Violence, Racism, and Fundamentally Changing the United States

Seventy-seven years ago, civil rights activist and poet Langston Hughes wrote his chilling poem “Kids Who Die” to illuminate the horrors of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Now at the one year mark of Michael Brown's death and the Ferguson uprising that sparked a movement, let us listen to Hughes' words with new ears. ColorOfChange.org.

Violence, Racism, and Fundamentally Changing the United States
By Richard Jehn / August 8, 2015

When will it be enough? Another horrible tragedy, self-confessed to be an act of terror and white supremacy has occurred. It isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, but we are seeing a more accurate record of these acts because of the available technology so many people now have in hand. And most observers are appalled to see them, police shooting unarmed black men in the back as they run away, a policeman abusing a young black girl at a junior high school pool party, and nine murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, followed by the burning of six more African American churches across the south, three of which have been unmistakably identified as arson.

But the fact is that nothing is new here. This has been happening since the founding of this nation, but events have simply had some different manifestations over time. This country was founded in some of the worst sorts of violence. In the very earliest days, European white settlers made it their business to eliminate, in one way or another, 90% of the resident population of the present-day United States. This took the form of outright slaughter most frequently, but also occurred through quite nefarious means such as burning Native American crops and deliberately passing smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans.¹ It should be no surprise that our founding fathers participated in this violence.²

While this “subduing” of the resident population was taking place, the settlers also thought it in their best interest to kidnap a few million Africans to come work for free in the new territory they were opening up. Thousands of those kidnapped never made it to the new world, dying during the voyage of disease, starvation, dehydration, and abject sadness. But those who did survive managed over the next couple of hundred years of mistreatment to create about 60% of present-day wealth in the US.³ Good arguments exist to demonstrate that the revolution that created the United States was a result of British reluctance to sanction continued slave-holding.⁴

Robert Jensen goes so far as to call these two periods “holocausts,” which they surely were: first, genocide of the Native Americans, followed closely by the genocide of Africans. He also describes the third holocaust as the continuing violence in other nations as the United States “protects” its overseas interests, sometimes in defending the oil industry, sometimes in removing a contrary government, occasionally to “bring democracy” to some needy nation, and for various other reasons in passing.⁵

Regardless, it is clear that from the earliest days of this nation, white European settlers unequivocally knew that they were superior to both the indigenous population and to the black immigrants who were building their nation. And this white supremacy has become a cultural fact of life for every person who has ever lived in the United States, manifested frequently in outright racist behavior, especially prior to passage of legislation specifically outlawing discrimination and segregation, but more frequently appearing in much more subtle ways, well documented in numerous in-depth studies.⁶

I have not seen it more appropriately expressed than in this short passage:

In my own lifetime, segregation and antimiscegenation laws were still on the books in many states. During the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents, and for several hundred years before them, laws were used to prevent blacks from learning to read, write, own property, or vote; blacks were, by constitutional mandate, outlawed from the hopeful, loving expectations that come from being treated as a whole, rather than three-fifths of a person. When every resource of a wealthy nation is put to such destructive ends, it will take more than a few generations to mop up the mess.

We are all inheritors of that legacy, whether new to this world or new to this country, for it survives as powerful and invisibly reinforcing structures of thought, language, and law. Thus generalized notions of innocence and guilt have little place in the struggle for transcendence; there is no blame among the living for the dimensions of this historic crime, this national tragedy. There is, however, responsibility for never forgetting another’s history, for making real the psychic obliteration that does live on as a factor in shaping relations not just between blacks and whites …., or between blacks and blacks …., but between whites and whites as well.⁷

And we continue to live this awful legacy every single day of every single year, in the form of those police murders (I will call them what they are) of black men and women; in the form of the overtly racist murders of nine African Americans in a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; in the form of continued economic disadvantage of Native and African Americans, and Hispanics⁸; in the form of significantly greater incarceration rates for Native and African Americans, and Hispanics⁹; and in the form of the continued existence of intentionally all-white towns and neighborhoods throughout the United States.

Sundown towns require special mention since they are not common knowledge. Between 1890 and 1930, many whites in the US took exception to the outcome of the Civil War, and especially the Reconstruction era, and took upon themselves the continued repression and exclusion of African Americans. These sundown towns were typically characterized by either signage or some other clear signal (such as a whistle that sounded at 6 pm) that blacks were to be out of the town by sundown or face dire (usually violent, including death) consequences. Moreover, these towns were more prevalent in the northern states and included every state in the US. The phenomenon is extensively documented both in James Loewen’s 2005 book on the subject and on his website which contains up-to-date information about these communities.¹⁰

To put it bluntly, this is a big-time white people problem and all of the people of color in this nation suffer because of it. And it is time for the white people to act like grown-ups, own this problem, and do something meaningful about it.

Since the event in Charleston, and the more recent incident where Sandra Bland was arrested on a fabricated charge and soon afterward died in jail,¹¹ I have seen some stunningly good suggestions for change. I especially appreciate Aaryn Belfer’s eleven suggestions in her article “How to Be an Interrupter: A White Person’s Guide to Activism,” where she says, “Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Be an up-stander, not a bystander. Be an interrupter.”

I do not believe anyone has yet proposed a solution to the white supremacy problem in this country that will result in the changes we need to reach a meaningful state of non-racist equilibrium and true social justice. I view what I have read to date as band-aid fixes for what ails us, although absolutely everything helps. I also believe that legislation passed during and after the era of the civil rights movement has turned out in retrospect to be band-aid measures through which those desiring continuation of the racial imbalance always find loopholes. We have reached a moment where we need much more and we have a meaningful precedent to guide us.

John Toland has suggested that Adolf Hitler used the United States model for his treatment of gypsies, Jews, and other non-Aryan undesirables.¹²

Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

Assuming that Hitler used the violence and aggression visited by the United States on the Indigenous population as the model for the Nazis’ violence against non-Aryan populations in Europe and other conquered lands, would it be worth considering what the German people decided to do in post-World War II Germany to cleanse themselves of the Nazi atrocities?

