In case you were wondering where all the money went and why the economy is still in the doldrums, here are a couple of clues. “The 500 largest non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in uninvested cash.” That’s a stat from Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, quoted by Paul Buchheit in 7/22 CommonDreams.org. The piece goes on to note that whereas the Republicans blame big government’s lavish spending on the poor, the truth is quite a different story: IRS figures report that “the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie” since 1980 (that’s when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich, and blaming “welfare queens” and big government for everything). From taking 1 out of every 15 income dollars, the rich now take 3 of every 15 income dollars, or a TRILLION extra dollars a year. Put another way, instead of taking $7 of every $100 of America’s income, the rich now take $20 of every $100.
If this sounds like class war, it is, only it’s the rich doing the firing (literally).
Then there’s this, from Bob Herbert’s Sunday column. Top corporations (you know, the guys who have been declared to be “persons” by the Supreme Court, and thereby free to pour as much money—it’s free speech!—as they like into buying politicians) have been using the economic collapse to fire workers in droves. Those who are left are forced to take pay cuts, or else. Here are the stats:
“from the 4th quarter of 2007 to the 4th quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by GDP, fell by about 2.5% but employers cut their payrolls by 6%.”
Worse, when the economy started to rebound (due to that evil government stimulation), the corporations somehow forgot to start hiring again. Herbert quotes economics Prof. Andrew Sum this way:
“At the end of the 4th quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go DOWN by $122 billion.”
In other words, the corporations are “making out like bandits” and, as Fakaria noted, sitting on mountains of cash, saved from not rehiring workers. As Prof. Sum writes: this economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”
Meantime, the Republicans blame Obama and the Democrats for a “jobless” recovery (demanding lower taxes to stimulate hiring; more “trickle-down”—that’s what we need). And the electorate appears ready to do the same thing.
Isn’t our capitalist democracy a wonder?
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, August 2, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Oh What a Lovely War
As we all ponder the meaning and impact of the massive release of 70,000 or 90,000 secret documents on Wikileaks this week, I can’t help but focus on just a few elements: First, the activity of drone aircraft in seeking out and killing “targets”; and second, the mistakes inevitable in relying on massive airstrikes to simply kill whatever moves in an area selected by troops on the ground. Both of these expedients—the certain result of the impeccable military logic that annoints high-tech equipment as a god capable of removing casualties from war and making its soldiers invulnerable—combine to justify massive killing to prevent any threat to Americans, even American forces armed to the teeth and invading another country.
Before looking at a few samples of the wikileak trove, it’s important to recall a June 2, 2010 report by Agence France Presse conveying a UN special rapporteur’s report on the CIA’s use of drones. Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said that the CIA’s droning amounted to “a license to kill without accountability.” Alston worried that the U.S.’s claimed license of targeting individuals anywhere in the world runs the risk of “doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” He especially complained about the fact that the criteria used by the CIA to justify its targeting of individuals was shrouded in official secrecy. In other words, not only were U.S. operatives assassinating individuals with impunity, but by offering no justification for their selections, they were judge, jury and executioner all in one: “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.” To add that the human agents in the drone killings were youthful pilots sitting in dark rooms in faraway Nevada and tracking shadows on a computer screen only makes the executions more macabre.
These drones, though, are the latest and apparently the most beloved of the military’s death toys. No human need enter a danger zone. The drones fly above battlefields or villages or wherever they choose, operated from afar, carrying lethal weapons that are precisely fired. They never complain, do not get tired (drones can stay aloft for 24 hours without a break), or bored, or distracted. They are the ultimate killing machine. Except, that is, when they get lost. This is what happened to one of the Air Force’s prized drones, a Reaper (don’t you just love the names the military comes up with? surely not to evoke thoughts of McCormick’s wheat reaper, but rather the euphemism for death as “the grim reaper”—though cutting down humans as the reaper cuts wheat is no doubt what animated the metaphor in the first place). As the NY Times explained the Wikileaks report:
“Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to its pilot [the one in Nevada]. No matter how he tried, the pilot couldn’t regain control [of his toy, only with a 66-foot wingspan], so his superiors ordered an F-15E fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared unguided into neighboring Tajikistan.” (NY Times, 7.25.10)
This grim comedy continued when the jet struck the drone with a Sidewinder missile, destroying the drone’s engine, just as the remote pilot regained satellite control. But it was too late. The comedy ended when the pilot steered it “into a remote mountainside for a final fiery landing.”
Imagine. Millions in equipment crashed into a mountain—because far worse than losing a measly $13 million would have been a landing that resulted in the Taliban recovering our secrets, our technology, our technological advantage.
Imagine, too, the terror of being on the ground pursued by one of these things. Death from the sky. No protestation of innocence. No begging for mercy. No warning even. Innocent or guilty, the Reaper seeks only to complete the death sentence ordered from half a world away. By some 20-something dweeb in a bunker in Nevada.
Or by some dweebs on the ground, those Special Forces killers until recently commanded by their killer-in-chief, General McChrystal. Another Wikileaks document, from June 17, 2007, details one of their missions gone awry. Of course, they were trying, via five rockets, to dispatch Abu Laith al-Libi, reportedly a top commander for Al Quaeda, said to be hiding in the targeted compound in Paktika province. But when helicopters dropped commandos from Task Force 373 to finish the job, they found no al-Libi. Instead, they found a “group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven of the children had been killed by the rocket attack.” When the men tried to flee, six of them were also killed by encircling helicopters. The rest were taken prisoner. But the good Americans did try to save a child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR.
Unaccountably, news of the attack resulted in “a wave of anger over the region.” But not to worry, with a list of “talking points” drawn up by the Americans, the local governor explained the mistake: the Americans had been after an Al Quaeda leader and no one told them women and children would be in the compound. Indeed, the attack was really their own fault, caused by the “presence of hoodlums,” he said, and “could have been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
Finally, a Sept. 3, 2009 report, from Kunduz province, described yet another mistaken airstrike, this time attributable to a slight mishap on the part of JATC, the Joint Terminal Attack Controller team responsible for ground communications and guidance for pilots and airstrikes. Responding to a police report saying that “2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE STOLEN BY UNK [unknown] NUMBER OF INS [insurgents]” who planned to cross the Kunduz River with their booty, the JTAC claimed to have seen not only the trucks, but “UP TO 70 INS” at “THE FORD ON THE RIVER.” [As to how JTAC “saw” this, the Times account speculates that the JTAC may have received live feed to their computer from infrared video cameras in some aircraft]. Then a German commander got involved, assured everyone that “NO CIVILIANS WERE IN THE VICINITY” and “AUTHORIZED AN AIRSTIKE.” An F-15 fighter plane then dropped two 500-pound guided bombs. Naturally, those killed were “56x INS KIA [insurgents killed in action],” 14 more fled northeast, and the two trucks were also destroyed. A good night’s work.
Only that the initial report was wrong. In fact, the trucks, apparently abandoned, were surrounded by civilians trying to remove fuel. This was learned only when the military reported that “International Media reported that US airstrikes had killed 60 civiians in Kunduz.” Those dastardly Taliban, having stolen the truck, had invited civilians in the area to help themselves with fuel. Seen from above, civilians were clearly INS [insurgents].
You get the picture. War is not lovely. In the best of conditions, it is messy, gruesome, murderous to those who have the misfortune of being in its vicinity. In this case, it is Afghan villagers who most often feed the grisly appetite of the war machine. And in Afghanistan, increasingly, the machines are in control. Trouble is, machines have no sense. They are inhuman by definition. When that inhumanity, as it inevitably must, reaches back and infects the humans ostensibly in control, they too become mechanical. That is what, overall, one discerns from reading the Wikileaks material. The United States, in attempting to maintain its tottering global empire, has become a killing machine. Far from protecting us as its champions claim, that transformation imperils us all.
Lawrence DiStasi
NB: For those of you too young to recall, the title of this piece comes from a 1963 musical composed by Joan Littlewood; it premiered on Broadway in 1964, and though it’s ostensibly about WWI, it applies to other wars rather nicely.
Before looking at a few samples of the wikileak trove, it’s important to recall a June 2, 2010 report by Agence France Presse conveying a UN special rapporteur’s report on the CIA’s use of drones. Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said that the CIA’s droning amounted to “a license to kill without accountability.” Alston worried that the U.S.’s claimed license of targeting individuals anywhere in the world runs the risk of “doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” He especially complained about the fact that the criteria used by the CIA to justify its targeting of individuals was shrouded in official secrecy. In other words, not only were U.S. operatives assassinating individuals with impunity, but by offering no justification for their selections, they were judge, jury and executioner all in one: “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.” To add that the human agents in the drone killings were youthful pilots sitting in dark rooms in faraway Nevada and tracking shadows on a computer screen only makes the executions more macabre.
These drones, though, are the latest and apparently the most beloved of the military’s death toys. No human need enter a danger zone. The drones fly above battlefields or villages or wherever they choose, operated from afar, carrying lethal weapons that are precisely fired. They never complain, do not get tired (drones can stay aloft for 24 hours without a break), or bored, or distracted. They are the ultimate killing machine. Except, that is, when they get lost. This is what happened to one of the Air Force’s prized drones, a Reaper (don’t you just love the names the military comes up with? surely not to evoke thoughts of McCormick’s wheat reaper, but rather the euphemism for death as “the grim reaper”—though cutting down humans as the reaper cuts wheat is no doubt what animated the metaphor in the first place). As the NY Times explained the Wikileaks report:
“Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to its pilot [the one in Nevada]. No matter how he tried, the pilot couldn’t regain control [of his toy, only with a 66-foot wingspan], so his superiors ordered an F-15E fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared unguided into neighboring Tajikistan.” (NY Times, 7.25.10)
This grim comedy continued when the jet struck the drone with a Sidewinder missile, destroying the drone’s engine, just as the remote pilot regained satellite control. But it was too late. The comedy ended when the pilot steered it “into a remote mountainside for a final fiery landing.”
