Month: August 2015

by William Skink

Man, I hate it when I’m an unwitting dupe of the fascists. If you didn’t know it yet, let me be the first to tell you Black Lives Matter is a movement funded by billionaire George Soros who is obviously using these black puppets who can’t think for themselves to take down Bernie for Hillary.

While that angle is certainly plausible, considering Soros does use his billions to destabilize other countries, what’s more likely is the two woman who stormed the stage in Seattle are opportunists co-opting BLM to get attention for their own message:

According to a group familiar with BLM operations on the ground in Seattle, Johnson and fellow protester Mara Jacqueline are “opportunists” from a group called Outside Agitators 206 who co-opted the BLM label — an easy thing to do considering that BLM is essentially a leaderless movement.

And what is that message? Here is part of the message from their press release:

Bernie’s arrival in Seattle is largely significant in the context of the state of emergency Black lives are in locally as well as across America. The Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree for the last three years and has been continually plagued by use-of-force violations and racist scandals amongst their rank and file. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has refused to push any reform measures for police accountability, not even the numerous recommendations of his self-appointed Community Police Commission. The Seattle School District suspends Black students at a rate six times higher than their white counterparts, feeding Black children into the school-to-prison pipeline. King County has fought hard to push through a plan to build a $210 million new youth jail to imprison these children, amid intense community criticism and dissent. The Central District, a historically Black neighborhood in Seattle, has undergone rapid gentrification over the past few decades, with Black people being displaced from the only neighborhood that we could legally live in until just years ago. While white men profit off of the legalization of marijuana, our prisons are still filled with Black people who are over-incarcerated for drug offenses.

This city is filled with white progressives, which is why Bernie Sanders’ camp was obviously expecting a friendly and consenting audience for today’s campaign visit. The problem with Sanders’, and with white Seattle progressives in general, is that they are utterly and totally useless (when not outright harmful) in terms of the fight for Black lives. While we are drowning in their liberal rhetoric, we have yet to see them support Black grassroots movements or take on any measure of risk and responsibility for ending the tyranny of white supremacy in our country and in our city. This willful passivity while claiming solidarity with the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement in an effort to be relevant is over. White progressive Seattle and Bernie Sanders cannot call themselves liberals while they participate in the racist system that claims Black lives. Bernie Sanders will not continue to call himself a man of the people, while ignoring the plight of Black people. Presidential candidates will not win Black votes without putting out an explicit criminal justice reform package. As was said at the Netroots action, presidential candidates should expect to be shut down and confronted every step along the way of this presidential campaign. Black people are in a state of emergency. Lines have been drawn in the sand. You are either fighting continuously and measurably to protect Black life in America, or you are a part of the white supremacist system that we will tear down in the liberation of our people.

Is this a part of a divide and conquer strategy to benefit the plutocrats? Is exacerbating racial tensions designed to distract from the class issues Bernie Sanders has made the focus of his campaign? Do they truly see Bernie as a threat? I mean, he is now leading in New Hampshire.

Personally, I think presidential politics is a waste of time. I tend to agree with Paul Street’s assessment of why movements shouldn’t get bogged down by presidential electoral politics. Here is an excerpt from his article Why Bernie Sanders is No Great White Hope for Black America:

…there’s a big difference between assisting a great grassroots struggle for social justice like the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and running for the White House under the banner of the corporate and imperial Democratic Party. The first form of activism is a worthy commitment. The second is not. It encourages people to link their hopes for progressive change and social justice to a reactionary political party with a long and deserved history as the graveyard of social movements. It channels popular anger and excitement into a dead, money-soaked political and elections system and its staggered, quadrennial, highly personalized and mass-marketed corporate media-ted candidate-centered electoral spectacles – as if that’s the real and only politics that matters.

