When Did This Become This

 “2017 Deadliest on Record for Killings by Police”  reads the headline of a recent article by Rachel Bevins. The author  consults the “Killed by Police” database to lay out her statistics. So far, police zealotry has resulted in 714 murders, indicating that this year may set the record for assassination-by-police. Murder-to-murder, an aggrieved U.S. public has registered crescendoing outrage. The Rodney King beating may furnish the trend’s overture. Or perhaps Trayvon Martin (murdered by an unhinged vigilante). But certainly the ruthless murder of Oscar Grant furnishes an iconic jumping off point. Since then we have had Michael Brown (left in the street to bleed out for hours), Tamir Rice (12 years old wielding a toy gun), Sandra Bland (murdered for a left turn), Freddie Gray (murdered for having a fragile neck), all of them black people, from U.S. regions as far apart as Missouri, Florida, and Maryland. Holding the thousands upon thousands of names of victims, primarily those of people of color, in heart and mind requires the kilobyte memory of the Recording Angel herself.

For a public which remains relatively unconcerned about the victimization of the poor, and of people of color, police were happy to furnish a wake-up call with the recent murder of Justine Damond, a manifestly white (and beautiful) Australian woman shot and killed when she made the fatal mistake of calling 911 to report a neighborhood disturbance. The newspapers were happy to run her picture (good for sales): a magnificent, blonde, manifestly white woman, her life cruelly snuffed out.

The political climate is ripe to run those annual mortality figures up with militarization of law enforcement, with the current Resident whose recent remarks indicate it’s open season now for uncontested police brutality, and whose obsession to erect an exclusionary border wall will call on Israeli firm, Elbit Systems to build; with an Attorney General hell-bent on increasing police larceny with asset forfeiture,  with a 1033 Federal Program which force feeds municipal police departments with battle-grade military hardware, with funneling discharged vets, many suffering from PTSD, into municipal police, not to mention Urban Shield, a program billed as “intense training for intense times,” and stop and frisk and arrest quota policies in force in major cities like New York.       

What Happened to ”Serve and Protect?”

According to the Official Story, the 1033 Program was created by the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal 1997 to “transfer excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies,” signed into law by Resident Clinton, but fairly hidden from public attention until the murder of Michael Brown by police in 2014 in Ferguson, MO. The most commonly transferred material from federal to municipal custody was ammunition. But after 911, Michael Chertoff, who happens to hold dual citizenship with Israel was instrumental not only in representing the firm manufacturing airport body scanners, but as head of Homeland Security under George Bush, promoted the acquisition of battle-grade hardware—not just ammunition—by municipal “law enforcement.”

According to Max Blumenthal, the “israelization” of American law enforcement began after 9-11, when the federal government began to look to the Israelis for counter-terrorism expertise. In response, the Israel lobby “provided thousands of top cops with all-expense paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials.” He states further that many of those trips and trainings were arranged by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a pro-Israel organization whose advisors have included Douglas Feith and Richard Perle (both of whom hold dual citizenship with Israel).

The chief of the police force, Timothy Fitch, responsible for the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson had received training from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF); the force responsible for nearly killing veteran Scott Olsen during the Oakland Occupy trained with the IDF.

$4.5 taxpayer-funded award to make good for cop mayhem

 Why Israel?

Israeli counter-terrorism expertise is the outgrowth of Israel’s Palestinian policy, a policy which more and more is bring compared to South African apartheid, and to American “Indian removal” policies. It leaves Gaza with fewer than four hours of electricity a day, with black outs and water shortages. Palestinian men and children are being held in Israeli prisons for months on end without trial. Palestinian homes are being bulldozed with impunity and replaced with thousands of illegal settlement units. Repeatedly Israel has been sanctioned by the United Nations for its colonial settler policies, with opposition to those sanctions consistently coming from the United States. I would go so far as to say that Palestinians are among many people of color in the front lines of the world-wide struggle to obtain manumission.

Certain contradictions.

In an August 16 article headlined “Racial Supremacy and the Zionist Exception” David Lloyd points out the contradiction between the readiness by American politicians to condemn the recent White Supremacist events in Charlottesville, VA, with their ardent support for a racist regime in Israel that is no less inspired by racial supremacy and an ideology that supports ethnic cleansing, demonstrated by signing on to a bill that would protect the State of Israel by imposing civil and possible criminal penalties on anyone opposing violations of Palestinian rights, and by advocating the boycott of Israel’s economic, academic or cultural institutions.

Steve Bannon cosies up to dual citizen Sheldon Adelson

My (Jewish) mother-in-law used to say “When you sleep with dogs, you catch fleas.” Of course it sounds even pithier in Polish. American law enforcement has fallen victim to an Israeli flea infestation, and by doing so has yielded United States sovereignty. Until that unholy alliance is ruptured, the United States will remain the client state of Israel.