Imagine. Millions in equipment crashed into a mountain—because far worse than losing a measly $13 million would have been a landing that resulted in the Taliban recovering our secrets, our technology, our technological advantage.
Imagine, too, the terror of being on the ground pursued by one of these things. Death from the sky. No protestation of innocence. No begging for mercy. No warning even. Innocent or guilty, the Reaper seeks only to complete the death sentence ordered from half a world away. By some 20-something dweeb in a bunker in Nevada.
Or by some dweebs on the ground, those Special Forces killers until recently commanded by their killer-in-chief, General McChrystal. Another Wikileaks document, from June 17, 2007, details one of their missions gone awry. Of course, they were trying, via five rockets, to dispatch Abu Laith al-Libi, reportedly a top commander for Al Quaeda, said to be hiding in the targeted compound in Paktika province. But when helicopters dropped commandos from Task Force 373 to finish the job, they found no al-Libi. Instead, they found a “group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven of the children had been killed by the rocket attack.” When the men tried to flee, six of them were also killed by encircling helicopters. The rest were taken prisoner. But the good Americans did try to save a child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR.
Unaccountably, news of the attack resulted in “a wave of anger over the region.” But not to worry, with a list of “talking points” drawn up by the Americans, the local governor explained the mistake: the Americans had been after an Al Quaeda leader and no one told them women and children would be in the compound. Indeed, the attack was really their own fault, caused by the “presence of hoodlums,” he said, and “could have been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
Finally, a Sept. 3, 2009 report, from Kunduz province, described yet another mistaken airstrike, this time attributable to a slight mishap on the part of JATC, the Joint Terminal Attack Controller team responsible for ground communications and guidance for pilots and airstrikes. Responding to a police report saying that “2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE STOLEN BY UNK [unknown] NUMBER OF INS [insurgents]” who planned to cross the Kunduz River with their booty, the JTAC claimed to have seen not only the trucks, but “UP TO 70 INS” at “THE FORD ON THE RIVER.” [As to how JTAC “saw” this, the Times account speculates that the JTAC may have received live feed to their computer from infrared video cameras in some aircraft]. Then a German commander got involved, assured everyone that “NO CIVILIANS WERE IN THE VICINITY” and “AUTHORIZED AN AIRSTIKE.” An F-15 fighter plane then dropped two 500-pound guided bombs. Naturally, those killed were “56x INS KIA [insurgents killed in action],” 14 more fled northeast, and the two trucks were also destroyed. A good night’s work.
Only that the initial report was wrong. In fact, the trucks, apparently abandoned, were surrounded by civilians trying to remove fuel. This was learned only when the military reported that “International Media reported that US airstrikes had killed 60 civiians in Kunduz.” Those dastardly Taliban, having stolen the truck, had invited civilians in the area to help themselves with fuel. Seen from above, civilians were clearly INS [insurgents].
You get the picture. War is not lovely. In the best of conditions, it is messy, gruesome, murderous to those who have the misfortune of being in its vicinity. In this case, it is Afghan villagers who most often feed the grisly appetite of the war machine. And in Afghanistan, increasingly, the machines are in control. Trouble is, machines have no sense. They are inhuman by definition. When that inhumanity, as it inevitably must, reaches back and infects the humans ostensibly in control, they too become mechanical. That is what, overall, one discerns from reading the Wikileaks material. The United States, in attempting to maintain its tottering global empire, has become a killing machine. Far from protecting us as its champions claim, that transformation imperils us all.
Lawrence DiStasi
NB: For those of you too young to recall, the title of this piece comes from a 1963 musical composed by Joan Littlewood; it premiered on Broadway in 1964, and though it’s ostensibly about WWI, it applies to other wars rather nicely.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Real People v. Corporate “People.”
(Note: The following is a piece written by Doug Pibel in Yes! Magazine, 6/8/10. It expresses the position and history of corporate “personhood” and the fight against it so well that I thought it should be reprinted in full. The piece is reprinted on the movetoamend website, www.movetoamend.org. I would urge everyone to go to that website, sign the petition, and pass it on. LDS.)
In 2009, Riki Ott was on the road for 252 days educating people about the dangers of “corporate personhood.” That’s the legal doctrine that says corporations have constitutional rights, just like human beings. She mostly spoke in academic settings, and there was some interest in the idea, says Ott, but not much.
All that changed on January 21, 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Now interest has skyrocketed, and Ott finds people eager to volunteer, to organize, to meet, to do anything to reverse the Court’s decision.
Rallying Around Citizens United
Supreme Court cases are usually interesting to lawyers, scholars, and those directly affected. Occasionally, a decision makes the news for a few days before disappearing from the public eye. But sometimes there’s a game changer—a decision that is so clearly wrong that it becomes a rallying point. David Cobb, former Green Party presidential candidate and longtime activist on corporate personhood, points to Dred Scott v. Sandford as one such decision. Citizens United, Cobb says, is shaping up as another.
The two cases are mirror images of error. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision said that a flesh-and-blood human being had no constitutional rights because he was black. On January 21, 2010, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, used Citizens United to declare that corporations—legal entities with no human attributes—have the same constitutional free-speech rights that humans have.
Dred Scott was the most notorious Supreme Court decision of its time. It was not a groundbreaking case—it simply took existing law to its logical conclusion. But it so clearly violated both logic and human decency that it forced people to look at what slavery really meant. Rather than legitimizing the status quo, as it was intended to do, the decision galvanized the growing abolitionist movement, and set the stage for the end of slavery. But it took the 14th Amendment to overturn Dred Scott.
Citizens United also takes existing law to its logical conclusion. And, like Dred Scott, it is generating tremendous discussion and debate—this time about corporate power and about what role, if any, corporations should play in the political process.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken February 4–8, 2010, found that 80 percent of Americans oppose the Court’s ruling, including 65 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Opposition cuts across the political spectrum: 85 percent of Democrats oppose the ruling, as do 81 percent of Independents, and 76 percent of Republicans.
Within days of the Citizens United decision, groups formed to undo the Court’s damage. They are pursuing remedies ranging from local ordinances to federal legislation to a constitutional amendment.
Why Should We Care?
Citizens United says that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising. The Court declared more than 30 years ago that spending money is a form of speech, and that corporations had a First Amendment right to speak that way. But there were still limits, particularly in the area of political speech, where there is a century-old tradition of controlling the influence of corporations on the electoral process. Citizens United takes away those limits. According to the Court, if human beings are allowed an unrestricted right to free speech, then corporations must have the same right.
The Court overturned a key provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform law that prohibited corporate- and union-funded campaign advertising within 90 days of a federal election. Now, corporations can spend unlimited money influencing our elections right up to Election Day.
More than $5 billion was spent on the 2008 campaigns with the McCain-Feingold law in place. If that seems like a lot of money, wait for the next election cycle. Citizens United was a case about a corporation spending money to advertise and air a movie that amounted to a hit piece on Hilary Clinton. There are now no limits on the funding of that sort of negative campaign material. Any candidate who doesn’t toe the corporate line can look forward to a flood of opposition cash.
The "Humanity" of Corporations
Just as Dred Scott was only an extension of existing law, Citizens United merely extends law that has been developing for a long time. But, like Dred Scott, the Court’s conclusion makes clear to most people that the law is wrong. To say that a corporation with billions to spend on advertising is no different from a human being with one voice and one vote goes beyond what a large majority of Americans are willing to accept.
But this is the logical conclusion of the doctrine of corporate personhood, a legal theory that has been developing since the 1800s. Until 1819 the law was clear that corporations had no constitutional rights. In that year, the Court held for the first time that the Constitution applied to corporations. The key moment was the 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, an unremarkable case about taxes on railroad property. One of the railroad’s arguments was that the tax they were challenging violated the then-relatively new 14th Amendment to the Constitution—the Amendment that specifically overruled Dred Scott.
The railroad claimed that it had been deprived of “equal protection under the law,” which is one of the guarantees of the 14th Amendment. The problem with the argument was that the Amendment said, “No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” There is nothing in the language of the Amendment that makes it apply to anyone but humans—it uses the words “person” and “citizen.” The railroad’s argument was that, since a corporation was a legal entity, it was rather like a person and, thus, should enjoy the rights granted by the 14th Amendment.
The Court made no official decision on that issue, and it is discussed nowhere in the Court’s opinion. But in the headnotes (an unofficial summary of the case, not written by a judge), the court reporter, a former president of a small railroad line, quoted the Chief Justice as saying that the Court did not want to hear arguments on whether the 14th Amendment applied to railroads because “we are all of the opinion that it does.”
A lawyer who based an argument on a headnote would be laughed out of court. Yet the headnote in Santa Clara has been treated ever since as a statement of the law. From that crack in the door, the Constitution has been broken open to gradually provide corporations more of the rights granted to humans. We have gone from a Constitution that nowhere mentions corporations, let alone grants them rights, to Citizens United, which says that the Constitution cannot tell the difference between General Motors and a member of the general public.