The development of grassroots social movements strong enough that they can’t be ignored by concentrated wealth, privilege, and power is far more significant. As Howard Zinn explained seven years ago, criticizing the “election madness” that had “egulf[ed] the entire society, including the left” in the year of Brand Obama’s ascendancy, “Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced [to act in accord with popular needs] by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be great if Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the primary battle, but even if Bernie Sanders were to win the presidency, not even an avowed socialist in the White House is going to be able to reverse the destruction of late-stage crony capitalism. More likely, a Sanders presidency would keep American foreign policy tied to the psychotic state of Israel and the western war machine chugging toward a suicidal confrontation with Russia. At least that is what Bernie Sanders’ record suggests.

by William Skink

You can’t talk about economic inequality without talking about race, but up until now that is what Bernie Sanders has been doing, and white progressives love him for it. What white progressives don’t love, apparently, is uppity black activists stealing the spotlight.

James Conner is especially incensed, once again referring to these disruptive blacks as thugs:

Black racist thugs from the Black Lives Matter group stormed the stage in Seattle today, shoving Bernie Sanders away from the microphone.
…
This has got to stop. Every time BLM’s shock troops storm a progressive stage without resistance, liberals and Democrats appear weak and irresolute — and the Republican nominee in 2016 gains more votes.

Charge these BLM thugs with assault, throw them in jail, and throw away the key.

Charge the organizers with stupidity and cowardice, and never let them near another political event. Instead of saying “okay, you’ve got a few minutes,” they should have said “take one step toward that stage and you’ll be frog-marched to the nearest jail.” The organizers had to have known from the Netroots debacle that BLM was there to grab headlines by disrupting the event.

Will black leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton denounce BLM’s attitude and tactics? Or through their silence will they become silent accomplices in their thuggery?

Taking a slightly less niggers-should-know-their-place approach, here’s Dan Brooks at his Combat! blog reminding us that protests are, by nature, disruptive:

On Saturday, protestors aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement shut down a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I think police violence against black people is a huge problem that the United States is, for the most part, still ignoring. I think activism—particularly activism by protest—is by definition disruptive and unpopular. You know what reduced institutional racism in Ferguson? Rioting in the streets. So you cannot criticize an act of protest for being inappropriate, because that’s the point. You can, however, criticize a protest for being ineffective, and I question whether Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford achieved what they wanted on Saturday.

If what they wanted was to stop the Bernie Sanders rally, mission accomplished. The Senator from Vermont had just started to address the crowd when Johnson and Willaford took the microphone and said, “If you do not listen, your event will be shut down.” When the audience started booing, Johnson accused them of “white supremacist liberalism.” Then the protestors called for four and a half minutes of silence to symbolize the four and a half hours Michael Brown lay dead on the streets of Ferguson. More booing. Johnson and Willaford would not let Sanders have the microphone, and eventually the event was canceled.

It’s not surprising Sanders has a racial blind-spot. Vermont is, after-all, 94% white and relatively well-educated. But Sanders isn’t running a state-wide campaign—he’s running for president, so ignoring the racial component of economic inequality isn’t a good idea.

The Sanders campaign has finally acknowledged this by formulating and releasing Sanders’ racial justice platform. That, I would say, is a big win for the Black Lives Matters movement. From the link:

The platform, which has won praise from several prominent voices in the Black Lives Matter movement, focuses on different forms of violence against people of color in the United States: physical violence from law enforcement and extremist vigilantes, the political violence of voter suppression, the legal violence of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, and the economic violence of crushing poverty. Sanders lays out several proposals to address each form of violence, from passing “ban the box” laws to prevent hiring discrimination against people with criminal records, to outlawing for-profit prisons, to restoring the gutted protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Instead of getting all indignant, white progressives might want to remember that political movements are what produce political change in this country, and without these types of movements, white supremacist liberalism is what we get, like 16 destructive years of Clinton/Obama neoliberalism.

Black Lives Matter, as a movement, isn’t going away. Not when people of color disproportionately fill our prisons and are regularly being gunned down in American streets. Privileged white people simply don’t understand what it’s like growing up black or brown in America. We don’t fear for our life when we see sirens or experience the more subtle mechanisms of structural racism.

So a few thousand Sandernistas didn’t get to soak up the Bernie love in Seattle. Boo-hoo. Instead of angrily lashing out at these activists, white progressives might want to acknowledge that those activists actually accomplished something—they compelled Bernie Sanders to address their movement’s concerns with a policy platform.

by William Skink

Near the end of last year, Chris Rock made some waves by explaining why he doesn’t play college campuses anymore—they’re too conservative. Not vote-Republican conservative, but demanding to be protected from feeling uncomfortable conservative:

What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?3

Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.

