.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Since graveyard humor is a Serbian specialty, it seems appropriate that Serbs just played a little joke on everybody by electing a former undertaker as President.

In the May 20 runoff, affable former funeral home manager Tomislav Nikolic won slightly over 50 per cent of valid votes cast against the incumbent, Boris Tadic, who had spent his eight years in office doing everything possible to please the Western powers that have in return done all they could to keep Serbia alone and humiliated. Constantly compared to Nazi Germany, Serbs have been subjected to a sleazy imitation of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, but no Marshall Plan billions to revive the economy.  Conditions are increasingly desperate.

More than half the electorate, perhaps considering the election itself a joke, did not bother to vote. Nikolic promised change, but there is no sign that he has either a plan or the means to bring it about. Earlier in the month, parliamentary elections were tainted by evidence of massive ballot rigging in favor of the ruling coalition. Even before the presidential runoff, the Socialist Party leader made a deal to form a coalition with Tadic’s Democratic Party – the coalition favored by Western embassies.  So Nikolic may find himself only a figurehead, with the government run by a prime minister from the same old Tadic majority.

Still, voters at least get a chance from time to time to say “no”, and saying “no” to Tadic brought a fleeting illusion of freedom.

For Western media and politicians, Serbia serves only one purpose: to be the bad example of “nationalism” that enhances the virtuous anti-nationalism of the EU and NATO.  In an era when in EU countries a mere disparaging remark against any ethnic or religious group may lead to lawsuits for “incitement to racial hatred”, the Serbs are there to allow cartoonists, editorialists and film-makers to stigmatize the pariah group to their heart’s content.  Serbia’s most prized export to Europe is its “genocidal war criminals”, sent to The Hague to feed Europe’s pride in its humanitarian values.  So the best thing Serbia could do for Western media was to elect “an extreme nationalist” – well, not exactly – only a “former extreme nationalist”, or “a former ultranationalist”, or “a former strident nationalist”.  In The Guardian, Ian Traynor fretted that “Serbia’s hopes of fast-track integration into Europe suffered a severe setback” with the defeat of the endlessly accommodating Tadic.

This “fast track” is another sour joke.  After eight years of giving in to EU pressure, all Tadic got this spring was grudging permission for Serbia to become an “official candidate” to join the EU.  To join when?  Only when Serbia makes some more “reforms” and above all, when Belgrade accepts the “independence” of Kosovo, stolen from Serbia by NATO bombing in 1999 and handed over to Albanian gangsters with friends in Washington.

That is something no Serbian government dares to do.  At least not openly. Like Tadic, Nikolic has promised to pursue two mutually exclusive policy aims: EU membership, and refusal to recognize that the historic Serb province of Kosovo is now an “independent State”.

The election of Nikolic probably shows that enthusiasm for joining the EU is waning, which would make sense considering the current crisis of the euro zone. But even a sinking ship may look like salvation to a drowning man.

Ever since the 1999 NATO war, Serbia has been a semi-occupied country, surrounded by NATO. Its politicians must seek approval of Western embassies and pro-Western media. Many have been groomed in the United States. Nikolic is an exception, but to compensate, he has turned to former U.S. Ambassador William Montgomery for advice on how to improve his image in the West.

As a “former extreme nationalist”, Nikolic may be called upon by EU gatekeepers to do even more (if such is possible) to prove his conversion to “Western values”.  He started off with the rather astonishing statement that he was eager to meet Angela Merkel, his “best ally in Europe” – astonishing since everyone knows that Germany and Austria, as Serbia’s historic enemies (Sarajevo 1914) were first to sponsor Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia and have vigorously pursued their century-old vendetta against Serbs ever since.

Nikolic has modified his former vow to pursue closer relations with Russia into a suggestion that Serbia must “have friends all over the world”.  The “former extreme nationalist”, who left the Serbian Radical Party to form his own Progressive Party, does not appear to be the man to defy Serbia’s Western tormentors.

“Take Him to The Hague!”

Since only “former extreme nationalists” are left in Serbia, whatever happened to the real thing?  Whatever happened to Vojislav Seselj?

Nikolic’s political mentor, the lawyer and Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, has been in prison in the Netherlands for over nine years, as his trial for belonging to an alleged “joint criminal enterprise” gets nowhere.

On February 24, 2003, learning that the Prosecutor’s office of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had issued a secret indictment against him, Seselj booked his own regular flight to the Netherlands to give himself up before the indictment could be issued.  He announced boldly that he was “convinced that I’m capable of winning against The Hague tribunal and refuting these Western allegations against the Serbian people.”  A farewell rally was held in Belgrade.

He has been in the ICTY prison in the Netherlands ever since.

The ICTY chief Prosecutor at that time, Ms. Carla Del Ponte, wrote in her memoirs that the indictment was issued at the request of the authorities in Belgrade. At a meeting on February 17, 2003,  Zoran Djindjic, who owed his position as Serbian Prime Minister to support from NATO powers, and was assassinated shortly thereafter, allegedly told her: “As far as Vojislav Seselj is concerned, we have only one request –take him away, never to bring him back again!”

The reason for getting Seselj out of Serbia was obvious.  He was a popular politician who had lost elections to Milosevic, but with Milosevic out of the way, he might be a formidable opponent for the pro-Western politicians sponsored by the NATO powers.  Or so they might worry.

The Seselj case illustrates an original purpose of the Hague tribunal, as described by one of its designers, Michael Scharf, a State Department adviser who took part in the creation of the ICTY. In an August 2004 Washington Post column, Scharf recalled: “In creating the Yugoslavia tribunal statute, the U.N. Security Council set three objectives: first, to educate the Serbian people, who were long misled by Milosevic’s propaganda, about the acts of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his regime; second, to facilitate national reconciliation by pinning prime responsibility on Milosevic and other top leaders and disclosing the ways in which the Milosevic regime had induced ordinary Serbs to commit atrocities; and third, to promote political catharsis while enabling Serbia’s newly elected leaders to distance themselves from the repressive policies of the past.”

To put it in slightly different terms, the purpose of the Tribunal was to oblige the Serbian people to accept the NATO version of events in their country.

Already in 1992, U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called for a war crimes tribunal as an instrument to force the Serbian people to see things our way: While “waiting for the people of Serbia, if not their leaders, to come to their senses, we must make them understand that their country will remain alone, friendless, and condemned to economic ruin and exclusion from the family of civilized nations for as long as they pursue the suicidal dream of a Greater Serbia.  They need, especially, to understand that a second Nuremberg awaits the practitioners of ethnic cleansing, and that the judgment, and opprobrium, of history awaits the people in whose name their crimes were committed.”

In reality, the Tribunal, precisely because it intervened in a complex civil war against the Serb side, has never been credible among most Serbs, but instead has served to strengthen the NATO countries’ own view of the conflict as caused solely by Serbian nationalism. The enemies of the Serbs, nationalist leaders of the Albanians, Bosnian Muslims or Croats, use the Western anti-Serb bias for their own purposes, first of all to portray themselves as pure innocent victims with no responsibility for the mayhem that tore Yugoslavia apart. That version is far too simplistic to convince Serbs who are aware of the complexities, even when they admit that crimes were indeed committed by Serbs during the bloody conflicts. Far from fostering reconciliation, the Tribunal has cemented divisions and made eventual reconciliation all but impossible.

Seselj, however, is a special case.  There is no evidence that he ever took part in combat, much less in war crimes, or that he exercised any command responsibility.  He joined a national unity government briefly during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, but for the rest of the time was an often bitter and vehement political opponent of President Slobodan Milosevic.

As a witness at the Milosevic trial in The Hague, Seselj surprised the prosecution by insisting that he, Seselj, was the real champion of “Greater Serbia”, while Milosevic was always opposed to the concept and instead wanted to preserve multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.  Milosevic died in his cell before the end of his trial.

In short, Seselj is spending years on trial for what he said, not for what he did.

The Crime of the “Rusty Spoons”

Some twenty years ago, Seselj became notorious in Western media for having allegedly boasted of “tearing out the eyes of Croats with rusty spoons”.  This was one of the main horror stories that built the reputation of Serbs as genocidal maniacs.

Vojislav Seselj was never one to be concerned with political correctness.  He gained a certain prominence in the early 1980s as one of Yugoslavia’s best-known political prisoners. Internationally known intellectuals of the Praxis group rallied to his defense on grounds of free speech, even though they disagreed with him on just about all major questions, as they tended to be reformist Marxists and Seselj was strongly anti-communist. But even his adversaries acknowledged his courage and intelligence.

Under Milosevic, political prisoners were released, and in the early 1990s Seselj became leader of the Serbian Radical Party, a revival of Serbia’s main historic political party from Serbia’s democratic heyday in the early 1900s, before World War I and the creation of Yugoslavia at the Versailles conference.  As Yugoslavia began to break up under the pressure of Croatian and Slovenian secessionism, Seselj became the leading champion of Serb nationalism, meaning roughly the idea that if Yugoslavia were to break up into its component nations, Serbia should revert to the nation it could have been as a victor in World War I before the creation of Yugoslavia, World War II, and the Communist division of Yugoslav territory – in short, “Greater Serbia”.  Milosevic never endorsed this idea.

In 1991, conflict was brewing between ethnic Serbs and nationalist Croats in regions of Croatia with a large Serb population.  Some Serbs fled to Serbia, fearful of a return of the Nazi-backed Ustasha movement that massacred Serbs after Nazi Germany invaded and broke up Yugoslavia in 1941. While the conflict aroused Serb fears of Ustasha, it also aroused Croat fears of Chetniks – the name for Serb guerrillas in wars against the Ottoman Empire or against the Nazi occupation.

That year, Seselj was guest on a satirical television show called Minimaxovision that made fun of the accusations against Serbs. “So you Chetniks are slaughtering people again?” Seselj was asked.  He replied deadpan: “of course, only we have changed our methodology.  Now, instead of knives we use shoe horns.  And rusty ones at that, so that it cannot be established whether the victim died because of butchering or from tetanus.”  The talk show participants laughed at the absurdity of using shoe horns.  This was graveyard humor in a tradition understood perhaps in Belgrade, but not everywhere.

Urged on by their Croat friends, Western reporters took the whole thing seriously.  The tasteless joke became a testimony to the fact that Seselj had boasted that his men slaughtered Croats with rusty spoons (the word kasika means both spoon and shoe horn in Serbian).

Since then, Seselj has explained repeatedly that he was joking.  But the story lives on. The May 22 report on Nikolic’s election in the International Herald Tribune included a background reference to Vojislav Seselj who “said he would like to gouge out the eyes of Croats with a rusty spoon.  He is now in The Hague for war crimes.”

An unmentioned aspect of this story is that in a paradoxical way it echoes the Italian author Curzio Malaparte, who wrote in “Kaputt”, his autobiographical account of Italy’s role in World War II, that when he visited the Leader of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, Ustasha chief Ante Pavelic, he was shown a basket of what looked like oysters and was told they were “human eyes… gouged from Serbs”.

Personally, I have never been able to take Malaparte’s story literally, and tend to think that it, too, is an illustration of a certain Balkan humor.

The simplistic belief that the Yugoslav wars of disintegration were caused solely by evil Serbs, imitating Hitler, is necessary to justify NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in order to “save the Kosovars”. This myth must be upheld as precedent for further “humanitarian intervention” whenever the United States and NATO decide to overthrow another recalcitrant government somewhere.  Until NATO goes broke, or Western citizens wake up and oppose endless war, the Serbs have no chance of achieving truth or justice.  They can only console themselves with graveyard humor.

DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at  diana.josto@yahoo.fr

I remember passing through Apollo and noticing a large industrial complex at the edge of town. Years later, I learned that this plant was owned by the Babcock & Wilcox Corporation, and it produced uranium fuel. Babcock & Wilcox, a global conglomerate, has been involved in nuclear-related industrial production ever since the Manhattan Project, designing, fabricating, and supplying components for nuclear power plants, ships, submarines, and weapons.

The facility in Apollo and another one in nearby Parks Township, initially built by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in 1957 and later bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and then by Babcock & Wilcox, closed in 1986. Left behind were contaminated land and water and sick and dead residents.
Victims and their families sued the companies in the mid-1990s for damages suffered, and ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were forced to pay $80 million to compensate victims for cancers and loss of property value. Sadly, by the time the lawsuits were settled, in 2008 and 2009, 40 percent of the claimants had died.

Meanwhile, Babcock & Wilcox declared bankruptcy in 2000 to avoid liability in thousands of lawsuits by employees subjected to asbestos, a substance that businesses have known since the 1930s causes cancer. As a condition of exiting bankruptcy, it set up a trust fund to pay asbestos claimants; the amount of money put aside was far less than the company would very likely have had to pay if it had faced those lawsuits.