Corporations are now a sort of super-being: They can live forever, they cannot be jailed, they have no conscience—yet they also enjoy virtually all the rights that humans have.
“[T]he Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.” But for the style, those words might have come from one of the activists working to abolish corporate personhood. They are actually the words of Justice John Paul Stevens, speaking for the four dissenters in Citizens United.
A Turning Point
Eighty percent of Americans agree with Justice Stevens, and they’re ready to demand a return to common sense. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), founded by Thomas Linzey in 1995, has long championed abolishing corporate personhood. Citizens United “opens peoples’ eyes,” says Mari Margil, CELDF’s associate director. “Very often we walk into communities and they’ve never heard of corporate constitutional rights, or they think it’s an academic concept that’s not important for their lives. So we have to show through stories, through examples, through breaking down how our structure of law came to be and how it works,” says Margil. “Now Citizens United allows us to speed that process up a bit.”
Riki Ott and David Cobb are working under the banner of Move to Amend, a coalition that launched its Web site the day the Citizens United decision came down. In less than three months, says Cobb, without coverage in a single mass media outlet, more than 77,000 people have signed the group’s online petition for a constitutional amendment to reject the Citizens United ruling. Move to Amend now counts among its growing steering committee and key partners more than 20 progressive organizations, including Black Agenda Report, the National Lawyers Guild, Velvet Revolution, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
A partnership of Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance launched Free Speech for People (FSFP), also on the day of the decision, and also seeking a constitutional amendment. They worked with Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) on the amendment she has introduced in the House, which restores the right of Congress and the states to regulate corporate spending. They have collected about 50,000 signatures on their petition.
John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action, has participated in FSFP presentations. “It’s pretty clear that the public is ahead of Washington,” Bonifaz says. “Washington, D.C. is looking at relatively modest reforms. The people around the country are very clear on the idea that corporations aren’t people. They believe the Citizens United ruling is a threat to our democracy and to the First Amendment.”
Still, all of these activists caution that this is a matter for the long haul. Amending the Constitution is not an overnight process—Dred Scott was accepted law for 11 years; the fight for women’s suffrage was multi-generational. Cobb says that although we’ve been told that this is a land of liberty, justice, and equality, people are realizing that it’s not. “Rather than just get caught up in despair and anguish, we can make it that land,” Cobb says. “We are going to force this country to live up to its promises and its best ideals. Are you with us?”
In 2009, Riki Ott was on the road for 252 days educating people about the dangers of “corporate personhood.” That’s the legal doctrine that says corporations have constitutional rights, just like human beings. She mostly spoke in academic settings, and there was some interest in the idea, says Ott, but not much.
All that changed on January 21, 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Now interest has skyrocketed, and Ott finds people eager to volunteer, to organize, to meet, to do anything to reverse the Court’s decision.
Rallying Around Citizens United
Supreme Court cases are usually interesting to lawyers, scholars, and those directly affected. Occasionally, a decision makes the news for a few days before disappearing from the public eye. But sometimes there’s a game changer—a decision that is so clearly wrong that it becomes a rallying point. David Cobb, former Green Party presidential candidate and longtime activist on corporate personhood, points to Dred Scott v. Sandford as one such decision. Citizens United, Cobb says, is shaping up as another.
The two cases are mirror images of error. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision said that a flesh-and-blood human being had no constitutional rights because he was black. On January 21, 2010, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, used Citizens United to declare that corporations—legal entities with no human attributes—have the same constitutional free-speech rights that humans have.
Dred Scott was the most notorious Supreme Court decision of its time. It was not a groundbreaking case—it simply took existing law to its logical conclusion. But it so clearly violated both logic and human decency that it forced people to look at what slavery really meant. Rather than legitimizing the status quo, as it was intended to do, the decision galvanized the growing abolitionist movement, and set the stage for the end of slavery. But it took the 14th Amendment to overturn Dred Scott.
Citizens United also takes existing law to its logical conclusion. And, like Dred Scott, it is generating tremendous discussion and debate—this time about corporate power and about what role, if any, corporations should play in the political process.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken February 4–8, 2010, found that 80 percent of Americans oppose the Court’s ruling, including 65 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Opposition cuts across the political spectrum: 85 percent of Democrats oppose the ruling, as do 81 percent of Independents, and 76 percent of Republicans.
Within days of the Citizens United decision, groups formed to undo the Court’s damage. They are pursuing remedies ranging from local ordinances to federal legislation to a constitutional amendment.
Why Should We Care?
Citizens United says that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising. The Court declared more than 30 years ago that spending money is a form of speech, and that corporations had a First Amendment right to speak that way. But there were still limits, particularly in the area of political speech, where there is a century-old tradition of controlling the influence of corporations on the electoral process. Citizens United takes away those limits. According to the Court, if human beings are allowed an unrestricted right to free speech, then corporations must have the same right.
The Court overturned a key provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform law that prohibited corporate- and union-funded campaign advertising within 90 days of a federal election. Now, corporations can spend unlimited money influencing our elections right up to Election Day.
More than $5 billion was spent on the 2008 campaigns with the McCain-Feingold law in place. If that seems like a lot of money, wait for the next election cycle. Citizens United was a case about a corporation spending money to advertise and air a movie that amounted to a hit piece on Hilary Clinton. There are now no limits on the funding of that sort of negative campaign material. Any candidate who doesn’t toe the corporate line can look forward to a flood of opposition cash.
The "Humanity" of Corporations
Just as Dred Scott was only an extension of existing law, Citizens United merely extends law that has been developing for a long time. But, like Dred Scott, the Court’s conclusion makes clear to most people that the law is wrong. To say that a corporation with billions to spend on advertising is no different from a human being with one voice and one vote goes beyond what a large majority of Americans are willing to accept.
But this is the logical conclusion of the doctrine of corporate personhood, a legal theory that has been developing since the 1800s. Until 1819 the law was clear that corporations had no constitutional rights. In that year, the Court held for the first time that the Constitution applied to corporations. The key moment was the 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, an unremarkable case about taxes on railroad property. One of the railroad’s arguments was that the tax they were challenging violated the then-relatively new 14th Amendment to the Constitution—the Amendment that specifically overruled Dred Scott.
The railroad claimed that it had been deprived of “equal protection under the law,” which is one of the guarantees of the 14th Amendment. The problem with the argument was that the Amendment said, “No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” There is nothing in the language of the Amendment that makes it apply to anyone but humans—it uses the words “person” and “citizen.” The railroad’s argument was that, since a corporation was a legal entity, it was rather like a person and, thus, should enjoy the rights granted by the 14th Amendment.
The Court made no official decision on that issue, and it is discussed nowhere in the Court’s opinion. But in the headnotes (an unofficial summary of the case, not written by a judge), the court reporter, a former president of a small railroad line, quoted the Chief Justice as saying that the Court did not want to hear arguments on whether the 14th Amendment applied to railroads because “we are all of the opinion that it does.”
A lawyer who based an argument on a headnote would be laughed out of court. Yet the headnote in Santa Clara has been treated ever since as a statement of the law. From that crack in the door, the Constitution has been broken open to gradually provide corporations more of the rights granted to humans. We have gone from a Constitution that nowhere mentions corporations, let alone grants them rights, to Citizens United, which says that the Constitution cannot tell the difference between General Motors and a member of the general public.
Corporations are now a sort of super-being: They can live forever, they cannot be jailed, they have no conscience—yet they also enjoy virtually all the rights that humans have.
“[T]he Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.” But for the style, those words might have come from one of the activists working to abolish corporate personhood. They are actually the words of Justice John Paul Stevens, speaking for the four dissenters in Citizens United.
A Turning Point
Eighty percent of Americans agree with Justice Stevens, and they’re ready to demand a return to common sense. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), founded by Thomas Linzey in 1995, has long championed abolishing corporate personhood. Citizens United “opens peoples’ eyes,” says Mari Margil, CELDF’s associate director. “Very often we walk into communities and they’ve never heard of corporate constitutional rights, or they think it’s an academic concept that’s not important for their lives. So we have to show through stories, through examples, through breaking down how our structure of law came to be and how it works,” says Margil. “Now Citizens United allows us to speed that process up a bit.”
Riki Ott and David Cobb are working under the banner of Move to Amend, a coalition that launched its Web site the day the Citizens United decision came down. In less than three months, says Cobb, without coverage in a single mass media outlet, more than 77,000 people have signed the group’s online petition for a constitutional amendment to reject the Citizens United ruling. Move to Amend now counts among its growing steering committee and key partners more than 20 progressive organizations, including Black Agenda Report, the National Lawyers Guild, Velvet Revolution, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
A partnership of Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance launched Free Speech for People (FSFP), also on the day of the decision, and also seeking a constitutional amendment. They worked with Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) on the amendment she has introduced in the House, which restores the right of Congress and the states to regulate corporate spending. They have collected about 50,000 signatures on their petition.
John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action, has participated in FSFP presentations. “It’s pretty clear that the public is ahead of Washington,” Bonifaz says. “Washington, D.C. is looking at relatively modest reforms. The people around the country are very clear on the idea that corporations aren’t people. They believe the Citizens United ruling is a threat to our democracy and to the First Amendment.”