Others have made such a suggestion, but not in as explicit terms as I do. Brian Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said in a recent interview:

So yes, the Confederate flag should come down but more than that, we need to engage with this in a very different way. You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps. Germans want you to go to the concentration camps and reflect soberly on the legacy of the Holocaust. We do the opposite here. We don’t want anybody talking about slavery, we don’t want anybody talking about lynching, we don’t want anybody talking about segregation. You say the word “race” and people immediately get nervous. You say the words “racial justice” and they're looking for the exits. If we're going to change the attitudes of the judges who are making sentencing decisions, and police officers who are unfairly suspecting young men of color, and employers and educators who are suspending and expelling kids of color at disproportionately high rates, if we're going to make a difference in overcoming the implicit bias that we all have, we're going to have to deal honestly with this history and have to consciously work on freeing ourselves from this history.

Following World War II, German society implemented a curriculum in all German schools teaching the Holocaust, its results, and how it transpired in gory detail to all German children as they went through school. This curriculum frequently includes trips to concentration camps so students can see for themselves the ovens, the gas chambers, and the horrible living conditions. In the words of a staff member of the German Information Center:

For Germans, the Holocaust is not an event that happened in a faraway place in some distant past, but is part and parcel of their recent history. The memory of the Nazi dictatorship -- of which the Holocaust is an integral part -- and its traumatic legacies have been shaping German policies since the end of World War II. The rebuilding of political institutions in western Germany and postwar political education were largely determined by a serious effort to try to understand the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and by searching for safeguards in order to prevent history from repeating itself. Consequently, teaching about Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust at schools is not limited to a niche in the history syllabus like the "French and the Indian Wars." Instead, it is discussed again and again in different ways, in a number of subjects, and at different points in time.

The treatment of the Nazi period in all its aspects -- Hitler's rise to power; his establishment of a dictatorship in Germany; the abolition of the rule of law; the persecution of all kinds of political opponents; the racially motivated persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust; the reticence and opposition of German citizens; and, Germany's instigation of World War II -- is compulsory teaching matter at all types of schools in Germany and at all levels of education. The Holocaust is treated as the most important aspect of the period of Nazi rule.¹³

It is not far-fetched in the least to compare the treatment of Native Americans to the Nazi Holocaust, nor is it inappropriate to consider slavery and its seemingly endless aftermath of racism and discrimination comparable to the treatment of Jewish and other non-Aryan Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s.¹⁴ Thus, to seek a similar solution to this US problem seems obvious.

So the specific proposal for the United States is to include explicit curriculum in our schools to teach the truth of our past, to include all the gory details of the slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, including the aftermath of the Civil War that resulted in covert methods of discrimination and segregation that persist to the present day. Let’s bring this information out into the light of day for detailed examination and include with it the teaching of empathy in our classrooms. Let’s change what our children are learning to instill in them the horror of our past so our culture can learn not to repeat that repulsive past.

Clear precedents and active programs are in place to seed the effort to change the United States curriculum. In particular, Rethinking Schools has been making a significant impact on teaching and curriculum in the past 25 years. Moreover, it is well past time to take meaningful action when we hear Barack Obama say, “… this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.” If we mean what we are saying in all of the eulogies, tirades, rants, and other assorted missives I’ve read and heard since the tragedy in Charleston on June 17, 2015 and the Sandra Bland incident in Waller County, Texas in mid-July, then now is the time to begin the work to change our US society.

I recognize the challenge this poses where some states in control of school curriculum tend toward regression in the teaching of science and history. And even before this conservative regression, history curriculum in the US has been sorely deficient.¹⁵ But clear precedents do exist to proceed with development of meaningful curriculum to change our society. More than ten years ago, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the state had ignored its constitutional responsibility to teach indigenous history and culture. That was the beginning of what has turned into a cascade of states implementing curriculum to teach Native American tribal history and culture, now including Idaho, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and most recently Washington.¹⁶

Although this is only anecdotal, the letter that appeared in the Bellingham Cascadia Weekly (on page 5) in June 2015 is indicative of the impact such curriculum can have:

I am in seventh grade at Fairhaven Middle School. In my social studies class, we have been learning about the past 200 years of Washington’s history. This includes the genocide of Native Americans, and also the cultural genocide through putting the natives in small reservations and sending the children far off to schools where their culture was belittled and they were transformed into the ways of the white culture. These things have now been found to be directly linked to problems many reservations face today.

Though there have been some apologies made, I feel that there has been little done in acknowledging our society’s actions in the past. The natives were living here first for thousands of years, yet they seem to get little respect. I noticed that in Fairhaven, there is a plaque that apologizes to the Chinese community for the Chinese deadline which was in place in 1898 to 1903. You probably know of this plaque. Former Mayor Dan Pike put it in, in 2011, as a formal apology to the Chinese community.

This made me think, why is there no such thing for the native community?

I believe what was done to them was worse than the Chinese deadline, the native people’s culture was absolutely destroyed! I think they deserve an apology from Whatcom County. It doesn’t have to be big or grand, but something like a plaque would remind our society of what has been done and it will show that we acknowledge previous actions and are sorry for them. It is just a thought, but I believe that it is the right thing to do. —Klara M. Schwarz, Bellingham

Any curriculum developed for meaningful portrayal of United States history must depend critically on the participation of the African American and the Native American communities, as well as all minority communities that suffer from the effects of white supremacy. I also believe that such a curriculum must be taught throughout the school years, starting at the earliest ages to ensure the lessons are deeply embedded.