Recently, nearly one hundred new lawsuits against ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were filed by scores of people claiming that they got cancer as a result of exposure to radiation. A report to the federal court by an expert witness stated that the two companies “knew about worst-in-the-nation releases of radioactive materials that spanned decades, but opted not to do enough to protect neighbors from cancer-causing dust.” NUMEC showed an almost wanton disregard for safety.  “In the first few years, the company lost so much uranium—enough to build several nuclear bombs—that the FBI investigated whether someone was actually stealing the material and selling it to a foreign country!” At the Parks Township facility, which produced plutonium and enriched uranium, NUMEC buried radioactive waste in an open unfenced field close to where children played. It is implausible that Babcock & Wilcox, with its many nuclear projects over a long period of time, did not know about the problems with the entities it was buying. Yet, it did nothing to protect its workers or the community. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,

A top official in 1974 viewed memos on the facility [which Babcock Wilcox bought in 1971] and wrote that if they were accurate, ‘we are guilty of gross irresponsibility in continuing to operate our uranium facilities.’ He threatened to shut them down, but the company didn’t stop making highly enriched uranium there until 1978, and it ended all production in 1984.

The actions of these corporations helped to destroy a town and its people, and it appears they knew what they were doing. They not only located a nuclear plant in a town, but then failed to shut it down when they knew that workers and residents were being poisoned. “ ‘A lot of people have lost not only their entire savings but their homes,’ due to the health effects and loss of property value caused by the plants, said Patricia Ameno, of Leechburg, who sued the companies in a previous round of litigation . . . . ‘Their families have been torn apart by illnesses and deaths.’” Ms. Ameno, whose body has been wracked by cancer and brain tumors, added, “I saw the town I grew up in … disintegrating, just like the bricks on that plant.” One of the persons who posted a comment on the Post-Gazette article noted that a 1999 piece in the same newspaper showed that one-sixth of Apollo’s population had some type of cancer!

I posted the Post-Gazette story on a facebook page dedicated to men and women who grew up in my hometown in the 1950s and 1960s. Most know about the Apollo plant. And they all lived in a town dominated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, which poisoned its own employees with asbestos and silica dust and whose now abandoned property is so full of harmful chemicals that it cannot even donate it to the town. Outside town, near the company-owned fields on which I used to play baseball, “waste lagoons” built by the company and fed by pipes that went under the river have been leaking “arsenic, chromium, lead, manganese, copper, zinc, mercury and other toxic compounds into the river.” Despite this, only two persons commented on what I posted. If a post concerns some ancient bit of trivia or the local hoagie shop, members of the group fall all over themselves to make some meaningless remark. But something so important is met with silence.

Sadly, a family member is a manager at Babcock & Wilcox. I have always wondered how he could do this. The division of the company in which he works is knee-deep in the bowels of the military-industrial system. It “manages complex, high-consequence nuclear and national security operations, including nuclear production facilities and the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” In others words, it is part of the U.S. war machine, making money by helping the government kill people, just like it killed people more directly in Apollo.

Thousands of people grew up in and near Apollo. They have learned what harm the corporations who employed them and their relatives and friends have done and continue to do. Men, women, and children were poisoned by that uranium fuel plant and that glass plant. Yet, for the most part, they ignore this, content to contemplate instead their “warm and fuzzy” memories, as one person put it on my hometown facebook page. And many hundreds of thousands of men and women work as managers for horrendous corporate criminals like Babcock & Wilcox without ever questioning their actions. Perhaps this tells us something about what those who raise their voices in protest are up against. Including the plaintiffs challenging Babcock & Wilcox. I wish them success.

MICHAEL D. YATES is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist’s Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. He is the editor of Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com

I arrived last Saturday, and after checking in at a hotel fairly close to the location of the NATO extravaganza, I wandered the eerily quiet area.  Security was thick.  Clusters of Illinois State Police, with police dogs, scrutinized.  I smiled and nodded.

On my way back to the hotel, I saw two musclemen, wearing school bus yellow shirts on which “SECURITY” was stitched thickly in black.  Buckled around their waists were black leather tool belts with pouches that carried instruments of destruction.  I thought of mutant, killer bumblebees.

“Why so armed and dangerous?” I asked.

“We’re looking for you.”

“You found me.”

“Are you a protester?”

“Yup, and I’m protesting FOR you, nonviolently.”

They smiled, and one said, “You’re the kind of protester I like.”  No, you don’t like me, I thought.  I knew they didn’t comprehend the meaning of my declaration. If they and the police officers did, they’d be marching with the protesters.

I would learn the next day just how much they like the power they wield for the warmongers.

Directionally challenged, I left early to take the train to meet Debra Sweet and other members of World Can’t Wait for dinner. On the Brown Line platform, I saw a group with antiwar pins and peace shirts. Engaging them in conversation, I learned they’d driven 24 hours from Utah to protest.

Next day, I walked to Grant Park for the rally that preceded the march.  I took photos of people, signs, and banners, and talked with peace pals I’ve known for years.  I asked permission and received a yes to photograph a disabled vet in a wheelchair, someone with a different perspective.  He wore his medals and the sign he held said:

100% Disabled

Vietnam Vet

Pro-Military

Pro-NATO

Pro-Chicago

Pro-Police

And if you don’t like it

GTFOOH

Juxtapose this with the poignant and solemn procession of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who, now, oppose war.  Later, at the end of the march, they would throw their medals near McCormick Place where NATO leaders were meeting.  Each veteran made a statement, some apologizing to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, denouncing policies, lies, and the “global war on terrorism, and praising Bradley Manning for his courage. Many voiced a need to heal. Vince Emanuele said:

My name is Vince Emanuele, and I served with the United States Marine Corps. First and foremost, this is for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Second of all, this is for our real forefathers. I’m talking about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I’m talking about the Black Panthers. I’m talking about the civil rights movement. I’m talking about unions. I’m talking about our socialist brothers and sisters, our communist brothers and sisters, our anarchist brothers and sisters, and our ecology brothers and sisters. That’s who our real forefathers are. And lastly—and lastly and most importantly, our enemies are not 7,000 miles from home. They sit in boardrooms. They are CEOs. They are bankers. They are hedge fund managers. They do not live 7,000 miles from home. Our enemies are right here, and we look at them every day. They are not the men and women who are standing on this police line. They are the millionaires and billionaires who control this planet, and we’ve had enough of it. So they can take their medals back.

There was a roster of speakers at the rally, and I listened to a few.  Among the most passionate was Zoe Sigmund of Occupy Chicago.  It was her home that was raided, leading to a charge of providing material support for terrorism against three of her friends.  She said:

These people were all my friends, people like you and me, people here to protest. This campaign of terror is not over….I’m scared. I don’t have a safe place to stay at night because there is no safe place to stay….People keep asking me, ‘Was it true?’ What they should be asking, what they should be questioning is the ease with which the police get away with terrorism. As tempting as it is to direct my fury at the police, I keep struggling to remind myself that they were not independent agents acting with a personal vendetta. It is in the mayor’s and the president’s best interest to persuade us from resisting the war machine.

And I met Michael who was shirtless.  He carried on one shoulder a drone, crafted from duct tape and wood. I asked the Christ-like young man if this was his cross to bear. He said, “Yes.”

After the rally, people moved to the street to begin the march.  All was peaceful.  Police officers bookended, some tasked with videoing the protesters.  Eventually, I left the street to run along the sidewalk, taking more photographs.  Finally, I walked back to my hotel, exhausted and realizing I hadn’t eaten anything all day except a vegan granola bar.

I went downstairs to the lobby and asked if there was a place nearby where I could get a salad.  Directed to an Italian restaurant in the hotel, I entered and saw a television set above the bar, blaring news that the march had become violent.  I asked if I could sit at the bar.  And as I ate and had a glass of wine, I watched in horror as police in full-riot gear and helmets with blue shields to protest themselves from teargas used their “bully” clubs to beat people with whom I had just marched.

I sat there.  I just sat at the bar, staring at the set.  And I thought about my original question: Do protests and marches accomplish anything?  I concluded they do.  Media were present from all over the world.  And the Internet would be abuzz with reports of the savagery.  People in the countries we’ve invaded and occupied, people in the countries that NATO “leaders” are plotting to invade and occupy would see that we the people oppose and are willing to risk bludgeoning and arrest to end war.  This is not insignificant.

Missy Beattie lives in Baltimore, Maryland.  Email:  missybeat@gmail.com   

Last month, Eileen Foster was at the National Press Club to receive the $10,000 Ron Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. In 2007, Foster was a vice president in charge of investigating fraud at Countrywide Financial. A full time job, if you can keep it. Which she couldn’t.

Because she took her job seriously.

A Countrywide employee in Boston called Foster with evidence of widespread loan fraud in the Boston area.

Foster investigated and confirmed the employee’s report and eventually shut down six Countrywide offices in Massachusetts.

She started to pursue what appeared to be systemic fraud at the company when the executive suite got itchy.

On September 8, 2008, they came to Foster and put a 14-page document on her desk. Foster calls that a gag order. They also offered her $228,000. Foster calls that hush money. She was told if she accepted the money and signed the document, she could quit. If not, she would be fired.

She was fired.

Foster filed a complaint with the Department of Labor under the Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower provisions.

Twenty-one out of 1,500 whistleblowers have gotten a favorable response from the Department of Labor.

So, Foster knew it was a bit like hitting the lottery.

But lo and behold, she hit it.

In October 2011, the Department of Labor ruled in her favor.

And in December 2011, the CBS News show 60 Minutes did a story titled Prosecuting Wall Street that featured Foster.

Now, Bank of America, which acquired Countrywide, is appealing the Department of Labor’s ruling.

A public hearing is scheduled for October 22.

On the 60 Minutes segment, Steve Kroft reported that “Eileen Foster has never been asked — and never spoken to the Justice Department – even though she was Countrywide’s executive vice president in charge of fraud investigations.”

We asked Foster – did the Justice Department ever contact you?

“Not before 60 Minutes,” Foster says. “After 60 Minutes, yes.”

What happened?

“I’m not sure I can talk about that,” she says.

“I’m encouraged, but I’m not sure if the movement is in the right direction,” Foster said. “There had been things taking place prior to the 60 Minutes piece.”

It has been widely reported that the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles opened and closed an investigation of Countrywide without bringing charges. Is that what Foster is talking about?

“I’m not talking about any specific effort.”

“If what took place in these organizations wasn’t illegal, there has been a lot of activity which has taken place since that seems to me is clearly illegal – perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.”

Is it your sense that this is over and done with and that the Justice Department has moved on?

“I hope not,” Foster said. “I have a fear that it is probably over and done with.”

At the Press Club last month, Foster said that she doesn’t trust the corporate line on internal reporting of problems.

“Critics insist that a whistleblower be compelled to first report problems internally, supposedly to provide the corrupt company the chance to correct wrongdoing,” Foster said at the Press Club. “But when I followed protocol and reported internally, I was summarily eliminated. The wrongdoing was protected, not corrected.”

“We cannot allow corporate malfeasance to run rampant and become institutionalized. People need to know that many corporations use hotlines and reporting policies to silence whistleblowers and conceal fraud.”

“Corporations now screen applicants for whistleblowing tendencies and assign lawyers to participate in internal investigations so they can shield the wrongdoing under the cloak of ‘privilege,’” Foster said. “The Congress and State Legislatures should eliminate the corporate lawyer cover-up by eliminating the use of so-called privileges in these circumstances.”

“So here we are several years after the onset of the financial crisis, caused in large part by reckless lending and risk-taking in major financial institutions. And still, not one executive has been charged or imprisoned! This stands in stark contrast to the savings and loan debacle in the 1980’s, where prosecutors sent more than 800 bank officials to jail.”

“Our current administration has defended the lack of prosecutions by labeling the executives’ actions ‘bad behavior,’ but not illegal. Assistant Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes, that although the risk-taking was offensive, and the greed was upsetting, it didn’t mean the Department of Justice could bring a criminal case. Perhaps we simply need a different means to a justifiable end.”

“When prosecutors were unable to convict Al Capone of racketeering, they convicted him of tax evasion instead. If there is insufficient legal evidence to convict these executives of what we believe are obvious crimes, then the federal government should refocus. Overwhelming evidence of perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice exist in the numerous claims, court filings and trial and investigative transcripts. We must not let these deeds go wholly unpunished. Perhaps financial industry whistleblowers should be permitted to present their information to grand juries without the help of government prosecutors. Then the people can decide how best to address this outrageous wrongdoing.”

“We can and must uphold the law and prosecute those who break it, especially “white collar criminals”, no matter how highly placed or how cozy they are with government officials. We must insist on full and complete investigations with accountability and punishment for the guilty parties. We must ‘keep the heat on’ and see justice done.”

[For the complete transcript of the Interview with Eileen Foster, see 26 Corporate Crime Reporter 21(10), print edition only.]

Russell Mokhiber edits Corporate Crime Reporter.

On Mother’s Day in Mexico City, it came up against Beatlemania. Just before Paul McCartney rocked the capital’s Zocalo square with a free gig for 200,000 fans, PRI supporters unfurled a giant Peña Nieto banner from a window high above the plaza. The waiting crowd responded with chants of “AMLO! AMLO!” for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – candidate of the Left and former Mexico City mayor – along with a volley of other four-letter words.

