http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/25005-leading-civil-rights-groups-just-sold-out-on-net-neutrality
Comcast truck. (photo: unknown)
Leading Civil Rights Groups Just Sold Out on Net Neutrality
By Lee Fang, Republic Report
27 July 14
The who's who of the civil rights community claims regulators would somehow “harm communities of color.”
Here's why
Last Friday, just before the Federal Communication Commission closed its comment period for its upcoming rule on “network neutrality,” a massive coalition of Asian, Latino and Black civil rights group filed letters arguing that regulators should lay off of Internet Service Providers regarding Title II reclassification and accept FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s original plan. In other words, something close to half of the entire civil rights establishment just sold out the Internet.
The civil rights group letters argue that Title II reclassification of broadband services as a public utility — the only path forward for real net neutrality after a federal court ruling in January — would somehow “harm communities of color.” The groups wrote to the FCC to tell them that “we do not believe that the door to Title II should be opened.” Simply put, these groups, many of which claim to carry the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr., are saying that Comcast and Verizon should be able to create Internet slow lanes and fast lanes, and such a change would magically improve the lives of non-white Americans.
The filings reveal a who’s who of civil rights groups willing to shill on behalf of the telecom industry. One filing lists prominent civil rights groups NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Urban League, the National Council on Black Civil Participation and the National Action Network. The other features the Council of Korean Americans, the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Black Farmers Association, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, the Latino Coalition, and many more.
Of course, the groups listed on these filings do not speak for all communities of color on telecom policy, and there are civil rights groups out there that actually support net neutrality, including Color of Change and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Joseph Torres with Free Press told VICE that communities of color believe a free and open Internet is essential in the digital age, especially when most non-whites do not own radio stations, broadcast outlets or other forms of mass media. “Protecting real net neutrality is critical for people of color because an open Internet gives us the opportunity to speak for ourselves without having to ask corporate gatekeepers for permission,” Torres says.
A number of K Street consultants have helped make this epic sell-out possible.
The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) coordinated many of the participants in the anti-net neutrality filings sent to the FCC last week. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity published an investigation of MMTC, showing that the group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from Verizon, Comcast, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, and other telecom sources while reliably peddling the pro-telecom industry positions. For instance, the group attacked the Obama administration’s first attempt at net neutrality, while celebrating the proposed (and eventually successful) merger between Comcast and NBC.
Martin Chavez, the former Mayor of Albuquerque, now works with a group called the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership (HTTP) to corral Latino civil rights groups into opposing net neutrality. Last month, Chavez hosted a net neutrality event on Capitol Hill to call on legislators to oppose Title II reclassification. As TIME recently reported, Chavez is on staff with one of Verizon’s lobbying firms, the Ibarra Strategy Group.
“HTTP is nothing more than an industry front-group that is at best misinformed and at worst intentionally distorting facts as it actively opposes efforts to better serve the communications needs of Latinos,” says Alex Nogales of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which strongly supports net neutrality. His group has filed its own letter to the FCC.
Still, telecom cash has become a vital source of funding for cash-starved nonprofits. OCA, the Asian American civil rights nonprofit formerly known as the Organization of Chinese Americans, counts Comcast as a major donor and sponsor for its events and galas. Not only did OCA go on to sign the anti-net neutrality letter last Friday, the group wrote a similar filing to the FCC in 2010, claiming absurdly that Asian American entrepreneurs would benefit from having ISPs able to discriminate based on content. Similarly, League of United Latin American Citizens, better known simply as LULAC, has been a dependable ally of the telecom industry while partnering with Comcast for a $5 million civic engagement campaign. Here’s a picture of LULAC proudly accepting a jumbo-sized check from AT&T.
As VICE first reported, telecoms are desperate for third party approval, and have even resorted to fabricating community support for their anti-net neutrality lobbying campaign.
Perhaps the bigger picture here is how so many of the old civil rights establishment have become comfortable with trading endorsements for cash. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and other telecom companies have donated, either directly or through a company foundation, to nearly every group listed on the anti-net neutrality letters filed last week. We saw a similar dynamic play out with Wal-Mart when the retailer handed out cash to civil rights groups in order to buy support for opening stores in urban areas.
Times have changed. Just as Martin Luther King Jr.’s children have embarrassingly descended intofighting bitterly over what’s left of his estate, the civil rights groups formed to advance Dr. King’s legacy seem willing to sell out their own members for a buck.
© 2014 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Monday, July 28, 2014
The Kochs' New Racial Gambit: Behind a Quiet Battle With AFSCME
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The Kochs' New Racial Gambit: Behind a Quiet Battle With AFSCME
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/25/koch_brothers_new_racial_gambit_whats_really_behind_a_quiet_battle_with_afscme/
Joan Walsh
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Salon
Rush Limbaugh attacked them as “lunatics” running a “plantation” [1] for black “slaves.” Another right-winger claimed a “white” union president was out to hurt “disadvantaged black youth,” even though the union president in question is black [2].
It’s no surprise AFSCME’s decision to end its partnership with the United Negro Colllege Fund [3], in the wake of UNCF accepting a $25 million contribution from the Koch brothers to establish a “Koch Scholars” program, as well as participating in their annual right-wing strategy summit, has conservatives trashing the influential public sector union. It fits their favorite story line: Liberals are the real racists.
But even some non-wingnuts have piled on. The Root’s Keli Goff blasted the decision [4] as “progressive intolerance,” insisting that the Kochs’ support of public sector union busting “has nothing to do with educating African-American students.” That’s led to renewed interest in AFSCME’s move, which president Lee Saunders announced two weeks ago.
In a letter to UNCF president Michael Lomax, AFSCME’s Saunders called the Kochs “the single most prominent funders of efforts to prevent African-Americans from voting.” Lomax’s appearance at the Koch brothers’ annual summit, where they plot conservative strategy – this year’s focus was taking back the Senate in 2014 — was “a betrayal of everything the UNCF stands for.” Members of AFSCME, a union that supports Democrats with money and people power, voted unanimously to back Saunders’ decision at their annual convention in Chicago last week.
“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue,” Saunders told Salon, in his first interview since the fracas. “It’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Still, the critics keep coming. Just this week, in the right-wing Daily Caller [5], Raynard Jackson called it “a stunning move that should anger every Black in America.” In the backyard of Koch-critic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Las Vegas Review Journal [6] called the decision “ridiculous,” complaining that “Democrats and their supporters are quick to and fond of accusing conservatives and Republicans of being racists, but when Republican supporters such as the Kochs aim to demonstrate otherwise, a government employee union responds by causing direct harm to blacks.” The Review Journal is a conservative paper, but the African-American newspaper South Florida Times [7], which is not, likewise insisted “AFSCME must restore UNCF funding,” though it called Lomax’s decision to join the Koch summit “a mistake.”
It should be noted that AFSCME has always said it would continue the scholarship program for students of color it began with UNCF, but will find different partners.
Clearly the controversy, which involves two venerable organizations, has African-Americans on both sides of the issue. Founded by Mary McLeod Bethune and others in 1944, the UNCF offers scholarships to black students and funds important but embattled historically black colleges and universities. AFSCME, the union Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was supporting when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, now has its first black president, Saunders, and African-Americans make up 15 percent of its membership.
“It was a very difficult decision for me to make as an African-American,” says Saunders, the AFSCME leader who first approached former UNCF president Bill Gray with the notion of partnering on a scholarship program for students of color interested in labor movement careers, more than 10 years ago. Saunders says he personally raised money for UNCF for years.
He adds that if the Kochs had donated $25 million to UNCF “and said ‘here it is, do what you want to do with it,’ maybe we would have taken a different tack. Maybe I would have swallowed it.” But Lomax’s participation in the Kochs’ annual summit made the union draw “a line in the sand,” he said.
Michael Lomax did not respond to requests for comment. In an earlier statement about the controversy he said: “While I am saddened by AFSCME’s decision, it will not distract us from our mission of helping thousands of African-American students achieve their dream of a college degree and the economic benefits that come with it.” In an interview with Education Week about some UNCF supporters’ opposition to taking the Koch money, he argued “I think that Washington’s partisanship has really poisoned the thinking of some people all across the country.” Koch spokesperson Melissa Cohlmia told AP the Kochs “have devoted their lives to advancing tolerance and a free society — where every individual is judged on his or her individual merits and they are free to make decisions about their lives.”
According to reporting in the Nation [7] by Lauren Windsor, who obtained a “confidential” draft meeting agenda [8] and spoke to participants, the summit Lomax attended drew Republican luminaries including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate candidates Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Cory Gardner of Colorado — three close races that are crucial to GOP hopes of taking back the Senate – along with 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio. No Democratic officeholders or candidates were included in the annual confab, which took place this year at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort in Dana Point, California.
Titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” an early panel featured David Koch and longtime political partner Richard Fink, with whom he set up the right-wing Mercatus Center, holding forth on “Saving America: Our Fight to Advance Freedom and Reverse the Country’s Decline.” A dinner and then a morning panel showcased the notorious Charles Murray [9], who has long posited the “intractable” and probably genetic intellectual inferiority of African-Americans (and, more recently, low-income white people [10]) and preached that government programs worsen poverty by destroying the work ethic and marriage habits of the poor.
In a four-session panel titled “The Foundation for Progress,” Lomax was featured in “Part One: Drive the National Conversation,” alongside Richard Fink and two Koch Industries executives. A session on how to “Advance in the States” featured Americans for Prosperity’s Teresa Oelke; Mitch McConnell headlined the final session, “Free Speech: Defending First Amendment Rights.”
UNCF’s decision to accept Koch funding was controversial even before AFSCME’s move, and some African-Americans have raised questions similar to Saunders. On NewsOneNow, Roland Martin hosted a discussion on the Kochs’ donation [11] last month that turned into a polite but sharp debate between Lomax and progressive economist Julianne Malveaux, the former president of Bennett College for Women, the oldest historically black women’s college.
Expressing gratitude for UNCF’s support, Malveaux nonetheless questioned the “strings” attached to the Kochs’ gift: $18.5 million of $25 million is to create a “Koch Scholars” program, for “exemplary students” who want to study “how entrepreneurship, economics, and innovation contribute to well-being for individuals, communities, and society.” Koch organizations get two of five seats on that scholarship selection committee.
Lomax noted that $4 million of the grant is unrestricted support to HBCUs, and he invited Malveaux to come speak to the Koch Scholars. She replied: “I’d rather be on the selection committee,” and went on: “They’re using it to say ‘we support black people’ when the truth is that they don’t, they fund voter suppression.”
Beyond the details of the “Koch Scholars” program, or Lomax’s role in the Kochs’ right-wing summit, is the question of the role of Koch-demonized labor unions in the black community. African-American workers are more likely to be represented by a union than other workers, and labor leaders were among the earliest supporters of the modern civil rights movement (the famous 1963 March on Washington [12] was also a “march for jobs and justice,” initially catalyzed by African-American labor luminary A. Philip Randolph). Black men have the highest rate of union membership of any group, at 14.8 percent compared with 11.9 percent of white men. In the 10 biggest metro areas, black workers are 42 percent more likely to be union members than workers of other races, according to Stephen Pitts of the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center [13].
Pitts’ study found black workers are 30 percent more likely than other groups to be employed in the public sector, which AFSCME represents. Those black public sector workers also make roughly 25 percent more than black workers in overall workforce – in part because public workers are more likely to be represented by unions, 35 percent vs. 7 percent in the private sector.
“The Koch brothers want a government-free society,” Saunders says. “Public service has enabled African-Americans to move into the middle class, but the Kochs are trying to dismantle that.”
The backlash against AFSCME’s decision on the right has led progressives to come out in support of the union in the last few days. “We believe that AFSCME is doing what is right for its members who the Koch brothers have targeted and is working in the interests of students of color who attend not only UNCF Institutions, but all institutions of higher learning,” Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network said in a statement. (Saunders is on its board.) Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson agreed, insisting that the Kochs, who “spend their lives advancing an agenda that puts our communities in harm’s way, will never give us enough money in the name of charity to overturn their agenda.”