Another component of US curriculum must be a program such as Roots of Empathy. This Canadian-born program has now been adopted for pilot study in four US states (California, Washington, New Mexico, New York, and Washington, D.C.), and is used in many nations around the globe. The original purpose of the program was to reduce the incidence of bullying and aggression in schools:

The focus of Roots of Empathy in the long term is to build capacity of the next generation for responsible citizenship and responsive parenting. In the short term, Roots of Empathy focuses on raising levels of empathy, resulting in more respectful and caring relationships and reduced levels of bullying and aggression. Part of our success is the universal nature of the program; all students are positively engaged instead of targeting bullies or aggressive children.¹⁷

But with little doubt, such a program would have more far-reaching effects. If it were combined with the teaching of US history, including the gross mistreatment of Native and African Americans, perhaps the impact would be even greater.

We can no longer continue living the lie of United States history as it is currently understood in this nation. We must take the next steps in our growth and evolution in order to eliminate the scourge of white supremacy and its racist manifestations from our culture. As Barack Obama says, “It is in our power to do something about it.” Let’s make sure what we do is meaningful.

Notes

1. "An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)," Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Sept. 2014. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
2. See also Dunbar-Ortiz, pp. 77-82.
3. "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," Edward E. Baptist. 2014. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Basic Books.
4. "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America," Gerald Horne. 2014. New York and London: New York University Press.
5. “The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege,” Robert Jensen. 2005. San Francisco: City Light Books. And for a listing of US incursions at home and abroad since 1890, see Zoltan Grossman’s website.
6. See, for example, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class,” Ian Haney Lόpez. 2014. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, and “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander. 2012. New York, New York: The New Press.
7. “The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor,” Patricia J. Williams (1991). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Pp. 60-61.
8. “People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn. 2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
9. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander. 2012. New York, New York: The New Press.
10. “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” James Loewen. 2005. New York: Touchstone. See also his website.
11. And see full video of arrest here, which, I believe, corroborates my claim that it is a fabricated charge.
12. “Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography,” John Toland. 1991. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. P. 202. Cited in “Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust” by Lia Mandelbaum. Jewish Journal, June 18, 2013.
13. “Holocaust Education in Germany,” German Information Center. 1998.
14. And Robert Jensen agrees with that analysis. See “The Heart of Whiteness,” pp. 27-44.
15. “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,” James M. Loewen. 2007. New York: Touchstone.
16. “Since Time Immemorial,” http://www.indian-ed.org/.
17. http://www.rootsofempathy.org/en/who-we-are/mission-goals-and-values.html.

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The War on Drugs Is a Failure: UN Commission

Photo: M.A. Cabrera Luengo.

Citing Failed War on Drugs, World Leaders Call for Widespread Decriminalization
Global commission condemns "harsh measures grounded in repressive ideologies"
By Deirdre Fulton / September 9, 2014

In the face of a failed War on Drugs, a global commission composed mostly of former world leaders recommended on Tuesday that governments decriminalize and regulate the use of currently illicit drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and psychedelics.

"The international drug regime is broken," reads the report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose members include former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan; former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz; former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and former high commissioner for human rights at the UN Louise Arbour; and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, as well as the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Portugal. "[O]verwhelming evidence points to not just the failure of the regime to attain its stated goals but also the horrific unintended consequences of punitive and prohibitionist laws and policies."

Punitive drug law enforcement has done nothing to decrease global drug use, the Commission says in "Taking Control: Pathways to Drug Policies that Work" (pdf). Instead, such policies have fueled crime, maximized health risks, undermined human rights, and fostered discrimination — all while wasting tens of billions of dollars.

In place of these "harsh measures grounded in repressive ideologies," the commission recommends that world governments:

• Shift their focus from enforcement to prevention and harm reduction;
• Ensure equitable and affordable access to "essential medicines" like opiate-based pain medications;
• Stop criminalizing people for drug use and possession;
• Rely on alternatives to incarceration for non-violent, low-level participants in illicit drug markets such as farmers and couriers;
Look for alternatives to militarized anti-drug efforts when going after organized crime groups;
• "Allow and encourage diverse experiments in legally regulating markets in currently illicit drugs, beginning with but not limited to cannabis, coca leaf and certain novel psychoactive substances;"
• Use the upcoming major review of drug policies by the UN General Assembly, scheduled for 2016, as an opportunity to open debate on true reform.

Implementing such reforms "is necessary because global drug prohibition, the dominant paradigm in the last 40 years, has not only failed in achieving its original stated objectives, which was to reduce drug consumption and improve health worldwide, but it has, in fact, generated a lot of harm, including an AIDS and hepatitis epidemic among people who use drugs and social violence and infiltration of democracies with narco-traffickers and the birth of a few narco-states in the world," commission member Michel Kazatchkine, UN Secretary General Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said in an interview with The World Today's Eleanor Hall.

He continued:

We're promoting a model similar to let's say what exists with tobacco. That is, put government in control: in control of who produces the drug, of the quality of the drug, on how and where it is sold, to whom it is sold — for example, forbid it to people less than let's say 18 years old or whatever.

Take back control of that market and therefore reduce, not only the violence, but also reduce the health and social harms that the current international regime has generated.

Experts called the report groundbreaking. In a statement, Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann said, “The import of the Commission’s report lies in both the distinction of its members and the boldness of their recommendations. The former presidents and other Commission members pull no punches in insisting that national and global drug control policies reject the failed prohibitionist policies of the 20th century in favor of new policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. There’s no question now that the genie of reform has escaped the prohibitionist bottle."

In its report, the Commission acknowledges that reshaping the global discussion on drugs will be a challenge:

The obstacles to drug policy reform are both daunting and diverse. Powerful and established drug control bureaucracies, both national and international, staunchly defend status quo policies. They seldom question whether their involvement and tactics in enforcing drug policy are doing more harm than good. Meanwhile, there is often a tendency to sensationalize each new “drug scare” in the media. And politicians regularly subscribe to the appealing rhetoric of “zero tolerance” and creating “drug free” societies rather than pursuing an informed approach based on evidence of what works. Popular associations of illicit drugs with ethnic and racial minorities stir fear and inspire harsh legislation. And enlightened reform advocates are routinely attacked as “soft on crime” or even “pro-drug.”