The next day, Peña Nieto visited the capital’s Iberoamericana University, where students berated him with cries of “Coward!” and “Get out!” The PRI/Green Party coalition later claimed that the incumbent, right-wing National Action Party (PAN) had deliberately planted sympathizers among the crowd. 131 Ibero students subsequently released a video where they displayed their IDs and declared themselves “neither puppets, nor thugs”. They, like many Mexicans, simply don’t want to see the former ruling party return.

The dirty tactics and smoke-and-mirror campaigning of the PRI recall the 71 years in which they ruled Mexico as a dictatorship, suppressing political and social opposition along the way, often with imprisonment and violence. Peña Nieto, with his movie star looks and soap actress “Seagull” wife, has been groomed as the new, democratic face of the party widely referred to as “the dinosaur”.

So just who is going to vote for Peña Nieto? Unfortunately, die-hard liberal and strongly “perredista” (Democratic Revolutionary Party) Mexico City is no barometer of the republic as a whole. Ever since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s broke the PRI from the values of the Mexican Revolution it claimed to uphold, the party’s support has rested in deeply corrupt unions and rural communities it long coerced with handouts and false promises. It also has the backing of the country’s corporate TV duopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca, which a majority of Mexicans still turn to for news.  

Peña Nieto’s campaign has been based on the heavily-airbrushed image he created while governor of Mexico State, where he first gained a national spotlight. During his term, he signed 608 “compromisos” (pledges) in front of public notaries – most involving expensive and shady public works projects – while suppressing crime and poverty statistics in a state where an estimated 200,000 of the 15 million inhabitants struggle to survive.

His record has an even darker side. May 3 saw the sixth anniversary of the San Salvador Atenco atrocity, when police brutally suppressed a peaceful protest by local flower-vendors, resulting in two deaths, dozens of sexual assaults, and hundreds of arbitrary arrests – an incident still shrouded in controversy. Furthermore, Mexico State saw its murder rate soar under Peña Nieto; murders and disappearances of women surpassing those in the nation’s homicide capital, Ciudad Juarez.

“Mexico, Wake Up!”

Yet, in the last few weeks, Mexicans who may have neglected to vote – turnout at the last two presidential elections was around 60% – seem to be waking up to the very real possibility of the PRI retaking power. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took part in anti-Peña Nieto marches around the country (a day when Anonymous also hacked the party’s website); while Sunday was AMLO Day as pro-Lopez Obrador and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) rallies were held across Mexico and by expats in cities from L.A to Dubai. This is the kind of publicity even Peña Nieto couldn’t buy; unfortunately, the Televisa-Azteca crowd wasn’t showing any of it.

While AMLO is supposedly third-placed among the candidates, none of the others (“citizen’s candidate” Gabriel Quadri de la Torre included) can count on such passionate and public support. Although he was believed to have lost many middle-class sympathizers with his Occupy-style protests after the 2006 election (AMLO cried fraud against winner and current president Felipe Calderon), he’s the only realistic alternative to the PRI-PAN (“PRIAN”) axis.

As for the validity of the polls that have Peña Nieto in first place, nobody can say for sure. In February, Francisco Abundis of the polling agency Parametria diplomatically opined that data is “massaged” to make one or another candidate appear in a positive light – as well as suggesting what everyone already knows, that many pollsters are up for sale.

The only other challenger, right-winger Josefina Vazquez Mota of the PAN, has the unfortunate task of having to follow Felipe Calderon, whose handling of both the economy and the so-called “Drug War” will likely see him go down as one of Mexico’s worst ever presidents.

Desperate to revive a flagging campaign that even fellow “panistas” have labeled a flop, Vazquez Mota has been playing “the narco card” – another grisly massacre (49 dead, many presumed to be Central and South American migrants) in Nuevo Leon a week ago led her to accuse the PRI of having allowed the country’s drug-trafficking mafia to flourish during its rule.

It’s a sad day for Mexico when the PAN can get away with marketing itself as a “progressive” choice, simply because 1) its candidate is a woman and 2) it isn’t the PRI. Merely accelerating the neoliberal reforms imposed by the old dictatorship in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the party has also used the pretext of the “war on drugs” to militarize the country beyond recognition, with a phenomenal surge in gang violence and abuses by security forces.

In 2007, Felipe Calderon’s first year in office, Mexico saw just 2,477 drug trafficking-related murders compared to 15,273 in 2010 and 12,903 in the first nine months of 2011. Many who turn to the PRI this year will likely do so in the hope it can broker peace between the country’s drug lords, but even that is doubtful given the ever-changing dynamics of the narco trade.

Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), whose job it is to officiate the melee, draws mixed opinion as to how well it performs its role. In one sense, its electoral reforms of 2008 have limited the influence of the corporate media on the race (and infuriated the likes of Televisa and Azteca), but there’s a nagging sense that IFE fears rocking the boat where the big two parties are concerned. IFE councillors were invited to meet privately with President Calderon on May 16 to discuss “issues surrounding the elections” and the role the Interior Ministry might play, prompting inevitable rumors of deals being cut behind the scenes.

Either way, despite its apparent lead, the PRI seems anxious. It has withdrawn Peña Nieto from public debates save for the two “official” IFE-sanctioned TV dates, and canceled future university appearances – including one at his alma mater, the Universidad Panamericana – after the debacle at the Ibero campus.

Among the 78 million Mexicans able to vote at home and abroad, it’s been suggested that as many as a third are undecided. They may be a little less so after the huge show of public emotion over the weekend. Contrary to the PRI-heavy spin, there’s plenty of time to put the brakes on the Peña Nieto rollercoaster between now and July.

PAUL IMISON lives in Mexico City. He can be reached at paulimison@hotmail.com

The Inquirer used to rake in Pulitzers, but serious reporting required a sustained investment of money, time and intellect, so when its then-owner, Knight Ridder, balked at this, the Philadelphia newspapers went into their death spiral. This is no local phenomenon, because the entire country is suffering from the dearth of hard-hitting news about anything that really matters: Wall Street and DC corruption; constant lying from our government; an endless war that’s bankrupting the nation and begging for blowbacks and, soon enough, riots; or the accelerating collapse of the economy, and thus, your way of life. In their stead, encyclopedic sports coverage and celebrity gossips, as purveyed by various moronic outfits. Today’s earthquaking burp from Yahoo!, “The prince says an unusual noise kept him awake the night before his nuptials.”

Divorced from local news and conversations, rootless and detached from what’s closest to them, most Americans are dragnetted into a national matrix as defined by cynical or sinister mind fuckers who care nothing about them or their individual communities. Yahoo! is run out of San Jose, long a cultural wasteland, but it was the home of Gary Webb, an American hero who broke the story about the CIA pushing crack cocaine to LA blacks to fund its covert war in Nicaragua. For being an excellent and ethical journalist, Webb was ran out of a job, then hounded into committing suicide, the official story, or simply killed. In any case, what happened to Webb is an apt parable for an America that punishes integrity and bravery, and rewards dishonesty and cowardice. In such a society, degradation is guaranteed.

Yesterday, I walked by the Daily News and Inquirer headquarters and saw, in its window, a blown-up cover about Chase Utley, an aging and often-injured second baseman. Like the country itself, the city is unraveling, but let’s fret over the Phillies, Sixers, Flyers and Eagles. Hey, how about dem Birds! Across the street, I spotted something unusual, however: an upside down 13-star flag in front of the Steak & Bagel Train, a diner in business since 1907. We’re due for another American Revolution, wouldn’t you say?

As I photographed this provocation, a security guard from the adjacent building marched over, “Hey, I didn’t even see that! Somebody is going to burn his place down. I’ve got to ask him tomorrow what’s up with that.” He also informed me that a flag cannot be up at night, unlit, and that he had a flag on his front porch, with a spot light shining on it.

“It’s freedom of speech,” I said to this security dude. “He probably thinks the country is in distress.”

“Yeah, but he’s playing with fire, buddy. Somebody is going to burn his place down.”

So for being a good enough citizen to rouse your compatriots from their slumber, you and yours may be torched, or, like Bradley Manning, held in solitary confinement and stripped naked each night.

Don’t rock the USS Full Spectrum Blowhard Righteous Recovery, you terrorist asshole, though this ship has neither fuel nor compass, nor even rats, not unless you count the Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices surrounding an oil-slick and blood splattered POTUS.

A block from the newspaper office, I saw a sign common in many distressed neighborhoods, “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” I wasn’t sure what the project was, but the sign itself had been well tagged by graffiti, plus some clever guerilla art, a depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

Seen from the side, a hag, with cane and sagging breasts, enters a fountain, then emerges as a lovely young lady, proudly frontal in her nudity. The hag half is shadowed by a vulture and littered with thorny weeds, while the sexy chick half is serenaded by song birds and blooming with flowers. No spring chicken myself, I wouldn’t mind a personal recovery through a dip in some miraculous pool, but as with Juan Ponce de León and his dolorous dick, to believe in magic is to court disaster.

Speaking of the paranormal, let’s walk a few blocks up Broad Street to check out the hulking ruins of the Father Divine Hotel. Few remember him now, but Father Divine was once nationally famous. Known as America’s first cult leader, and an inspiration to Jim Jones, Father Divine inspired his followers with the commonsensical, such as being self-reliant and debt-free; to the idealistic, such as being color blind, even to yourself; to the puritanical, such as abstaining from tobacco, alcohol and gambling; to the weirdly ascetic, such as total celibacy even among married couples. Though he declared himself a living god, and his second wife, four decades his junior, to be the reincarnation of his first wife, his followers believed everything their 5’2” leader said because he was supremely confident and a charismatic speaker, and when he died, many of his devotees even thought he would rise again. It is telling that Father Divine’s movement peaked during the Great Depression.

Now that we’re entering what promises to be an even greater period of material and spiritual despair, which Father Divines will rise up to save the desperate and gullible? Instead of preaching self-control, racial harmony and charity, what bitter impulses will they unleash? The magical Fountain of Recovery will likely gush blood.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a  novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union. 

Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran’s nuclear activities, and (3) a permanent agreement that verifiably assures that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Supports: (1) the universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and (2) U.S. policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Rejects any U.S. policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.

The resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt.

The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability of said manufacturing. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were.

Further, examining the House’s reasoning for denouncing Iran as a repressive regime highlights severe hypocrisy:

“Whereas, on December 26, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution denouncing the serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran, including torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’, as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’”

Switch in that paragraph “the United States” for “Iran” and you might think we should be sanctioning ourselves. Regarding the first several accusations, consider this: the United States tortures foreign adversaries by proxy, abuses accused whistle-blowers in prison before trial, detains more prisoners than any country on Earth, and continues to pass state laws assaulting women’s rights. Perhaps the most hypocritical, though, is the accusation of the repression of peaceful assembly. Just two days after the House passed this resolution, Chicago riot police beat protesters with nightsticks, hit others with CPD vehicles, and used sound canons to disrupt peaceful demonstrators against the NATO summit. So the idea that the U.S. deems Iran a barbaric nation that represses political speech is extremely two-faced at best.

The worst part about the bill, though, is not what policies it specifically introduces or accusations it announces but rather what it signifies more broadly: the U.S. is taking the next step in the war on Iran that has already begun.

For one thing, Israel has already teamed up with a U.S.-backed terror group within Iran to assassinate nuclear scientists, serving both the temporary, practical purpose of inhibiting Iran’s nuclear progress and the long-term, psychological purpose of instilling fear within Iran and its fledgling nuclear program.

More insidiously, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on Iran that most describe as “crippling” and that all should describe as acts of war. Just today, the Senate voted unanimously to escalate those very sanctions. While President Obama may say that sanctions are intended to isolate Iran’s leaders in their nuclear position, it is citizens who bear the burden of these economic moves. Look to Iraq for the devastating effects, where a senior U.N. official estimated that U.N.-imposed sanctions in the 1990s killed a staggering 500,000 children under the age of 5. They don’t call ‘em “crippling” for nothing.

We should also look to Iraq to understand how this bipartisan process of escalation works, from sanctions to bombing to occupation. Arguing against sanctions on Iran in April 2010, Rep. Ron Paul recalled how sanctions on Iraq led inevitably to war:

“Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.”

The Iraq war did not begin with the 2003 invasion – it began with the 1990s embargo. Sanctions on Iraq not only killed hundreds of thousands, but they structured the narrative on Iraq to winnow out peaceful options on the path to war. And the same is true of Iran. Now debates on Iran focus on whether Ahmadinejad will relent in his pursuit of weapons, whether sanctions are “working” sufficiently, or where the U.S. and Israel should draw “red lines” for attack.

President Obama called last month’s “negotiations” with Iran that country’s “last chance,” effectively threatening to escalate sanctions or initiate an attack if Iran didn’t cease and desist its nuclear enrichment program entirely. How are those “negotiations”? How is that “diplomacy”? Threatening Iran to completely submit to the U.S.’s will to get nothing in return is not a discussion – it’s bullying.