Saunders says, once again, that critics are wrong when they insist AFSCME is taking scholarships away from black students. He promises the union will continue its scholarship program for students of color.
“We’re going to find another partner, or do it ourselves,” he promised. “We’re committed to that.” He went on: “We agree with the mission of UNCF 100 percent. But the question is, are we going to be sold off to the highest bidder? I just think that’s wrong. We can’t be bought.”
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America [14]."
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-26/kochs-new-racial-gambit-behind-quiet-battle-afscme
Links:
[1] http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/limbaugh-blasts-union-for-running-black-plantation/
[2] http://buzzpo.com/white-union-rep-calls-united-negro-college-fund-racists/
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-a-saunders/a-principle-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste_b_5571970.html
[4] http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/07/afscme_s_wrong_about_uncf_s_koch_money.html
[5] http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/21/lee-saunders-union-is-wrong-to-cut-ties-with-uncf-over-koch-funding/#ixzz38PMtJeRk
[6] http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorial-partisan-union-cuts-ties-united-negro-college-fund
[7] http://sfltimes.net/opinion/what-we-think-afscme-must-restore-uncf-funding
[8] http://www.scribd.com/doc/230108736/The-Koch-Brothers-Secret-Billionaire-Summit
[9] http://www.salon.com/2014/03/18/paul_krugman_demolishes_charles_murrays_stunning_racist_dishonesty/
[10] http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/charles_murray_does_it_again/
[11] http://newsone.com/3018256/uncf-president-explains-koch-brothers-25m-donation/
[12] http://www.salon.com/2013/08/28/the_rights_outrageous_mlk_ignorance/
[13]
http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/blackworkers/report.php
[14] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476733120/?tag=saloncom08-20
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
The Kochs' New Racial Gambit: Behind a Quiet Battle With AFSCME
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/25/koch_brothers_new_racial_gambit_whats_really_behind_a_quiet_battle_with_afscme/
Joan Walsh
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Salon
Rush Limbaugh attacked them as “lunatics” running a “plantation” [1] for black “slaves.” Another right-winger claimed a “white” union president was out to hurt “disadvantaged black youth,” even though the union president in question is black [2].
It’s no surprise AFSCME’s decision to end its partnership with the United Negro Colllege Fund [3], in the wake of UNCF accepting a $25 million contribution from the Koch brothers to establish a “Koch Scholars” program, as well as participating in their annual right-wing strategy summit, has conservatives trashing the influential public sector union. It fits their favorite story line: Liberals are the real racists.
But even some non-wingnuts have piled on. The Root’s Keli Goff blasted the decision [4] as “progressive intolerance,” insisting that the Kochs’ support of public sector union busting “has nothing to do with educating African-American students.” That’s led to renewed interest in AFSCME’s move, which president Lee Saunders announced two weeks ago.
In a letter to UNCF president Michael Lomax, AFSCME’s Saunders called the Kochs “the single most prominent funders of efforts to prevent African-Americans from voting.” Lomax’s appearance at the Koch brothers’ annual summit, where they plot conservative strategy – this year’s focus was taking back the Senate in 2014 — was “a betrayal of everything the UNCF stands for.” Members of AFSCME, a union that supports Democrats with money and people power, voted unanimously to back Saunders’ decision at their annual convention in Chicago last week.
“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue,” Saunders told Salon, in his first interview since the fracas. “It’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Still, the critics keep coming. Just this week, in the right-wing Daily Caller [5], Raynard Jackson called it “a stunning move that should anger every Black in America.” In the backyard of Koch-critic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Las Vegas Review Journal [6] called the decision “ridiculous,” complaining that “Democrats and their supporters are quick to and fond of accusing conservatives and Republicans of being racists, but when Republican supporters such as the Kochs aim to demonstrate otherwise, a government employee union responds by causing direct harm to blacks.” The Review Journal is a conservative paper, but the African-American newspaper South Florida Times [7], which is not, likewise insisted “AFSCME must restore UNCF funding,” though it called Lomax’s decision to join the Koch summit “a mistake.”
It should be noted that AFSCME has always said it would continue the scholarship program for students of color it began with UNCF, but will find different partners.
Clearly the controversy, which involves two venerable organizations, has African-Americans on both sides of the issue. Founded by Mary McLeod Bethune and others in 1944, the UNCF offers scholarships to black students and funds important but embattled historically black colleges and universities. AFSCME, the union Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was supporting when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, now has its first black president, Saunders, and African-Americans make up 15 percent of its membership.
“It was a very difficult decision for me to make as an African-American,” says Saunders, the AFSCME leader who first approached former UNCF president Bill Gray with the notion of partnering on a scholarship program for students of color interested in labor movement careers, more than 10 years ago. Saunders says he personally raised money for UNCF for years.
He adds that if the Kochs had donated $25 million to UNCF “and said ‘here it is, do what you want to do with it,’ maybe we would have taken a different tack. Maybe I would have swallowed it.” But Lomax’s participation in the Kochs’ annual summit made the union draw “a line in the sand,” he said.
Michael Lomax did not respond to requests for comment. In an earlier statement about the controversy he said: “While I am saddened by AFSCME’s decision, it will not distract us from our mission of helping thousands of African-American students achieve their dream of a college degree and the economic benefits that come with it.” In an interview with Education Week about some UNCF supporters’ opposition to taking the Koch money, he argued “I think that Washington’s partisanship has really poisoned the thinking of some people all across the country.” Koch spokesperson Melissa Cohlmia told AP the Kochs “have devoted their lives to advancing tolerance and a free society — where every individual is judged on his or her individual merits and they are free to make decisions about their lives.”
According to reporting in the Nation [7] by Lauren Windsor, who obtained a “confidential” draft meeting agenda [8] and spoke to participants, the summit Lomax attended drew Republican luminaries including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate candidates Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Cory Gardner of Colorado — three close races that are crucial to GOP hopes of taking back the Senate – along with 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio. No Democratic officeholders or candidates were included in the annual confab, which took place this year at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort in Dana Point, California.
Titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” an early panel featured David Koch and longtime political partner Richard Fink, with whom he set up the right-wing Mercatus Center, holding forth on “Saving America: Our Fight to Advance Freedom and Reverse the Country’s Decline.” A dinner and then a morning panel showcased the notorious Charles Murray [9], who has long posited the “intractable” and probably genetic intellectual inferiority of African-Americans (and, more recently, low-income white people [10]) and preached that government programs worsen poverty by destroying the work ethic and marriage habits of the poor.
In a four-session panel titled “The Foundation for Progress,” Lomax was featured in “Part One: Drive the National Conversation,” alongside Richard Fink and two Koch Industries executives. A session on how to “Advance in the States” featured Americans for Prosperity’s Teresa Oelke; Mitch McConnell headlined the final session, “Free Speech: Defending First Amendment Rights.”
UNCF’s decision to accept Koch funding was controversial even before AFSCME’s move, and some African-Americans have raised questions similar to Saunders. On NewsOneNow, Roland Martin hosted a discussion on the Kochs’ donation [11] last month that turned into a polite but sharp debate between Lomax and progressive economist Julianne Malveaux, the former president of Bennett College for Women, the oldest historically black women’s college.
Expressing gratitude for UNCF’s support, Malveaux nonetheless questioned the “strings” attached to the Kochs’ gift: $18.5 million of $25 million is to create a “Koch Scholars” program, for “exemplary students” who want to study “how entrepreneurship, economics, and innovation contribute to well-being for individuals, communities, and society.” Koch organizations get two of five seats on that scholarship selection committee.
Lomax noted that $4 million of the grant is unrestricted support to HBCUs, and he invited Malveaux to come speak to the Koch Scholars. She replied: “I’d rather be on the selection committee,” and went on: “They’re using it to say ‘we support black people’ when the truth is that they don’t, they fund voter suppression.”
Beyond the details of the “Koch Scholars” program, or Lomax’s role in the Kochs’ right-wing summit, is the question of the role of Koch-demonized labor unions in the black community. African-American workers are more likely to be represented by a union than other workers, and labor leaders were among the earliest supporters of the modern civil rights movement (the famous 1963 March on Washington [12] was also a “march for jobs and justice,” initially catalyzed by African-American labor luminary A. Philip Randolph). Black men have the highest rate of union membership of any group, at 14.8 percent compared with 11.9 percent of white men. In the 10 biggest metro areas, black workers are 42 percent more likely to be union members than workers of other races, according to Stephen Pitts of the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center [13].
Pitts’ study found black workers are 30 percent more likely than other groups to be employed in the public sector, which AFSCME represents. Those black public sector workers also make roughly 25 percent more than black workers in overall workforce – in part because public workers are more likely to be represented by unions, 35 percent vs. 7 percent in the private sector.
“The Koch brothers want a government-free society,” Saunders says. “Public service has enabled African-Americans to move into the middle class, but the Kochs are trying to dismantle that.”
The backlash against AFSCME’s decision on the right has led progressives to come out in support of the union in the last few days. “We believe that AFSCME is doing what is right for its members who the Koch brothers have targeted and is working in the interests of students of color who attend not only UNCF Institutions, but all institutions of higher learning,” Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network said in a statement. (Saunders is on its board.) Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson agreed, insisting that the Kochs, who “spend their lives advancing an agenda that puts our communities in harm’s way, will never give us enough money in the name of charity to overturn their agenda.”
Saunders says, once again, that critics are wrong when they insist AFSCME is taking scholarships away from black students. He promises the union will continue its scholarship program for students of color.
“We’re going to find another partner, or do it ourselves,” he promised. “We’re committed to that.” He went on: “We agree with the mission of UNCF 100 percent. But the question is, are we going to be sold off to the highest bidder? I just think that’s wrong. We can’t be bought.”
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America [14]."
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-26/kochs-new-racial-gambit-behind-quiet-battle-afscme
Links:
[1] http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/limbaugh-blasts-union-for-running-black-plantation/
[2] http://buzzpo.com/white-union-rep-calls-united-negro-college-fund-racists/
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-a-saunders/a-principle-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste_b_5571970.html
[4] http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/07/afscme_s_wrong_about_uncf_s_koch_money.html
[5] http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/21/lee-saunders-union-is-wrong-to-cut-ties-with-uncf-over-koch-funding/#ixzz38PMtJeRk
[6] http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorial-partisan-union-cuts-ties-united-negro-college-fund
[7] http://sfltimes.net/opinion/what-we-think-afscme-must-restore-uncf-funding
[8] http://www.scribd.com/doc/230108736/The-Koch-Brothers-Secret-Billionaire-Summit
[9] http://www.salon.com/2014/03/18/paul_krugman_demolishes_charles_murrays_stunning_racist_dishonesty/
[10] http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/charles_murray_does_it_again/
[11] http://newsone.com/3018256/uncf-president-explains-koch-brothers-25m-donation/
[12] http://www.salon.com/2013/08/28/the_rights_outrageous_mlk_ignorance/
[13]
http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/blackworkers/report.php
[14] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476733120/?tag=saloncom08-20
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The Drought Apocalypse Approaches as the Colorado River Basin Dries Up
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/24967-the-drought-apocalypse-approaches-as-the-colorado-river-basin-dries-up
Woody reports: "Scientists on Thursday released the results of a first-of-its-kind study that finds the seven states of the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin are depleting groundwater reserves at a rapid rate."
(photo: tailwindsphotography/Flickr)
The Drought Apocalypse Approaches as the Colorado River Basin Dries Up
By Todd Woody, TakePart.com
25 July 14
Scientists on Thursday released the results of a first-of-its-kind study that finds the seven states of the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin are depleting groundwater reserves at a rapid rate. That threatens the future of a river that supplies water to 40 million people and irrigates 4 million acres of farmland.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA analyzed data from a satellite that measures underground water reserves to calculate that the Colorado River Basin has lost 65 cubic kilometers—that’s 17.3 trillion gallons—of water between December 2004 and November 2013. That represents twice the capacity of the United States’ largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada. Most worrying, 75 percent of the loss came from groundwater supplies.