But the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session — and the time between now and then — is seen as an opportunity to overthrow that status quo. Several Latin American leaders, including Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemala's Otto Perez Molina, have already called for a paradigm shift on international drug policy.

"2016 will be the beginning of years, perhaps decades, of debate on new drug conventions," Arbour said at the New York press conference marking the report's release. The conversation was already beginning on Tuesday, under the Twitter hashtag #ControlDrugs.

Source / Common Dreams

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America's Firm Grounding in Neo-Nazi Facism

Source: An Armchair Misanthrope.

The Malthusian Obsession: Eugenics, American-Style
By Jeffrey St. Clair / January 10, 2014

In 1952, Charlie Follett, a wayward orphan, was a resident of the Sonoma County State Boys Home. One day when he was 14-years old, he was taken to the hospital, told to disrobe and sit on a table. The orderly didn’t explain what was about to happen to him.

“First, they shot me with some kind of medicine. It was supposed to deaden the nerves,” Charlie Follett told the Sacramento Bee, describing his forced vasectomy. “Then the next thing I heard was snip, snip. Then when they did the other side, it seemed like they were pulling my whole insides out.”

Follett was a minor, unaware of what was happening to him or why, unable to resist or even challenge it. The state had simply decided that this teenager (and thousands of others like him) was a derelict, unworthy of the right to reproduce.

Follett was one of at least 20,000 people sterilized against their will by the state of California from 1909 to 1963, in a eugenics program explicitly geared toward ridding the state of “enfeebled” and “defective” people.

California’s eugenics program proved so efficient that in the 1930s, Nazi scientists asked California eugenicists for advice on how to run their own sterilization regime. “Germany used California’s program as its chief example that this was a working, successful policy,” says Christina Cogdell, author of Eugenic Design. ”They modeled their law on California’s law.”

But California wasn’t alone. The state of Virginia forcibly sterilized 8,300 people. North Carolina sterilized 7,600 people against their will, the last in 1974. My home state of Indiana has a wretched record, with 2,500 forced sterilizations, nearly equally divided between young women and men, with most occurring between 1938 and 1953. Oregon, which had a population about half the size of Indiana, performed 2300 sterilizations, with 60 percent of them conducted on patients entombed in the barbarous state mental hospital. The sterilizations were approved by the state-sanctioned Oregon Eugenics Board. Incredibly, this board wasn’t disbanded until 1975, though the state’s eugenics program persisted until 1983.

A grim chapter of history, you say. But the era of sterilization hasn’t ended yet. It has simply migrated from state hospitals and health departments to the courts and medical offices. Take the case of Kathy Looney, a Louisiana woman convicted in 2000 of abusing three of her eight children. She was given a savage choice: either undergo medical sterilization or face lengthy jail time. Ultimately, she agreed to the sterilization and the judge issued a 10-year suspended sentence and placed Ms. Looney on five years of probation.

“I don’t want to have to lock you up to keep you from having any more children,” barked District Judge Carl V. Sharp. “So some kind of medical procedure is needed to make sure you don’t.”

In this context, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a revealing comparison by Drs. Andre N. Sofair and Lauris C. Kaldjian of German and U.S. sterilization policies from 1930 to 1945. During the years when Americans were being involuntarily sterilized as part of a multi-state eugenics program dating back to 1907, what did the leading medical journals here have to say on the topic in their editorials?

The authors reviewed the relevant periodicals only from the 1930s. Even in this narrow time frame, against the backdrop of Nazi eugenic programs, the facts are instructive. The American Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Psychiatry had nothing to say. The American Journal of Public Health ran one anonymous editorial on mental health that Sofair and Kaldjian described as “relevant,” probably because it suggested that rising rates of hospitalization for the mentally infirm didn’t necessarily mean that Americans’ mental IQs were falling, a belief that was exploited by the advocates of eugenic sterilization.

A special committee convened by the American Neurological Association endorsed the widely held view that mentally “defective” people were a drain on national resources. The committee took a positive view of “feeblemindedness,” on the grounds that it breeds “servile, useful people who do the dirty work of the race.” The committee reviewed the Germany sterilization law of 1933, and praised it for precision and scientific grounding.

The editorial record of the New England Journal in the early 1930s was dreadful. Editorials lamented the supposed increase in the rate of American feeblemindedness as dangerous, and the economic burden of supporting the mentally feeble as “appalling.” In 1934, The Journal’s editor, Morris Fishbein, wrote that “Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,” and argued that the “individual must give way to the greater good.”

While researching our book Whiteout, I came across a remarkable federal court opinion on sterilizations of the poor. In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell wrote that “over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually in federally-funded programs.”

Gesell pointed out that though Congress had decreed that family planning programs function on a voluntary basis, “an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally funded benefits would be withdrawn. … Patients receiving Medicaid assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure.”

Starting in the early 1990s, poor women were allowed Medicaid funding to have Norplant inserted into their arms; then, when they complained of pain and other unwelcome side effects, they were told no funding was available to have the Norplant rods taken out. Here, therefore, was a new species of involuntary sterilization, implemented under the approving gaze of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who later imposed their cruel Malthusian obsession on the destitute women of Haiti.

In the coming age of austerity, as poverty, homelessness and huger take deep root across the Republic, the eugenic impulse is almost certain to reemerge, probably dressed in the old progressive guise of social improvement and economic benevolence.

[Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.]

Source / Counterpunch

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We Still Seek the Cure Even When the Cause Is Under Our Noses

Protestor at the March Against Monsanto in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 12, 2013.

Source / March Against Monsanto Facebook Page

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Occasionally, the Truth Is Very Painful

Source / Go Left (on Facebook)

Thank you to J.S. Cline / Fluxed Up World

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Think You're Not a Racist? A Sexist? Think Again ...