What would Iran have to gain in that situation? Iran is seeking to defend itself from nuclear-armed bullies surrounding it constantly. Passively complying would only speed up the U.S. plan to replace the Iranian regime with one even more compliant.

But the United States will not relent on Iran – just as it did not relent on Iraq. Examine again the House resolution’s first principle:

“…it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening.”

Compare that with President Bill Clinton’s 1998 remarks on Iraq:

“One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.”

This is how American bipartisanship – or more accurately, duopoly – works. Both parties want war with Iran, the way both parties wanted war with Iraq. It is in both of their interests – appeasing Israel and its chief lobby, AIPAC, and posturing for their respective bases. Republicans take the hard line on our “enemies,” using blatantly aggressive language, refusing to “apologize for America” and reducing our victims to less than human. Democrats take the more “pragmatic” approach, adopting “national security” rhetoric based in protecting Americans that disguises the exact same policies. The Senate vote to go to war with Iraq, after all, didn’t barely squeak through on Republican support: it passed 96-4. (Now, 9/11 catalyzed the whole process in Iraq and made dissent even less popular, but the biggest antiwar protest in recorded history couldn’t sway more than four measly votes in the Senate.)

This endless posturing is how President Obama can be accused of being “soft on terror” and simultaneously escalate sanctions on Iran and massive drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

This is why, in the interest of war, sanctions by one party is a huge gift to the other. If Mitt Romney is elected this year, he’ll likely announce that Obama’s sanctions were insufficient and encourage an Israeli attack on Iran behind closed doors. If Obama is re-elected, he’ll continue on the path he’s currently on: allowing Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists, officially recognizing the terror group seeking regime change in Iran, and escalating sanctions that cripple the Iranian people and isolate its leaders.

Citing Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent on liberal support for Obama’s escalated drone strikes, here’s Stephen Walt on ‘Why Hawks Should Vote for Obama’:

“Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It’s the flipside of the old “Nixon Goes to China” meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don’t have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government’s permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.”

So if you vote for Barack Obama because you think that Mitt Romney would put troops on the ground, you’ll only be doing it to make yourself feel better. You’ll be playing right into the partisan posturing that seeks to fabricate a meaningful difference between the two major parties, both with long histories of support for wars of aggression. You’ll be fundamentally misunderstanding how American duopoly works: both parties decry each other for tactically approaching the same policies differently in the interest of electing their own representatives to power. Both parties want war – they just want to play it to their respective bases properly.

If you think Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, that Ralph Nader ruined the antiwar movement and George Bush is all to blame, point me to where Gore opposed Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq when he was Vice President. In the meantime, read how Gore argued for regime change in Iraq a few short months before Bush invaded:

“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

If you think Bush’s war was a terrible mistake that warranted John Kerry’s election in 2004, read Kerry on Iraq two months before the invasion:

“Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…”

Find more quotes from Democrats leading up to and supportive of Bush’s 2003 invasion here.

Liberals criticize President Obama for escalating drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, aggressively persecuting Bradley Manning, illegally invading Libya, offering cuts to Social Security, and immunizing the war crimes and torture of the Bush administration – but many same liberals say that despite all of these transgressions, the ostensible likelihood of Mitt Romney attacking Iran makes them feel they have to re-elect the president.

If this were true, wouldn’t these liberals be criticizing Obama’s sanctions on Iran? Wouldn’t they have abandoned Clinton, Gore, and Kerry after their comments on Iraq? More to the point, if these liberals despise war so much, why aren’t Obama’s surge in Afghanistan or expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen deal-breakers for re-election?

If you actually don’t want war with Iran, you have to help end duopoly. You can’t support either of the two establishment parties who feed the military-industrial complex and fear-monger voters into submission. We must make it known that the people want peace – meaning no sanctions, no assassinations, no threats of war.

We must make war making and fear mongering unacceptable. Come Election Day, we can vote third party, or boycott the election, or protest to shut down military recruitment centers or drone bases. But we can’t fund or vote for the war parties – our victims can’t afford it. No votes for empire, no money for war. No exceptions.

Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

1. The issue is debt, not tuition
2. Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent
3. The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims
4. This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon
5. Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students
6. Excessive state violence has been used against the students
7. The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students
8. Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students
9. The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students
10. The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power

1) The issue is debt, not tuition: In dismissing the students, who are striking against a 75% increase in the cost of tuition over the next five years, the most common argument used is in pointing out that Quebec students pay the lowest tuition in North America, and therefore, they should not be complaining. Even with the 75% increase, they will still be paying substantially lower than most other provinces. Quebec students pay on average $2,500 per year in tuition, while the rest of Canada’s students pay on average $5,000 per year. With the tuition increase of $1,625 spread out over five years, the total tuition cost for Quebec students would be roughly $4,000. The premise here is that since the rest of Canada has it worse, Quebec students should shut up, sit down, and accept “reality.” THIS IS FALSE. In playing the “numbers game,” commentators and their parroting public repeat the tuition costs but fail to add in the numbers which represent the core issue: DEBT. So, Quebec students pay half the average national tuition. True. But they also graduate with half the average national student debt. With the average tuition at $5,000/year, the average student debt for an undergraduate in Canada is $27,000, while the average debt for an undergraduate in Quebec is $13,000. With interest rates expected to increase, in the midst of a hopeless job situation for Canadian youth, Canada’s youth face a future of debt that “is bankrupting a generation of students.” The notion, therefore, that Quebec students should not struggle against a bankrupt future is a bankrupted argument.

2) Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent: Nearly 60% of Canadian students graduate with debt, on average at $27,000 for an undergraduate degree. Total student debt now stands at about $20 billion in Canada($15 billion from Federal Government loans programs, and the rest from provincial and commercial bank loans). In Quebec, the average student debt is $15,000, whereas Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have an average student debt of $35,000, British Columbia at nearly $30,000 and Ontario at nearly $27,000. Roughly 70% of new jobs in Canada require a post-secondary education. Half of students in their 20s live at home with their parents, including 73 per cent of those aged 20 to 24 and nearly a third of 25- to 29-year-olds. On average, a four-year degree for a student living at home in Canada costs $55,000, and those costs are expected to increase in coming years at a rate faster than inflation. It has been estimated that in 18 years, a four-year degree for Canadian students will cost $102,000. Defaults on government student loans are at roughly 14%. The Chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students warned in June of 2011 that, “We are on the verge of bankrupting a generation before they even enter the workplace.” This immense student debt affects every decision made in the lives of young graduates. With few jobs, enormous housing costs, the cutting of future benefits and social security, students are entering an economy which holds very little for them in opportunities. Women, minorities, and other marginalized groups are in an even more disadvantaged position. Canadian students are increasingly moving back home and relying more and more upon their parents for support. An informal Globe and Mail poll in early May of 2012 (surveying 2,200 students), “shows that students across Canada share a similar anxiety over rising tuition fees” as that felt in Quebec. Roughly 62% of post-secondary students said they would join a similar strike in their own province, while 32% said they would not, and 5.9% were undecided. In Ontario, where tuition is the highest in Canada, 69% said they would support a strike against increasing tuition. A Quebec research institution released a report in late March of 2012 indicating that increasing the cost of tuition for students is creating a “student debt bubble” akin to the housing bubble in the United States, and with interest rates set to increase, “today’s students may well find themselves in the same situation of not being able to pay off their student loans.” The authors of the report from the Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-economique explained that, “Since governments underwrite those loans, if students default it could be catastrophic for public finances,” and that, “If the bubble explodes, it could be just like the mortgage crisis.” In the United States, the situation is even worse. In March of 2012, the Federal Reserve reported that 27 percent of student borrowers whose loans have gone into repayment are now delinquent on their debt.” Student debt in the United States has reached $1 trillion, “passing total credit card debt along the way.” It has become a threat to the entire existence of the middle class in America. Bankruptcy lawyers in the US are “seeing the telltale signs of a student loan debt bubble.” A recent survey from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) indicated, “more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.” The head of the NACBA stated, “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.” In 1993, 45% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree had to go into debt; today, it is 94%. The average student debt in the United States in 2011 was $23,300, with 10% owning more than $54,000 and 3% owing more than $100,000. President Obama has addressed the situation by simply providing more loans to students. A recent survey of graduates revealed that 40% of them “had delayed making a major purchase, like a home or car, because of college debt, while slightly more than a quarter had put off continuing their education or had moved in with relatives to save money,” and 50% of those surveyed had full-time jobs. Between 2001 and 2011, “state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally.” In the same period of time,“tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent.” It would appear that whether in the United States, Canada, or even beyond, the decisions made by schools, banks, and the government, are geared toward increasing the financial burden on students and families, and increasing profits for themselves. The effect will be to plunge the student and youth population into poverty over the coming years. Thus, the student movement in Quebec, instead of being portrayed as “entitled brats” elsewhere, are actually setting an example for students and youth across the continent and beyond. Since Quebec tuition is the lowest on the continent, it gives all the more reason that other students should follow Quebec’s example, instead of Quebec students being told to follow the rest of the country (and continent) into debt bondage.

3) The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims: The decision to strike was made through student associations and organizations that uniquely operate through direct-democracy. While most student associations at schools across Canada hold elections where students choose the members of the associations, the democratic accountability ends there (just like with government). Among the Francophone schools in Quebec, the leaders are not only elected by the students, but decisions are made through general assemblies, debate and discussion, and through the votes of the actual constituents, the members of the student associations, not just the leaders. This means that the student associations that voted to strike are more democratically accountable and participatory than most other student associations, and certainly the government. It represents a more profound and meaningful working definition of democracy that is lacking across the rest of the country. The Anglophone student associations that went on strike – from Concordia and McGill – did so because, for the first time ever, they began to operate through direct-democracy. This of course, has resulted in insults and derision from the media. The national media in Canada – most especially the National Post – complain that the student “tactics are anything but democratic,” and that the students aren’t acting in a democratic way, but that “it’s really mob rule.” Obviously, it is naïve to assume that the National Post has any sort of understanding of democracy.

4) This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon: I am an Anglophone, I don’t even speak French, I have only lived in Montreal for under two years, but the strikers are struggling as much for me as for any other student, Francophone or Anglophone. Typically, when others across Canada see what is taking place here, they frame it along the lines of, “Oh those Quebecois, always yelling about something.” But I’m yelling too… in English. Many people here are yelling… in English. It is true that the majority of the students protesting are Francophone, and the majority of the schools on strike are Francophone, but it is not exclusionary. In fact, the participation in the strike from the Anglophone schools (while a minority within the schools) is unprecedented in Quebec history. This was undertaken because students began mobilizing at the grassroots and emulating the French student groups in how they make decisions (i.e., through direct-democracy). The participation of Anglophone students in the open-ended strike is unprecedented in Quebec history.

5) Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students: With all the focus on student violence at protests, breaking bank windows, throwing rocks at riot police, and other acts of vandalism, student leaders have never called for violence against the government or vandalism against property, and have, in fact, denounced it and spoken out for calm, stating: “The student movement wants to fight alongside the populace and not against it.” On the other hand, it has been government officials and the national media which have been openly calling for violence to be used against students. On May 11, Michael Den Tandt, writing for the National Post, stated that, “It’s time for tough treatment of Quebec student strikers,” and recommended to Quebec Premier Jean Charest that, “He must bring down the hammer.” Tandt claimed that there was “a better way” to deal with student protesters: “Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain.” He even went on to suggest that, “caning is more merciful than incarceration,” or perhaps even re-imagining the medieval punishment in which “miscreants and ne’er-do-wells were placed in the stockade, in the public square, and pelted with rotten cabbages. That might not be a bad idea, either.” This, Tandt claimed, would be the only way to preserve “peace, order, and good government.” Kelly McParland, writing the for National Post on May 11, suggested that it was now time for Charest to “empower the police to use the full extent of the law against those who condone or pursue further disruption,” and that the government must make a “show of strength” against the students. If this was not bad enough, get ready for this: A member of the Quebec Liberal Party, head of the tax office in the Municipal Affairs Department, Bernard Guay, wrote an article for a French-language newspaper in Quebec in mid-April advocating a strategy to “end the student strikes.” In the article, the government official recommended using the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s as an example in how to deal with “leftists” in giving them “their own medicine.” He suggested organizing a political “cabal” to handle the “wasteful and anti-social” situation, which would mobilize students to not only cross picket lines, but to confront and assault students who wear the little red square (the symbol of the student strike). This, Guay suggested, would help society “overcome the tyranny of Leftist agitators,” no doubt by emulating fascist tyranny. The article was eventually pulled and an apology was issued, while a government superior supposedly reprimanded Guay, though the government refused to elaborate on what that consisted of. Just contemplate this for a moment: A Quebec Liberal government official recommended using “inspiration” from fascist movements to attack the striking students. Imagine if one of the student associations had openly called for violence, let alone for the emulation of fascism. It would be national news, and likely lead to arrests and charges. But since it was a government official, barely a peep was heard.