“We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” Stephanie Castle, the report’s lead author and a water resources specialist at UC Irvine, said in a statement. “This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”
Terrifying, actually. Groundwater reserves have accumulated over thousands of years and recharge at an exceedingly slow rate as rainwater and snowmelt seep into the ground. Rain is rare as the current drought enters its 15th year.
The data indicates that farmers and cities are pumping far more groundwater than can be replenished. At some point, the well will run dry.
“We observe a negative net change in groundwater storage over the 108-month time period [of the study], indicating that groundwater withdrawals (pumping) are not balanced by recharge and must be greater than the observed depletion rate,” Castle said in an email.
Once the seven states of the Colorado River Basin—Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming—deplete their groundwater reserves beyond the point of no return, they will run out of options.
Usually, the states rely on aboveground reservoirs like Lake Mead to help them weather dry years. But the water level at Lake Mead has fallen to a historic low, and other reservoirs are drying up fast.
It will get worse, especially as the region grows hotter because of climate change.
“The rapid rates of groundwater depletion will lead to further declines in Colorado River steam flows and, combined with declining snowpack and population growth, will likely threaten the long-term ability” to supply water to the seven states, said Castle.
With less water flowing into reservoirs, the states will keep pumping irreplaceable groundwater reserves. That “poses a significant threat to the long-term water security of the region,” concluded the report, which is to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
So what to do? First, fill in the data gap to figure out exactly how much water is left so decisions can be made about its management for the future. That’s where the satellite program called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment comes in. The satellite measures tiny changes in an area’s gravitational pull to determine its groundwater capacity.
“There’s only one way to put together a very large–area study like this, and that is with satellites,” Jay Famiglietti, a coauthor of the report and a senior water cycle scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
© 2014 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Woody reports: "Scientists on Thursday released the results of a first-of-its-kind study that finds the seven states of the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin are depleting groundwater reserves at a rapid rate."
(photo: tailwindsphotography/Flickr)
The Drought Apocalypse Approaches as the Colorado River Basin Dries Up
By Todd Woody, TakePart.com
25 July 14
Scientists on Thursday released the results of a first-of-its-kind study that finds the seven states of the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin are depleting groundwater reserves at a rapid rate. That threatens the future of a river that supplies water to 40 million people and irrigates 4 million acres of farmland.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA analyzed data from a satellite that measures underground water reserves to calculate that the Colorado River Basin has lost 65 cubic kilometers—that’s 17.3 trillion gallons—of water between December 2004 and November 2013. That represents twice the capacity of the United States’ largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada. Most worrying, 75 percent of the loss came from groundwater supplies.
“We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” Stephanie Castle, the report’s lead author and a water resources specialist at UC Irvine, said in a statement. “This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”
Terrifying, actually. Groundwater reserves have accumulated over thousands of years and recharge at an exceedingly slow rate as rainwater and snowmelt seep into the ground. Rain is rare as the current drought enters its 15th year.
The data indicates that farmers and cities are pumping far more groundwater than can be replenished. At some point, the well will run dry.
“We observe a negative net change in groundwater storage over the 108-month time period [of the study], indicating that groundwater withdrawals (pumping) are not balanced by recharge and must be greater than the observed depletion rate,” Castle said in an email.
Once the seven states of the Colorado River Basin—Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming—deplete their groundwater reserves beyond the point of no return, they will run out of options.
Usually, the states rely on aboveground reservoirs like Lake Mead to help them weather dry years. But the water level at Lake Mead has fallen to a historic low, and other reservoirs are drying up fast.
It will get worse, especially as the region grows hotter because of climate change.
“The rapid rates of groundwater depletion will lead to further declines in Colorado River steam flows and, combined with declining snowpack and population growth, will likely threaten the long-term ability” to supply water to the seven states, said Castle.
With less water flowing into reservoirs, the states will keep pumping irreplaceable groundwater reserves. That “poses a significant threat to the long-term water security of the region,” concluded the report, which is to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
So what to do? First, fill in the data gap to figure out exactly how much water is left so decisions can be made about its management for the future. That’s where the satellite program called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment comes in. The satellite measures tiny changes in an area’s gravitational pull to determine its groundwater capacity.
“There’s only one way to put together a very large–area study like this, and that is with satellites,” Jay Famiglietti, a coauthor of the report and a senior water cycle scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
© 2014 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/world/george-tenet-ex-chief-of-cia-is-set-to-defend-actions-on-interrogation-program.html?&_r=0
WORLD
Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report
By MARK MAZZETTIJULY 25, 2014
Photo
A military base in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland, which was a suspected location for the C.I.A.’s detentions and interrogations. CreditTomasz Waszcuk/European Pressphoto Agency
WASHINGTON — Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.
The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.
Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.
The report is expected to accuse a number of former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House about the program and its effectiveness, but it is Mr. Tenet who might have the most at stake.
The detention and interrogation program was conceived on his watch and run by men and women he had put in senior positions. After virtually disappearing from public view since leaving the C.I.A. in 2004 except for a brief period promoting his memoir, Mr. Tenet is working behind the scenes with many of the same people to develop a strategy to challenge the report’s findings. And he is relying on his close relationship with Mr. Brennan to keep him apprised as the report moves through a glacial declassification process. Mr. Brennan rose to the C.I.A.’s senior ranks during Mr. Tenet’s tenure, and served as one of the former C.I.A. chief’s most trusted advisers during the post-9/11 period.
Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report.
After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”
Mr. Brennan then passed the letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ms. Feinstein agreed to let a group of former senior C.I.A. officials read a draft of the report, although she initially insisted they be allowed to review it only at the committee’s office. Officials said President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, intervened and brokered an arrangement in which the officials could read an unredacted version of the report inside a secure room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Feinstein declined to comment.
The White House has been working closely with intelligence agencies to redact the document before it is returned to the Intelligence Committee, providing fuel to critics that Mr. Obama was giving license to the C.I.A. to vet a report that accuses the agency of a raft of misdeeds. The president has said little publicly about the report, other than that he would like it to be made public as soon as possible.
But some Senate Democrats are seething about how long it has taken to declassify the document, what they see as Mr. Obama’s inattention to the process, and the role played by Mr. McDonough, who is personally coordinating the redaction of the document and has a close relationship with Mr. Brennan, who served in the White House as Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser during the president’s first term.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “in my view this report should have been public yesterday, and attempts to disrupt and delay it are unacceptable.”
There is also residual anger at Mr. Brennan within the committee for authorizing the C.I.A. to search the computers of committee staff members working on the report late last year. The C.I.A. carried out the search after security officials came to think the committee staff may have improperly gained access to the spy agency’s computer systems.
“While former C.I.A. officials may be working to hide their own past wrongs, there’s no reason Brennan or any other current C.I.A. official should help facilitate the defense of the indefensible,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment.
The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.
At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.
Wagging a finger at the correspondent, Scott Pelley, Mr. Tenet said over and over, “We don’t torture people.”
“No, listen to me. No, listen to me. I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of that fact that there was so much we did not know. I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is expected to directly challenge this contention. Several people who have read the report said that it concludes that the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods broke up no terrorist plots and that agency officials repeatedly inflated the value of the program.
Mr. Tenet resigned a decade ago amid the wash of recriminations over the C.I.A.’s botched Iraq assessments, and he has given few interviews since his book tour.
But he remains bound to the spy agency he once led, raising money for the C.I.A. Officers Memorial Foundation, which gives scholarship money to children of C.I.A. officers killed in the line of duty. He has also advised companies that do business with military and intelligence agencies, including Palantir Technologies, a California-based data analysis company that has won lucrative government contracts.
He maintains his friendship with Mr. Brennan, whose C.I.A. career flourished during the Tenet era. Despite being an analyst, rather than a clandestine case officer, Mr. Brennan in the late 1990s was given the prestigious position of C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia.
He returned from Riyadh to become Mr. Tenet’s chief of staff, and later moved up to become the C.I.A.’s deputy executive director.
Correction: July 26, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser during his first term. It was John O. Brennan, not Denis McDonough.
Matt Apuzzo and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Is Set to Respond to Sharp Rebuke.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
WORLD
Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report
By MARK MAZZETTIJULY 25, 2014
Photo
A military base in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland, which was a suspected location for the C.I.A.’s detentions and interrogations. CreditTomasz Waszcuk/European Pressphoto Agency
WASHINGTON — Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.
The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.
Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.
The report is expected to accuse a number of former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House about the program and its effectiveness, but it is Mr. Tenet who might have the most at stake.
The detention and interrogation program was conceived on his watch and run by men and women he had put in senior positions. After virtually disappearing from public view since leaving the C.I.A. in 2004 except for a brief period promoting his memoir, Mr. Tenet is working behind the scenes with many of the same people to develop a strategy to challenge the report’s findings. And he is relying on his close relationship with Mr. Brennan to keep him apprised as the report moves through a glacial declassification process. Mr. Brennan rose to the C.I.A.’s senior ranks during Mr. Tenet’s tenure, and served as one of the former C.I.A. chief’s most trusted advisers during the post-9/11 period.
Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report.
After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”
Mr. Brennan then passed the letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ms. Feinstein agreed to let a group of former senior C.I.A. officials read a draft of the report, although she initially insisted they be allowed to review it only at the committee’s office. Officials said President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, intervened and brokered an arrangement in which the officials could read an unredacted version of the report inside a secure room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Feinstein declined to comment.
The White House has been working closely with intelligence agencies to redact the document before it is returned to the Intelligence Committee, providing fuel to critics that Mr. Obama was giving license to the C.I.A. to vet a report that accuses the agency of a raft of misdeeds. The president has said little publicly about the report, other than that he would like it to be made public as soon as possible.
But some Senate Democrats are seething about how long it has taken to declassify the document, what they see as Mr. Obama’s inattention to the process, and the role played by Mr. McDonough, who is personally coordinating the redaction of the document and has a close relationship with Mr. Brennan, who served in the White House as Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser during the president’s first term.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “in my view this report should have been public yesterday, and attempts to disrupt and delay it are unacceptable.”
There is also residual anger at Mr. Brennan within the committee for authorizing the C.I.A. to search the computers of committee staff members working on the report late last year. The C.I.A. carried out the search after security officials came to think the committee staff may have improperly gained access to the spy agency’s computer systems.
“While former C.I.A. officials may be working to hide their own past wrongs, there’s no reason Brennan or any other current C.I.A. official should help facilitate the defense of the indefensible,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment.
The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.
At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.
Wagging a finger at the correspondent, Scott Pelley, Mr. Tenet said over and over, “We don’t torture people.”
“No, listen to me. No, listen to me. I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of that fact that there was so much we did not know. I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is expected to directly challenge this contention. Several people who have read the report said that it concludes that the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods broke up no terrorist plots and that agency officials repeatedly inflated the value of the program.
Mr. Tenet resigned a decade ago amid the wash of recriminations over the C.I.A.’s botched Iraq assessments, and he has given few interviews since his book tour.
But he remains bound to the spy agency he once led, raising money for the C.I.A. Officers Memorial Foundation, which gives scholarship money to children of C.I.A. officers killed in the line of duty. He has also advised companies that do business with military and intelligence agencies, including Palantir Technologies, a California-based data analysis company that has won lucrative government contracts.
He maintains his friendship with Mr. Brennan, whose C.I.A. career flourished during the Tenet era. Despite being an analyst, rather than a clandestine case officer, Mr. Brennan in the late 1990s was given the prestigious position of C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia.
He returned from Riyadh to become Mr. Tenet’s chief of staff, and later moved up to become the C.I.A.’s deputy executive director.
Correction: July 26, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser during his first term. It was John O. Brennan, not Denis McDonough.
Matt Apuzzo and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Is Set to Respond to Sharp Rebuke.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
CIA Does the Torture, US Ally Pays the Price
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24980-focus-cia-does-the-torture-us-ally-pays-the-price
Kucinich writes: "The European Court of Human Rights yesterday ruled against Poland, charging our ally with human rights violations for helping the CIA operate an 'extraordinary rendition' program in which two persons suspected of terrorism were delivered to a 'black site' in 2002-2003, for detention, interrogation and torture -- in the attempt to extract bogus confessions."