Still, all of these activists caution that this is a matter for the long haul. Amending the Constitution is not an overnight process—Dred Scott was accepted law for 11 years; the fight for women’s suffrage was multi-generational. Cobb says that although we’ve been told that this is a land of liberty, justice, and equality, people are realizing that it’s not. “Rather than just get caught up in despair and anguish, we can make it that land,” Cobb says. “We are going to force this country to live up to its promises and its best ideals. Are you with us?”
Saturday, July 10, 2010
"To Let the Punishment Fit the Crime.."
The line is from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (My Object all sublime/ I shall achieve in time/ To let the punishment fit the crime…), and as always in G&S, it is said with a bit of irony, if not sarcasm. The same is true here. Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed African-American Oscar Grant on New Year’s morning in 2009, has been convicted of “involuntary manslaughter.” And so, though Oscar Grant’s murder was caught on several video cameras, and though the video showed that the unarmed Grant was not only lying face down when shot, but also had his hands bound behind his back, the jury concluded that Mehserle’s act was unintentional (his lawyers insisting, as did he, that he thought he was using his taser), and therefore deserved only the lesser conviction of involuntary or negligent manslaughter, not murder. The conviction carries a sentence of 2 to 4 years—though the judge could add up to 10 more years for the added offense of using a gun. He could also sentence Mehserle to probation—no additional jail time at all.
Now here, without going further into the rights or wrongs of the jury’s decision (no Blacks were seated on that jury; the judge ruled out first-degree murder), it is important to understand this verdict in context. A black man is shot to death by a white man who has pledged to protect the public. The black man is bound and face down on the ground. The murderer’s culpability is undisputed. And yet, the killer is looking forward to a sentence that pales in comparison not simply to sentences in other murders, but in comparison to millions of convictions of black men in America for non-violent crimes like drug possession. To get some sense of the outrage this inspires in the African American community, it is necessary to read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (New Press: 2010). In fact, reading the New Jim Crow should outrage any American, even absent the Mehserle verdict. But in the context of this flagrant example of the differential “justice” in our system, well, outrage simply doesn’t cover it.
Here is some of what Michelle Alexander tells us. First, the system of mass incarceration of African Americans—a system put in place mostly as a result of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan Administration in 1980 and more specifically in its 1986 and 1988 legislation—is no less than a modern system for controlling black (and brown) men. It is the New Jim Crow—the old one having been ended, finally, by the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. So, of the approximately 2.3 million people in American prisons and jails, about ½ million are there for a drug offense (compare today’s 500,000 to 41,000 drug-related felons in 1980). Further, of the more than 31 million!!! people arrested for drug offenses since this “war” began, most are NOT charged with dealing drugs; in 2005, for example, “4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession, and only 1 out of 5 for sales.” So what, you may say, that’s justice: use drugs and go to jail. But it’s not that simple. As Alexander writes,
…in the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.…Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least 15 states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from 20 to 57 times greater than that of white men….Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths (¾) of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
What’s more, the penalties for “crack” cocaine (used primarily by blacks), as opposed to powder cocaine (used primarily by whites) are biased in the extreme: 500 grams of powder gets a 5-year mandatory sentence; 5 grams of crack gets a 10-year mandatory—a 100 to 1 ratio (500 grams to 5 grams). Judge Clyde Cahill of the Federal District Court of Missouri, himself an African-American, ruled in the case of Edward Clary, that this ratio was discriminatory, but his ruling was struck down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The result was that Clary, the 18-year old first-time violator in the case, was given and served 4 years by Judge Cahill, but upon the reversal by the Circuit Court, was forced back to jail to serve out his ten-year mandatory sentence.
The story of how this “war” got started, including the accompanying penalties for “felons” that renders them literally second-class citizens (5.1 million now on probation or parole), makes for fascinating reading, and I would recommend Alexander’s book to anyone who wants reality instead of TV propaganda. Here, I want to focus on the inequities in sentencing because that is what’s behind the rage hurled at the Mehserle verdict. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for starters, initiated those mandatory minimum sentences for “distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.” The 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act upped the ante even more, including the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and a new 5-year mandatory minimum for “simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell.” These mandatory sentences for possession were new, writes Alexander: up till that time, one year in prison was the maximum for possessing any amount of any drug.
The effects were immediate. And were immediately carved in stone by the Supreme Court. In 1982, “the Supreme Court upheld 40 years of imprisonment for possession and an attempt to sell 9 ounces of marijuana.” Somewhat later, the same Supreme Court in Hamelin v. Michigan upheld a life sentence for “a defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 672 grams (approx. 23 ounces) of crack cocaine.” Though these two cases involved drug sellers, most of those hit with mandatory minimums, according to Alexander, are not the “drug kingpins” we are led to imagine. Weldon Angelos, for example, a 24-year-old record producer who possessed a weapon he did not use or threaten to use, was “sentenced to life for 3 marijuana sales, due to the mandatory minimum of 55 years under the law.” The judge noted even as he sentenced him that it was “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Another judge, William Schwarzer, “choked with tears” over the sentence he had to impose on Richard Anderson; Anderson, a longshoreman and first-time offender, got “10 years in prison without parole” not for selling or even possessing drugs, but for “what appeared to be a minor mistake in judgment in having given a ride to a drug dealer” who got caught.
That’s 10 years in prison for giving a dealer a ride! Johannes Mehserle is looking at 2 to 4 years for killing an unarmed black man. Punishment to fit the crime?
And yet, the Supreme Court, our court of last resort, the great arbiter of fairness, upholds this kind of savagery, this out-and-out racism. Consider, as Michelle Alexander forces us to consider: Professor David Baldus, of the University of Iowa Law School, (in the interest of full disclosure, Baldus was a fraternity brother of mine) led a study comparing sentencing in murder trials in Georgia. The study discovered that:
…defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty 11 times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70% of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19% of cases involving white defendants and black victims…and that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. (p. 107)
A trial appeal, by Warren McCleskey in Georgia, used the Baldus study to claim racial bias in violation of the 14th Amendment to try to reverse the death penalty conviction. The case, McCleskey v. Kemp, reached the Supreme Court in 1987. But the Supreme Court “ruled that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the 14th Amendment” unless McCleskey could prove that the prosecutor in his case “had sought the death penalty because of race, or that the jury had imposed it for racial reasons.” That is, the Court said that clear statistical evidence, as provided by the Baldus study, did not prove unequal treatment, and thus did not violate the 14th Amendment. This meant that the prosecutor or the jury would have to openly admit they were racially biased—an impossibility not only because few would admit such a thing, but also because litigants are barred from even attempting to discover the prosecution’s motives. In short, statistical proof of racial bias was allowed and is allowed to stand under the court’s ruling.
Add to this the consistent rulings of the Supreme Court in allowing racial profiling by police officers by giving them “discretion” in deciding whom to stop and search without a warrant—using “pretext stops” where a minor traffic violation becomes a pretext to search for drugs (where the driver “looks” like a dealer); or “consent,” where police who get a driver’s consent (most people fear refusing) can search for any reason or no reason at all—and you get rampant violations of 4th Amendment protections, and American jails filled to capacity with black and brown drug violators. In the Ohio v. Robinette case, for example, where police stopped a black driver for speeding, turned on a video camera, and asked whether he was carrying drugs and would consent to a search, the driver consented. The police thereupon found a small amount of marijuana and a single meth pill. In reviewing the case, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the conviction, saying police must advise motorists of their right to refuse before asking them for consent to search their vehicles. At the Supreme Court, however, this “advise” requirement was struck down as “unrealistic.” No one needed to be informed of the right to refuse before being solicited for consent to a search. And in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court went even further, ruling that even when a motorist does refuse to consent to a search, the police can arrest him anyway.
What results is what pertains in Illinois, where an amazing 90% of those imprisoned for drug offenses are African-American; where “the total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55% of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80% of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area.” Nor are the effects limited to the streets. Politically, African Americans are being disenfranchised at a staggering rate, with 1 in 7 black men nationally having lost the right to vote as ex-felons. Socially, moreover, black people, especially black men, literally define criminality, and crime is defined as a black problem. However, since we live in a putatively “colorblind” society, (there are, after all, that small percentage of whites imprisoned for drugs; there is, after all, that African-American President) this entire problem can be suppressed, ignored and denied. ‘It’s not black people we target; it’s criminals.’
Only when we get to see, graphically, how white murderers like Johannes Mehserle are treated do we begin to notice that something is rotten. Only when we are exposed, chapter and verse, to the way the system is constructed to exploit every avenue for targeting black and brown men, and how that targeting is continually sanctioned by the highest court in the land, do we begin to understand how obscene it all is—how obscene for TV commentators (like those commenting on the “riot” after the Mehserle verdict) to wring their hands about a few windows broken while they ignore the broken lives, the broken families, the broken cities, the deliberately broken system that allows and encourages racism to maintain its death grip on millions, so the rest of us can prate on about democracy, about our revered system of “equal justice for all.”
Lawrence DiStasi
Now here, without going further into the rights or wrongs of the jury’s decision (no Blacks were seated on that jury; the judge ruled out first-degree murder), it is important to understand this verdict in context. A black man is shot to death by a white man who has pledged to protect the public. The black man is bound and face down on the ground. The murderer’s culpability is undisputed. And yet, the killer is looking forward to a sentence that pales in comparison not simply to sentences in other murders, but in comparison to millions of convictions of black men in America for non-violent crimes like drug possession. To get some sense of the outrage this inspires in the African American community, it is necessary to read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (New Press: 2010). In fact, reading the New Jim Crow should outrage any American, even absent the Mehserle verdict. But in the context of this flagrant example of the differential “justice” in our system, well, outrage simply doesn’t cover it.