Source / YouTube

Thanks to Bix Burkhart / Fluxed Up World

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The Ultimate Codependent Relationship

Source / Armchair Patriots (Facebook)

Thanks to Janet Gilles / Fluxed Up World

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We Are No Longer Homo Sapiens: We're Cyborgs

Valerie Belin/Edwynn Houk Gallery/New York.

Mental Breakdown of a Nation: Panting for Breath on a Virtual Shore
By Stefanie Krasnow / February 28, 2013

We are no longer homo sapiens: we're cyborgs.

Each day, our porous skin opens less and less to fresh air, sunlight, the touch of others, the smell of pine, rain, compost, and manure . . . and instead we find ourselves hunched over machines in the standard posture of reverence, bowing our heads to the humming and warm computer-pets that rest on our laps or in our palms.

It took millions of years of evolution for life on earth to move out of the oceans onto land, where our phylogenetic ancestors gasped for their first breaths on a pebbled beach. Now, some 590,000,000 years later, we find ourselves panting for air on a virtual shore.

We're embarking on the second greatest migration in the history of life of earth, from the physical world into virtuality. In the span of just one generation, we've been completely wooed over by the entirely-cerebral and entirely-virtual adventures accessed when our fingertips apply light pressure to a plastic "mouse."

Today, teenagers in America spend seven hours on a screen each day, 11 if you include multitasking hours: this is more time than human beings spend doing anything else, including sleeping. Teenage girls send over 3,700 texts a month, even 12 year old girls have over 500 Facebook friends, 250 of which are total strangers to them. The combination of online sexual coercion in chat rooms and cyber-bullying drives a young girl, Amanda Todd, to suicide. And just think, it's only been thirty years – even less for most – since the world wide web came into our lives.

Initially, the internet was created by and for the military. For several decades after that it was used only in emergencies, and later on by computer engineers, IT professionals or for the back-end of certain businesses and institutions. But then came the commercialization of the internet in 1995, the invention of search engines in the mid-late 90s, Google in 1998, BlackBerry in 2001, Facebook in 2004, and the first iPhone in 2007. These events have all occurred in less than twenty years. The most current trend, the personal computer revolution – where everyone, everywhere, is online, nearly all the time – is very new, less than five years old. It is this latest trend which has impacted our lives most dramatically, and in a remarkably unprecedented way if you consider the vast timeline of our development on planet Earth. We are no longer homo sapiens: we're cyborgs.

Our common understanding of cyborgs are hollywood clichés: rogue robots with human skin pulled taut over sleek metal wiring, and ON/OFF buttons tucked away in thigh or knee crevasses. But we don't have to wait until we embed chips beneath our skin, nor till we get Google Goggles as contact lens glued to our eyes, to earn our status as cyborgian. As Donna Haraway famously suggests, we are entirely cyborgs just as we appear now – with smart-phones tucked snugly in our pockets for every minute of every waking hour, held as close as possible to our skin in a hard-to-access area, much like a sacred amulet was once worn around one's neck in a burlap pouch.

In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway collapses the boundaries between human/animal, and human/machine, suggesting that there is as much artifice as there is "nature" in human nature. Our cyborgian condition was not begot by some sinister mutation, rather, we are as vitally and ineradicably entwined with machines as we are with the bacteria in our intestines. As Marshall McLuhan said: "we create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs."

Years before the techno-prolifia we live in today, McLuhan wrote an eerie forecast that has perhaps now come true: "Man would become...as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."

The bond between man and machine indeed gleams of eroticism. Technically speaking though, this relationship is an endosymbiotic one (a reciprocal relationship where one of the beings lives within the body of the other, merging with it). But is it us who live inside the machine, as it's sex organs, or does the machine live inside us? Contrary to McLuhan, Freud believed the machine lives on us, as an appendage that has enabled us to become God-like. We're omnipotent, since we've overcome nature where we can; and thanks to Google, we feel omniscient. In 1929, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents: Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs […] still give him much trouble at times. Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our present investigation, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character.

Generations before tamagochi, Facebook and iPads, Freud sensed that there was something primordial being forsaken as man became more and more civilized, and he warned that the prevalent disavowal of our animality would have costs – psychically, physically, socially, erotically.

Today's most popular gadgets – those palm-sized avatars of hyper-activity and hyper-connectivity – are precisely so seductive because they compensate for the physical, social and erotic loses that technological advances bring. Every ding, tweet, ring, and vibration promises a social, sexual, or professional opportunity. And in less than a decade, our brains have been reprogrammed to respond to these dings, tweets, rings and vibrates with rushes of dopamine, adrenaline and other stimulating neurotransmitters, such that our brains on smart-phones look, on an MRI scan, identical to those of an addict on drugs. The internet's effects on the brain is the subject of Nicholas Carr's bestseller, The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Price. The latest studies in neuroscience confirm Carr's suspicions that the internet is a detriment to cognition, concentration, contemplation and psychological health. These studies are finding that what's most addictive about the internet is not the technology itself, nor the content, but these jolts of energy we get from habitual use of internet applications, which foster and promote compulsive behaviour.

Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, explains that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” instigating cycles of mania followed by periods of depression. “There’s just something about the medium that’s addictive,” adds Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist who manages the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic at Stanford Medical School, “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive behavior – or substance abuse of any kind – become addicted to the internet and these other technologies.” Scientists at Oxford University warn that children who spend too much time on social networks sites could suffer from personality and brain disorders. Research published in China discovered links between internet addiction and “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” that is, a fifteen percent shrinkage in the area of the brain that controls speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. This shrinkage is cumulative: the more time online, the more grey matter shrivels.