Former congressman Dennis Kucinich. (photo: Getty Images)
CIA Does the Torture, US Ally Pays the Price
By Dennis Kucinich, Reader Supported News
26 July 14
The European Court of Human Rights yesterday ruled against Poland, charging our ally with human rights violations for helping the CIA operate an 'extraordinary rendition' program in which two persons suspected of terrorism were delivered to a "black site" in 2002-2003, for detention, interrogation and torture -- in the attempt to extract bogus confessions.
Court documents provide insight into the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques": Hooding, handcuffing, chambering a bullet, putting the gun to the suspect's head while cocking the trigger; threatening a hooded, naked suspect with a power drill; threatening to apprehend the suspect's mother or female relative, bring them before him to be sexually assaulted; various stress positions which could force dislocation of limbs; using a stiff brush on a suspect's naked body to induce pain; suspending the suspect on a bar or a hook for two to three days at a time; water boarding; electric shock; threatening to sodomize the suspect and to infect the suspect with the HIV virus.
The torture program has resulted in deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. One Guantanamo inmate who was tortured will soon go on trial before a US military tribunal. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted for torturing suspects. But one CIA agent who blew the whistle on an agency practitioner of torture was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
This year America will observe the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that should never have been appropriated to advance a foreign policy agenda that included war against innocent people, torture and murder of terror "suspects" abroad, and the destruction of dearly held US Constitutional values here at home.
It is time to take truth off the torture rack. America needs a full accounting of those dark days through a process of Truth and Reconciliation.
________________________________________
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Kucinich writes: "The European Court of Human Rights yesterday ruled against Poland, charging our ally with human rights violations for helping the CIA operate an 'extraordinary rendition' program in which two persons suspected of terrorism were delivered to a 'black site' in 2002-2003, for detention, interrogation and torture -- in the attempt to extract bogus confessions."
Former congressman Dennis Kucinich. (photo: Getty Images)
CIA Does the Torture, US Ally Pays the Price
By Dennis Kucinich, Reader Supported News
26 July 14
The European Court of Human Rights yesterday ruled against Poland, charging our ally with human rights violations for helping the CIA operate an 'extraordinary rendition' program in which two persons suspected of terrorism were delivered to a "black site" in 2002-2003, for detention, interrogation and torture -- in the attempt to extract bogus confessions.
Court documents provide insight into the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques": Hooding, handcuffing, chambering a bullet, putting the gun to the suspect's head while cocking the trigger; threatening a hooded, naked suspect with a power drill; threatening to apprehend the suspect's mother or female relative, bring them before him to be sexually assaulted; various stress positions which could force dislocation of limbs; using a stiff brush on a suspect's naked body to induce pain; suspending the suspect on a bar or a hook for two to three days at a time; water boarding; electric shock; threatening to sodomize the suspect and to infect the suspect with the HIV virus.
The torture program has resulted in deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. One Guantanamo inmate who was tortured will soon go on trial before a US military tribunal. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted for torturing suspects. But one CIA agent who blew the whistle on an agency practitioner of torture was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
This year America will observe the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that should never have been appropriated to advance a foreign policy agenda that included war against innocent people, torture and murder of terror "suspects" abroad, and the destruction of dearly held US Constitutional values here at home.
It is time to take truth off the torture rack. America needs a full accounting of those dark days through a process of Truth and Reconciliation.
________________________________________
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Baltimore Activist Alert July 27 – July 29, 2014
Baltimore Activist Alert July 27 – July 29, 2014
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours.
The initiative to stop it must be ours." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Friends, this list and other email documents which I send out are done under the auspices of the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. Go to www.baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com. If you appreciate this information and would like to make a donation, send contributions to BNC, 325 East 25th Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Max Obuszewski can be reached at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski [at] verizon.net.
Tune into the Maryland Progressive Blog at http://mdprogblog.org.
1] Books, buttons & stickers
2] Web site for info on federal legislation
3] Join Nonviolent Resistance lists
4] Buy coffee through HoCoFoLa
5] Free adoptions in July
6] GUTSY: Taking the Fear Factor Out of Feminism – through Aug. 8
7] Human, Soul & Machine: The Coming Singularity – through Aug. 31
8] To be a Humanist – July 27
9] Peace and Pancakes – July 27
10] Coffee Talk – July 27
11] Mobilize people to go to New York City – July 27
12] Two books on slave resistance – July 27
13] Pentagon Vigil – July 28
14] Marc Steiner on WEAA – July 28 – Aug. 1
15] Current invasion of Gaza – July 28
16] "Final Deal with Iran: Outcomes and Next Steps” – July 28
17] "Nuclear Politics on the Korean Peninsula" – July 28
18] Pledge of Resistance/Fund Our Communities meeting – July 28
19] Bless the EPA Hearing on Carbon Pollution Safeguards – July 29
20] National Conference on Ending Homelessness – July 29
21] Colombia Peace Forum – July 29
-----
1] – Buttons, bumperstickers and books are available. “God Bless the Whole World, No Exceptions” stickers are in stock. Donate your books to Max. Call him at 410-366-1637.
2] – To obtain information how your federal legislators voted on particular bills, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/. Congressional toll-free numbers are 888-818-6641, 888-355-3588 or 800-426-8073. The White House Comment Email is accessible at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
3] – THE ORGANIZING LIST will be the primary decision-making mechanism of the National Campaign of Nonviolent Resistance [NCNR]. It will be augmented by conference calls and possibly in-person meetings as needed. It will consist of 1 or 2 representatives from each local, regional, or national organization (not coalitions) that wishes to actively work to carry out the NCNR campaign of facilitating and organizing nonviolent resistance to the war in Iraq. To join the ORGANIZING List, please send your name, group affiliation, city and email address to mobuszewski at Verizon dot net. Different local chapters of a national organization are encouraged to subscribe.
THE NOTICES LIST will include only notices of NCNR actions and related information and is open to any interested person to subscribe. It will be moderated to maintain focus & will include periodic notices about getting involved in NCNR national organizing. To join the NOTICES List, send an email message to mobuszewski at Verizon dot net.
4] – You can help safeguard human rights and fragile ecosystems through your purchase of HOCOFOLA Café Quetzal. Bags of ground coffee or whole beans can be ordered by mailing in an order form. Also note organic cocoa and sugar are for sale. For more details and to download the order form, go to http://friendsoflatinamerica.typepad.com/hocofola/2010/02/hocofola-cafe-quetzal-order-form-2010.html. The coffee comes in one-pound bags.
Fill out the form and mail it with a check made out to HOCOFOLA on or before the second week of the month. Be sure you indicate ground or beans for each type of coffee ordered. Send it to Francine Sheppard at 5639B, Harpers Farm Rd., Columbia 21044. The coffee will arrive some time the following week and you will be notified where to pick it up. Contact Francine at 410-992-7679 or FrancineMSW@aol.com.
5] – The Maryland SPCA has wonderful companions waiting for you! Adopt one of them this July during the Summer Lovin' event! For the entire month, the adoption fees for all adult cats (regularly $55) and large, adult dogs (regularly $125) are waived. The $17 Pet ID Package and all regular adoption procedures still apply. Visit http://www.mdspca.org/adopt/howto/.
6] – GUTSY: Taking the Fear Factor Out of Feminism is a group exhibit of female artists whose work deals with feminist issues, themes, and aesthetics through Fri., Aug. 8 at Gallery CA, 440 East Oliver St. Call 410-528-9239 or http://galleryca.org.
7] – See the exhibit Human, Soul & Machine: The Coming Singularity, which
delves into the various ways technology affects lives through the perspective of inventors, futurists and 40 plus visionary artists. The intent is to bring new thoughts on artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and big data, and you can see it through August 31 at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy. Call 410-244-1900. Go to http://avam.org. A ticket costs $20.
8] - Usually, the Baltimore Ethical Society, 306 W. Franklin St., Suite 102, Baltimore 21201-4661, meets on Sundays, and generally there is a speaker and discussion from 10:30 AM to noon. On Sun., July 27, BES member Fred Compton will share his personal experiences “How Humanism Has Helped Me,” and then lead a discussion inviting others to share theirs. Call 410-581-2322 or email ask@bmorethical.org.
9] - Join the Kadampa Meditation Center for Peace and Pancakes on Sundays at 10:30 AM at KMC Maryland, 2937 North Charles St. All are invited to participate in guided meditation and chant praying for world peace. There will be a talk based on Buddhist thought followed by brunch. Call 410- 243-3837. Brunch is $5.
10] – On Sun., July 27 at 1 PM at Red Emma's Bookstore Cafe, 30 W. North Ave., Baltimore 21201, hear a Coffee Talk with a presentation about cooperative coffee farming in Sumatra with a roaster, Casey McKeel. And see how to cup Thread’s Permata Gayo coffee. Call 443-602-7585. Go to http://www.redemmas.org. Thread Coffee co-founder Casey McKeel spent two weeks in March 2014 visiting coffee farms in Sumatra, researching coffee trade and its impacts - both positive and negative - on communities. Casey will share a photo report back and interviews with farmers, looking at the dynamics of coffee trade on the ground in Sumatra.
11] – At the Conference Room, Shaw Library, 1630 7th St. NW, on Sun., July 27 at 2 PM, be a part of a discussion concerning the political importance of mobilizing people to go to New York City before corporate and governmental leaders arrive this September for the UN Climate Summit. System Change Not Climate Change together with the Global Climate Convergence will be laying the groundwork for an alternative summit, the New York City Climate Convergence. The objective is to build and strengthen an environmental movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crises--a social-economic system that values profits above people, planet and peace. As the corporate captured UN proposes false solutions like carbon trading and sets meager greenhouse reduction targets, this action will show the world what tackling global warming from the bottom up looks like. Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/762091697176312/.
12] – On Sun., July 27 at 7:30 PM at Red Emma's Bookstore Cafe, 30 W. North Ave., Baltimore 21201, Gerald Horne presents "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America" & "Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow." The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London. In this trailblazing book, Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. In the prelude to 1776, some Africans join the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were starting to ripen in Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were rising.
The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In “Race to Revolution,” Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. He draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core. Go to http://www.redemmas.org. Call 443-602-7585.
13] -- There is a weekly Pentagon Peace Vigil from 7 to 8 AM on Mondays, since 1987, outside the Pentagon Metro stop. The next vigil is Mon., July 28, and it is sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker. Email artlaffin@hotmail.com or call 202-882-9649. The vigil will be outside the Pentagon's south Metro entrance and in the designated "protest zone" behind bicycle fences across from the entrance to the Metro. By Metro, take Yellow Line and get out at the "Pentagon" stop. Do not go to the Pentagon City stop! Go up south escalators and turn left and walk across to protest area. By car from D.C. area, take 395 South and get off at Exit 8A-Pentagon South Parking. Take slight right onto S. Rotary Rd. at end of ramp and right on S. Fern St. Then take left onto Army Navy Dr. You can "pay to park" on Army Navy Dr., and there is meter parking one block on right on Eads St. Payment for both of these spots begin at 8 AM. No cameras are allowed on Pentagon grounds. Restrooms are located inside Marriott Residence Inn on corner of S. Fern and Army Navy Dr.
14] – The Marc Steiner Show airs Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 AM on WEAA 88.9 FM, The Voice of the Community, or online at www.weaa.org. The call-in number is 410-319-8888, and comments can also be sent by email to steinershow@gmail.com. All shows are also available as podcasts at www.steinershow.org.
15] – At the Institute for Policy Studies Conference Room, 1112 16th St. NW, Suite 600, on Mon., July 28 from noon to 1 PM, join the Institute for Policy Studies for an in-depth discussion on the underlying dynamics and root causes of the current invasion of Gaza. They'll discuss the latest news and developments and address questions! You can also participate by phone. Dial-in to listen only at 1-415-655-0059 with an access code at 592-768-385. RSVP to be part of the webinar at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6682311964551824898.
