The frightening face of American fascism. By Murray Dobbin

Via: Murray Dobbin’s Blog.

The violent reaction both before and after the historic vote on health care in the US Congress is truly unnerving. There has always been a virulent right-wing in the US but until now it has always been marginal – in part because the Republican Party, however conservative it was, actively marginalized violent elements which purported to be part of the political mainstream.

All that has changed. As US writer Sara Robinson said in her excellent article, Fascist America: Are we there yet? when elements of the right-wing political elite begin to wink and nod at grass roots violence, or actually encourage it, you have the beginnings of fascism. The tea partiers, some of whom brought guns to rallies outside Obama appearances, are reminding a lot of people of the Nazi Brown Shirts. They haven’t started shooting yet – but I expect someone in Germany brought guns before they fired them, too.

Robinson quotes a prominent authority on fascism, Robert Paxton:  ”The most important variables…are the conservative elites’ willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate.”

That, says Robinson…“…sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now.”  She went on to say (this was in September last year): “America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.”

In the days before the recent vote, Democratic Congressmen were harassed, threatened and subjected to   racist taunts. An American Press story stated:  “Representative Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat, told a reporter that as he left the Cannon House Office Building with Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights era, some among the crowd chanted “the N-word, the N-word, 15 times.” Both Mr. Carson and Mr. Lewis are black. It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis,”

It got worse after the vote – now Democrat’s offices are being vandalized and members of Congress are getting death threats over the phone. If you want a taste of these scary events take five minutes to listen the Rachel Maddow show. Republicans are not-so-subtly encouraging this behaviour and when confronted by their words, refuse to retract them – or to take any responsibility for the actions they foment.

One such incident featured Republican House Minority leader John Boehner “warning” his fellow Cincinnati Democratic Congressman Steve Driehaus not to vote for the reforms. If he did? “He may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati.”

It’s coming. The question for Canadians to begin asking themselves is what do we do as American moves inexorably towards fascism?

AIPAC: Telling a Whopper. By Stephanie Westbrook

Via: Creative-i.

The theme of this year’s annual policy conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was ‘Israel: Tell the Story.’ And it was quite a story that AIPAC wanted to tell.

The conference aimed at imparting to the over 7000 attendees ‘an intimate understanding of the many ways that Israel is making the world a better place,’ with a focus on peacemaking and innovation. According to the AIPAC web site, conference goers will also ‘meet Israelis who rush to the scene of natural disasters in far away lands because they believe that to save one life is to save the whole world.’ No mention was made of the 1400 people killed during the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Against a backdrop of creative blends of US and Israeli flags and icons, the three-day conference in Washington DC included plenary speeches by former Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom, according to journalist MJ Rosenberg, delegates were warned in advance not to boo or hiss. Workshops varied from self-serving questions such as ‘Are Settlements An Obstacle to Peace?’ and ‘Is Israel Treated Unfairly in the Press?’ to ‘The Gaza Dilemma’ and ‘Inside Iran.’

Large numbers of young people attended the conference. With more than 900 university students from 370 campuses as well as 397 high school students, many benefiting from scholarships, students made up nearly 17% of the total number of participants.

Standing outside the conference it was clear that AIPAC is reaching out well beyond the Jewish community for support.

The constant flow of buses, with taxpayer-funded police escort, dropped off conference attendees including many African-American delegations. In fact, workshop sessions centered on the emerging alliance with the African American community and how this alliance can be ‘ignited around the pro-Israel cause.’

The conference also included fear-mongering workshops in Spanish, presumably as an attempt to reach the Latino community, on Iran’s influence in Latin America via its strong ties with Venezuela, Cuba and Brazil, and concerns that this might lead to terrorism, Islamic extremism and anti-American sentiments.

Children of Gaza

Via: PULSE.

A moving, must-see video that first aired on Channel 4 (UK)’s Dispatches on 15 March. BAFTA-winning filmmaker Jezza Neumann follows the lives of three children for over a year. The children are amazing: well-spoken, reflective, resilient, and very endearing. Yet the toll this inhumanity has taken is also clear.