Sign the Jewish Voice for Peace petition to the Anti-Defamation League to end the deadly exchange with Israeli police that mimics Israeli military occupation.

And now for something you’ll really enjoy:  watch Mozart stick it to Trumpocracy.

A Scattering of Roses Amongst This Week’s Thorns

Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Obaidullah secured a settlement from James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, the two psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA torture program that ensnared two of them and killed a relative of the third.

Culinary Workers Union in Nevada instrumental in defeating Big Pharma in demanding transparency in insulin pricing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) had the authority to deny a Clean Water Act permit to four companies planning to construct the Constitution Pipeline, which would have carried fracked gas from Pennsylvania to Eastern New York State. 

Nine Eastern states (five with Republican governors) agree to cut power plant Emissions an extra 90%.

For the second time this week, citing the threat to climate change, another US court rejects a federal regulators approval of a $3.5 billion natural gas pipeline

In Texas, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos rules against Senate Bill 14 voter ID law, on the grounds that it would place a “disproportionate burden” on black and  Latino voters.

Proactive Oberlin Ohio replaces Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Holiday.

DOJ drops demand for IP addresses of 1.3 million visitors to anti-Trump site.

Arizona’s ethnic studies ban ruled unconstitutional.

Democrat, Dawn Euer wins Rhode Island special election.

While North Korea Makes Overtures the US Saber Rattles

The Korean War is sometimes referred to as the forgotten war. It may have been quite overlooked by most Americans, but Korea still bears its scars and will for eternity. Now especially, with threat and counter threat, and in the face of an abdicating media, and the very fearsome possibility of a nuclear conflict looming, it is time to remind ourselves of exactly how the American economy hangs on two sectors, one of which happens to be perpetual war. (I leave discussion of the other for an issue on Afghanistan.)

This past week I had the pleasure of listening to three extremely well-informed women speakers who shared their remarks with us on the occasion of Nagasaki Day at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, attended by 200 peace advocates for a nuclear-free world and followed by the non-violent civil disobedience arrest of 42 of us. Here are the remarks of Christine Hong, who joined us last Friday morning from Santa Cruz where she teaches literature and specializes in Korean diaspora and Pacific Rim studies:

I am here speaking before you today because of the terrible urgency of the present crisis with North Korea and the need for those of us in the anti-nukes, peace, and social justice movements in the United States to mobilize en masse to push for peace.

Korea by Picasso

Many of you who have fought for a world without nukes understand that the horror of the atomic bombings of civilian populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki amount to a terrible stain on the American conscience. Some of you came of age during the era of the brutal American war in Vietnam, and you recall how youth and conscience-stricken people converged in protest, making that time period a watershed moment in the American peace movement. In more recent decades, some of you may have taken part in the anti-war protests, raising your voices in the lead-up to the unconscionable war in Iraq. These have all been signature moments in the grassroots struggle for peace.

By contrast, North Korea, a country that knows more intimately than almost any other what it means to be in the cross-hairs of the U.S. war machine and that the United States has repeatedly threatened with nuclear annihilation has hardly occasioned any organized grassroots action. North Korea does not weigh on the conscience of the American public, though it should. Most Americans have no sense of how intimately the current crisis with North Korea is shaped by the ugly and reckless adventurism of American warmongering and the overwhelming disregard that most Americans demonstrate when the deaths of others as a result of our foreign policy occurs far from U.S. shores. North Korea comes to us in media portraits not in its complex truth, but as a simultaneously cartoonish and demonic portrait filtered through the fog of war, so shrouded in jingoistic rhetoric that too many of us consent to its apocalyptic destruction in advance. 

 When asked this past spring to ponder in real terms what it would mean if Trump were to authorize a nuclear strike against North Korea, Senator Lindsey Graham stated, “Yes, it would be terrible, but the war would be over there. It wouldn’t be here. It would be bad for the Korean peninsula, it would be bad for China, it would be bad for Japan, it would be bad for South Korea, it would be the end of North Korea but what it would not do is hit America.”

Yesterday we were subjected to Trump’s reckless challenge to North Korea, the most terrifying that we’ve yet seen from his administration: If North Korea continues to make threats against the United States, he stated, appearing to draw a red line with regard to North Korean speech acts, it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Given that his words fall around the somber anniversary of the atomic apocalypse the United States visited on Japan, we are again reminded that the policy-makers in Washington are afflicted with what Chalmers Johnson described as the amnesia of imperial powers.

We don’t recall that at the root of the present crisis is the Korean War, a brutal, dirty, and unresolved war—a war ironically known in this country for being “forgotten” but that set a paradigm for subsequent U.S. wars of intervention to follow. Few, in the mid-twentieth century, during a time of McCarthyism, registered opposition to the Korean War. Paul Robeson was an exception, and he is an example for us now. In a critique of “armed adventure in Korea” that resonates to this day, he lambasted his fellow citizens’ “meek conformity with the policies of the war-minded, the racists, and the rich.”