16] – On Mon., July 28 from noon to 1:30 PM, Dennis Ross, former special assistant to President Obama, Eric Edelman, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Stephen Rademaker, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations, will examine "Final Deal with Iran: Outcomes and Next Steps” at JINSA, 1307 New York Ave., Large Conference Hall, 1st Floor, W DC 20005. The forum is sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Visit https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07e9jllh694e4a1351.
17] – On Mon., July 28 from 3 to 5:15 PM, the Carnegie Endowment and Korea Economic Institute present "Nuclear Politics on the Korean Peninsula" with seven speakers at the Carnegie Endowment, 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, WDC. RSVP at http://carnegieendowment.org/events/forms/?fa=registration&event=4509.
18] – The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore usually meets on Mondays at 7:30 PM, and the meetings take place at Max’s residence. The next meeting will be on Mon., July 28. The proposed agenda will include the appeal of the conviction of the CIA Five, anti-drone activities, including the arraignment of the NSA Three, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, bigotry on the border, Gaza and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration. Call 410-366-1637 or email mobuszewski at verizon.net for directions.
19] – Bless the EPA Hearing on Carbon Pollution Safeguards on Tues., July 29 at 8:30 AM at EPA Headquarters, 1201 Constitution Ave. NW, WDC. Use the Federal Triangle Metro. The EPA has proposed the first-ever safeguards that would limit climate pollution from existing power plants, our nation's single greatest source of the heat-trapping pollution that is causing our earth to warm.
Gather with Creation Justice Ministries and Sojourners to kick off two full days of EPA hearings and to share blessings for this auspicious process and for over two dozen diverse religious leaders who will be offering testimony. Then, join hundreds of caring citizens and speak out at the EPA hearing to call for reducing climate pollution from the nation's power plants. RSVP program@gwipl.org.
20] – On Tues., July 29 from 9 AM to noon, join the National AIDS Housing Coalition at the 2014 National Conference on Ending Homelessness at the Renaissance Washington, D.C. Hotel, 999 Ninth St. NW. There will be a Community Listening Session on Addressing Homelessness through HIV/AIDS Housing: What’s working? What’s not? And why? Join HIV/AIDS housing and service providers, consumers, and officials to discuss successful models and challenges in fulfilling housing's promise as a powerful prevention and healthcare intervention for homeless people with HIV/AIDS. Email NAHC at nahc@nationalaidshousing.org to register. Go to http://www.endhomelessness.org/news/calendar/2014-national-conference-on-ending-homelessness.
21] – On Tues., July 29 at 10 AM at the U.S. Institute of Peace, 2301 Constitution Ave. NW, WDC 20037, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Washington Office on Latin America, and United States Institute of Peace are pleased to invite you to Colombia Peace Forum -- Peace Proposals from Victims of Colombia's Armed Conflict. It will feature Clara Rojas González, Colombian National Congress Representative, Aida Quilcué, director of Human Rights, Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), Deyis Margarita Carmona Tejada, spokeswoman, Peasants' Assembly of Cesar for Land Restitution, and José Antequera Guzmán, co-founder, Sons and Daughters of Memory and Against Impunity. This event will be webcast live at www.usip.org/webcasts. RSVP to Omar Martinez at 202-546-7010 or omartinez@lawg.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours.
The initiative to stop it must be ours." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Friends, this list and other email documents which I send out are done under the auspices of the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. Go to www.baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com. If you appreciate this information and would like to make a donation, send contributions to BNC, 325 East 25th Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Max Obuszewski can be reached at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski [at] verizon.net.
Tune into the Maryland Progressive Blog at http://mdprogblog.org.
1] Books, buttons & stickers
2] Web site for info on federal legislation
3] Join Nonviolent Resistance lists
4] Buy coffee through HoCoFoLa
5] Free adoptions in July
6] GUTSY: Taking the Fear Factor Out of Feminism – through Aug. 8
7] Human, Soul & Machine: The Coming Singularity – through Aug. 31
8] To be a Humanist – July 27
9] Peace and Pancakes – July 27
10] Coffee Talk – July 27
11] Mobilize people to go to New York City – July 27
12] Two books on slave resistance – July 27
13] Pentagon Vigil – July 28
14] Marc Steiner on WEAA – July 28 – Aug. 1
15] Current invasion of Gaza – July 28
16] "Final Deal with Iran: Outcomes and Next Steps” – July 28
17] "Nuclear Politics on the Korean Peninsula" – July 28
18] Pledge of Resistance/Fund Our Communities meeting – July 28
19] Bless the EPA Hearing on Carbon Pollution Safeguards – July 29
20] National Conference on Ending Homelessness – July 29
21] Colombia Peace Forum – July 29
-----
1] – Buttons, bumperstickers and books are available. “God Bless the Whole World, No Exceptions” stickers are in stock. Donate your books to Max. Call him at 410-366-1637.
2] – To obtain information how your federal legislators voted on particular bills, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/. Congressional toll-free numbers are 888-818-6641, 888-355-3588 or 800-426-8073. The White House Comment Email is accessible at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
3] – THE ORGANIZING LIST will be the primary decision-making mechanism of the National Campaign of Nonviolent Resistance [NCNR]. It will be augmented by conference calls and possibly in-person meetings as needed. It will consist of 1 or 2 representatives from each local, regional, or national organization (not coalitions) that wishes to actively work to carry out the NCNR campaign of facilitating and organizing nonviolent resistance to the war in Iraq. To join the ORGANIZING List, please send your name, group affiliation, city and email address to mobuszewski at Verizon dot net. Different local chapters of a national organization are encouraged to subscribe.
THE NOTICES LIST will include only notices of NCNR actions and related information and is open to any interested person to subscribe. It will be moderated to maintain focus & will include periodic notices about getting involved in NCNR national organizing. To join the NOTICES List, send an email message to mobuszewski at Verizon dot net.
4] – You can help safeguard human rights and fragile ecosystems through your purchase of HOCOFOLA Café Quetzal. Bags of ground coffee or whole beans can be ordered by mailing in an order form. Also note organic cocoa and sugar are for sale. For more details and to download the order form, go to http://friendsoflatinamerica.typepad.com/hocofola/2010/02/hocofola-cafe-quetzal-order-form-2010.html. The coffee comes in one-pound bags.
Fill out the form and mail it with a check made out to HOCOFOLA on or before the second week of the month. Be sure you indicate ground or beans for each type of coffee ordered. Send it to Francine Sheppard at 5639B, Harpers Farm Rd., Columbia 21044. The coffee will arrive some time the following week and you will be notified where to pick it up. Contact Francine at 410-992-7679 or FrancineMSW@aol.com.
5] – The Maryland SPCA has wonderful companions waiting for you! Adopt one of them this July during the Summer Lovin' event! For the entire month, the adoption fees for all adult cats (regularly $55) and large, adult dogs (regularly $125) are waived. The $17 Pet ID Package and all regular adoption procedures still apply. Visit http://www.mdspca.org/adopt/howto/.
6] – GUTSY: Taking the Fear Factor Out of Feminism is a group exhibit of female artists whose work deals with feminist issues, themes, and aesthetics through Fri., Aug. 8 at Gallery CA, 440 East Oliver St. Call 410-528-9239 or http://galleryca.org.
7] – See the exhibit Human, Soul & Machine: The Coming Singularity, which
delves into the various ways technology affects lives through the perspective of inventors, futurists and 40 plus visionary artists. The intent is to bring new thoughts on artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and big data, and you can see it through August 31 at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy. Call 410-244-1900. Go to http://avam.org. A ticket costs $20.
8] - Usually, the Baltimore Ethical Society, 306 W. Franklin St., Suite 102, Baltimore 21201-4661, meets on Sundays, and generally there is a speaker and discussion from 10:30 AM to noon. On Sun., July 27, BES member Fred Compton will share his personal experiences “How Humanism Has Helped Me,” and then lead a discussion inviting others to share theirs. Call 410-581-2322 or email ask@bmorethical.org.
9] - Join the Kadampa Meditation Center for Peace and Pancakes on Sundays at 10:30 AM at KMC Maryland, 2937 North Charles St. All are invited to participate in guided meditation and chant praying for world peace. There will be a talk based on Buddhist thought followed by brunch. Call 410- 243-3837. Brunch is $5.
10] – On Sun., July 27 at 1 PM at Red Emma's Bookstore Cafe, 30 W. North Ave., Baltimore 21201, hear a Coffee Talk with a presentation about cooperative coffee farming in Sumatra with a roaster, Casey McKeel. And see how to cup Thread’s Permata Gayo coffee. Call 443-602-7585. Go to http://www.redemmas.org. Thread Coffee co-founder Casey McKeel spent two weeks in March 2014 visiting coffee farms in Sumatra, researching coffee trade and its impacts - both positive and negative - on communities. Casey will share a photo report back and interviews with farmers, looking at the dynamics of coffee trade on the ground in Sumatra.
11] – At the Conference Room, Shaw Library, 1630 7th St. NW, on Sun., July 27 at 2 PM, be a part of a discussion concerning the political importance of mobilizing people to go to New York City before corporate and governmental leaders arrive this September for the UN Climate Summit. System Change Not Climate Change together with the Global Climate Convergence will be laying the groundwork for an alternative summit, the New York City Climate Convergence. The objective is to build and strengthen an environmental movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crises--a social-economic system that values profits above people, planet and peace. As the corporate captured UN proposes false solutions like carbon trading and sets meager greenhouse reduction targets, this action will show the world what tackling global warming from the bottom up looks like. Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/762091697176312/.
12] – On Sun., July 27 at 7:30 PM at Red Emma's Bookstore Cafe, 30 W. North Ave., Baltimore 21201, Gerald Horne presents "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America" & "Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow." The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London. In this trailblazing book, Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. In the prelude to 1776, some Africans join the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were starting to ripen in Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were rising.
The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In “Race to Revolution,” Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. He draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core. Go to http://www.redemmas.org. Call 443-602-7585.
13] -- There is a weekly Pentagon Peace Vigil from 7 to 8 AM on Mondays, since 1987, outside the Pentagon Metro stop. The next vigil is Mon., July 28, and it is sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker. Email artlaffin@hotmail.com or call 202-882-9649. The vigil will be outside the Pentagon's south Metro entrance and in the designated "protest zone" behind bicycle fences across from the entrance to the Metro. By Metro, take Yellow Line and get out at the "Pentagon" stop. Do not go to the Pentagon City stop! Go up south escalators and turn left and walk across to protest area. By car from D.C. area, take 395 South and get off at Exit 8A-Pentagon South Parking. Take slight right onto S. Rotary Rd. at end of ramp and right on S. Fern St. Then take left onto Army Navy Dr. You can "pay to park" on Army Navy Dr., and there is meter parking one block on right on Eads St. Payment for both of these spots begin at 8 AM. No cameras are allowed on Pentagon grounds. Restrooms are located inside Marriott Residence Inn on corner of S. Fern and Army Navy Dr.
14] – The Marc Steiner Show airs Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 AM on WEAA 88.9 FM, The Voice of the Community, or online at www.weaa.org. The call-in number is 410-319-8888, and comments can also be sent by email to steinershow@gmail.com. All shows are also available as podcasts at www.steinershow.org.
15] – At the Institute for Policy Studies Conference Room, 1112 16th St. NW, Suite 600, on Mon., July 28 from noon to 1 PM, join the Institute for Policy Studies for an in-depth discussion on the underlying dynamics and root causes of the current invasion of Gaza. They'll discuss the latest news and developments and address questions! You can also participate by phone. Dial-in to listen only at 1-415-655-0059 with an access code at 592-768-385. RSVP to be part of the webinar at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6682311964551824898.
16] – On Mon., July 28 from noon to 1:30 PM, Dennis Ross, former special assistant to President Obama, Eric Edelman, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Stephen Rademaker, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations, will examine "Final Deal with Iran: Outcomes and Next Steps” at JINSA, 1307 New York Ave., Large Conference Hall, 1st Floor, W DC 20005. The forum is sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Visit https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07e9jllh694e4a1351.