In their political views?

Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

A recent Missoulian article featuring a transgender woman accusing Missoula College of discrimination got me thinking about this. Because the transgender issue is one of the du jour issues right now, the Missoulian saw a chance to get some clicks, and the alleged victim of this discrimination saw a chance to use the media to plead her case.

One of the questions this article raises is how many exceptions should a person be given? And do certain people deserve more exceptions because their special victimhood status apparently absolves them of the consequences of their actions?

An exception was already made for Jame Wallack in order for her to be admitted to Missoula College because Wallack is a convicted felon. Then she attacked her partner, but that wasn’t her fault—no, it was the drugs she was taking:

This past January, Jame Wallack grew depressed and anxious because of fluctuations in her hormones, and Kim decided her wife should go to the doctor and get medication.

“Boy, did that backfire in my face,” Kim said.

Over spring break, Jame Wallack took painkillers for slipped discs in her back, and she took antidepressants.

One day in March, Kim asked if she had taken too many pills. Jame gave her a blank stare.

Then, she attacked her wife. A police report provided to the Missoulian by Jame Wallack said Jame grabbed her wife’s throat and pinned her against the wall.

Kim told police that Jame let her go when she realized she was hurting her. Then, Jame panicked and put Kim in a head lock.

Kim escaped, Jame fled and Kim called police.

Now, if Jame was still a man attending college as a convicted felon, and HE beat his wife, then that would be it. Case closed. But HE is now a SHE, and she is essentially demanding that the difficulty of this transition absolve her of the consequences of her actions.

At Counterpunch today, Derrick Jensen has an interesting piece, titled Liberals and the New McCarthyism. In this article Jensen takes a look at a new iteration of blacklisting, which Jensen calls deplatforming. From the link:

For the past decade or so, deplatforming—the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group—and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, “exploding.” Between 2002 and 2013, disinvitations from universities went up six times. And no longer are the primary blacklisters the capitalists (as was the case in the 1950s) or the pro-Israel lobby (as it has been for the past few decades). The pro-Israel lobby is still blacklisting like mad, but it’s been overtaken these days in the anti-free-speech sweepstakes by those who often consider themselves the brave heirs of Mario Savio: the liberals and leftists. And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well). Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was recently deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women. Only outcry by women forced the college to reinstate him. Writer and activist Gail Dines was recently deplatformed because she speaks out against pornography. Last year an anarchist organization called “Civil Liberties Defense Center” lent its efforts to attempts to deplatform writer and activist Lierre Keith from the University of Oregon because she’s a radical feminist. The irony of an organization with “civil liberties” in its title attempting to deplatform someone because her ideology doesn’t fit its own doesn’t escape me, and probably won’t escape anyone outside of anarchist/liberal/leftist circles. Last year, female genital mutilation survivor, child bride survivor, and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis because she writes, from unspeakably painful experience, about how millions of women are treated under Islam.

Capitalists used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The pro-Israel lobby uses the rhetoric of “Anti-Semitism.” And the modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”

How extreme has this gotten? More from the article:

Things are much worse than I’ve so far made them seem. Brown University recently held a debate about sexual assault on campus. In response to the very existence of this debate—and this time it’s not The Onion reporting, but rather The New York Times—the college set up a “safe space” where those who might be made uncomfortable, or to use the politically correct parlance, “triggered,” by the debate could remove to relax with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” A student gave her reason for using the safe room: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”

Silly me. I thought being challenged was a primary point of college.

Over the past few years I’ve talked to several university instructors (especially adjuncts) who’ve told me they’re afraid of their students. Not physically, as in their students killing them, but rather they fear that uttering any opinion that any of their students—either conservative or liberal: it swings both ways—find objectionable will lead to that student complaining to the administration, after which the instructor may lose her or his classes, in effect be fired. And I just read an essay by an instructor in which he mentions an adjunct whose contract was not “renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.”

I’m not sure what I think about all this. There are definitely victims who have experienced trauma and need support, but it seems we are conditioning people to expect a sanitized collegiate environment in which nothing will ever be said that will make any special group feel uncomfortable. That doesn’t exist in the real world, and I thought college was supposed to prepare young people for dealing with reality off-campus, not create an insular world on campus where the slightest tinge of discomfort triggers suppressing whatever text/speaker makes people feel uncomfortable.