Robeson unflinchingly observed that “the maw of warmakers [was] insatiable” in Korea. In an asymmetrical conflict in which the United States monopolized the skies, raining down ruin from on high, four million Koreans—the vast majority of them civilians—were killed. Chinese statistics indicate that North Korea lost an unimaginable thirty percent of its population. Civilian infrastructure was not spared. Dams, schools, any standing structure was deemed to be fair game; indeed, American bombers complained that there was nothing left for them to bomb. As the historian Bruce Cumings notes, it was during this period that North Koreans, whom he describes as the “party of memory,” learned how to live below ground. Three days into the war, Truman slapped a punitive round of sanctions against North Korea as an explicit part of his war policy—sanctions not as an alternative to war, this is to say, but as war—and North Korea to this day is the most heavily sanctioned nation on this earth. Against the conditions of the 1953 Armistice Agreement, the United States maintains roughly 30,000 forces and 100 military installations south of the DMZ—in stark contrast to China, which withdrew its forces from the peninsula within a short window of time. This is to underscore that for the entirety of its existence, North Korea has been subjected to a regime-change policy from the United States.

 Just as most Americans did not register that the United States test-launched a Minuteman 3 ICBM from Vandenberg last week in a show of force aimed at North Korea—something that is, we should note, routinely done—so too do most Americans not know that at mid-century General Douglas MacArthur contemplated dropping “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria” in order to create a zone of cobalt where no one could live for at least 60, perhaps over a hundred years, thus making impossible a Chinese advance from the north.In addition to placing nuclear weapons in South Korea for the duration of the Cold War in violation of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, the United States has threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation on at least a dozen occasions: when North Korea captured the crew of the Pueblo in the late sixties, when Colin Powell threatened to turn North Korea into a “charcoal briquette” in the nineties, when North Korea was added to the list of permissible preemptive targets in the 2002 Nuclear Posture review during the George W. Bush “Axis of Evil” era, when President Obama announced he was sending two Stealth bombers to drop dummy nuclear munitions off the Korean peninsula in a simulated nuclear first strike against North Korea, when Trump administration officials have repeatedly declared that all options are on the table. The unresolved Korean War, U.S. threats of nuclear annihilation, and U.S. regime-change policy are the structural roots of North Korea’s proliferation 

  

In this time of unprecedented danger, we have to be ruthless not in our threats but in our pursuit of truth, courageous not with our swords but in our willingness to confront our own denial. We have to recognize that North Korea does not require further U.S. intervention but rather that what we are seeing is a result of prior U.S. intervention and a state of unending war. The question before us is what a genuine peace means with North Korea. Few media outlets have reported on North Korea’s overtures to the United States. When it comes to North Korea, media coverage is all too often truly “fake news.” Yet these overtures, if pursued, might result in meaningful de-escalation on both sides. To be clear: there are peaceful alternatives at hand. Far from being an intractable foe, North Korea has repeatedly asked the United States to sign a peace treaty that would bring the unresolved Korean War to a long overdue end. It has also proposed that the United States cease its annual war games with South Korea. North Korea has cautioned the United States not to treat war as a game, especially in the form of the simulated invasion and occupation of North Korea, the “decapitation” of its leadership, and rehearsals of a preemptive nuclear strike. In return, North Korea will cap its nuclear weapons testing. China and Russia have reiterated this proposal. The United States, however, maintains that its joint war games with South Korea are simply business as usual and has not seen fit to respond. On August 21, it plans to proceed with its annual Ulchi-Freedom Guardian joint war exercises.

At mid-century, the vast majority of Americans were silent as this country went to war with North Korea. We cannot, we must not, be silent now.

Please endorse the petition to Presidents Trump & Moon to negotiate not escalate.

If you wish, also sign the Change.org petition here.

Join a Peace demonstration near you!

A Scattering of of this Week's Roses Amidst the Thorns

Women

Tunisia passes law against violence against women July 26.

Politics

Democrat Phil Miller wins special election for Iowa House in District 82.

White House withdraws nominee, George Nesterczuk, former employee of  the Ukrainian Government, as Director of the Office of Personnel Management.  

Shedding the Dark Legacy of 1945

This week the world marks the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. government eager to grandstand by reminding the Eastern bloc that U.S. is the world’s Number One strong man.

In one small part of the world, I will join the monthly demonstration taking place on the 11^th of every month outside the Japanese consulate in San Francisco, sponsored by the No Nukes Action Committee, to commemorate the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima which occurred on March 11^th, 2011, and to confront the government of Prime Minister Abe as the leader of one of American’s many client states.