17] – On Mon., July 28 from 3 to 5:15 PM, the Carnegie Endowment and Korea Economic Institute present "Nuclear Politics on the Korean Peninsula" with seven speakers at the Carnegie Endowment, 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, WDC. RSVP at http://carnegieendowment.org/events/forms/?fa=registration&event=4509.
18] – The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore usually meets on Mondays at 7:30 PM, and the meetings take place at Max’s residence. The next meeting will be on Mon., July 28. The proposed agenda will include the appeal of the conviction of the CIA Five, anti-drone activities, including the arraignment of the NSA Three, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, bigotry on the border, Gaza and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration. Call 410-366-1637 or email mobuszewski at verizon.net for directions.
19] – Bless the EPA Hearing on Carbon Pollution Safeguards on Tues., July 29 at 8:30 AM at EPA Headquarters, 1201 Constitution Ave. NW, WDC. Use the Federal Triangle Metro. The EPA has proposed the first-ever safeguards that would limit climate pollution from existing power plants, our nation's single greatest source of the heat-trapping pollution that is causing our earth to warm.
Gather with Creation Justice Ministries and Sojourners to kick off two full days of EPA hearings and to share blessings for this auspicious process and for over two dozen diverse religious leaders who will be offering testimony. Then, join hundreds of caring citizens and speak out at the EPA hearing to call for reducing climate pollution from the nation's power plants. RSVP program@gwipl.org.
20] – On Tues., July 29 from 9 AM to noon, join the National AIDS Housing Coalition at the 2014 National Conference on Ending Homelessness at the Renaissance Washington, D.C. Hotel, 999 Ninth St. NW. There will be a Community Listening Session on Addressing Homelessness through HIV/AIDS Housing: What’s working? What’s not? And why? Join HIV/AIDS housing and service providers, consumers, and officials to discuss successful models and challenges in fulfilling housing's promise as a powerful prevention and healthcare intervention for homeless people with HIV/AIDS. Email NAHC at nahc@nationalaidshousing.org to register. Go to http://www.endhomelessness.org/news/calendar/2014-national-conference-on-ending-homelessness.
21] – On Tues., July 29 at 10 AM at the U.S. Institute of Peace, 2301 Constitution Ave. NW, WDC 20037, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Washington Office on Latin America, and United States Institute of Peace are pleased to invite you to Colombia Peace Forum -- Peace Proposals from Victims of Colombia's Armed Conflict. It will feature Clara Rojas González, Colombian National Congress Representative, Aida Quilcué, director of Human Rights, Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), Deyis Margarita Carmona Tejada, spokeswoman, Peasants' Assembly of Cesar for Land Restitution, and José Antequera Guzmán, co-founder, Sons and Daughters of Memory and Against Impunity. This event will be webcast live at www.usip.org/webcasts. RSVP to Omar Martinez at 202-546-7010 or omartinez@lawg.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Remembrances of Charlie Haden
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Remembrances of Charlie Haden
Maurice Jackson
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Portside
I first met Charlie Haden in the late 1970s. He was playing at the One Step Down on Pennsylvania Ave. with the pianist and arranger JoAnn Bracken. Later he had duets there with the noted DC pianist Reuben Brown. The One Step was a cozy spot with booths and a long bar where I sat. After the gig we struck up a talk-not about music but about radical politics-and we kept talking, most often on his frequent calls to me (except when he was on the road), for over 35 years.
By the time I met him he had already gained an international reputation as a member of the legendary Ornette Coleman Quartet. And I had every record that I could find by Coleman's group and had Charlie's first recording with his Liberation Music Orchestra. I was just a young activist. We spoke that first night about the songs of the Spanish Civil War that he recorded and the men and women who fought to defend the Spanish Republic in 1930s. He had interspersed some of their songs, including "Los Cuatro Generales" the "Four Generals." He became excited when I told him that once at a rally in Moscow I saw Delores Ibarruri - the famed "La Pasonaria" of the Spanish resistance. Like Ben Webster or Lester Young on the tenor sax her voice was so powerful that she seldom needed a microphone and she could belt out a speech so resonant that one could hear her in whispers on the front row or loudly in the rear of a rally, with the same intonations.
Charlie was a man of the world who cared about the world-and its environment and peoples. Too often people, especially artists, like Charlie or scholars like me, know very little of the plight of everyday human beings. Many, as the late historian and social activist W.E.B. Du Bois once said, know a lot about humanity but know little of men (and women). Charlie was different and I try to be.
Whenever he would call and even if my wife or children answered the phone they would always be greeted with the same refrain "Hey man, Its Charlie." Over the years the topics changed. When the hearings on Clarence Thomas and his suitability for the Supreme Court were held, Charlie was glued to the proceedings. He wondered how a man who had been so convincingly portrayed by Anita Hill as a sexual harasser could be nominated for the land's highest Court. Charlie felt the discrimination suffered by women, especially African American women. He had a deep appreciation of their role in history and in music. He loved playing with DC's own Shirley Horn, and with the Howard University trained pianist Geri Allen, who joins us today. He was close to and recorded with Abby Lincoln and with Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, and a grand musician in her own right. He had a special relationship with their son saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, who he also taught at Cal Arts, where he founded the jazz program.
Over the years, when any a big political event occurred he would call. Because of his disdain of U.S. policies in Latin America, especially during the Iran-Contra hearings, he recorded another album with the Liberation Music Orchestra, "Not in Our Name." He also recorded, partly at my own suggestion, the Chilean resistance song "The People United Will Never be Defeated" and the anthem of the African National Congress, of South Africa "Nkosi SikeleL'I Afrika."
Charlie helped me understand the role of jazz in changing society and I regularly teach a course "Jazz and Human Rights" at Georgetown University about the social origins and the effect of the music on society.
He and Hank Jones recorded "Spirituals, Folksongs and Hymns," (1995) and "Come Sunday." (2012) I was honored when he asked me to write the liner notes for both CD's. He performed these songs twice at Georgetown, in 1995 with Mr. Jones and in 2009, with NEA Jazz master Kenny Barron. I accompanied him and Hank when they preformed them at Duke University in 2007. It was always a pleasure being with Hank and Charlie, both NEA jazz masters and Downbeat Hall of Fame inductees. They were both teetotalers and would tell the corniest jokes, and we all fell out laughing with them.
I wrote a letter to the National Endowment of the Arts to nominate Charlie for the NEA Jazz Master's honor. He did not receive it the first time. He asked me not to bother with submitting a letter the next year. I ignored him and the next year he was inducted at a grand ceremony at the Lincoln Center, chaired by its musical director, Wynton Marsalis. Charlie was ill and could not attend so his daughter Petra, the singer and violinist, read a message from him. The noted NY Post columnist and Charlie Parker biographer Stanley Crouch said introductory words for Charlie. Some time later I got a message from an old friend in NYC who sent me an article, in the NY Post, by Mr. Crouch in praise of Anthony Benezet, the French born Huguenot turned Quaker (1713-1784) who had fled France, gone to Philadelphia and became an international leader against slavery and the slave trade and founder of a school to educate Blacks. I had written a book, Let this Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet Father of Atlantic Abolitionism about Benezet and Charlie quietly made sure that Mr. Crouch got a copy. Charlie, for me, was made of the same cloth as the anti-racist Quaker, Benezet. In the parlance of Black people, like me, who have witnessed so much inequality, poverty, hatred and bigotry and have seen too few whites willing to fight for justice "they were two good white men."
As he grew weaker, our talks became less frequent. Often I would just call his number to leave a voicemail and his wonderful wife Ruth would let me know that he got it. In some of his last calls he would play ,over the telephone, an unrecorded tape, of one of his bands, or recordings of Sergei Rachmaninov's "Piano Trio Number 2 in D Minor" or Maurice Ravel's "Concerto in G Major" or some other favorite, or especially a Bach Etude.
Near the end he called and at the conclusion said, "I love you man." While I have always told my wife and our kids how much I love them, it caught me by surprise when a white man, my senior, spoke those words to me. After all, I grew up in the horrible Jim Crow, worked as a longshoreman and rigger in my native Newport News, Virginia and worked in the "movement." I felt battle scarred from my years growing up in Jim Crow Virginia and Alabama and from my many years in the "movement," where I indeed saw too few good white men.
On a recent radio program paying tribute to Charlie I was asked to suggest several songs with him playing.
The last song I played was the Cole Porter classic "Every Time We Say Goodbye" . "I die a little." It was recorded by him and pianist Keith Jarrett in 2007 but just released in the last month or so. In those last calls each time I said goodbye to Charlie "I died a little... I cried a little." To paraphrase the words of Khalil Gibran, Charlie's kindness "touched my silent heart and made it sing." I love you man and I will miss you immensely.
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University and Chair of the District of Columbia's Commission on African American Affairs. He is coeditor with Blair Ruble of Jazz in Washington, D.C. in Washington History, Journal of the Historical Society of Washington, April 2014. jacksonz@georgetown.edu [1]
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-24/remembrances-charlie-haden
Links:
[1] mailto: jacksonz@georgetown.edu
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Remembrances of Charlie Haden
Maurice Jackson
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Portside
I first met Charlie Haden in the late 1970s. He was playing at the One Step Down on Pennsylvania Ave. with the pianist and arranger JoAnn Bracken. Later he had duets there with the noted DC pianist Reuben Brown. The One Step was a cozy spot with booths and a long bar where I sat. After the gig we struck up a talk-not about music but about radical politics-and we kept talking, most often on his frequent calls to me (except when he was on the road), for over 35 years.
By the time I met him he had already gained an international reputation as a member of the legendary Ornette Coleman Quartet. And I had every record that I could find by Coleman's group and had Charlie's first recording with his Liberation Music Orchestra. I was just a young activist. We spoke that first night about the songs of the Spanish Civil War that he recorded and the men and women who fought to defend the Spanish Republic in 1930s. He had interspersed some of their songs, including "Los Cuatro Generales" the "Four Generals." He became excited when I told him that once at a rally in Moscow I saw Delores Ibarruri - the famed "La Pasonaria" of the Spanish resistance. Like Ben Webster or Lester Young on the tenor sax her voice was so powerful that she seldom needed a microphone and she could belt out a speech so resonant that one could hear her in whispers on the front row or loudly in the rear of a rally, with the same intonations.
Charlie was a man of the world who cared about the world-and its environment and peoples. Too often people, especially artists, like Charlie or scholars like me, know very little of the plight of everyday human beings. Many, as the late historian and social activist W.E.B. Du Bois once said, know a lot about humanity but know little of men (and women). Charlie was different and I try to be.
Whenever he would call and even if my wife or children answered the phone they would always be greeted with the same refrain "Hey man, Its Charlie." Over the years the topics changed. When the hearings on Clarence Thomas and his suitability for the Supreme Court were held, Charlie was glued to the proceedings. He wondered how a man who had been so convincingly portrayed by Anita Hill as a sexual harasser could be nominated for the land's highest Court. Charlie felt the discrimination suffered by women, especially African American women. He had a deep appreciation of their role in history and in music. He loved playing with DC's own Shirley Horn, and with the Howard University trained pianist Geri Allen, who joins us today. He was close to and recorded with Abby Lincoln and with Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, and a grand musician in her own right. He had a special relationship with their son saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, who he also taught at Cal Arts, where he founded the jazz program.
Over the years, when any a big political event occurred he would call. Because of his disdain of U.S. policies in Latin America, especially during the Iran-Contra hearings, he recorded another album with the Liberation Music Orchestra, "Not in Our Name." He also recorded, partly at my own suggestion, the Chilean resistance song "The People United Will Never be Defeated" and the anthem of the African National Congress, of South Africa "Nkosi SikeleL'I Afrika."
Charlie helped me understand the role of jazz in changing society and I regularly teach a course "Jazz and Human Rights" at Georgetown University about the social origins and the effect of the music on society.