6) Excessive state violence has been used against the students:Throughout the three months of protests from students in Quebec, the violence has almost exclusively been blamed on the students. Images of protesters throwing rocks and breaking bank windows inundate the media and ‘inform’ the discourse, demonizing the students as violent, vandals, and destructive. Meanwhile, the reality of state violence being used against the students far exceeds any of the violent reactions from protesters, but receives far less coverage. Riot police meet students with pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, smoke bombs, beating them with batons, shoot them with rubber bullets, and have even been driving police cars and trucks into groups of students. On May 4, on the 42nd anniversary of the Kent State massacre in which the U.S. National Guard murdered four protesting students, Quebec almost experienced its own Kent State, when several students were critically injured by police, shot with rubber bullets in the face. One student lost an eye, and another remains in the hospital with serious head injuries, including a skull fracture and brain contusion. The Quebec provincial police – the SQ – have not only been involved in violent repression of student protests in Quebec, but have also (along with the RCMP) been involved intraining foreign police forces how to violently repress their own populations, such as in Haiti. Roughly 12,000 people in Quebec have signed a petition against the police reaction to student protests, stipulating that the police actions have been far too violent.  In late April, even before the Quebec police almost killed a couple students, Amnesty International “asked the government to call for a toning down of police measures that… are unduly aggressive and might potentially smother students’ right to free expression.” The Quebec government, of course, defends police violenceagainst students and youths. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – Canada’s spy agency – has recently announced its interest in “gathering intelligence” on Quebec student protesters and related groups as “possible threats to national security.” Coincidentally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismantled the government agency responsible for oversight of CSIS, making the agency essentially unaccountable. In reaction to student protests, the City of Montreal is considering banning masks being worn at protests in a new bylaw which is being voted on without public consultation. Thus, apparently it is fine for police to wear gas masks as they shoot chemical agents at Quebec’s youth, but students cannot attempt to even meagerly protect themselves by covering their faces. The federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper is attempting to pass a law that bans masks at protests, which includes a ten-year sentence for “rioters who wear masks.” Quebec has even established a secretive police unit called the GAMMA squad to monitor political groups in the province, which has already targeted and arrested members of the leading student organization behind the strike. The police unit is designed to monitor “anarchists” and “marginal political groups.” Some political groups have acknowledged this as “a declaration of war” by the government against such groups. Spokesperson for the largest student group, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, stated that, “This squad is really a new kind of political police to fight against social movements.” The situation of police repression has become so prevalent that even the U.S. State Department has warned Americans to stay away from student protests in the city, “as bystanders can quickly be caught up in unforeseen violence and in some cases, detained by the local police.”

Click here to watch a video compilation of police brutality against students. 

7) The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students: The government claims that it must increase the cost of tuition in order to balance the budget and to increase the “competitiveness” of schools. The government has ignored, belittled, undermined, attempted to divide, and outright oppress the student movement. The Liberal Government of Quebec, in short, has declared organized students to be enemies of the state. Meanwhile, that same government has no problem of working with and supporting organized crime, namely, the Montreal Mafia. In 2010, Quebec, under Premier Jean Charest, was declared to be “the most corrupt province” in Canada. A former opposition leader in the Montreal city hall reported that, “the Italian mafia controls about 80 per cent of city hall.” The mafia is a “big player” in the Quebec economy, and “is deeply entrenched in city affairs” of Montreal, as “more than 600 businesses pay Mafia protection money in Montreal alone, handing organized crime leaders an unprecedented degree of control of Quebec’s economy.” The construction industry, especially, is heavily linked to the mafia. The Montreal Mafia is as influential as their Sicilian counterparts, where “all of the major infrastructure work in Sicily is under Mafia control.” In 2009, a government official stated that, “It’s Montreal’s Italian Mafia that controls what is going on in road construction. They control, from what we can tell, 80 per cent of the contracts.” In the fall of 2011, an internal report written by the former Montreal police chief for the government was leaked, stating, “We have discovered a firmly rooted, clandestine universe on an unexpected scale, harmful to our society on the level of safety and economics and of justice and democracy.” The report added, “Suspicions are persistent that an evil empire is taking form in the highway construction domain,” and that, “If there were to be an intensification of influence-peddling in the political sphere, we would no longer simply be talking about marginal, or even parallel criminal activities: we could suspect an infiltration or even a takeover of certain functions of the state.” Quebec Premier Jean Charest, for several years,rejected calls for a public inquiry into corruption in the construction industry, even as the head of Quebec’s anti-collusion squad called for such an inquiry. An opposition party in Quebec stated that Jean Charest “is protecting the (Quebec) Liberal party – and in protecting the Liberal party, Mr. Charest is protecting the Mafia, organized crime.” After the leaked report revealed “cost overruns totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, kickbacks and illegal donations to political parties,” Charest had to – after two years of refusing – open a public inquiry into corruption. The Quebec mafia have not only “run gambling and prostitution and imported stupefying amounts of illegal drugs into Canada, but they have extended their influence to elected civic and provincial governments, and to Liberal and Conservative federal governments through bribery and other ‘illustrious relations’.” The Federal Conservative Party of Canada, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper as its leader, received dozens of donations from Mafia-connected construction and engineering firm employees. The Mafia-industry has also donated to the Federal Liberal Party, but less so than the Conservatives, who hold power. In Quebec, government officials have helped the Mafia charge far more for public-works contracts than they were worth. These Mafia companies would then use a lot of that extra money to fund political parties, most notably, the Liberals, who have been in power for nine years. A former Montreal police officer who worked in the intelligence unit with access to the police’s confidential list of informants was suspected of selling information to the mafia. In January of 2012, he was found dead, reportedly of a suicide. In April of 2012, fifteen arrests were made in Montreal by the police in relation to corruption charges linked to the Mafia. Among them were one of the biggest names in the construction industry, with 14 individual facing conspiracy charges “involving municipal contracts associated with the Mascouche water-treatment plants [that] are connected to big construction, engineering and law firms that have been involved in municipal contracts and politics across the Montreal region for decades. And the individuals have been around the municipal world for years.” One Quebec mayor has even been charged. The Montreal police force has “not been very interested, and it should be,” in helping the anti-corruption investigation. Two of those who were arrested included Quebec Liberal Party fundraisers, one of whom Charest personally delivered an award to in 2010 for his “years of service as an organizer.” All three of Quebec’s main political parties were connected to individuals arrested in the raids. Canada’s federal police force,the RCMP, have refused to cooperate with the Mafia-corruption inquiry in handing over their massive amounts of information to the judge leading the inquiry. Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp, who has been leading the government assault against the students, attended a political fundraiser for herself which was attended by a notorious Mafia figure who personally “donated generously to the minister’s Liberal riding association.” As these revelations emerged, Beauchamp stated, “I don’t know the individual in question and even today I wouldn’t be able to recognize him.” At the time, Beauchamp was the Environment Minister, and was responsible for granting the Mafia figure’s company a favourable certificate to expand its business. Beauchamp claimed she did not know about the deal, but as head of the Ministry which handled it, either she is utterly incompetent or a liar. Either way, she is clearly not fit for “public service” if it amounts to nothing more than “service to the Mafia.” The fact that she is now responsible for increasing tuition and leading the attack on students speaks volumes.  Line Beauchamp, when questioned about taking political contributions from the Mafia, stated, “Now that the information is public and the links well established, I would not put myself in that position again.” Well isn’t that reassuring? Now that it’s public, she wouldn’t do it again. That’s sort of like saying, “I wouldn’t have committed the crime if I knew I was going to be caught.” The notion that Beauchamp didn’t know whom this Mafia figure was who was giving her money is absurd. It’s even more absurd when you note that one of Beauchamp’s political attaches was a 30-year veteran of the Montreal police force. As one Quebec political figure commented about the Liberal Government’s Mafia links: “They refuse to sit down with a student leader but they have breakfast with a mafioso … where is the logic in that?” Indeed. It’s clear that the Quebec government has no problem working with, handing out contracts to, and taking money from the Mafia and organized crime. In fact, they are so integrated that the government itself is a form of organized crime. But for that government, and for the media boot-lickers who follow the government line, organized students are the true threat to Quebec. National newspapers declare Quebec students following “mob rule” when it’s actually the government that is closely connected to “mob rule.” The students are challenging and being repressed by a Mafioso-government alliance of industrialists, politicians, financiers and police… yet it is the students who are blamed for everything. The government gives the Mafia public contracts double or triple their actual value, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more), while students are being asked to pay nearly double their current tuition. There’s money for the mob, but scraps for the students.

Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students: It’s not simply the government of Quebec which has set itself against the students, sought to increase their tuition and repress their resistance, often with violent means, but a wide sector of elite society in Quebec and Canada propose tuition increases and blind faith to the state in managing its repression of a growing social movement. As such, the student movement should recognize that not simply are Jean Charest and his Liberal-Mafia government the antagonists of social justice, but the whole elite society itself. As early as 2007, TD Bank, one of Canada’s big five banks, outlined a “plan for prosperity” for the province of Quebec, and directly recommended Quebec to raise tuition costs for students. Naturally, the Quebec government is more likely to listen to a bank than the youth of the province. Banks of course, have an interest in increasing tuition costs for students, as they provide student loans and lines of credit which they charge interest on and make profits. The Royal Bank of Canada acknowledged that student lines of credit are “very popular products.” Elites of all sorts support the tuition increases. In February of 2010, a group of “prominent” (i.e., elitist) Quebecers signed a letter proposing to increase Quebec’s tuition costs. Among the signatories were the former Premier of Quebec for the Parti Quebecois, Lucien Bouchard.  In early May, a letter was published in the Montreal Gazette which stated that students need to pay more for their education in Quebec, signed by the same elitists who proposed the tuition increase back in February of 2010. Initially, this group of elitists had proposed an increase of $1,000 every year for three years. The letter then calls for the application of state power to be employed against the student movement: “It is time that we react. We must reinstate order; the students have to return to class… This is a situation when, regardless of political allegiances, the population must support the state, which is ultimately responsible for public order, the safety of individuals and the integrity of our institutions.” The “integrity” of institutions which cooperate with the Mafia, I might add. What incredible integrity! The letter was signed by Lucien Bouchard, former Premier of Quebec; Michel Audet, an economist and former Finance Minister in the first Charest government in Quebec; Françoise Bertrand, the President and chief executive officer of the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (The Quebec Federation of Chambers of Commerce), where she sits alongside the presidents and executives of major Canadian corporations, banks, and business interests. She also sits on the board of directors of Quebecor Inc., a major media conglomerate, with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on its board. Another signatory was Yves-Thomas Dorval, President of the Quebec Employers’ Council, who formerly worked for British American Tobacco Group, former Vice President at Edelman Canada, an international public relations firm, was a director at a pharmaceutical corporation, head of strategic planning at an insurance company, and previously worked for the Government of Quebec and Hydro-Quebec. Joseph Facal, another signatory to the letter demanding higher tuition and state repression of students, is former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, and was a cabinet minister in the Quebec government of Lucien Bouchard. Other signatories include Pierre Fortin, a professor emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal; Michel Gervais, the former rector of Université Laval; Monique Jérôme-Forget, former finance minister of Quebec and former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, member of the Quebec Liberal Party between 1998 and 2009, was responsible for introducing public-private partnerships in Quebec’s infrastructure development (which saw enormous cooperation with the Mafia), and is on the board of directors of Astral Media. Robert Lacroix, another co-signer, was former rector of the Université de Montréal is also a fellow at CIRANO, a Montreal-based think tank which is governed by a collection of university heads, business executives, and bankers, including representatives from Power Corporation (owned by the Desmarais family). Another signatory is Michel Leblanc, president and CEO of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, a prominent business organization in Montreal, of which the board of directors includes a number of corporate executives, mining company representatives, university board members, bankers and Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family. Another signatory is Claude Montmarquette, professor emeritus at the Université de Montréal, who is also a member of the elitist CIRANO think tank, which as a “research institution” (for elites) has recommended increasing Quebec’s tuition costs for several years. Another signatory was Marcel Boyer, a Bell Canada Professor of industrial economics at the Université de Montréal, Vice-president and chief economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, is the C.D. Howe Scholar in Economic Policy at the C.D. Howe Institute, Member of the Board of the Agency for Public-Private Partnerships of Québec, and Visiting Senior Research Advisor for industrial economics at Industry Canada. At the Montreal Economic Institute, Boyer sits alongside notable elitists, bankers, and corporate executives, including Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family (the most powerful family in Canada). At the C.D. Howe Institute, Boyer works for even more elitists, as the board of directors is made up of some of Canada’s top bankers, corporate executives, and again includes Hélène Desmarais. The Desmarais family, who own Power Corporation and its many subsidiaries, as well as a number of foreign corporations in Europe and China, are Canada’s most powerful family. The patriarch, Paul Desmarais Sr., has had extremely close business and even family ties to every Canadian Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau, and all Quebec premiers (save two) in the past several decades. The Desmarais’ have strong links to the Parti Quebecois, the Liberals, Conservatives, and even the NDP, and socialize with presidents and prime ministers around the world, as well as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and even Spanish royalty. Paul Desmarais Sr. has “a disproportionate influence on politics and the economy in Quebec and Canada,” and he especially “has a lot of influence on Premier Jean Charest.” When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave Desmarais the French Legion of Honour, Desmarais brought Jean Charest with him. Quebec author Robin Philpot commented that Desmarais “took him along like a poodle,” referring to Charest. The Desmarais family has extensive ties to Canadian and especially Quebec politicians, have extensive interests in Canadian and international corporations and banks, are closely tied to major national and international think tanks (including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group), and even host an annual international think tank conference in Montreal, the Conference of Montreal. The Desmarais family have had very close ties to Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, and even Stephen Harper, and to Quebec premiers, including Lucien Bouchard, who co-authored the article in the Gazette advocating increased tuition. The Desmarais empire also includes ownership of seven of the ten French newspapers in Quebec, including La Presse. The Desmarais family stand atop a parasitic Canadian oligarchy, which has bankers and corporate executives controlling the entire economy, political parties, the media, think tanks which set policy, and even our educational institutions, with the chancellors of both Concordia and McGill universities serving on the boards of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, respectively, as well as both schools having extensive leadership ties to Power Corporation and the Desmarais family. It is this very oligarchy which demands the people pay more, go further into debt, suffer and descend into poverty, while they make record profits. In March of 2012, Power Corporation reported fourth quarter profits of $314 million, with yearly earnings at over $1.1 billion. Canada’s banks last yearmade record profits, and then decided to increase bank fees. At the end of April, it was reported that Canada’s banks had received a “secret bailout” back in 2008/09, from both the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve, amounting to roughly $114 billion, or $3,400 for every Canadian man, woman, and child (more than the cost of yearly tuition in Quebec). And yet Quebec youth are told we suffer from “entitlement.” And now banks are expected to be making even more profits, as reported in early May. As banks make more record profits, Canadians are going deeper into debt. The big Canadian banks, along with the federal government, have colluded to create a massive housing bubble in Canada, most especially in Toronto and Vancouver, and with average Canadian household debt at $103,000, most of which is held in mortgages, and with the Bank of Canada announcing its intent to raise interest rates, Canada is set for a housing crisis like that seen in the United States in 2008, forcing the people to suffer while the banks make a profit. The head of the Bank of Canada (a former Goldman Sachs executive) said that Canadian household debt is the biggest threat to the Canadian economy, but don’t worry, Canada’s Finance Minister said he is working in close cooperation with the big banks to intervene in the housing market if necessary, which would likely mean another bailout for the big banks, and of course, hand the check to you! So, Canada has its priorities: every single Canadian man, woman, and child owes $3,400 for a secret bank bailout to banks that are now making record profits and increasing their fees, while simultaneously explaining that there is no money for education, so we will have to pay more for that, too, which is something those same banks demand our governments do to us. When the students stand up, they are said to be “brats” and whining about “entitlements.” But then, what does that make the banks? This is why I argue that Canada’s elites are parasitic in their very nature, slowly draining the host (that’s us!) of its life until there is nothing left the extract.