Dispatches-Children Of Gaza

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How You Can Help
To donate to the children in this film, and for information on how to help them and others, please visit this website http://childrenofgazafund.org/

Cross-posted from PeoplesGeography

Written by Ann.

The conviction of ex-Nazi Boere and Washington’s war crimes. By Bill Van Auken

Via: WSWS.

On March 23, a German court sentenced former Nazi death squad member Heinrich Boere to life imprisonment for war crimes carried out more than 65 years ago.

Boere, 88, was charged with the cold-blooded killing of three Dutch civilians suspected of supporting resistance to Nazi occupation in 1944. The murders were carried out as part of a repressive campaign waged by his unit, known as the “Germanic SS of the Netherlands.”

Boere had lived in Germany openly since escaping from the Netherlands at the end of the war. A Dutch court tried him in absentia in 1949, condemning him to death. While the sentence was later commuted to life in prison, the German government refused to extradite him. In the early 1980s, a German commission investigating Nazi war crimes dropped his case, concluding that the killings were “acceptable acts of war,” justifiable under international law as a response to violent acts of resistance against the German occupiers.

This was the position held by Boere himself, who made no attempt to deny the killings. He invoked the so-called Nuremberg defense: He was following orders. In 2007, he told the German magazine Der Speigel: “They told us they were partisans, terrorists. We thought we were doing the right thing.”

Much of the press coverage of Boere’s prosecution and conviction has stressed that this will be one of Germany’s last war crimes trials, given that the surviving perpetrators of the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich are rapidly dying off.

The New York Daily News editorialized on the subject: “There aren’t many Nazi slugs left to feel such justice, but every last one must—and soon.” The newspaper added that “culpability for monstrous crimes is never erased. It is the job of those who believe in justice to make evildoers pay.”

While Boere richly deserves his sentence, with neither the passage of time nor his advanced age justifying clemency, one does not have to reach back nearly seven decades to uncover such crimes, or focus solely on octogenarians in meting out justice.

The same newspaper, last month, published an editorial entitled “One for the good guys: Sharpshooting drones pick off Pakistan Taliban chief.”

Did a Racist Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town Overthrow Its Black Mayor and Police Chief? By Jordan Flaherty

Via: Dissident Voice.

In Waterproof, a small northern Louisiana town near Natchez, Mississippi, the African-American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an alliance of white politicians and their followers. In a lawsuit filed last week, Police Chief Miles Jenkins asserts a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the area’s district attorney and parish sheriff, along with several other members of the region’s entrenched political power structure. These events come at a time when the validity of federal power is being questioned because of the race of the US president, and in a state where white political corruption and violence have been, and continue to be, used as tools to fight Black political power.

About 800 people live in Waterproof, a rural community in the south of Tensas Parish. Tensas has just over 6,000 residents, making it both the smallest parish in the state, and the parish with the state’s fastest declining population. The parish’s schools remain mostly segregated, with nearly all the Black students attending public schools, and nearly all the white students attending private schools. With a median household income of $10,250, Waterproof is also one of the poorest communities in the US. The only jobs for Black people in town are in work for white farmers, according to Chief Jenkins. “Unless you go out of town to work,” he says, “You’re going to ride the white man’s tractor. That’s it.”

Bobby Higginbotham was elected mayor of Waterproof in September of 2006. The next year, he appointed Miles Jenkins as chief of police. Jenkins, who served in the US military for 30 years and earned a master’s degree in public administration from Troy University in Alabama, immediately began the work of professionalizing a small town police department that had previously been mostly inactive. “You called the Waterproof police for help before,” says Chief Jenkins, “He would say, wait ‘til tomorrow, it’s too hot to come out today.” He also sought to reform the town’s financial practices, which Chief Jenkins says were in disorder and consumed by debt.