Here is some of what Michelle Alexander tells us. First, the system of mass incarceration of African Americans—a system put in place mostly as a result of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan Administration in 1980 and more specifically in its 1986 and 1988 legislation—is no less than a modern system for controlling black (and brown) men. It is the New Jim Crow—the old one having been ended, finally, by the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. So, of the approximately 2.3 million people in American prisons and jails, about ½ million are there for a drug offense (compare today’s 500,000 to 41,000 drug-related felons in 1980). Further, of the more than 31 million!!! people arrested for drug offenses since this “war” began, most are NOT charged with dealing drugs; in 2005, for example, “4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession, and only 1 out of 5 for sales.” So what, you may say, that’s justice: use drugs and go to jail. But it’s not that simple. As Alexander writes,
…in the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.…Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least 15 states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from 20 to 57 times greater than that of white men….Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths (¾) of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
What’s more, the penalties for “crack” cocaine (used primarily by blacks), as opposed to powder cocaine (used primarily by whites) are biased in the extreme: 500 grams of powder gets a 5-year mandatory sentence; 5 grams of crack gets a 10-year mandatory—a 100 to 1 ratio (500 grams to 5 grams). Judge Clyde Cahill of the Federal District Court of Missouri, himself an African-American, ruled in the case of Edward Clary, that this ratio was discriminatory, but his ruling was struck down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The result was that Clary, the 18-year old first-time violator in the case, was given and served 4 years by Judge Cahill, but upon the reversal by the Circuit Court, was forced back to jail to serve out his ten-year mandatory sentence.
The story of how this “war” got started, including the accompanying penalties for “felons” that renders them literally second-class citizens (5.1 million now on probation or parole), makes for fascinating reading, and I would recommend Alexander’s book to anyone who wants reality instead of TV propaganda. Here, I want to focus on the inequities in sentencing because that is what’s behind the rage hurled at the Mehserle verdict. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for starters, initiated those mandatory minimum sentences for “distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.” The 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act upped the ante even more, including the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and a new 5-year mandatory minimum for “simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell.” These mandatory sentences for possession were new, writes Alexander: up till that time, one year in prison was the maximum for possessing any amount of any drug.
The effects were immediate. And were immediately carved in stone by the Supreme Court. In 1982, “the Supreme Court upheld 40 years of imprisonment for possession and an attempt to sell 9 ounces of marijuana.” Somewhat later, the same Supreme Court in Hamelin v. Michigan upheld a life sentence for “a defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 672 grams (approx. 23 ounces) of crack cocaine.” Though these two cases involved drug sellers, most of those hit with mandatory minimums, according to Alexander, are not the “drug kingpins” we are led to imagine. Weldon Angelos, for example, a 24-year-old record producer who possessed a weapon he did not use or threaten to use, was “sentenced to life for 3 marijuana sales, due to the mandatory minimum of 55 years under the law.” The judge noted even as he sentenced him that it was “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Another judge, William Schwarzer, “choked with tears” over the sentence he had to impose on Richard Anderson; Anderson, a longshoreman and first-time offender, got “10 years in prison without parole” not for selling or even possessing drugs, but for “what appeared to be a minor mistake in judgment in having given a ride to a drug dealer” who got caught.
That’s 10 years in prison for giving a dealer a ride! Johannes Mehserle is looking at 2 to 4 years for killing an unarmed black man. Punishment to fit the crime?
And yet, the Supreme Court, our court of last resort, the great arbiter of fairness, upholds this kind of savagery, this out-and-out racism. Consider, as Michelle Alexander forces us to consider: Professor David Baldus, of the University of Iowa Law School, (in the interest of full disclosure, Baldus was a fraternity brother of mine) led a study comparing sentencing in murder trials in Georgia. The study discovered that:
…defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty 11 times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70% of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19% of cases involving white defendants and black victims…and that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. (p. 107)
A trial appeal, by Warren McCleskey in Georgia, used the Baldus study to claim racial bias in violation of the 14th Amendment to try to reverse the death penalty conviction. The case, McCleskey v. Kemp, reached the Supreme Court in 1987. But the Supreme Court “ruled that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the 14th Amendment” unless McCleskey could prove that the prosecutor in his case “had sought the death penalty because of race, or that the jury had imposed it for racial reasons.” That is, the Court said that clear statistical evidence, as provided by the Baldus study, did not prove unequal treatment, and thus did not violate the 14th Amendment. This meant that the prosecutor or the jury would have to openly admit they were racially biased—an impossibility not only because few would admit such a thing, but also because litigants are barred from even attempting to discover the prosecution’s motives. In short, statistical proof of racial bias was allowed and is allowed to stand under the court’s ruling.
Add to this the consistent rulings of the Supreme Court in allowing racial profiling by police officers by giving them “discretion” in deciding whom to stop and search without a warrant—using “pretext stops” where a minor traffic violation becomes a pretext to search for drugs (where the driver “looks” like a dealer); or “consent,” where police who get a driver’s consent (most people fear refusing) can search for any reason or no reason at all—and you get rampant violations of 4th Amendment protections, and American jails filled to capacity with black and brown drug violators. In the Ohio v. Robinette case, for example, where police stopped a black driver for speeding, turned on a video camera, and asked whether he was carrying drugs and would consent to a search, the driver consented. The police thereupon found a small amount of marijuana and a single meth pill. In reviewing the case, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the conviction, saying police must advise motorists of their right to refuse before asking them for consent to search their vehicles. At the Supreme Court, however, this “advise” requirement was struck down as “unrealistic.” No one needed to be informed of the right to refuse before being solicited for consent to a search. And in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court went even further, ruling that even when a motorist does refuse to consent to a search, the police can arrest him anyway.
What results is what pertains in Illinois, where an amazing 90% of those imprisoned for drug offenses are African-American; where “the total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55% of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80% of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area.” Nor are the effects limited to the streets. Politically, African Americans are being disenfranchised at a staggering rate, with 1 in 7 black men nationally having lost the right to vote as ex-felons. Socially, moreover, black people, especially black men, literally define criminality, and crime is defined as a black problem. However, since we live in a putatively “colorblind” society, (there are, after all, that small percentage of whites imprisoned for drugs; there is, after all, that African-American President) this entire problem can be suppressed, ignored and denied. ‘It’s not black people we target; it’s criminals.’
Only when we get to see, graphically, how white murderers like Johannes Mehserle are treated do we begin to notice that something is rotten. Only when we are exposed, chapter and verse, to the way the system is constructed to exploit every avenue for targeting black and brown men, and how that targeting is continually sanctioned by the highest court in the land, do we begin to understand how obscene it all is—how obscene for TV commentators (like those commenting on the “riot” after the Mehserle verdict) to wring their hands about a few windows broken while they ignore the broken lives, the broken families, the broken cities, the deliberately broken system that allows and encourages racism to maintain its death grip on millions, so the rest of us can prate on about democracy, about our revered system of “equal justice for all.”
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The Gulf Disaster: A Time for Truth?
The volcano still erupting from BP’s exploded oil well in the Gulf would appear to be enough—after two months and millions of barrels of crude fouling the waters and wetlands—to stimulate an awakening in the U.S. Congress and around the world: The human dependence on fossil fuels is leading to an unlivable planet. Species are dying. The planet is warming in an unprecedented way. The climate that humans have depended on for 10,000 years, the climate that made possible what we call “civilization,” is changing, has changed, threatens to change further and so fundamentally that life as we have known it will be impossible. So the oil fouling one of the most important waters in our hemisphere would seem to be enough to do the trick; no more lies, no more half-truths or untruths, this is serious, folks.
And on the surface, one might suppose it’s working. News reports on June 19 discussed the possibility that the environmental disaster may well give Obama and the Democrats the leverage they need to pass some form of clean-energy legislation. Obama talked about the legislation now in the House—a cap and trade bill which, by making carbon emissions and thus fossil fuels more expensive, “finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.” (“Gulf Spill Could Swing Obama’s Power Play on Energy Policy,” Yahoo News, 6/19/10). The idea here, and in the Senate, is that a deal could be engineered whereby progressives get a cap on carbon (cap and trade), while conservatives get the White House’s permission to allow both more offshore drilling and a revitalized nuclear power industry.
And suddenly, with the realization that these idiots are talking about MORE oil drilling, MORE nuclear waste, the whole thing begins to totter. Because not only are the odds for such an agreement dubious at best (Republicans are already complaining that Obama is trying to “exploit” the oil spill for his own political advantage), but the measures that are being discussed fall far short of both the scale of the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf, and of the environmental disaster unfolding all over the planet. Indeed, one might have thought that Obama, in his Oval Office Speech, would have taken the opportunity to really ram home this truth. The planet is in trouble. Humans as a species are in trouble. All species, because of human activities, are in trouble. And the trouble is caused, in the first instance, by corporate greed of the kind that BP has displayed. A pair of officials from the Louisiana coast, in fact, made exactly this connection. Complaining about the pace of remediation efforts to clean up the oil already reaching the beaches and the wetlands, these officials made no bones about the fact that BP has acted not in the interest of humans or the environment, but in the interest of their corporate bottom line; they’ve continuously taken shortcuts to preserve their profits, their corporate bottom line, their dominance as a corporation. And it was clear, these officials said, that this corporate attitude was inimical to preventing, stopping, and cleaning up the mess they’d made. This is why we need government, they insisted; because only government can act in the people’s interest, in the interest of the common good.