Thoughts?

by William Skink

I want to expound on yesterday’s post about Oath Keepers in Lincoln, Montana. I think I’ll start with Rob’s comment:

Yes, James makes a very level headed argument. His only mistake is that he ends it with a period and not a question mark. We all suspect that it is only a matter of time before someone is shot in these anti-government militia encounters with people trying to do their jobs. And then what?

That’s the same question I have for all of the awake folk who believe that the shadow forces of what our government has become have us so thoroughly under their thumb that the Sheeple are terrified to do anything about it. Violence happens either in the Ukraine, Ferguson Mo, or Lincoln Montana. And then what?

I guess the simple answer is simple: Blog posts, and more blog posts ranking on someone else’s blog posts. Surely the Sheeple will awaken any day now … unless somebody else’s blog post silences the alarm of a blog post. And then what?

These are tedious times we are living through. Why even try to understand, or write silly blog posts to inform and influence others? It’s almost football season. There are more important things to be doing I guess.

For me, I want to understand as best I can what the hell is going on. I want to know why our government gets to regularly spy on its citizens in violation of the constitution without consequence. I want to know why James Clapper can perjure himself in front of Congress and escape indictment. I want to know why General Hayden can tell a whopper about pre-9/11 intelligence gathering while anyone who questions the government’s version of events that day is denigrated as a borderline mentally ill truther. Since questioning 9/11 is so vehemently ridiculed, I’m going to include a rather lengthy excerpt because I think it’s incredibly important information:

In a recent piece published by Foreign Policy Bamford examines a phone call to a clandestine operations center run by Osama bin Laden in Yemen during March of 2000. The phone call was dialed by one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, from his apartment in San Diego. In fact, there were a number of such phone calls made by 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego. Why didn’t our security services immediately launch investigations?

According to then Director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, the NSA was unable to determine the geographic origin of these calls despite the fact that the phone line in Yemen (967-1-200-578) was under intense scrutiny by NSA. The Yemen number was tracked using a form of surveillance known as “cast-iron” coverage where dedicated resources were allocated to continuously monitor the line 24/7.

Years later, in 2014, Hayden claimed that technical difficulties prevented exact geolocation. By the way, this is the same justification that he relied on post-9/11 to help institute the bulk collection program for phone metadata. Hayden told interviewers from Frontline:

“Two guys, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, living in San Diego… come to the United States, call home, call Yemen, call a safe house in Yemen seven times. We intercepted every one of the calls, right?

Nothing in the physics of the intercept, nothing in the content of the call told us they were in San Diego. If we’d have had the metadata program, OK, if we’d have had that basket of stuff and that phone number of that safe house in Yemen, which we knew, and we would have walked up to that metadata and said, ‘Hey, any of you guys talked to this number in Yemen?,’ those numbers in San Diego would have popped up.”

James Bamford, himself a former NSA whistleblower, digs into Hayden’s assertions. Leveraging the technical expertise of former NSA insiders he unearths an unsettling find. The narrative spun by Hayden is “an absolute lie.” The NSA knew damn well that these calls were coming from San Diego. According to former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake:

“Every number that comes into that switchboard, if you’re cast-iron coverage on that switchboard, you know exactly what that number is and where it comes from.… You know exactly—otherwise it can’t get there.”

Former NSA senior analyst Kirk Wiebe expounds on Drake’s counterpoint, noting that telephone communiques are bundled with the bits of information necessary to bill the correct phone company:

“You know the phone numbers involved, who’s making the phone call, and who it’s going to because the billing system has to have that metadata to charge you.”

So Drake, Wiebe, and other NSA veterans charge that Hayden is full of it. That the NSA was aware of terrorists in San Diego phoning home to Yemen. This raises some important questions. For example, how on earth could an intelligence agency with billions in resources neglect to follow up on these calls? From people whom they knew to be associated with bin Laden? How could internal security services not request court authorization for wiretaps and launch an inquiry? It’s a given that any investigator worth their salt would’ve linked and correlated the San Diego callers to other 9/11 terrorists in the United States and almost certainly put a halt to the operation.