Chief Jenkins asserts that a white political infrastructure, led by the Parish Sheriff Ricky Jones and District Attorney James Paxton, were threatened by their actions. This group immediately sought to orchestrate a coup against the two Black men, including clandestine meetings, false arrests, harassment, and even physical violence. Court documents describe how Paxton, Jones, and their allies formed an alliance “designed to harass intimidate, arrest, imprison, prosecute, illegally remove plaintiff from his position of police chief, prevent plaintiff from performing his law duties as police chief and/or force plaintiff to leave the town of Waterproof.”

Palestinian Political Prisoners. By Stephen Lendman

Via: SteveLendmanBlog.

The numbers vary but range at any time from over 7,000 to 12,000 or more. In April 2008, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel cited 11,000, including 345 children and 98 women. Over 1,000 suffered from chronic or other diseases. Around 150 were seriously ill from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases, and 195 or more Palestinians died or were killed in prison since 1967.

As of January 2009, Adalah said about “22,500 individuals were imprisoned or detained in Israeli prisons; around 70% (or 15,750 are) Arabs.” Included are 9,735 Palestinians, nearly 80% classified as “security.” Of these, 570 were administrative detainees, uncharged by order of an administrative official, not a judge.

Another 20 were so-called “unlawful combatants” under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law (UCL), saying they’re not entitled to POW status under international law because they either took part in hostilities against Israel (directly or indirectly) or belong to a force carrying them out. No proof is needed, only “a reasonable basis for believing” the designation is accurate, and under UCL, detentions can be permanent, without trial or judicial fairness.

According to the Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, since 1967, “over 650,000 have been detained by Israel,” about 20% of the total Occupied Territory (OPT) population and 40% of the male population. Most are held in Palestine, but many thousands in Israeli civil and military prisons, in violation of numerous Fourth Geneva provisions, including Article 49 stating:

“….forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons (including prisoners) from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

This applies to OPT prisoners, most of whom are political victims of militarized oppression, or in other words, guilty of being Palestinian. In addition, Fourth Geneva states protected persons shall be detained in the occupied territory and, if convicted, serve there sentences therein.

Good-Bye. Paul Craig Roberts

Via: Counter Punch.

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

Ghosts Threaten to Return to Haiti. By Nikhil Aziz

Via: Foreign Policy in Focus.

Some of the advice for how Haiti ought to rebuild after the earthquake sounds hauntingly familiar. There are echoes of the same bad development advice Haiti has received for decades, even before the nation faced its current devastating situation. To avoid repeating past failures, we would be wise to review how previous aid models led down the wrong path.

Twelve years ago, Grassroots International released a study entitled “Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy: USAID Policies in Haiti.” Offering an in-depth examination of USAID development policies in Haiti, the study concluded that official aid actually damaged the very aspects of Haitian society it was allegedly trying to fix. The aid was undermining democracy and creating too much dependency.

The study was particularly critical of the development community for making Haiti into a net food importer when it had been nearly self-sufficient and, in fact, a major rice producer. Despite, or because of, years of aid programs and structural adjustment policies imposed by international financial institutions and donor countries, the study found that Haiti’s food dependency was actually increasing. This disturbing result was partially caused by subsidized food aid programs that fed transnational agribusiness corporations but didn’t help Haitians grow food for their families.

Sadly, much of that 12-year-old study could have been written today.

The Collapse Of Journalism/The Journalism Of Collapse: New Storytelling And A New Story. By Robert Jensen

Via: Counter Currents.

There is considerable attention paid in the United States to the collapse of journalism — both in terms of the demise of the business model for corporate commercial news media, and the evermore superficial, shallow, and senseless content that is inadequate for citizens concerned with self-governance. This collapse is part of larger crises in the political and economic spheres, crises rooted in the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism. New journalistic vehicles for storytelling are desperately needed.

There has been far less discussion of the need for a journalism of collapse — the challenge to tell the story of a world facing multiple crises in the realms of social justice and sustainability. This collapse of the basic political and economic systems of the modern world, with dramatic consequences on the human and ecological fronts, demands not only new storytelling vehicles but a new story.