Obama said nothing of the kind. As quoted above, he continues to try to adhere to the reigning conservative economic line: we can fix this, we can institute clean energy policies and products that will be profitable for America’s businesses. No one will have to sacrifice. No one will have to pay more. We can continue to have it all, continue to grow our economy and put people back to work, all nice and clean and with the maintenance of our comfortable American lifestyle—the envy of the world. And it’s all bullshit. What this kind of political doubletalk depends on is the maintenance of the American myth: we’re the best, we’re the biggest, we’re the baddest, and we can continue being that way, can get even more and bigger that way for our best days are yet to come. It’s amazing really. American conservatives are fond of trotting out their mantra: there’s no free lunch. And yet, where profit-making is concerned, where fossil fuels are concerned, they continue to parrot the need for policies that require precisely that: a free lunch. No accounting for the damage done to mountains and rivers and oceans. No accounting for the free minerals and oils and fuels and soils we’ve been burning through as if they were infinite. No accounting for the clear natural law that dictates that nothing can grow infinitely, not even cancer. Sooner or later, the host is overcome and dies. But we have not absorbed that yet, not where our precious way of life is concerned. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that our politicians and leaders have not absorbed that yet because they fear that what happened to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s when he admonished the nation about a new era of limits, and was crucified for it, will happen to them.
So here’s the deal. Unless and until we find a politician, a leader who is willing to take the heat for telling Americans and the world the truth—that global warming is already upon us, that we have already overshot the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that most scientists believe is the limit, i.e. 350 parts per million (we are now at 390 ppm)—we will go on trying to grow bigger and better and more dominant and more wasteful, and continue destroying our planet. We will make the overshoot even more catastrophic. Because, according to Bill McKibben, even were we to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow, completely, it would still take 1,000 years to reverse the damage already well under way. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this specifically, on January 26, 2009, i.e., that ocean physics prove that “changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped” (McKibben, Eaarth, p. 17). And we’re not stopping. Given the policies that most governments, including our own, are now pursuing, we will be at a carbon dioxide level that is doubled in a few years: 700 parts per million. Indeed, we may have already passed the point of no return. And Obama is hoping to get a few measly carbon caps into place. Is he kidding? Is he, are all of us, out of our minds?
It appears that way. Because what it will take, now, to even preserve the damaged planet that we have left, will be a complete change in the way we live. The mantras about growth have to be reversed. The bumper sticker a friend of mine has on her car has to be taken seriously: “growing the economy is shrinking the ecology”. One would think humans, by now, would realize that. We know about cancer. We know that cancer cells grow as if demented, out of control, overwhelming the body’s capacity to contain them. So we know that runaway growth—and the growth that has been killing us for nearly a century is the cancer known as “consumerism,” a cancerous growth to be sure for it has been artificially induced by the masters of production who saw that oil-based industry could produce far more than people needed, and so invented such things as planned obsolescence and “shop-till-you- drop” cultures equating material possessions with well-being, with the good life itself—is equally demented, literally “cancerous.” We know it, that is, and we don’t know it, we refuse to know it. But we had better learn soon. As the monster in the gulf is trying to tell us: there is simply not much time left.
(NB: to see how consumerism arose shortly after WWI, take a look at Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self: http://www.archive.org/details/the.century.of.the.self)
Lawrence DiStasi
And on the surface, one might suppose it’s working. News reports on June 19 discussed the possibility that the environmental disaster may well give Obama and the Democrats the leverage they need to pass some form of clean-energy legislation. Obama talked about the legislation now in the House—a cap and trade bill which, by making carbon emissions and thus fossil fuels more expensive, “finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.” (“Gulf Spill Could Swing Obama’s Power Play on Energy Policy,” Yahoo News, 6/19/10). The idea here, and in the Senate, is that a deal could be engineered whereby progressives get a cap on carbon (cap and trade), while conservatives get the White House’s permission to allow both more offshore drilling and a revitalized nuclear power industry.
And suddenly, with the realization that these idiots are talking about MORE oil drilling, MORE nuclear waste, the whole thing begins to totter. Because not only are the odds for such an agreement dubious at best (Republicans are already complaining that Obama is trying to “exploit” the oil spill for his own political advantage), but the measures that are being discussed fall far short of both the scale of the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf, and of the environmental disaster unfolding all over the planet. Indeed, one might have thought that Obama, in his Oval Office Speech, would have taken the opportunity to really ram home this truth. The planet is in trouble. Humans as a species are in trouble. All species, because of human activities, are in trouble. And the trouble is caused, in the first instance, by corporate greed of the kind that BP has displayed. A pair of officials from the Louisiana coast, in fact, made exactly this connection. Complaining about the pace of remediation efforts to clean up the oil already reaching the beaches and the wetlands, these officials made no bones about the fact that BP has acted not in the interest of humans or the environment, but in the interest of their corporate bottom line; they’ve continuously taken shortcuts to preserve their profits, their corporate bottom line, their dominance as a corporation. And it was clear, these officials said, that this corporate attitude was inimical to preventing, stopping, and cleaning up the mess they’d made. This is why we need government, they insisted; because only government can act in the people’s interest, in the interest of the common good.
Obama said nothing of the kind. As quoted above, he continues to try to adhere to the reigning conservative economic line: we can fix this, we can institute clean energy policies and products that will be profitable for America’s businesses. No one will have to sacrifice. No one will have to pay more. We can continue to have it all, continue to grow our economy and put people back to work, all nice and clean and with the maintenance of our comfortable American lifestyle—the envy of the world. And it’s all bullshit. What this kind of political doubletalk depends on is the maintenance of the American myth: we’re the best, we’re the biggest, we’re the baddest, and we can continue being that way, can get even more and bigger that way for our best days are yet to come. It’s amazing really. American conservatives are fond of trotting out their mantra: there’s no free lunch. And yet, where profit-making is concerned, where fossil fuels are concerned, they continue to parrot the need for policies that require precisely that: a free lunch. No accounting for the damage done to mountains and rivers and oceans. No accounting for the free minerals and oils and fuels and soils we’ve been burning through as if they were infinite. No accounting for the clear natural law that dictates that nothing can grow infinitely, not even cancer. Sooner or later, the host is overcome and dies. But we have not absorbed that yet, not where our precious way of life is concerned. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that our politicians and leaders have not absorbed that yet because they fear that what happened to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s when he admonished the nation about a new era of limits, and was crucified for it, will happen to them.
So here’s the deal. Unless and until we find a politician, a leader who is willing to take the heat for telling Americans and the world the truth—that global warming is already upon us, that we have already overshot the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that most scientists believe is the limit, i.e. 350 parts per million (we are now at 390 ppm)—we will go on trying to grow bigger and better and more dominant and more wasteful, and continue destroying our planet. We will make the overshoot even more catastrophic. Because, according to Bill McKibben, even were we to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow, completely, it would still take 1,000 years to reverse the damage already well under way. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this specifically, on January 26, 2009, i.e., that ocean physics prove that “changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped” (McKibben, Eaarth, p. 17). And we’re not stopping. Given the policies that most governments, including our own, are now pursuing, we will be at a carbon dioxide level that is doubled in a few years: 700 parts per million. Indeed, we may have already passed the point of no return. And Obama is hoping to get a few measly carbon caps into place. Is he kidding? Is he, are all of us, out of our minds?
It appears that way. Because what it will take, now, to even preserve the damaged planet that we have left, will be a complete change in the way we live. The mantras about growth have to be reversed. The bumper sticker a friend of mine has on her car has to be taken seriously: “growing the economy is shrinking the ecology”. One would think humans, by now, would realize that. We know about cancer. We know that cancer cells grow as if demented, out of control, overwhelming the body’s capacity to contain them. So we know that runaway growth—and the growth that has been killing us for nearly a century is the cancer known as “consumerism,” a cancerous growth to be sure for it has been artificially induced by the masters of production who saw that oil-based industry could produce far more than people needed, and so invented such things as planned obsolescence and “shop-till-you- drop” cultures equating material possessions with well-being, with the good life itself—is equally demented, literally “cancerous.” We know it, that is, and we don’t know it, we refuse to know it. But we had better learn soon. As the monster in the gulf is trying to tell us: there is simply not much time left.
(NB: to see how consumerism arose shortly after WWI, take a look at Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self: http://www.archive.org/details/the.century.of.the.self)
Lawrence DiStasi
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Israeli Massacre on the High Seas
Everyone must know by now of the most recent outrage perpetrated by the Israelis. On Sunday evening, under cover of darkness, Israeli forces and commandos attacked the Freedom Flotilla, a group of 6 ships heading for Gaza with 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies. Included in the cargo were medical supplies (hundreds of wheelchairs for Gazans crippled in the 2009 Israeli assault, and a dental clinic for Al-Shifa Hospital), as well as much-needed supplies to repair such things as destroyed houses and water systems. This was too much for the Israelis. They had warned they would stop the ships, and they did. What they hadn’t warned about was a commando assault in international waters, with at least 9 members of the relief effort dead.