He and Hank Jones recorded "Spirituals, Folksongs and Hymns," (1995) and "Come Sunday." (2012) I was honored when he asked me to write the liner notes for both CD's. He performed these songs twice at Georgetown, in 1995 with Mr. Jones and in 2009, with NEA Jazz master Kenny Barron. I accompanied him and Hank when they preformed them at Duke University in 2007. It was always a pleasure being with Hank and Charlie, both NEA jazz masters and Downbeat Hall of Fame inductees. They were both teetotalers and would tell the corniest jokes, and we all fell out laughing with them.
I wrote a letter to the National Endowment of the Arts to nominate Charlie for the NEA Jazz Master's honor. He did not receive it the first time. He asked me not to bother with submitting a letter the next year. I ignored him and the next year he was inducted at a grand ceremony at the Lincoln Center, chaired by its musical director, Wynton Marsalis. Charlie was ill and could not attend so his daughter Petra, the singer and violinist, read a message from him. The noted NY Post columnist and Charlie Parker biographer Stanley Crouch said introductory words for Charlie. Some time later I got a message from an old friend in NYC who sent me an article, in the NY Post, by Mr. Crouch in praise of Anthony Benezet, the French born Huguenot turned Quaker (1713-1784) who had fled France, gone to Philadelphia and became an international leader against slavery and the slave trade and founder of a school to educate Blacks. I had written a book, Let this Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet Father of Atlantic Abolitionism about Benezet and Charlie quietly made sure that Mr. Crouch got a copy. Charlie, for me, was made of the same cloth as the anti-racist Quaker, Benezet. In the parlance of Black people, like me, who have witnessed so much inequality, poverty, hatred and bigotry and have seen too few whites willing to fight for justice "they were two good white men."
As he grew weaker, our talks became less frequent. Often I would just call his number to leave a voicemail and his wonderful wife Ruth would let me know that he got it. In some of his last calls he would play ,over the telephone, an unrecorded tape, of one of his bands, or recordings of Sergei Rachmaninov's "Piano Trio Number 2 in D Minor" or Maurice Ravel's "Concerto in G Major" or some other favorite, or especially a Bach Etude.
Near the end he called and at the conclusion said, "I love you man." While I have always told my wife and our kids how much I love them, it caught me by surprise when a white man, my senior, spoke those words to me. After all, I grew up in the horrible Jim Crow, worked as a longshoreman and rigger in my native Newport News, Virginia and worked in the "movement." I felt battle scarred from my years growing up in Jim Crow Virginia and Alabama and from my many years in the "movement," where I indeed saw too few good white men.
On a recent radio program paying tribute to Charlie I was asked to suggest several songs with him playing.
The last song I played was the Cole Porter classic "Every Time We Say Goodbye" . "I die a little." It was recorded by him and pianist Keith Jarrett in 2007 but just released in the last month or so. In those last calls each time I said goodbye to Charlie "I died a little... I cried a little." To paraphrase the words of Khalil Gibran, Charlie's kindness "touched my silent heart and made it sing." I love you man and I will miss you immensely.
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University and Chair of the District of Columbia's Commission on African American Affairs. He is coeditor with Blair Ruble of Jazz in Washington, D.C. in Washington History, Journal of the Historical Society of Washington, April 2014. jacksonz@georgetown.edu [1]
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-24/remembrances-charlie-haden
Links:
[1] mailto: jacksonz@georgetown.edu
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Dogs Feel Jealousy, Raising Questions About Its Evolutionary Origin
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Dogs Feel Jealousy, Raising Questions About Its Evolutionary Origin
http://animals.io9.com/dogs-feel-jealousy-raising-questions-about-its-evoluti-1609292639
Jason G. Goldman
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
io9
Despite the wide variety of species that have complex social structures – elephants, monkeys, chimps, dolphins, giraffes, wolves, corvids, and lots more – many have argued that jealousy requires a sophisticated understanding of the self and of other's social goals and desires.
That skepticism has proven reasonable in the case of guilt. What many dog owners report as guilt is probably the dog's learned response to the owner's own scolding behavior. As I wrote in 2012 at Scientific American, dogs probably give the "guilty look" because they've learned that it reduces the likelihood or severity of their scolding, not because they know they've broken a rule.
But dog owners may actually be right when it comes to jealousy. That's because young infants and toddlers, with their immature, developing brains, appear capable of at least simple forms of the emotion. Indeed, it was after reading a small but growing literature on jealousy in babies that Christine R. Harris and Caroline Prouvost of the University of California, San Diego, decided to adapt the experiment for pet dogs.
In the baby experiments, six-month-old infants showed jealous reactions when their mothers interacted with another infant (actually a lifelike doll), but not when their mothers interacted with a non-social object (a book). That suggested to the researchers that "jealousy may have a primordial or core form that can be triggered without complex cognition about the self or about the meaning of the social interaction." The primordial jealousy response can be provoked, they explain, by the "relatively simple perception that an attachment figure or loved one's attention has been captured by a potential usurper." The baby then does what it can to regain the attention of their loved one. More complex forms of jealousy experienced by human adults could build on simpler forms that are present in human infants.
If that's the case, then other social species might also be capable of demonstrating primordial jealousy. The basic structure of jealousy – whether primordial or complex – is straightforward: it emerges from a social triangle. When an interloper threatens an existing, important relationship, the outcome can be jealousy. That's the case for sexual or romantic relationships threatened by real or imagined infidelity, or for parent-child relationships threatened by siblings. Jealousy can also arise from non-kin relationships. The same underlying process that leads to jealousy in sexual or familial relationships can apply to any friendship of social or emotional value.
Harris and Prouvost simply adapted the baby experiment for dogs. Thirty-six dogs and their owners participated in their experiment. For safety purposes, the experiment was restricted to dogs under 35 pounds and shorter than 15 inches ("because of the possibility that the jealousy manipulation would result in aggression and small dogs could be more easily controlled in such circumstances"). Owners, who weren't aware of the true purpose of the experiment, interacted with a realistic looking stuffed dog that barked and wagged its tail, and as well as with two objects – a Halloween candy pail, and a book – while their dogs looked on.
The owners were instructed to interact affectionately with the pail, just as they had with the stuffed dog. If the dogs responded with jealousy to the stuffed dog but not the candy pail, that would suggest that the dogs could attenuate their jealousy, directing it at other dogs in particular. The fact that most of the dogs sniffed the doll's anal region suggests that they indeed perceived it as real. If the dogs responded jealously even when their owners read from the book, that would suggest that it wasn't jealousy at all that motivated their so-called "jealous behavior," but instead a simple lack of attention.
The researchers found that the dogs were much more likely to display jealousy behaviors, including aggression – snapping, getting between the owner and the object, and pushing the object away – for the stuffed dog compared with either the candy pail or the book. Not that the dogs wouldn't rather have all of their owners' attention on themselves: when engaging with the candy pail, the dogs still spent more time looking at their owners than for the book. While the dogs weren't thrilled to be ignored in favor of the candy pail, they directed their jealousy appropriately, just at the canine interloper.
Harris and Prouvost conclude the primordial form of jealousy isn't unique to human infants, but is shared at least with domestic dogs, if not with other animals. "This emotional state does not presuppose complex interpretations of the behavior of the rival and the attachment figure and its meaning to the self," they say, although "such cognitions clearly can impact jealousy in adult interpersonal relationships."
While primordial jealousy emerges early in human development and may have emerged early in evolution, that doesn't mean that the subjective emotional experience is equivalent to the type of jealousy that human adults experience.
Did jealousy evolve out of sexual or familial relationships? Could it have emerged in animals that require group cooperation for survival, in which alliances between individuals are malleable and are therefore open to threats from outsiders?
Since dogs (and wolves) are born into litters, have pair bonding, and hunt cooperatively, they won't be particularly useful for better understanding the evolutionary origins of jealousy. Other species could prove more informative: domestic cats, for example, bear litters but do not pair bond.
It is also possible that it was domestication itself that gave rise to dogs' capacity for even simple forms of jealousy. It would be prudent to see whether wolves also have primordial jealousy. And even if they do, dogs could be unique in their capacity for cross-species jealousy. Given how attuned they are to human social cues, research with horses could shed light on that question.
As with most interesting research, this finding raises more questions than it provides answers. It is clear, at least, that jealousy is not a uniquely human emotion.
But where does it come from? Are jealous behaviors actually effective at regaining the attention of a social partner? Are dogs alone in participating in multi-species social triangles, or is jealousy another marker of domestication? If nothing else, this study is yet another reminder that our species is not alone in experiencing social emotions.
Read the entire study in PLoS ONE [1].
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-26/dogs-feel-jealousy-raising-questions-about-its-evolutionary-origin
Links:
[1] http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094597
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Dogs Feel Jealousy, Raising Questions About Its Evolutionary Origin
http://animals.io9.com/dogs-feel-jealousy-raising-questions-about-its-evoluti-1609292639
Jason G. Goldman
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
io9
Despite the wide variety of species that have complex social structures – elephants, monkeys, chimps, dolphins, giraffes, wolves, corvids, and lots more – many have argued that jealousy requires a sophisticated understanding of the self and of other's social goals and desires.
That skepticism has proven reasonable in the case of guilt. What many dog owners report as guilt is probably the dog's learned response to the owner's own scolding behavior. As I wrote in 2012 at Scientific American, dogs probably give the "guilty look" because they've learned that it reduces the likelihood or severity of their scolding, not because they know they've broken a rule.
But dog owners may actually be right when it comes to jealousy. That's because young infants and toddlers, with their immature, developing brains, appear capable of at least simple forms of the emotion. Indeed, it was after reading a small but growing literature on jealousy in babies that Christine R. Harris and Caroline Prouvost of the University of California, San Diego, decided to adapt the experiment for pet dogs.
In the baby experiments, six-month-old infants showed jealous reactions when their mothers interacted with another infant (actually a lifelike doll), but not when their mothers interacted with a non-social object (a book). That suggested to the researchers that "jealousy may have a primordial or core form that can be triggered without complex cognition about the self or about the meaning of the social interaction." The primordial jealousy response can be provoked, they explain, by the "relatively simple perception that an attachment figure or loved one's attention has been captured by a potential usurper." The baby then does what it can to regain the attention of their loved one. More complex forms of jealousy experienced by human adults could build on simpler forms that are present in human infants.
If that's the case, then other social species might also be capable of demonstrating primordial jealousy. The basic structure of jealousy – whether primordial or complex – is straightforward: it emerges from a social triangle. When an interloper threatens an existing, important relationship, the outcome can be jealousy. That's the case for sexual or romantic relationships threatened by real or imagined infidelity, or for parent-child relationships threatened by siblings. Jealousy can also arise from non-kin relationships. The same underlying process that leads to jealousy in sexual or familial relationships can apply to any friendship of social or emotional value.
Harris and Prouvost simply adapted the baby experiment for dogs. Thirty-six dogs and their owners participated in their experiment. For safety purposes, the experiment was restricted to dogs under 35 pounds and shorter than 15 inches ("because of the possibility that the jealousy manipulation would result in aggression and small dogs could be more easily controlled in such circumstances"). Owners, who weren't aware of the true purpose of the experiment, interacted with a realistic looking stuffed dog that barked and wagged its tail, and as well as with two objects – a Halloween candy pail, and a book – while their dogs looked on.
The owners were instructed to interact affectionately with the pail, just as they had with the stuffed dog. If the dogs responded with jealousy to the stuffed dog but not the candy pail, that would suggest that the dogs could attenuate their jealousy, directing it at other dogs in particular. The fact that most of the dogs sniffed the doll's anal region suggests that they indeed perceived it as real. If the dogs responded jealously even when their owners read from the book, that would suggest that it wasn't jealousy at all that motivated their so-called "jealous behavior," but instead a simple lack of attention.
The researchers found that the dogs were much more likely to display jealousy behaviors, including aggression – snapping, getting between the owner and the object, and pushing the object away – for the stuffed dog compared with either the candy pail or the book. Not that the dogs wouldn't rather have all of their owners' attention on themselves: when engaging with the candy pail, the dogs still spent more time looking at their owners than for the book. While the dogs weren't thrilled to be ignored in favor of the candy pail, they directed their jealousy appropriately, just at the canine interloper.