9) The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students: In the vast majority of coverage on the student strike and protests in Quebec, the media and its many talking heads have undertaken a major propaganda campaign against the students. The students have been consistently ignored, dismissed, derided, insulted and attacked. One Canadian newspaper said it was “hard to feel sorry” for Quebec students, who were “whining and crying” and “kicking up a fuss,” treating Canada’s young generation like ungrateful children throwing a collective tantrum. In almost every article about the student strike, the main point brought up to dismiss the students is that Quebec has the lowest tuition costs in North America. The National Post published a column written by a third-year political science student at McGill University in Montreal stating that, “Quebec students must pay their share,” and advised people to “ignore the overheated rhetoric from student strikers,” and that, “Jean Charest must go full steam ahead.” The student author, Brendan Steven, is co-founder of McGill’s Moderate Political Action Committee (ModPAC), which is an organizing mobilizing McGill students inopposition to the strike. Steven’s organization attacked striking student associations as “illegitimate, unconstitutional shams” and attacked the democratic functioning of other student associations holding general assemblies. Steven complained that the democratic general assemblies “are being invented on a whim.” Brendan Steven not only gets to write columns for the National Post, but getsinterviewed on CBC. Steven’s anti-strike group sent a letter to the McGill administration complaining about pro-strike students on the campus, writing, “This group violates our democratic right to access an education without fear of harm,” and added: “We are demanding the McGill administration take action against this minority group before the current conflicts escalate into disasters. They have proven they will not remain peaceful.” As a lap-dog boot-licking power worshipper, Brendan Steven has a future for himself in politics, that’s for sure! Back in January, Steven wrote an article for the Huffington Post in which he explained that the reason why CEOs get paid so much is because “they’re worth it.” He referred to Milton Friedman – the father of neoliberalism – as a “great economic thinker.” Back in November of 2011, Steven wrote an article for the McGill Daily entitled, “Do not demonize authorities,” and then went on to justify police violence against protesting students engaged in an occupation of a school building, which he characterized as “an inherently hostile act.” Steven later got an opportunity to appear on CBC’s The Current. Margaret Wente, writing for the Globe and Mail, wrote that, “It’s a little hard for the rest of us to muster sympathy for Quebec’s downtrodden students, who pay the lowest tuition fees in all of North America.” She then referred to the striking students as “the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it.” Wente then attempted to explain the Quebec students by writing: “Now I get it: The kids are on another planet.” Interesting how she used the word “kids” to just add a little extra condescension. But it seems clear that Wente “gets” very little. In an August 2011 column, Wente tried to explain why poor black communities in Britain and America were experiencing riots and gang activity, placing blame on “single-mothers” and “family breakdown,” and explained that, “Rootless, unmoored young men with no stake in society are a major threat to social order.” Explaining this demographic in economic terms, Wente wrote: “They are, quite simply, surplus to requirements.” In another column, Wente argued that helping deliver much-needed humanitarian supplies to Gaza would “enable terrorists.” Wente also wrote an article entitled, “The poor are doing better than you think,” suggesting that it’s not so bad for poor people because they have air conditioning, DVD players, and cable TV. Wente has been consistently critical of the Occupy movement, and suggested in another article that, “the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.” Of course, in Wente’s world, the inability of young men to get a job has nothing to do with income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth. In another article criticizing the Occupy movement, Wente managed to argue that it was not Wall Street and bankers that have destroyed the economy and left people without jobs, but rather what she refers to as the “virtueocracy,” blaming unions, single mothers who gets masters degrees in social sciences, and people who want to work at NGOs and non-profits, doing “transformational, world-saving work.” So it’s Wente’s “insightful” voice which is “informing” Canadians about the student movement in Quebec. Other Canadian publications writing about the Quebec student strike have headlines like, “Reality check for the entitled,” repeating the idiotic argument that because Quebec students pay less than the rest of Canada, they shouldn’t be “complaining” about the hikes. Andrew Coyne wrote a syndicated column in which he claimed that, “Quebec students know violence works,” framing the protest at which police almost killed two students as an action “of general rage the students had promised.” With no mention of the student who lost an eye, or the other student who ended up in the hospital with critical head injuries, Coyne talked about a cop who “was beaten savagely” and “lay helpless on the ground.” No mention, of course, of the police truck that drove into a group of students moments later, or the fact that the cop who was “beaten savagely” got away with minor injuries, unlike the students who were shot in the face with rubber bullets. By simply omitting police brutality and violence, Coyne presented the student movement as itself inherently violent, instead of at times erupting in violent reactions to state violence, which is far more extreme in every case. The Toronto Sun even had an article which claimed that the students have employed tactics of “thuggery” and “violent criminal behaviour.” Publications regularly ask their readers if Quebec students have “legitimate” grievances, if they are fighting for “social justice,” or if they are just “spoiled brats.” A syndicated column from theVancouver Sun by Licia Corbella was titled, “How rioting students help make me grateful.” She discussed her latest visit to church where the pastor advised: “Parents, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them,” and mentioned how parents anger their children by “belittling them, underestimating them and not treating them as individuals.” Corbella then took particular note of how parents provoke and enrage children “when we give them a sense of entitlement.” With the word “entitlement,” Corbella naturally then began thinking about Quebec students, as according to Corbella’s pastor, “entitlement leads to rage.” Corbella wrote that rioting “is, in essence, what a spoiled two-year-old would do if they had the ability.” She further wrote: “In Quebec, these entitled youth, who believe the rest of society MUST provide them with an almost free education or else, have blocked other students from accessing the educations they paid for, burned vehicles, smashed shop windows, looted property and severely beaten up a police officer who got separated from the rest of his colleagues.” Again, no mention of the two students who were almost killed by police at the same event. Corbella quoted someone interviewed on TV, endorsing the claim that the student protests are “starting to resemble terrorism,” though she took issue with the word “starting.” This is the result of creating, according to Corbell, “an entitlement society.” Apparently, the pastor’s lesson about not “belittling” the young did not sink in with Corbella. An article in the Chronicle Heraldasked, “What planet are these kids on?” The author then wrote that, “the irony is that these students now want the system to accommodate their desires and for someone else to pay the bill,” and that, “students should stop making foolish demands.” Other articles claim that students “need a lesson in economics.” After all, the fact that the majority of economists, fully armed with “lessons in economics,” were unable to predict the massive global economic crisis in 2008, should obviously not lead to any questioning of the ideology of modern economic theory. No, it would be better for students to learn about the ocean from those who couldn’t see a tsunami as it approached the beach. Another article, written by a former speechwriter to the Prime Minister of Canada, wrote that the student arguments were vacuous and that the youth were in a “state of complete denial.” Rex Murphy, a commentator with the National Post and CBC, referred to the student strike as “short-sighted” and that student actions were “crude attempts at precipitating a crisis.” Student actions, he claimed, were the “actions of a mob” and were “simply wrong,” and thus, should be “condemned.” The CBC has been particularly terrible in their coverage of the student movement. With few exceptions, the Canadian media have established a consensus in opposition to the student protests, and use techniques of omission, distortion, or outright condemnation in order to promote a distinctly anti-student stance.

10) The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power: In the coverage and discourse about the student movement, very little context is given in placing this student movement in a wider global context. The British newspaper, The Guardian, acknowledged this context, commenting on the red squares worn by striking students (a symbol of going squarely into the red, into debt), explaining that they have “become a symbol of the most powerful challenge to neoliberalism on the continent.” The article also adopted the term promoted by the student movement itself to describe the wider social context of the protests, calling it the “Maple Spring.” The author placed the fight against tuition increases in the context of a struggle against austerity measures worldwide, writing: “Forcing students to pay more for education is part of a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich – as with privatization and the state’s withdrawal from service-provision, tax breaks for corporations and deep cuts to social programs.” The article noted how the student movement has linked up with civic groups against a Quebec government plan to subsidize mining companies in exploiting the natural resources of Northern Quebec (Plan Nord), taking land from indigenous peoples to give to multibillion dollar corporations. As one of the student leaders stated, the protest was about more than tuition and was aimed at the elite class itself, “Those people are a single elite, a greedy elite, a corrupt elite, a vulgar elite, an elite that only sees education as an investment in human capital, that only sees a tree as a piece of paper and only sees a child as a future employee.” The student strike has thus become a social movement. The protests aim at economic disruption through civil disobedience, and have garnered the support of thousands of protesters, and 200,000 protesters on March 22, and close to 300,000 on April 22. Protests have blocked entrances to banks, disrupted a conference for the Plan Nord exploitation, linking the movement with indigenous and environmental groups. It was only when the movement began to align with other social movements and issues that the government even accepted the possibility of speaking to students. Unions have also increasingly been supporting the student strike, including with large financial contributions. Though, the large union support for the student movement was also involved in attempted co-optation and undermining of the students. At the negotiations between the government and the students, the union leaders convinced the student leaders to accept the deal, which met none of the student demands and kept the tuition increases intact. There was a risk that the major unions were essentially aiming to undermine the student movement. But the student groups, which had to submit the agreement to democratic votes, rejected the horrible government offer. Thus the Maple Spring continues. Quebec is not the only location with student protests taking place. In Chile, a massive student movement has emerged and developed over the past year, changing the politics of the country and challenging the elites and the society they have built for their own benefit. One of the leaders of the Chilean student movement is a 23-year old young woman, Camila Vallejo, who has attained celebrity status. In Quebec’s student movement, the most visible and vocal leader is 21-year old Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who has also achieved something of celebrity status within the province. Just as in Quebec, student protests in Chile are met with state violence, though in the Latin American country, the apparatus of state violence is the remnants of a U.S.-supported military dictatorship. Still, this does not stop tens of thousands of students going out into the streets in Santiago, as recently as late April. Protests by students have also been emerging elsewhere, often in cooperation and solidarity with the Occupy movement and other anti-austerity protests. Silent protests are emerging at American universities where students are protesting their massive debts. California students have been increasingly protesting increased tuition costs. Student protests at UC Berkeley ended with 12 citations for trespassing. Some students in California have even begun a hunger strike against tuition increases. In Brooklyn, New York, students protesting against tuition increases, many of them wearing the Quebec “red square” symbol, were assaulted by police officers. Even high school students in New York have been protesting. Israeli social activists are back on the streets protesting against austerity measures. An Occupy group has resumed protests in London. The Spanish indignado movement, which began in May of 2011, saw a resurgence on the one year anniversary, with another round of anti-austerity protests in Spain, bringing tens of thousands of protesters, mostly youths, out into the streets of Madrid, and more than 100,000 across the country. Their protest was met with police repression. Increasingly, students, the Occupy movement, and other social groups are uniting in protests against the costs of higher education and the debts of students. This is indeed the context in which the ‘Maple Spring’ – the Quebec student movement – should be placed, as part of a much broader global anti-austerity movement.