From follow-up studies, we learn that it doesn't take even many hours online for these changes to occur. Gary Small, head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, documented that even just five hours of internet use, for web-virgins, substantially rewired the prefrontal cortex of the brain. So we can infer what happens as we spend more and more hours online. The amount of time one spends online is directly correlated to depression, obesity, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and anxiety. New studies are showing that internet and social media use contribute to or instigate even bigger mental breakdowns: split-personality disorder, delusional and paranoid thought, suicidal thinking, even psychosis . . . psychosis, that is defined as, a loss of what is real.

This research must not be misinterpreted to suggest that those who've become addicted to Facebook, smart-phones, gaming, chatting, or the internet in general are entirely to be blamed. Is this really their own issue, or is it society's ill? Most people don't want to be online all the time. But its a necessity of today's urban, capitalist society that employees keep their Blackberry's always-on and within-reach even during holidays and private moments. Many workplaces now require employees to spend at least eight hours a day sitting at a desk staring at a screen. After-hours, the compulsion seeded by the habits of the work day to surf the web, refresh e-mail, tweet, update your status, and feel plugged in at all times continues late into the night. How many hours of the day are we not feeding and pruning our virtual alter-egos ? How many hours of our life are we not busying ourselves, hunting around aimlessly on virtual shores? What ways of being, beliefs, and values come along with this new digi-virtual media realm we are all being sucked into?

We must never lose sight that the internet is a solipsistic universe – everything you take in is stuff made by and for humans. No animals, no trees, no lichen, no insects, no fungi, none of those beings who help us breathe, none of the creatures who help us play are here. We are just stewing in our own juices. For those who do worry over what's happening to Nature, there are online portals which exist to compensate for this feeling of lack: 360-degree landscapes, from Peru to the Arctic, all online to explore, digital animal daemons who'll accompany you on an online adventure. These online animal avatars are designed (so goes the logic of the Telus ads) to assuage your anxiety, to help you feel more "natural" and at ease as you muck around in an entirely digi-realm. The Youtube showcase of a starry sky, the pictures of dogs, the representations of a representation of the real thing out there – offline – this is all wonderful, this is all we need.

The internet is like humanity's neural network. It mirrors the brain with its networks, coding systems, information storage, and with it's highly abstract and purely conceptual language. We feel proud as we look in this mirror. As we surf the net, we feel a deep sense of awe over our human ingenuity. Browsing has become not just a vital part of contemporary lifestyle, but a new modality of human being. Accordingly, the values and meaning with which we imbue life in this world are becoming more and more narrowly anthropocentric, and more and more cerebral, abstract, detached, and disembodied.

A word of advice: don't get too attached. We're still in a honey-moon phase with this new technology. The wonders afforded by the internet are still so dazzling to us that we can't really question it, or take into account that this invention may just be the leading cause of the mental breakdown of our species. Some 400,000 years ago, Homo Erectus discovered how to control fire. Humanity's first technology. As we learned with fire, we must work to master our inventions in order to augment their potential, else they will go out of control, and we get a nuclear burn.

The internet-enthusiasts who are no doubt severely agitated by this idea, who are assuming the author is a primitivistic luddite overlooking all the good brought into the world by the world wide web, consider this: for 100 years we celebrated the automobile as the ultimate achievement of our species' invention! What extraordinary feats we were suddenly capable of in locomotion and adventure! Not til generations later did we realize that cars were a leading villain in the destruction of the planet. What will we discover in 100 years about the internet, smart-phones and other harbingers of virtual life?

Already, our enthusiasm about cyberspace is turning against us, for all the information about ourselves which we volunteer to share online, and the data-trails we leave in our wake as we navigate, are being used against us in the war that's underway against our civil liberties. The obliteration of privacy comes with the appropriation of the internet by Big Daddy as the ultimate surveillance tool. And the radical potential we've seen in social media is being stolen from us: all the insidiousness of advertising is all the more in your face on the internet, more so than it ever was on TV. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, pitched Facebook as the ultimate advertising platform to Madison Avenue businesses in late 2012. She assured the industry people that Facebook's number one prerogative is to serve $ucce$$ for those that advertise on it.

The internet, to some, is a crystallization of, and homage to, the nearly-miraculous things human beings can do. We hang on to our god-like abilities attained via technology because they make us feel invulnerable. Though, a cosmic perspective will always put our precarity back in the spotlight. Amidst these ongoing solar storms, it's possible that one of these gigantic solar flares could hit the planet, and all the electronics and gadgets would be wiped out in an instant . . .

Source / AdBusters

Thanks to Deva Wood / Fluxed Up World

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Oh, Brave Second Amendment People: Read This

And on that note, this article recently appeared in Truthout:

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
By Thom Hartmann, Truthout / January 15, 2013

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

Read all of the article here.

Source of Graphics / Children's Defense.Org

Thanks to Kerry Johnson / Fluxed Up World

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Our History and Future in Less Than Four Minutes

Civilized man. What an extraordinary creature. He has walked on the moon and created the worldwide web that connects billions of people like us right here. But there is a darker side of civilized man and his history that tends to remain unseen. A side that gets brushed over. YOU may actually be a part of it. Do you want to be? Time to open your eyes to the history of Taker culture in this animation by Steve Cutts.

Source / Films for Action

Fluxed Up World

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A Thousand Words Department

Source / Topeka Capitol Journal

Fluxed Up World

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Although We May Not Be Capable of Changing History, How Can We Equip Ourselves to Survive It?

Epistle to the Ecotopians
By Ernest Callenbach / May 6, 2012

[This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.]

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support -- a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together -- whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices -- of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things -- impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.
___________________
Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived. Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved -- tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them -- the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

Ecotopia is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? As Ecotopia Emerging puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The "ecology in one country" argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether "socialism in one country" was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the "tongue" of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of "succession," as the biological concept has it, where "disturbances" kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state -- not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically -- since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

[Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopia among other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly. He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer.]