As usual, the Israeli propaganda machine, supported by its American media puppets, went into high gear as soon as the news broke. The Israelis said that they were only acting in “self-defense,” because the “activists” aboard the ship attacked them first, with clubs, knives, and “even guns.” The commandos, who had been lowered to the lead ship’s deck by helicopters, had no choice, it was claimed, but to defend themselves. Poor things. They were simply boarding a ship in international waters—clearly illegal, and at the least piracy, at the worst an act of war—and those dastardly “activists” attacked them. So who could blame these innocents for “defending themselves” against putative “Hamas sympathizers” who were really trying to spark a confrontation?
There were subtler points to be made as well. Several news reports, in describing the background in Gaza, pointed out that Israel’s blockade was only imposed “after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized control of the tiny Mediterranean territory in 2007” (May 31, 2010 AP article, by Selcan Hacaoglu and Lea Keath). The blame for this and other Israeli acts was thus placed on Hamas—i.e. for violently “seizing control” of Gaza. But wait. Wasn’t there an election in there somewhere? Didn’t Hamas win an election judged fully open and fair on January 26, 2006, which gave it control over all Palestinian territory, including the West Bank? I think so. I also seem to remember that Israel and the United States immediately condemned this insufferable result, democratic or not, and began supplying Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement headed by its puppet Mahmoud Abbas, with weapons to attack Hamas and prevent them from taking power. It was this engineered conflict that finally resulted in a Hamas victory over Fatah on June 14, 2007—what the media calls “seizing control.” In fact, Hamas was defending the electoral victory it had fairly and democratically won. It was then hit with a full Israeli blockade, and, in January 2009, a full-scale Israeli invasion that slaughtered some 1400 Gazans and left the territory of 1.5 million inhabitants in ruins.
It was this deadly, punitive blockade that the Israelis were trying to keep in place and the Freedom Flotilla was openly trying to breach with humanitarian goods. And in contrast to the Israeli position—that Gaza is by no means a humanitarian disaster, its inhabitants well-fed and taken care of—the United Nations has several times condemned the blockade, most recently in the form of the UN-commissioned Gaza report by Justice Richard Goldstone (known as the Goldstone Report). As laid out by Ray McGovern in a splendid article on June 1, “Obama’s Timidity and Death at Sea,” (commondreams.org) the report concluded:
“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …
“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …
“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip."
This business of “collective punishment” is serious, for it constitutes “a violation of the provisions of Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
This is the real background of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The blockade is illegal and inhuman, and attempting to bring some relief to the Gazan people and attention to the blockade has implied international sanction. Some of the people aboard the flotilla provide not only evidence of this, but also of the shameful history of decades of United States support for such violations. I am referring to Navy veteran Joe Meadors, a past president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. As Ray McGovern notes, Meadors was on the USS Liberty when the American intelligence-collecting ship was attacked by Israeli warplanes on June 5, 1967, during the Six-Day War (Israel apparently feared that some of its communications, proving that it had initiated the war against Egypt, had been picked up by the Liberty, and would become public). As they did two days ago, Israeli forces attacked an unarmed ship without provocation, killing 34 American sailors and wounding another 170. Incredibly, the U.S. government, fearful of exacerbating relations with an important ally, colluded in covering up the massacre. Sailors were ordered to remain silent about what happened. Joe Meadors was one of them, and, after so many years, apparently decided to take part in this latest attempt to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians. He is now among the 600 or so freedom activists being held incommunicado (stripped of all cell phones, laptops, cameras, and personal belongings) by the Israelis.
What we have, then, is yet another violation of international law by the Israeli government, and yet another instance of American timidity in response to it. The Obama administration has so far adopted a “let’s wait for the evidence” attitude, limiting itself to “regret” over the unfortunate deaths. Israel has also expressed regret that its “innocent” mission somehow turned violent when the activists attacked first. But the first comments from released activists—including those of Nilufer Cetin of Turkey, who was released because she accompanied her husband (the chief engineer of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship) with her tiny child—tell a different story. “There was a massacre on board,” said Cetin. “The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood.” As opposed to the Israeli version, Cetin says:
“the operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn’t stop, these warnings turned into an attack. There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters.” (“Israelis Opened Fire Before Boarding Gaza Flotilla, say Released Activists” by Dorian Jones, June 1, 2010, The Guardian/UK (reprinted commondreams.org).
The above article also quoted Dimitris Gielalis, aboard a second ship:
“Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used.”
Yet another released survivor from another ship, Michalis Grigoropoulos, said:
“The Israelis acted like pirates…They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do…Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks.”
So much for innocent Israelis forced into violence by fully-armed activists (it should be noted that all the dead were activists). The truth seems to be that the Israelis wanted, once again, to demonstrate who is in control in the eastern Mediterranean, and what the consequences are for international activists trying to ease the pain of those in Gaza. Israel considers such actions hostile, and is eager to convey its warning: ‘help the Palestinians and you will be treated just as they are.’ Another activist, demonstrating in Jerusalem, served as part of this warning yesterday. As reported by the AP on June 1, Emily Henochowicz of Maryland lost her eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired directly at her face. She joins American activists like Rachel Corrie and others who have been maimed and killed while trying to protect Palestinians, or their homes (Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death while standing before a Palestinian house slated for demolition) or their human dignity. This in the face of all those who lament, ‘why can’t the Palestinians use non-violence?’
In response to all this, American politicians seem content to express regrets over the bloodshed, and support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But as Ray McGovern points out, this kind of pusillanimous behavior has consequences. Israel clearly takes America’s silence, Obama’s silence in the face of its most brutal depradations as encouragement: 'do whatever you want to, but try to be a bit more discreet about it.' The result is that people die, people are brutalized, people are forced to endure the kind of treatment that stands comparison with the worst tortures and oppressions in human history. And we, we are forced to contemplate the cowardice of our political “leaders” and the continuing degradation of our ethics, our standing in the world, and the very language that is used to justify piracy and the murder of aid workers as “self-defense.”
Lawrence DiStasi
As usual, the Israeli propaganda machine, supported by its American media puppets, went into high gear as soon as the news broke. The Israelis said that they were only acting in “self-defense,” because the “activists” aboard the ship attacked them first, with clubs, knives, and “even guns.” The commandos, who had been lowered to the lead ship’s deck by helicopters, had no choice, it was claimed, but to defend themselves. Poor things. They were simply boarding a ship in international waters—clearly illegal, and at the least piracy, at the worst an act of war—and those dastardly “activists” attacked them. So who could blame these innocents for “defending themselves” against putative “Hamas sympathizers” who were really trying to spark a confrontation?
There were subtler points to be made as well. Several news reports, in describing the background in Gaza, pointed out that Israel’s blockade was only imposed “after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized control of the tiny Mediterranean territory in 2007” (May 31, 2010 AP article, by Selcan Hacaoglu and Lea Keath). The blame for this and other Israeli acts was thus placed on Hamas—i.e. for violently “seizing control” of Gaza. But wait. Wasn’t there an election in there somewhere? Didn’t Hamas win an election judged fully open and fair on January 26, 2006, which gave it control over all Palestinian territory, including the West Bank? I think so. I also seem to remember that Israel and the United States immediately condemned this insufferable result, democratic or not, and began supplying Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement headed by its puppet Mahmoud Abbas, with weapons to attack Hamas and prevent them from taking power. It was this engineered conflict that finally resulted in a Hamas victory over Fatah on June 14, 2007—what the media calls “seizing control.” In fact, Hamas was defending the electoral victory it had fairly and democratically won. It was then hit with a full Israeli blockade, and, in January 2009, a full-scale Israeli invasion that slaughtered some 1400 Gazans and left the territory of 1.5 million inhabitants in ruins.
It was this deadly, punitive blockade that the Israelis were trying to keep in place and the Freedom Flotilla was openly trying to breach with humanitarian goods. And in contrast to the Israeli position—that Gaza is by no means a humanitarian disaster, its inhabitants well-fed and taken care of—the United Nations has several times condemned the blockade, most recently in the form of the UN-commissioned Gaza report by Justice Richard Goldstone (known as the Goldstone Report). As laid out by Ray McGovern in a splendid article on June 1, “Obama’s Timidity and Death at Sea,” (commondreams.org) the report concluded:
“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …
“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …
“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip."
This business of “collective punishment” is serious, for it constitutes “a violation of the provisions of Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
This is the real background of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The blockade is illegal and inhuman, and attempting to bring some relief to the Gazan people and attention to the blockade has implied international sanction. Some of the people aboard the flotilla provide not only evidence of this, but also of the shameful history of decades of United States support for such violations. I am referring to Navy veteran Joe Meadors, a past president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. As Ray McGovern notes, Meadors was on the USS Liberty when the American intelligence-collecting ship was attacked by Israeli warplanes on June 5, 1967, during the Six-Day War (Israel apparently feared that some of its communications, proving that it had initiated the war against Egypt, had been picked up by the Liberty, and would become public). As they did two days ago, Israeli forces attacked an unarmed ship without provocation, killing 34 American sailors and wounding another 170. Incredibly, the U.S. government, fearful of exacerbating relations with an important ally, colluded in covering up the massacre. Sailors were ordered to remain silent about what happened. Joe Meadors was one of them, and, after so many years, apparently decided to take part in this latest attempt to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians. He is now among the 600 or so freedom activists being held incommunicado (stripped of all cell phones, laptops, cameras, and personal belongings) by the Israelis.