So march on, students. Show Quebec, Canada, and the world what it takes to oppose parasitic elites, mafia-connected politicians, billionaire bankers, and seek to change a social, political, and economic system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Solidarity, brothers and sisters!

For a comprehensive analysis of the Quebec student strike, see: “The Québec Student Strike: From ‘Maple Spring’ to Summer Rebellion?”

For up to date news and information of student movements around the world, join this Facebook page: We Are the Youth Revolution.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, “Empire, Power, and People,” on BoilingFrogsPost.com.

Virginia is for gun freaks, I realize, but why would the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles permit designer tags proclaiming “BULLET For Hire?”  My reaction wasn’t a matter of censorship.  I wouldn’t have been upset by “BULLET” itself, without the “For Hire,” but together the intent is quite clear, violating the State of Virginia’s own guidelines for “personalized license plates.”  One of the restrictions states that the plate must not be “used to condone or encourage violence.”

A day or so later, I called the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles and—after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach the right person—eventually talked to a spokesperson, who told me, “We take a lot of precautions to avoid inappropriate messages” on license plates.  To her credit, since I had identified myself, she tracked me down a few days later and sent me an email indicating that the BULLET license plate was under review. But with all of those precautions, how did this call to violence occur in the first place?

I suggest a climate of violence that is so pervasive that few people are able to see what is directly in front of them.  In other words, the license plate I observed is no longer offensive to most people.  Guns are a fact of life, and even an event like the Virginia Tech Massacre, in April of 2007, which resulted in the deaths of 32 people, isn’t a big deal.  Sure, the pundits expressed their grief in muted reactions when the massacre occurred, but what happened then?  Very little.  Ditto Columbine and any number of other massacres where guns were the implement for the murders.  Guns, we say, are such a reality of our lives that we’d better learn to live with them.

Guns are not a fact of my life and, as all the polls about gun control tell us, the majority of Americans want more—not less—gun control.  Again, this is a well-known fact, not something recent, but the National Rifle Association is so powerful that almost no politician will challenge it.  What happens, instead, is that guns become more and more ubiquitous in our society.  After the Virginia Tech incident, there was a fair bit of discussion about guns in classrooms and the usual cry from the NRA that if students had been able to take guns into classrooms, fewer people would have been killed.

Even if this were true—and I’m not convinced that it is—who wants to encourage a shoot-out in a classroom?  If students are permitted to take guns into their classes, there’s going to be a major increase in the number of teachers and professors who are shot.  I taught long enough to see the reactions of students when they got a low grade on a paper or an exam.  Some were angry enough to pull out a gun and shoot me, a rather sick variation on kill the messenger.

But let’s return to Virginia, where just about the only restriction on guns is that “A person under 18 shall not possess or transport a handgun or assault firearm.”   True, if the handgun is concealed, then a permit is required.  Big deal.  And what about rifles?  And what about the recent advertisement from the National Association for Gun Rights, a Virginia organization?  The advertisement—referred to as “A message from U.S. Senator Rand Paul”—shows Paul on the left, with a rifle pointed at President Obama on the right.  What’s unclear about this message?  It’s not even subliminal.

I’ve written enough about guns in the past to be able to anticipate the kind of reaction an essay like this will generate from the gun crazies in the United States.  When I’ve published essays about America’s gun insanity in overseas publications, within minutes the gun lunatics in the United States begin sending me threatening messages, which also tell me that if I don’t like guns, I should take up residence in another country.  Sorry, but I’m not going to help you create your kind of utopia.

Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.  So, if we can’t put restrictions on guns, how about putting them on people?

Killers will always be able to get guns, so why ban guns?  Agreed, but most victims of guns are family members or known acquaintances.  Aren’t those people worth saving, even if we can’t stop the rampage of a true fanatic?

There is an easier solution to the disagreement between the pro-gun and anti-gun factions in the United States.  Let the pro-gun proponents have a national shoot-out, since what they secretly desire—but are afraid to say—is to kill another person with one of their many guns.  Agree on a day and let all the pro-gun fanatics line up across the nation, each one facing another, and at a designated time have a shoot-out.  Half of them will be shot, and those who survive will be able to proclaim that they’ve killed someone.  A badge of honor.  And then, afterwards, can’t we destroy all the remaining weapons that senselessly kill thousands of innocent people each year in this country?  The national carnage will be over all at once.

Let no one shoot a pistol into the air in celebration of that fact.

Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.    

“The building of the Retreat at Twin Lakes is a classic Florida story,” begins the St. Pete Times. “Developers saw potential in the sandy acres east of Orlando and determined to turn them into an oasis. They planned a gated subdivision just 10 minutes from downtown — a cloistered community near the interstate, close to good schools, outlet malls and the magic of Disney World.”

What kind of an oasis is a gated community, really? There are no lakes at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. And it is only a retreat in the sense of withdrawal. Subdivisions across the American landscape are places where getting lost is crystallized. “The idea, as always, was that people could live peacefully in a paradise where nobody could park a car on the street or paint the house an odd color.”

But the houses are all the same, and not because it is what the market wants. Subdivisions like the Retreat at Twin Lakes fed the Wall Street derivatives machine. Mortgage backed securities were fabricated on the flimsiest of foundations; the notion that investor and shareholder risk could be dispersed and rewarded, using subdivisions to conform demographics to scalable investment models.

George Zimmerman was virtually a self-appointed, law enforcer in a soulless place dragged down by the real estate crash. He had the law on his side in a place that wasn’t much of a place at all the night Trayvon Martin died.

According to the Tampa Bay Times: “In 2004, Engle Homes began construction on 263 two-story townhouses, with upstairs porches and covered back patios and plenty of green space. Inside, the townhomes boasted granite countertops, hardwood floors, master suites and walk-in closets. Outside, there was a pond, a clubhouse and a community pool. Everything was walled in, to keep out the unknown.”

As the only person to volunteer when the homeowners association wanted to organize a community watch, Zimmerman was appointed coordinator by his neighbors, according to Wendy Dorival, Neighborhood Watch organizer for the Sanford Police Department.” I bet you couldn’t find two “neighbors” who vetted George Zimmerman.

Yes, there was a “community pool” at The Retreat, like any one of the million, half-hearted attempts at builder-created civic life in gated subdivisions in Florida. The chief feature of communal value: a soda machine.

The same way that it is difficult to be healthy living on an unhealthy planet, in platted subdivisions where nothing is built to last beyond the lifetime of particle board and sheetrock, how can anything last? Police had been called to The Retreat at Twin Lakes 402 times from January 1, 2011, to February 26, 2012.

The St. Pete Times notes that the initial average price of the Retreat homes had dropped from $250,000 to less than $100,000 today. “The developers had envisioned a stable neighborhood with home­owners planting long-term roots, but now townhouses were turning over all the time. Insiders moved out. Outsiders moved in.”

The place where Trayvon Martin lost his life is not on trial. But as surely as the places we build reflect us, we are reflections of our surroundings. In a real estate market driven off the rails by oversupply, mortgage fraud, and greed, why would builders be held to account? They only build what the market wants, right? Their legal rights to build sprawl are as solid as George Zimmerman’s right to carry a weapon and to stand his ground. Right?

Sanford Police volunteer program coordinator Wendy Dorival, told the Miami Herald that she met Zimmerman in September, 2011 at a community neighborhood watch presentation. “I said, ‘If it’s someone you don’t recognize, call us. We’ll figure it out.” Places don’t shoot people, people do.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

ALAN FARAGO, conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades, lives in south Florida. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net

NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as “Peace and Security,” and shows two children lying in the grass, accompanied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion in military spending.

The organizers of the demonstrations, put together by peace and social justice groups, assailed NATO for bogging the world down in endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism. According to a spokesperson for one of the protest groups, Peace Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unemployment, hunger, and climate change.”

NATO was launched in April 1949, at a time when Western leaders feared that the Soviet Union, if left unchecked, would invade Western Europe. The U.S. government played a key role in organizing the alliance, which brought in not only West European nations, but the United States and Canada. Dominated by the United States, NATO had a purely defensive mission — to safeguard its members from military attack, presumably by the Soviet Union.

That attack never occurred, either because it was deterred by NATO’s existence or because the Soviet government had no intention of attacking in the first place. We shall probably never know.

In any case, with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, it seemed that NATO had outlived its usefulness.

But vast military establishments, like other bureaucracies, rarely just fade away. If the original mission no longer exists, new missions can be found. And so NATO’s military might was subsequently employed to bomb Yugoslavia, to conduct counter-insurgency warfare in Afghanistan, and to bomb Libya. Meanwhile, NATO expanded its membership and military facilities to East European nations right along Russia’s border, thus creating renewed tension with that major military power and providing it with an incentive to organize a countervailing military pact, perhaps with China.

None of this seems likely to end soon. In the days preceding the Chicago meeting, NATO’s new, sweeping role was highlighted by Oana Longescu, a NATO spokesperson, who announced that the summit would discuss “the Alliance’s overall posture in deterring and defending against the full range of threats in the twenty-first century, and take stock of NATO’s mix of conventional, nuclear, and missile defense forces.”

In fairness to NATO planners, it should be noted that, when it comes to global matters, they are operating in a relative vacuum. There are real international security problems, and some entity should certainly be addressing them.

But is NATO the proper entity? After all, NATO is a military pact, dominated by the United States and composed of a relatively small group of self-selecting European and North American nations. The vast majority of the world’s countries do not belong to NATO and have no influence upon it. Who appointed NATO as the representative of the world’s people? Why should the public in India, in Brazil, in China, in South Africa, in Argentina, or most other nations identify with the decisions of NATO’s military commanders?

The organization that does represent the nations and people of the world is the United Nations. Designed to save the planet from “the scourge of war,” the United Nations has a Security Council (on which the United States has permanent membership) that is supposed to handle world security issues. Unlike NATO, whose decisions are often controversial and sometimes questionable, the United Nations almost invariably comes forward with decisions that have broad international support and, furthermore, show considerable wisdom and military restraint.

The problem with UN decisions is not that they are bad ones, but that they are difficult to enforce. And the major reason for the difficulty in enforcement is that the Security Council is hamstrung by a veto that can be exercised by any one nation. Thus, much like the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, which is making the United States less and less governable, the Security Council veto has seriously limited what the world organization is able to do in addressing global security issues.

Thus, if the leaders of NATO nations were really serious about providing children with a world in which they could play in peace among the birds and flowers, they would work to strengthen the United Nations and stop devoting vast resources to dubious wars.

Lawrence S. Wittner is professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is “Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual” (University of Tennessee Press).

The plan seems to be working.

The elaborate and deceitful military production casting the elections as the best hope to turn Egypt around is only part of the reason. Millions of frustrated Egyptians place their earnest hopes on the elections also because many, clearly exhausted from an economy that continues its downward plunge, are expectantly looking for easy, quick-fix solutions.

It is estimated that 50 percent live below the staggeringly low minimum level of poverty set by the government. Many of these hopelessly impoverished Egyptians watched with great interest a May 10 televised debate between the two top-polling candidates.

One, Amr Moussa, former Mubarak foreign minister and recent leader of the Arab League, is considered a favorite of the U.S. State Department. It did not go unnoticed in the Egyptian press, for example, that U.S. Senator John Kerry met with Moussa and none of the other candidates.

The other candidate leading in the polls is Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh, an expelled, former Muslim Brotherhood leader who has an honorable reputation as a fierce opponent of Mubarak’s rule and who has garnered even more support for his declared objective of bridging the Islamic/secular divide.

One notable minority candidate is renown human rights and labor rights attorney Khaled Ali who filed papers the day he turned 40 years old, the minimum age requirement. Ali is an avowed leftist who is most identified as a prominent supporter of the emerging wave of independent unions. These unions are just beginning to get properly organized under very difficult conditions but they already claim a membership of over two million.

If none of the twelve candidates wins a majority this week, a run-off will occur in late June with the military pledging to turn over power to the new president at that time. But this is simply not true, it is pure stage craft. There will be no real turnover of power.