Source / TomDispatch

Thank you to Deva Wood / Fluxed Up World

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Al-Qaida: The Endless American Bogeyman

Mythical al-Qaida fortress portrayed by CIA analysts.
Osama’s Almost Letter To Me
By Eric Margolis / May 6, 2012

Why was I named in alleged al-Qaida letters last week as a recipient for documents about 9/11?

Al-Qaida was not founded by Osama bin Laden, as many wrongly believe, but in the mid-1980’s in Peshawar, Pakistan, by a revolutionary scholar, Sheik Abdullah Azzam.

I know this because I interviewed Azzam numerous times at al-Qaida HQ in Peshawar while covering the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Azzam set up al-Qaida, which means “the base” in Arabic, to help CIA and Saudi-financed Arab volunteers going to fight in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In those days, the west hailed them as “freedom fighters.”

In letters allegedly captured by US special forces from bin Laden’s compound, Al-Qaida’s public relations people cited me and 19 other western journalists as potential recipients of new documents about the 9/11 attacks on the US.

No surprise there. I’ve followed al-Qaida for the past 26 years as a writer, broadcaster and military consultant. My columns are read widely across South Asia and the Gulf. I have a reputation for being fiercely independent-minded and determined to get at the truth, no matter how unpopular.

The big US news networks heavily censored al-Qaida’s statements on government orders, or misreported them, complete with fake videos of bin Laden.

The report cites redoubtable British writer Robert Fisk, the New Yorker’s ace investigator Seymour Hersh, ABC News investigator Brian Ross, and me as journalists who reported fairly and accurately on the region.

All of us veterans have tried to report facts honestly and cut through propaganda from all sides. We have all been strong critics of al-Qaida and terror attacks, but also critics of heavy-handed, often counter-productive US and western policies in the Muslim world.

As these letters shows, Al-Qaida was never the vast, worldwide terror organization that President George W. Bush claimed. As I witnessed, it was always tiny, no more than 200 men. Al-Qaida’s original goal was to fight the mostly Tajik and Uzbek Afghan Communists and their Soviet masters.

Al-Qaida became an ally of Taliban in this anti-Communist struggle. But Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. As the renowned journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave reported from Afghanistan, Taliban’s tribal chiefs tried to oust firebrand Bin Laden from their nation.

Today, what’s left of al-Qaida numbers no more than 25 men in Afghanistan, according to US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Yet President Barack Obama cites the alleged al-Qaida “threat” as the reason for keeping US forces in Afghanistan and keeping Pakistan under semi-occupation. That was the real purpose for releasing these letters. Al-Qaida has become an integral part of US politics.

Al-Qaida is being used as a bogeyman by America’s Republicans to defend bloated US military spending and defend torture as having led to finding bin Laden. My sources tell me a huge bribe led the US to bin Laden, not torture.

The Pentagon has been leaking so-called information claiming bin Laden was planning a wave of terror attacks just before he died. In fact, bin Laden had become an isolated, powerless jihadi living in retirement when he was killed.

Why was he not brought back to the US for trial?

An open trial would have finally allowed Americans to discover the truth about the crime of 9/11, al-Qaida, and anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Tragically, this did not happen. Dead men tell no tales.

We still don’t know how much bin Laden was involved in 9/11, or if it was hatched in Pakistan. My own understanding is that 9/11 was planned in Hamburg and Madrid, and executed by mostly Saudi citizens.

Al-Qaida lives on after bin Laden, but as a tiny bunch of western-hating militants with no power and little ability to stage major attacks. Violent anti-American groups from West Africa to Indonesia have adopted the title al-Qaida. For example, al-Qaida in Iraq never existed before the US invasion.

It’s like the slaves in the film “Spartacus” crying out, “we are all Spartacus.”

These stepsons of al-Qaida are not centrally linked and have nothing in common except for opposing western domination of the Muslim world and espousing religious law. As US intervention in Africa and Central Asia intensifies, so will they spread. It’s a perpetual terrorist motion machine.

[Columnist and author Eric Margolis is a veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.]

Source / EricMargolis.com

Fluxed Up World

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Forty-Two Years After Kent State: Do You Think It's Changed?

May 4th wounded from Kent State shootings want independent review of new evidence
By John Mangels / May 4, 2012

KENT, Ohio — Seven people wounded by Ohio National Guard gunfire 42 years ago today during an anti-war protest at Kent State University are appealing to government officials, human-rights organizations and the soldiers who shot them to resolve the tragedy's unanswered questions.

In a news conference Thursday, the survivors said they are launching a campaign to persuade state and federal lawmakers and other officials to convene hearings to examine new evidence from the May 4, 1970, shootings, which were a defining event of 20th-century America.

Ohio National Guardsmen open fire on Kent State University
anti-Vietnam War protesters, May 4, 1970.
Four of the wounded former students were present at Thursday's briefing. Three others joined them in signing a consensus statement.

Four students were killed and a total of nine were wounded when Guardsmen, retreating as the raucous protest wound down, suddenly wheeled and unleashed a 13-second barrage of 67 indiscriminant shots. Why the Guardsmen fired remains a mystery.

"We appeal to our supporters across America and worldwide to raise your voices and attention now, as we enter our final campaign for truth and justice," said Alan Canfora, who was shot in the wrist and who now directs the Kent May 4 Center, a nonprofit educational organization.

"It's important to get the truth out before it's too late," added Dean Kahler, who was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet as he lay on the ground. Thomas Grace, who was hit in the ankle, and Joseph Lewis, who was shot in the stomach and leg, also were present Thursday.

The survivors' group, their attorneys and the May 4 Task Group, an organization of current KSU students, are backing a broad-based effort to root out more information about the shootings. It includes appeals to Congress, the Ohio legislature, Gov. John Kasich, Attorney General Mike DeWine and human-rights groups to initiate inquiries.

The appeal follows the U.S. Justice Department's decision last month not to reopen an investigation of the shootings. The agency had weighed requests to revive its inquiry based on a recent re-analysis of an audio recording that captured the events of May 4.