What we have, then, is yet another violation of international law by the Israeli government, and yet another instance of American timidity in response to it. The Obama administration has so far adopted a “let’s wait for the evidence” attitude, limiting itself to “regret” over the unfortunate deaths. Israel has also expressed regret that its “innocent” mission somehow turned violent when the activists attacked first. But the first comments from released activists—including those of Nilufer Cetin of Turkey, who was released because she accompanied her husband (the chief engineer of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship) with her tiny child—tell a different story. “There was a massacre on board,” said Cetin. “The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood.” As opposed to the Israeli version, Cetin says:
“the operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn’t stop, these warnings turned into an attack. There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters.” (“Israelis Opened Fire Before Boarding Gaza Flotilla, say Released Activists” by Dorian Jones, June 1, 2010, The Guardian/UK (reprinted commondreams.org).
The above article also quoted Dimitris Gielalis, aboard a second ship:
“Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used.”
Yet another released survivor from another ship, Michalis Grigoropoulos, said:
“The Israelis acted like pirates…They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do…Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks.”
So much for innocent Israelis forced into violence by fully-armed activists (it should be noted that all the dead were activists). The truth seems to be that the Israelis wanted, once again, to demonstrate who is in control in the eastern Mediterranean, and what the consequences are for international activists trying to ease the pain of those in Gaza. Israel considers such actions hostile, and is eager to convey its warning: ‘help the Palestinians and you will be treated just as they are.’ Another activist, demonstrating in Jerusalem, served as part of this warning yesterday. As reported by the AP on June 1, Emily Henochowicz of Maryland lost her eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired directly at her face. She joins American activists like Rachel Corrie and others who have been maimed and killed while trying to protect Palestinians, or their homes (Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death while standing before a Palestinian house slated for demolition) or their human dignity. This in the face of all those who lament, ‘why can’t the Palestinians use non-violence?’
In response to all this, American politicians seem content to express regrets over the bloodshed, and support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But as Ray McGovern points out, this kind of pusillanimous behavior has consequences. Israel clearly takes America’s silence, Obama’s silence in the face of its most brutal depradations as encouragement: 'do whatever you want to, but try to be a bit more discreet about it.' The result is that people die, people are brutalized, people are forced to endure the kind of treatment that stands comparison with the worst tortures and oppressions in human history. And we, we are forced to contemplate the cowardice of our political “leaders” and the continuing degradation of our ethics, our standing in the world, and the very language that is used to justify piracy and the murder of aid workers as “self-defense.”
Lawrence DiStasi
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Mesmerized by Disaster
It doesn’t take the media to let us know that the entire nation, perhaps the entire world, is mesmerized by BP’s oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We all feel it in our gut—something horrible looming, not quite fully formed, but sliding unstoppable towards the full-on environmental catastrophe we’ve been expecting for years. We in the United States, that is. Russia had its Chernobyl meltdown, but all we felt of it, in truth, was a new caution about not buying jams and jellies made in eastern Europe. India, via our beloved Union Carbide (now owned by Dow Chemical), had its Bhopal eruption of poison gases (methyl isocyanate), but we in the United States have still not digested the facts: more than 8,000 people killed instantly, with 12,000 others dying slowly, while countless others into the second generation endure retardation, birth defects, and reproductive problems. In the Bhopal case, indeed, those responsible have still not been brought to justice, and even refuse to release information on the health impact of their chemical, calling it a “trade secret.” And still what we have in the United States is a Congress that refuses to pass stringent regulations to control the energy industry (wasn’t there a coal mine disaster recently? haven’t these bastards continued to blow the tops off mountains so as to more economically access the coal beneath?), and CEOs who spout the usual mantra when it comes to oil: accidents are bound to happen, they’re the inevitable tradeoff to forging “energy independence,” so take your pick—your car or your environment.
And, docile as cattle led to slaughter, we all know this. We may deny it, we may keep hoping that the next Prius or the next electric car or the next fusion reaction will solve our energy problems, but the truth is, we understand what’s happening. Oil is running out, which means that we have to fatten oil companies with obscene profits in order to encourage them to drill in ever more risky places for the stuff without which our civilization would simply crash and burn. And so we remain glued to our TV sets, watching that monstrous (reminds one of the black smoke monster in “Lost”) black, white and brown cloud spewing from the pipe day and night, night and day for 40 days and still counting, and gauging in the backs of our minds the anguished questions: where is all that toxic goup going? What is it going to do to not just birds, not just endangered pelicans, but the entire marine chain starting with plankton? Will they ingest the toxic globules and pass it on up the food chain to shrimp and fish and birds and us? It seems likely. And we know it. We know this isn’t just about a few fishermen put out of business, though that’s grim enough. It isn’t just about a few miles of beaches getting soiled, though that’s horrible as well. It isn’t even about the marshes that could be inundated when the first hurricane lifts those miles-long oil plumes and sweeps them over and through the wetlands to create of them the toxic oil dump of our nightmares.
No. This is about the whole megillah. Because we know that ever since we started using this fiendish substance called petroleum, and all its by-products like plastic and pesticides and frankensteinian chemicals poisoning our farms and factories and rivers, and the obscene explosion in population it makes possible, we’ve been on a short path to a major comeuppance. A major realization. We’re poisoning the planet; destroying its fertility; clearcutting its forests; turning its once-fecund oceans into dead zones. And then, of course, there’s global warming—again, due to the hellfire of precisely those fossil fuels that are spewing out of that accursed drill pipe. Which is why that horror show at 5,000 feet holds us so transfixed. It represents now, for us all, the unvarnished truth we’ve been holding at bay for so long: we, the out-of-control human race that really can’t control anything especially a damn well 5,000 feet below the ocean, are the problem. And the problem has come home to the Gulf of Mexico to roost.
How it will end is anyone’s guess. At this point, all we can do is weep for what we have done—all of us. Because that’s why, in my view, we’re sitting here mesmerized, depressed, terrified and grieving for the innocent life we know is being oiled and soiled, tormented and tortured by what we do daily. It is us. Which makes me think of Walt Kelly’s great character, Pogo, who in one episode says: “We have met the enemy and it is us.” Amen. It is. We are doing it to ourselves. Because this is not just some crime against Nature—where Nature is something outside ourselves to observe in our laboratories and admire through our binoculars, and control and exploit and explode from above. Nature is us. We are that food chain. We are those wetlands. Like it or not, we derive from that mud, owe it our existence to this day. And the real question is, what can be said about a species that slowly but surely destroys that upon which it depends—the soil, the water, the trees, the creatures, the air—destroys that which it ineluctably is?
(May 29 update: BP has just admitted that its “top kill” maneuver—the language speaks volumes about the attitudes noted above—has failed. So the death watch goes on.)
Lawrence DiStasi
And, docile as cattle led to slaughter, we all know this. We may deny it, we may keep hoping that the next Prius or the next electric car or the next fusion reaction will solve our energy problems, but the truth is, we understand what’s happening. Oil is running out, which means that we have to fatten oil companies with obscene profits in order to encourage them to drill in ever more risky places for the stuff without which our civilization would simply crash and burn. And so we remain glued to our TV sets, watching that monstrous (reminds one of the black smoke monster in “Lost”) black, white and brown cloud spewing from the pipe day and night, night and day for 40 days and still counting, and gauging in the backs of our minds the anguished questions: where is all that toxic goup going? What is it going to do to not just birds, not just endangered pelicans, but the entire marine chain starting with plankton? Will they ingest the toxic globules and pass it on up the food chain to shrimp and fish and birds and us? It seems likely. And we know it. We know this isn’t just about a few fishermen put out of business, though that’s grim enough. It isn’t just about a few miles of beaches getting soiled, though that’s horrible as well. It isn’t even about the marshes that could be inundated when the first hurricane lifts those miles-long oil plumes and sweeps them over and through the wetlands to create of them the toxic oil dump of our nightmares.
No. This is about the whole megillah. Because we know that ever since we started using this fiendish substance called petroleum, and all its by-products like plastic and pesticides and frankensteinian chemicals poisoning our farms and factories and rivers, and the obscene explosion in population it makes possible, we’ve been on a short path to a major comeuppance. A major realization. We’re poisoning the planet; destroying its fertility; clearcutting its forests; turning its once-fecund oceans into dead zones. And then, of course, there’s global warming—again, due to the hellfire of precisely those fossil fuels that are spewing out of that accursed drill pipe. Which is why that horror show at 5,000 feet holds us so transfixed. It represents now, for us all, the unvarnished truth we’ve been holding at bay for so long: we, the out-of-control human race that really can’t control anything especially a damn well 5,000 feet below the ocean, are the problem. And the problem has come home to the Gulf of Mexico to roost.
How it will end is anyone’s guess. At this point, all we can do is weep for what we have done—all of us. Because that’s why, in my view, we’re sitting here mesmerized, depressed, terrified and grieving for the innocent life we know is being oiled and soiled, tormented and tortured by what we do daily. It is us. Which makes me think of Walt Kelly’s great character, Pogo, who in one episode says: “We have met the enemy and it is us.” Amen. It is. We are doing it to ourselves. Because this is not just some crime against Nature—where Nature is something outside ourselves to observe in our laboratories and admire through our binoculars, and control and exploit and explode from above. Nature is us. We are that food chain. We are those wetlands. Like it or not, we derive from that mud, owe it our existence to this day. And the real question is, what can be said about a species that slowly but surely destroys that upon which it depends—the soil, the water, the trees, the creatures, the air—destroys that which it ineluctably is?
(May 29 update: BP has just admitted that its “top kill” maneuver—the language speaks volumes about the attitudes noted above—has failed. So the death watch goes on.)
Lawrence DiStasi
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