Writing letters to a Prime Minister who is probably as moss-backed as Donald Trump, but not quite as unpredictable, represents some kind of folly—except that this demonstration is live-streamed directly to Japan where it reminds many Japanese traumatized by the actions of their government that in a small part of the world, there are a few Americans left still capable of expressing hamdard* on their behalf. (Hamdard is the Dari word for ‘shared pain.’)

With some help from my nuclear-resisting friends, and on behalf of the No Nukes Action Committee, I share this month’s letter to P.M. Abe:

Your Excellency:

This week marks the 72^nd anniversary of the most heinous war crime ever perpetrated on one warring nation by another: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You sir, were not yet born. But by the time of your birth, thanks to the machinations of the U.S. government in collaboration with war criminal Matsutaro Shoriki, and despite the deep aversion of the Japanese people, the government of Japan was sold on nuclear energy, and Japan’s period of nuclear research and nuclear plant construction by American companies began.

Your administration has inherited this dark legacy. But at the same time, it has inherited what could turn out to be two magnificent opportunities if your government is brave enough to pursue them:

•Your administration could countermand the order forcing persons displaced by the nuclear disaster to return to live in the contaminated areas of Fukushima and in particular, the city of Namie, and to re-populate an area even more contaminated than Chernobyl with its one thousand square mile exclusion zone.

Fukushima 311 Voices’ recent post at https://fukushima311voices.wordpr describes the work of the Fukuichi Area Environmental Radiation Monitoring Project team, a group of people over 60 years of age who have ventured into these heavily contaminated areas to obtain radiation readings at great risk to their own lives. Their post includes a 372 plot map of Namie. each plot measuring 375 meters X 250 meters in the Futaba District of Fukushima prefecture showing 13 plots which register 2 million to 3 million Bequerels contamination by Cesium 137 and Cesium 134 per square meters; 76 plots registering between 1 and 2 million Bq/m3;  an additional 111 plots registering between 400 thousand and 1 million Bq/m3; plus 160 plots showing contamination ranging from 40,000 Bq/m3 to 400, thousand. But 9 plots show contamination exceeding 3 million Bq/m3.

The average surface count per minute above ground is 1,199 counts per minute.  At this average level of contamination, drinking, eating or staying overnight is prohibited; even adults, including nuclear workers, are not allowed to stay more than 10 hours—and your government is proposing that those displaced persons must return there to live???

Fukushima "clean-up" Crew

• Still another opportunity presents itself: Recently the Tokyo Electric Power Company announced plans to dump the 770,000 tons of tritium-contaminated water presently being stored in some 580 tanks at the Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean based on the naïve theory that the ocean is so big it can absorb an insult of such magnitude. But the dumping cannot occur without the consent of your government. Your opportunity and the opportunity of your government is to recognize the irreparable harm such a measure would entail, and to prohibit TEPCO from realizing such an eco-cidal plan.

Besides repeated cover-ups, TEPCO’s criminal track record includes failing to meet the basic safety  requirements which might have prevented the Fukushima-Daiichi emergency generators from failing. With 40% of marine species already unfit for human consumption, dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of tritium-contaminated water would further devastate sea life.

Will you step up to the plate? Will your government recognize that Japan is part of a larger planetary system which transcends national boundaries, and political maneuvering by prohibiting TEPCO from dumping its tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific, whose waters are shared by 42 other countries and 12 colonial dependencies?

Will your government uphold the human right of the survivors of Fukushima’s nuclear catastrophe by countermanding your administrations’s order condemning them to face the risk of radiation disease and death by forcing them to return to an area more heavily contaminated than Chernobyl?

Will your government have the courage to seize these opportunities? Or will you

surrender Japan’s independence by following in the dark footsteps of Japan’s American-imposed nuclear legacy?

Tell the Japanese Government: don’t dump hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water into the Pacific.

Endorse and circulate the WILPF petition supporting the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by 122 countries on July 7, 2017.  

A Few Roses Amongst This Week’s Thorns

Environment

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rules that the EPA must immediately reinstate the Obama-era pollution rule that sets methane emission standards for the oil and natural gas industry.

EPA director Scott Pruiit withdraws the unlawful delay postponing standards regulating smog pollution.

Energy

Spains’s Garoña, a boiling water reactor will be shut down after the ministry of energy announced its license will not be renewed.

Santee Cooper Utilities and the Scana Corporation, co-owners of the Summer, N.C.  light water reactor building project announced cancellation owing to cost overruns, and inability of the nuclear industry to compete with wind and solar.

Labor

In Malaysia workers at Shangri-La Hotels won their thirteen-year fight to restore collective bargaining rights.

Endorse the petition to stop Scott Pruit’s waffling on the issue of methane pollution, a gas far more lethal to global warming even than C02.

Endorse the no war planes over Syria (in violation of sovereign airspace) petititon now.