The re-analysis, conducted by two forensic audio experts at The Plain Dealer's request, revealed what the experts said was an order for the Guard to fire, preceded by what one of the analysts said were four .38-caliber pistol shots.

An FBI review of the recording this year was inconclusive, determining the voices were unintelligible and that the sounds identified as pistol shots may have been slamming doors. The Justice Department said there were "insurmountable legal and evidentiary barriers" to reopening the case.

Canfora stressed the Kent State survivors want a political resolution of the unanswered questions. He urged other independent audio experts to review the recording.

"We're not going to courts first, filing lawsuits," said Paul Meyer, a Cleveland attorney who is advising the group. "We'd rather build up a groundswell of public opinion to support the effort to seek the truth and achieve some reconciliation. We think if elected officials are aware of the [new] evidence, they will be persuaded to take effective action. There are people who know things who have yet to tell their stories . . . and we are looking for them, too."

One of those is Terry Norman, a Kent State student and sometime police and FBI informer who was on campus May 4, 1970, photographing protesters. After the shootings and a violent confrontation with demonstrators, he sought the Guard's protection and surrendered a .38-caliber pistol. He denied firing it, but some suspect the four supposed pistol shots on the recording were from Norman's gun.

The survivors stressed they have no desire to prosecute or to sue individual Guardsmen who fired. Canfora, who on May 4, 1970, waved a black flag at Guardsmen as some of them knelt and pointed their rifles at him, acknowledged that he had been "an angry young man" but that "the time for antagonisms against the National Guard are over."

"Many of us here now believe that those Guardsmen who were ordered to fire had the burden on their shoulders all these years forced upon them by their commanding officers, who gave the order," Canfora said. "In a way, they've been victimized just as we have. That's why we're asking them to join with us for the sake of truth and for the sake of healing."

In a related development this week, the Justice Department's refusal to re-open the Kent State investigation prompted an impassioned appeal for reconsideration from Laurel Krause, whose sister Allison was fatally wounded by the Guard's gunfire as her boyfriend Barry Levine pulled her behind a car for shelter. She died in his arms.

Krause, writing to President Barack Obama on behalf of her elderly mother, Doris, a Lorain native, described her sister as a "compassionate, gorgeous, full-of-life young woman who seemed to have it all." She recounted the wrenching impact Allison Krause's death had on the family, and the efforts by her parents and herself to seek justice so that her sister would not have died in vain.

"Last week, Allison would have celebrated her 61st birthday," Krause wrote to the president. "Please do not allow another Kent State anniversary to pass without truth and justice for Allison Krause and her fellow murdered classmates, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder."

Source / Cleveland Plain Dealer

Fluxed Up World

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But What Will Be the Final Outcome?

Source / Informed Comment

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Outside My Window

Outside My Window
By Jeff Hay / April 29, 2012

They Appear to be intelligent
engaging
even full of a type of life energy
and yet
there they are
with a table
full of buttons and stickers
supporting
advocating
voting for
a monster

On the surface
they seem to be
progressives
do they not know
have they ignored
or are they
just in denial

I'm sure
when Bush was President
they were adamantly opposed to war
to torture
to slaughtering
blowing the guts out of
women and children
of treating "illegal" immigrants
like cockroaches
of fucking the poor
while enriching his rich buddies
of shredding the Constitution
of total disregard
for the safety of our
food supply
of total disregard
for the climate catastrophe
that is unfolding
of being an
asshole

And yet they have a table
outside my window
campaigning for a man
who has invaded more countries than Bush
given more money to the Banksters than Bush
deported and imprisoned more immigrants
than Bush
wiped his ass on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
more than Bush
had more contempt for the poor
than Bush

And yet
there they are
smiling and handing out
their buttons
and stickers
never reflecting
upon their hypocrisy
upon their
favoring
the policies
they hated
when it was Bush

Then there are my
right-wing friends
who call him a "socialist"
And if
you're talking about
corporate welfare
and tax breaks for the rich
in other words
redistributing the wealth
to the already wealthy
than he is sort of a
Robin Hood in reverse
Stealing from the poor
to give to the rich
a Socialist
in reverse

My right-wing friends
wonder about his birth certificate
wondering about his
"muslim" name
never noticing
his glee
as he
"changes the mindset that leads to war"
by blowing the brains
out of
those "other" people
those "unpeople"
which he holds
in as much contempt
as Bush ever dreamed of

He said his campaign would be different
wouldn't take huge corporate donations
he lied
He said he would filibuster
retroactive immunity for the telecoms
who helped the government
spy on us
He lied
He said in his victory speech
that global warming
would start cooling
that rising oceans
would start receding
now that he was in charge
he lied
He said he would not fill his
Administration
as Bush had
with lobbyists
he lied

He said he would close Guantanamo
instead he opened more Guantanamo's than even Bush
He said he would make it easier
for workers to join a union
he lied
When it came to
who to help
he decided
that ten million people
losing their homes
while he gave trillions
of dollars
to the very people
who gave him more money
than any presidential candidate has ever received
from Wall Street
His choice was easy
I WILL FUCK THE POOR
Guess that's
"Socialism"

He "saved General Motors"
by giving billions to Management
while forcing pay cuts
loss of health care
and pensions
on the workers
Guess that's "Socialism"

He said
his administration
would be transparent and open
and democratic
he said
"whistleblowers should be protected"
he fucking lied
he has prosecuted more whistleblowers
than all other presidents in
the history of the United States combined
No President has hated democracy more than him

Oddly my right-wing friends
who loved all of this
when Bush did it
think
he's a "Socialist"
and my "progressive" friends
who hated it when Bush did what he does
are the same
in one way
they are tragically
ill informed
about
Barack Obama

Also published at Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle.

Thanks to Karen Lee Wald / Fluxed Up World

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