In this essay I want to review the failure of existing systems and suggest ideas for how to think about something radically different, through the lens of journalists’ work. The phrase “how to think about” should not be interpreted to mean “provide a well-developed plan for”; I don’t have magical answers to these difficult questions, and neither does anyone else. The first task is to face the fact that every problem we encounter does not necessarily have a solution that we can identify, or even imagine, in the moment; that identifying how existing systems have failed does not guarantee we have the capacity to devise new systems that will succeed.

This is a realistic attitude, not a defeatist one. The lack of a guarantee of success does not mean the inevitability of failure, and it does not absolve us of our responsibility to struggle to understand what is happening and to act as moral agents in a difficult world. In fact, I think such realism is required for serious attempts at fashioning a response to the crises. The eventual solutions, if there are to be solutions, may come in frameworks so different from our current understanding that we can’t yet see even their outlines, let alone the details. This is a time when we should be focused on “questions that go beyond the available answers,” to borrow a phrase from sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson.

PETITION: War Criminal Tony Blair Should Not Be Allowed on Malaysian Soil

Via: Perdana Global Peace.

This is a petition by the Perdana Global Peace Organisation in conjunction with its partners, and addressed to all Malaysian NGO’s, their members and supporters.

We ask you to join in our opposition to the decision by Success Resources, a company founded in Singapore, to bring former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Malaysia as a sponsored speaker at the National Achievers Congress, Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre, 23 April to 25 April 2010.

We strongly oppose this decision because we believe Blair is a war criminal for his role in the war of aggression in Iraq. In international law and under the Nuremberg principles, war of aggression constitutes the supreme crime. This war also contravenes the United Nations Charter and has led to the death of over one million Iraqis.

To have him on our soil is a travesty of natural justice and a mockery to those Iraqis who have paid with their lives for Blair’s illegal war. To this day, the killing, butchery and enormous suffering endures.

It is our utmost hope that Malaysian NGO’s, their members and supporters who feel and sympathise with the Iraqis, will sign this petition to tell Blair and the organisers that he is not welcome in Malaysia.

Please click here to sign the petition.

Perdana Leadership Foundation
No.1, Jalan P8H, Precinct 8 | 62250 Putrajaya | Wilayah Persekutuan |
Malaysia
Call us : 603-8885 8900 | E-mail us: perdana@perdana.org.my | Visit our
website: www.perdana.org.my

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Related:
Blair’s Fight to Keep his Oil Cash Secret

My Children, Ralph Nader and the South China Sea. By Ramzy Baroud

Via: The Jordan Times.

I basked in the warm Borneo sun, following a long run somewhere at the edge of a rainforest. The beach was only partly clean, but the water was most inviting. My children ran excitedly, collecting what I assumed to be shells and whatever other treasures the South China Sea had decided to divulge that afternoon. Their movement, from afar, signaled frenzy and perhaps even a slight panic. I hesitated at first, then ran to investigate.

At the ages of six and four, my girls Zarefah and Iman were already the most kindhearted kids. They were actually going through complete and unmitigated panic, as they had just noticed the starfish which had been cast off by the waves and which were now dotting the shoreline as far as the eye could see. The children became determined to place every single one of them back in the water before they died.

But most all of them were already dead.

My kids didn’t know this. And I didn’t have the courage to break the dreadful news. I stood in silence, proud to the core, as the girls’ shaky voices urged everyone around them to help. Then I too was summoned. “Dad, what are you waiting for? Please help us before they all die.” I tried to absolve myself from what seemed to me a waste of time. But when I saw the tears in Zarefah’s eyes, and heard the fright in her voice, I joined in – as enthusiastically as the many other beachgoers-turned-environmentalists.

Four years later, in 2008, both Zarefah and Iman voted for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. They were ten and eight, so their votes didn’t count. It was a mockup election at their elementary school in the little town of Bothell in Washington State.

Have a Nice World War, Folks. By John Pilger

Via: Information Clearing House.

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.