David Kennedy, director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and a keen observer of Egyptian politics also seems to doubt any real changes will take place with these elections when he recently wrote in Al Jazeera that “after a year, the clamour, the disenchantment, and the resignation – along with the hope that nothing enduring will change – have all grown. At the same time, the ‘transition’ process offers complex opportunities for existing and aspiring elites to jockey for position and struggle to improve their position for the next round.”

In reality, the question of power will be determined in the future, not now, and not by these elections. Any power shift will be determined by how successfully the youth and the growing workers’ movement become politically organized because as of yet, this majority is not represented by the main contenders in the presidential election, a situation we in the United States appreciate is not unique to Egypt.

Who Changes What?

Why is it certain the military will not leave the stage?

Because media, academic and foreign consulate estimates of the military’s control of the economy ranges from a low of 15 percent to a whopping 30 percent. And none of this “militarization of the economy” will be diminished by the presidential elections anymore than the much-ballyhooed November 2011 elections to parliament lessened the military’s power.

The army’s initial coalition with the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extreme fundamentalist Salafists was seriously challenged when the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) refused to delegate any genuine power to the Islamist-controlled parliament.

For example, parliament could dismiss cabinet ministers but SCAF exclusively made all new appointments. In addition, SCAF maintained sole control of all military affairs, including their extensive budget and ownership of major portions of the economy – both state secrets.

Under circumstances that limited parliament’s power and because the Islamist parties remained politically committed to defending SCAF against protestors, parliament failed miserably to enact any reforms. Ali Fattouh, a bus driver and independent union organizer with the Public Transport Authority, expressed popular criticisms of the do-nothing parliament published in Egypt Independent on May 1, 2012: “These parties and MPs provide us with no assistance or support during our struggles. Other than lip service, they offer us nothing.”

Thus, suffering erosion of their mass base, the Islamist parliamentary majority clamored in the last several months for more discretionary power.

But SCAF refused. In the most recent embarrassing and humiliating incident, SCAF dismissed the Muslim Brotherhood/Salafist-controlled committee charged with writing a new constitution and, instead, stated that it would write a new interim draft itself.

The proposed interim constitution under consideration reportedly extends extremely broad powers to the military that includes safeguarding national security, maintaining national unity and protecting the constitution and the revolution’s legitimacy.

This just about sums up the complete role of any government.

In addition, the interim constitution will reportedly grant SCAF exclusive powers to discuss and review the military’s internal affairs, including its budget, armaments and military law. The budget can be discussed by parliament’s defense and national security committee, according to the provisional constitution, but only in secret closed-door meetings.

SCAF and Islamist Partnership Frays

The recent disputes between SCAF and the Islamists are more akin to “inside the beltway” jockeying for position as professor Kennedy alluded, than to any real political policy argument. However, even these minor types of conflicts made more urgent the military’s search for more reliable allies among the power elite.

The Islamist organizations were selected as allies by SCAF in the immediate aftermath of the revolution when their mass base was a real asset to a faltering structure. Now, having an ally that will sometimes use their mass base to challenge SCAF, no matter how narrowly limited, has become a liability.

SCAF has urgently devoted resources to reforming the police and security forces, rejuvenating Mubarak’s old trade union federation, and now, reviving old political figures with photo-shopped resumes distancing themselves from Mubarak and attesting support for the revolution.

New parties are being promoted and funded that can more reliably ‘democratize” the status quo with some cosmetic plastic surgery that will polish the rough spots in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

Leading presidential candidate Amr Moussa is a good example. He has already made perfectly clear he will be a reliable ally of the military.

When asked by the U.S. State Department’s Voice of America how he would handle “the military economy,” Moussa reassuringly responded that the “issue should not concern people, because the ruling power will be transferred from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to the elected president. Then, the armed forces…would take care of their own affairs.”

Here we see an experienced double-talking diplomat putting two contradictory sentences together as one thought.

While this arrangement may work well for the generals, not everyone is happy. Zeinab Abul-Magd, assistant professor at the American University in Cairo and Oberlin College, recently reported that “civilians working under retired army personnel show continuous discontent about mismanagement, corruption, and injustice. During the last 14 months, after SCAF took power, numerous major labor strikes and sit-ins emerged in facilities managed by retired generals. In many incidents, the managers called on military police to end the labor unrest.

“For example, widespread protests were staged at military factories, the Suez Canal ports, the Red Sea ports, petroleum companies, a cement factory, factories of chemical industries, the Alexandria port, and the Water and Sewerage Company. The SCAF has condemned labor strikes at large, arguing that they harm the country’s economy and ‘stall the wheel of production,’ but the largest of these strikes were staged in places where military managers rule. Labor strikes are primarily harming the military economic interests rather than the national economy.”

The military desperately wants to return to a backstage role where the curtain will shield their vast hold on the economy but their efforts are in vain. But in my view, the real challenge will not come from reinvented politicians, rebuilt parties or refurbished government institutions but from the newly emerging independent unions, from the still undefeated and confident workers’ movement and from the valiant youth under 30 years of age who alone comprise 60 percent of the population and around 85 percent of the unemployed.

For those of interested in following real politics, it is these forces that should receive most of our attention and inspire all of our hopes for a new Egypt.

Carl Finamore is Machinist Local Lodge 1781 delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He was in Cairo only hours after Mubarak was deposed and visited again a few months ago for the one year anniversary. He can be reached at local1781@yahoo.com and his writings viewed on http://carlfinamore.wordpress.com/

Last week I also noted the important real world problem of some 250 million tons of solid waste a year in our country alone.

Guess which “world” gets the most investment, status, fame, klieg lights, and attention of the skilled classes and the power structure?

Guess which world is more important for our wellbeing and that of the planet?

You’ve heard of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 900 million users exchanging gossip and other personal pleasantries or worries through a medium that inflates narcissism.

You’ve probably not heard of Ben Rose of the New York City Materials Exchange Development Program (NYC MEDP) or the equivalent organizations in your
communities providing services to thousands of charitable non-profit groups which promote the donating and reusing of materials to avoid incineration, landfilling and recycling.

To grasp the enormity of modern society’s waste products, Ann Leonard created a sparkling website, visited by millions of people (www.storyofstuff.org). She also published a recent popular book titled “The Story of Stuff” that details every aspect of your environment and physical being. Air, water, food, soil and even your genes absorb the byproducts of processing mountains of stuff. The results are not pretty.

While recycling efforts in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and Los Angeles rise above 50 percent, New York City has been slipping behind its own 2002 level and is still struggling to reach 20 percent. New York City has been a leader in improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it still has dreaded incinerators producing toxic air and toxic residues.

In the early 90s, pragmatic environmental scientist, Professor Barry Commoner demonstrated in two operational pilot projects that the city could reach a residential recycling level of nearly 100 percent. Unfortunately, New York City missed a chance to become a world leader in recycling when its leaders, beginning with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, declined to establish a city-wide recycling program based on Professor Commoner’s model.

The New York City recycling challenge still hasn’t recovered from that devastatingly wrongheaded decision. Politicians and corporations cannot stop an even superior environmental cycle, presently driven by charitable associations, in Mr. Rose’s words, “nimbly accepting, exchanging and distributing thousands of tons of reusable material each year”, as they have done for generations, “all the while contributing to the social, economic and environmental fabric of New York City.” Over the decades, the recipients have been communities in need, such as homeless shelters and poor populations.

The NYC Materials Exchange Development Program now sees a great potential to “organize, grow and advocate for the practice of donating and reusing materials for the benefit of all New Yorkers,” creating local jobs and adding productivity without any tax dollars. They are rediscovering the past of a thrifty culture and expanding it mightily to contribute to the neighborhood and economic landscape.

Donating materials instead of trashing or recycling them enlarges the gifting culture and the beneficial human interactions that follow. As Ben Rose notes: “In contrast to recycling, where used materials are broken down into their raw elements to make new items, reuse takes useful products and exchanges them without reprocessing, thus saving time, money, energy and valuable resources.”

The obstacles are obvious. First a throwaway economy of waste is profitable for sellers who want you to keep throwing away and buying. They plan product obsolescence and lure consumers with the convenience of disposable products. So we have to change habits: become more cunning about what manufacturers and vendors are up to and expand second hand, reuse and material exchange programs.

What are reusable materials? Just about everything you purchase that doesn’t spoil or perish. Clothing, furniture, books, bicycles, containers, computers, tools, surplus construction materials and things you buy or grow that you do not use. Reuse outlets include Goodwill or Thrift stores, charitable book and clothing drives, ecology centers and creative arts programs.

Nothing less than a “New Age” for a burgeoning sub-economy of reusable products and materials is being envisioned by the collaborative likes of the New York City Sanitation Department and the City College of New York’s Department of Civil Engineering. Collecting data which shows how much energy is saved, how many jobs can be created, how much better pricing systems can be, and how much solid waste can be prevented will elevate this subject and its social status within  the “zero waste” movement. We should aspire to using resources, in the worlds of Paul Hawkins, “10 to 100 times more productively.”

Other countries are advancing in the reuse sector in ways we can learn from immediately. Holland is starting numerous “Repair Cafes,” that are attracting increasing interest in “fixing” rather than dumping. These used to be called “Fix-It Shops” in the U.S. before the advent of our throw away corporate culture.

For more information visit (www.nycmedp.org)

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

That was 1971, and the Vietnam War continued to drag on for two more years, with more Americans dying, and with many more Vietnamese being killed, until finally the last US combat troops were gone. But even then the fighting continued, with the Army of South Vietnam armed and financed by the United States, until April 30, 1975, when the last resistance ended and Vietnam was liberated and reunified and finally at peace.

During those two terrible years between Kerry’s statement and the end of US combat operations, American soldiers stationed in Vietnam knew that the war was lost, and knew they were there for no reason other than keeping President Nixon from looking like he had lost a war, particularly as he faced re-election during the campaign year of 1972. There was, understandably, massive resort to drugs, including marijuana, opium, heroin, LSD and others, as well as alcohol. There was the fragging of commanding officers who were too aggressive about sending their troops into danger. There was insubordination and insurrection and there was desertion.

Now consider the situation in Afghanistan. Once again a war has been lost by the US, this time to forces far weaker and more poorly organized than the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army. Once again American troops are being asked to keep fighting for a mistake — this time the 2001 fantasy of the Bush/Cheney administration that it could make a client state out of Afghanistan, a mistake that President Obama doubled down on after taking over the White House, when he called Afghanistan the “good war” and committed another 30,000 troops there, plus ordering up an aggressive kill campaign of night raids, assassinations and the heavy use of pilotless armed drone aircraft.

The difference this time is that these troops are hearing their commander in chief tell the American public that he is going to end the whole thing at the end of 2014 (assuming of course that he is still commander in chief then). He is saying that the war, now opposed by almost three-fourths of the American people according to recent polls, will be ended in two and a half more years no matter what the situation is on the ground in Afghanistan.

The American forces in Afghanistan know they have already lost the war there. And they also know that as the drawdown of troops begins from that war-torn country, they will be hit harder and harder by the Taliban and other forces trying to take back the country from the US and from the compradore leaders who have been serving as the lackeys to the US. They know too that as soon as the last of them has boarded the last plane out, or perhaps even earlier, the current corrupt  Afghan leadership will be hopping a commercial flight out too, to join their money in Switzerland or Abu Dhabi or some other safe haven, and the Taliban will come marching into Kabul to take over from them.

How much worse must those soldiers feel than the US soldiers in Vietnam, who at least didn’t have an end-point held out in front of them to taunt them. Today’s American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan fight staring at a surrender date at which point all their fighting and killing and dying and being will be acknowledged as having been in vain. The American soldiers in Vietnam in 1971 or 1972 could at least pretend that after they left, the South Vietnamese government might at least try to fight on and establish itself.

In Afghanistan, the soldiers being ordered to fight on can have no such illusions. Soldiers in the Afghan army and police, whom US forcers are training, supposedly to be able to take over from them, are turning their guns on the Americans with alarming frequency. Just today, the Pentagon cited, as “good news” (!), word that Afghan security services had disrupted 160 planned attempts by their uniformed countrymen to kill US soldiers and marines.

That’s gotta be a downer if you wear a US uniform over there.

I predict that the next two and a half years of pointless war in Afghanistan will be a terrible scene of drug abuse (there’s no shortage of opium and heroin in the country, perhaps the leading producer of the drug in the world), of terrible carnage of civilians as increasingly automated remote killing methods are employed to make up for the lack of motivation among the troops, and of US casualties, as the Taliban resistance grows increasingly confident of its power and its impending victory.

The “government” of Afghanistan, meanwhile, knowing its days are numbered, will be preparing its exit, with money spirited out of the country, while the police and army, knowing that they will ultimately pay a deadly price for serving the US master, and too poor to buy their way out of the country, will increasingly turn on American forces, or simply switch to what they know will be the ultimate winning side. This is all totally predictable.

The end, then, is not in question.

The only question is, why on earth would we here in America allow this disaster to drag on for another two and a half years, just to provide cover for our current failed crop of political and military leaders?

Dave Lindorff is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He lives in Philadelphia.