There may be those who point to incompetence and embarrassment as a possible explanation. Such people would argue that the NSA is an agency like other agencies made up of people and that people are fallible; the San Diego call was somehow overlooked or was accidentally lost in the commotion of the NSA’s monolithic bureaucracy.

Your author questions this account, as it would indicate an organization that’s way beyond dysfunctional. Recent disclosures by WikiLeaks describe economic espionage by the United States which depict an NSA that’s more than capable of performing SIGINT missions. Other Snowden-era documents also indicate that the NSA runs a world class spy outfit. Consider also that foreign countries like Germany are just itching to be brought into the Five Eyes fold. No keystone cops here, no sir!

Precluding ineptitude leaves us with a more disturbing scenario. That the calls from San Diego were intentionally ignored. In other words, certain people didn’t want them investigated. Thus raising even more disturbing questions.

And then what?

I don’t have any answers. Divide and conquer works, so they will keep doing it, with our help.

Maybe that’s something to focus on. The criminal consolidators of wealth can’t do what they are doing without our help. Why don’t we stop helping them?

by William Skink

White people with guns get to do things non-white people wouldn’t dare to do. Last year it was anti-government white people in a standoff against the Feds to protect Cliven Bundy’s ranch that allegedly ‘invigorated‘ anti-government groups. This year it might be the Oath Keepers in Lincoln, Montana providing armed resistance against the tyranny of the Forest Service meddling with innocent miners. Here’s the rub, from the Missoulian link:

The groups say the mining claim held by George Kornec predates 1955 regulations that granted surface rights to the Forest Service. The claim thus falls under the 1872 mining law, granting both surface and subsurface rights to Kornec, they say.

The Forest Service, the groups said in a news release, has been unlawfully demanding operating plans under the 1955 law, and not allowed the miners to operate for two years.

“Our position is to protect the rights of these miners thru a open dialogue with the USFS and reach a Legal & Constitutional conclusion,” the news release state

Instead of delving into the merits of this nuanced legal argument that should probably be left to the courts to decide, I’d like to take a look at Don Pogreba’s predictable reaction, with a post titled THE OATH KEEPERS ARE COMING! HIDE YOUR BOOK LEARNING! (CAPITALIZATION ADDED FOR EMPHASIS!)

Let’s start with the second paragraph of this insightful post:

The merits of the claim by the miners is irrelevant, because in a civilized society, those disputes are settled by courts and negotiation, not wannabe Rambos cosplaying as hereoes of the Revolution. Only in the paranoid fantasies and grandiose self-delusion of the chemtrail-fearing, Jade Helm-resisting, tinfoil-donning militia crowd does appearing at a mine dispute to “defend liberty” improve a situation or defuse what could be a tense situation, but here they are, no doubt with a Fox News team on its way to stoke the flames.

I find this rich piece of discourse, pitting the civilized norms of society against paranoid Rambo fantasies steeped in conspiracy, totally boring. More to the point, Don’s civilized society can go %$*! itself.

While these paranoid white conspiracists with guns are worthy of Don’s disdain, actual murderous right-wing neo-Nazi thugs get to go berserker in Ukraine because American foreign policy is reckless and insane. But hey, don’t worry, Congress totally made sure some of those neo-Nazi thugs won’t get our tax dollars:

The House of Representatives has unanimously approved an amendment to the U.S. military budget, proposed by Conyers and Florida Republican Ted Yoho, banning support and training for “the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary militia ‘Azov Battalion.'” Azov was set up in May 2014 to fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Fantastic!

Now let’s see Don’s parting shot against our local Oath Keeper threat:

It’s easy to mock these clowns, because their grasp of history, logic, government, and human decency is so limited, but mockery obscures the fact that they are dangerous, in their ham-fisted, clumsy way. One would hope that Montanan politicians, especially those who give these patriots credence, will condemn their actions, and that the press, charged with informing us, will give them the scrutiny they deserve.

Instead of mocking the predictability of this reaction, I’d like to offer a different take. Warning: the following may sound conspiratorial.

Allowing the militia threat to fester is a feature, not a bug.