Harris and Prouvost conclude the primordial form of jealousy isn't unique to human infants, but is shared at least with domestic dogs, if not with other animals. "This emotional state does not presuppose complex interpretations of the behavior of the rival and the attachment figure and its meaning to the self," they say, although "such cognitions clearly can impact jealousy in adult interpersonal relationships."
While primordial jealousy emerges early in human development and may have emerged early in evolution, that doesn't mean that the subjective emotional experience is equivalent to the type of jealousy that human adults experience.
Did jealousy evolve out of sexual or familial relationships? Could it have emerged in animals that require group cooperation for survival, in which alliances between individuals are malleable and are therefore open to threats from outsiders?
Since dogs (and wolves) are born into litters, have pair bonding, and hunt cooperatively, they won't be particularly useful for better understanding the evolutionary origins of jealousy. Other species could prove more informative: domestic cats, for example, bear litters but do not pair bond.
It is also possible that it was domestication itself that gave rise to dogs' capacity for even simple forms of jealousy. It would be prudent to see whether wolves also have primordial jealousy. And even if they do, dogs could be unique in their capacity for cross-species jealousy. Given how attuned they are to human social cues, research with horses could shed light on that question.
As with most interesting research, this finding raises more questions than it provides answers. It is clear, at least, that jealousy is not a uniquely human emotion.
But where does it come from? Are jealous behaviors actually effective at regaining the attention of a social partner? Are dogs alone in participating in multi-species social triangles, or is jealousy another marker of domestication? If nothing else, this study is yet another reminder that our species is not alone in experiencing social emotions.
Read the entire study in PLoS ONE [1].
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-26/dogs-feel-jealousy-raising-questions-about-its-evolutionary-origin
Links:
[1] http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094597
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Victory! Congress Votes Against New Iraq War!"The Kill Team": When US Soldiers in Afghanistan Became Trophy Hunters/
Angela Miller [mailto:info@winwithoutwar.org]
Friday, July 25, 2014 3:19 PM
Victory! Congress Votes Against New Iraq War!
Dear Max,
Over the past few weeks, we’ve asked you to take action to keep us from sliding back to war in Iraq. We were overwhelmed by your response: our coalition generated an estimated 236,000 petition signatures, 41,000 emails, and 26,000 calls to Congress. Your voices were heard, and we wanted to update you on our progress!
Today the House passed H. Con. Res. 105, the McGovern (D-MA)-Jones (R-NC)-Lee (D-CA) proposal to keep U.S. troops out of Iraq, by an overwhelming vote of 370-40. By passing the Iraq War Powers Resolution, Congress made clear that they stand with the American public, who do not want to go back to war in Iraq.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/306-10/24969-qthe-kill-teamq-when-us-soldiers-in-afghanistan-became-trophy-hunters
O'Hehir reports: "In a week when a different conflict with a high civilian body count is dominating the headlines, 'The Kill Team' arrives as a terrifying example of how easily basic human decency and morality can melt away in the fog of war."
(screenshot: Salon)
"The Kill Team": When US Soldiers in Afghanistan Became Trophy Hunters
By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
25 July 14
A wrenching documentary explores the Army's gruesome murders of Afghan civilians, and one soldier who spoke out
U.S. Army Cpl. Jeremy Morlock comes off as a thoughtful and intelligent fellow, at least as we meet him in Dan Krauss’ award-winning documentary “The Kill Team.” He discusses his own emotional limitations, and the way that his time in Afghanistan changed him, with impressive clarity and insight. He was startled, Morlock says, when he saw the souvenirs assembled by his immediate superior and team leader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs: Human fingers that Gibbs had cut from the hands of Afghan civilians their unit had murdered. Gibbs told Morlock he intended to allow the fingers to decompose into bone, and then fashion a necklace from them. In civilian life that might have seemed “messed up,” Morlock admitted, but in war the rules of ordinary behavior are suspended. If his sergeant wanted a necklace of human bones, who was he to judge?
In a week when a different conflict with a high civilian body count is dominating the headlines, “The Kill Team” arrives as a terrifying example of how easily basic human decency and morality can melt away in the fog of war. As Army Spc. Adam Winfield, who tried to blow the whistle on his comrades and then was swept up in their crimes, wrote to his father in a Facebook chat from Afghanistan, “There are no good men here.” First of all, “The Kill Team” is soberly executed and highly principled documentary filmmaking, tightly focused on the Winfield family’s efforts to navigate the byzantine Army bureaucracy and the ass-covering military justice system. But it’s also a kind of Rorschach test of any viewer’s attitudes about war, the military and the United States’ amorphous 13-year mission in Afghanistan.
We are certainly free to interpret the story of the “Maywand District murders” of 2010, as they are semi-officially known, as the story of a bad apple who turned an entire infantry platoon rotten. The apple in that analogy would be Staff Sgt. Gibbs, who has made no public statements and continues to proclaim his innocence, although he is now serving a life sentence for murder. (He is seen in Krauss’ film only in photographs and snippets of homemade video.) As described by those who served under him, Gibbs was a first-rate macho infantryman, something of a cowboy when it came to rules and regulations, and pretty close to a sociopath. His left calf was tattooed with numerous skull-and-crossbones designs, supposedly indicating the kills he had accumulated on previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did all those skulls represent legitimate enemy combatants? Gibbs made it clear to his men that if those were in short supply, it was easy to invent them. One Afghan was pretty much like another; if they weren’t all our enemies, they definitely weren’t our friends.
So it was that Gibbs turned the tedium and stress of life in the 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment toward murder. His soldiers staged at least three deliberate killings of unarmed civilians in the Maywand District of southern Afghanistan. One was a 15-year-old boy doing farm work for his father, another was an adult man believed to be deaf and/or mentally disabled and the third was a local Islamic mullah. All three were justified through the use of “drop weapons,” meaning guns or grenades the soldiers brought with them specifically to detonate or plant near the bodies. You can read the story of the cold-blooded execution of Gul Mudin, the 15-year-old, in this Rolling Stone article by Mark Boal (also the screenwriter of “Zero Dark Thirty”). Platoon members, including Gibbs and Morlock, stripped Mudin’s corpse naked and posed him for photographs, smiling and holding up his mutilated head by the hair. Gibbs snipped off one of the kid’s pinky fingers with medical shears, although he awarded that trophy to Pvt. 1st Class Andrew Holmes, who may have fired the fatal shots.
“The Kill Team,” which won a Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is not based on Boal’s reporting, and Krauss avoids borrowing any descriptions or accounts from the Rolling Stone article. You and I don’t have to be so careful, and in taking the two together it becomes clear that the real problem exposed here is much larger than one deranged sergeant. One Bravo Company soldier not charged with any crime, Pvt. 1st Class Justin Stoner, tells Krauss that he’d heard about numerous similar incidents in other units: “We were just the ones who got caught.” Boal also interviewed Stoner, and got to read Army internal files on the investigation, and he concludes that the “kill team” murders were hardly a dirty secret but rather “an open topic of conversation” among the 3,800 soldiers of the 5th Stryker Brigade, the larger unit that encompassed Bravo Company and its regiment. If other soldiers didn’t necessarily participate or approve of killing random civilians for fun, they also did nothing to stop it.
Investigations by Der Spiegel and the Army Times have both suggested that Col. Harry Tunnell, the brigade’s commanding officer, may have created an environment in which rogue soldiers like Gibbs felt sure they could literally get away with murder. (I’m not trying to connect the dots here, but it also sounds like half the soldiers in the brigade got baked on potent Afghan hashish every day while the officers looked away.) But no one higher than Gibbs’ rank was ever charged with anything, and as “The Kill Team” demonstrates, the Army spent significant time and resources on prosecuting the one soldier who actively tried to report Gibbs and the other killers. Winfield’s obvious revulsion at what was happening made him the target of Gibbs and other soldiers, who discussed eliminating him by way of an unfortunate accident in the weight room, or a friendly-fire incident while on patrol.
It’s clear that Winfield told his parents back in Florida about the killing of Gul Mudin shortly after it occurred, and also that his father, a ramrod-straight Marine Corps veteran, repeatedly tried to contact military authorities and was repeatedly ignored. Despite all that, Winfield was arrested and charged with murder, along with Gibbs, Holmes, Morlock and Spc. Andrew Wagnon, when the case finally came to light. (That only happened, by the way, as collateral damage from a drug bust.) His story is a heartbreaking one, about a diminutive, idealistic kid from a military family who yearned to be a patriotic hero and encountered only despair and disillusion. Winfield has now served his sentence for involuntary manslaughter, and can move on with his life, damaged as he surely is. The larger story, about the way our pointless and endless wars degrade the human condition, is still being written and never seems to stop.
© 2014 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Friday, July 25, 2014 3:19 PM
Victory! Congress Votes Against New Iraq War!
Dear Max,
Over the past few weeks, we’ve asked you to take action to keep us from sliding back to war in Iraq. We were overwhelmed by your response: our coalition generated an estimated 236,000 petition signatures, 41,000 emails, and 26,000 calls to Congress. Your voices were heard, and we wanted to update you on our progress!
Today the House passed H. Con. Res. 105, the McGovern (D-MA)-Jones (R-NC)-Lee (D-CA) proposal to keep U.S. troops out of Iraq, by an overwhelming vote of 370-40. By passing the Iraq War Powers Resolution, Congress made clear that they stand with the American public, who do not want to go back to war in Iraq.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/306-10/24969-qthe-kill-teamq-when-us-soldiers-in-afghanistan-became-trophy-hunters
O'Hehir reports: "In a week when a different conflict with a high civilian body count is dominating the headlines, 'The Kill Team' arrives as a terrifying example of how easily basic human decency and morality can melt away in the fog of war."
(screenshot: Salon)
"The Kill Team": When US Soldiers in Afghanistan Became Trophy Hunters
By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
25 July 14
A wrenching documentary explores the Army's gruesome murders of Afghan civilians, and one soldier who spoke out
U.S. Army Cpl. Jeremy Morlock comes off as a thoughtful and intelligent fellow, at least as we meet him in Dan Krauss’ award-winning documentary “The Kill Team.” He discusses his own emotional limitations, and the way that his time in Afghanistan changed him, with impressive clarity and insight. He was startled, Morlock says, when he saw the souvenirs assembled by his immediate superior and team leader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs: Human fingers that Gibbs had cut from the hands of Afghan civilians their unit had murdered. Gibbs told Morlock he intended to allow the fingers to decompose into bone, and then fashion a necklace from them. In civilian life that might have seemed “messed up,” Morlock admitted, but in war the rules of ordinary behavior are suspended. If his sergeant wanted a necklace of human bones, who was he to judge?
In a week when a different conflict with a high civilian body count is dominating the headlines, “The Kill Team” arrives as a terrifying example of how easily basic human decency and morality can melt away in the fog of war. As Army Spc. Adam Winfield, who tried to blow the whistle on his comrades and then was swept up in their crimes, wrote to his father in a Facebook chat from Afghanistan, “There are no good men here.” First of all, “The Kill Team” is soberly executed and highly principled documentary filmmaking, tightly focused on the Winfield family’s efforts to navigate the byzantine Army bureaucracy and the ass-covering military justice system. But it’s also a kind of Rorschach test of any viewer’s attitudes about war, the military and the United States’ amorphous 13-year mission in Afghanistan.
We are certainly free to interpret the story of the “Maywand District murders” of 2010, as they are semi-officially known, as the story of a bad apple who turned an entire infantry platoon rotten. The apple in that analogy would be Staff Sgt. Gibbs, who has made no public statements and continues to proclaim his innocence, although he is now serving a life sentence for murder. (He is seen in Krauss’ film only in photographs and snippets of homemade video.) As described by those who served under him, Gibbs was a first-rate macho infantryman, something of a cowboy when it came to rules and regulations, and pretty close to a sociopath. His left calf was tattooed with numerous skull-and-crossbones designs, supposedly indicating the kills he had accumulated on previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did all those skulls represent legitimate enemy combatants? Gibbs made it clear to his men that if those were in short supply, it was easy to invent them. One Afghan was pretty much like another; if they weren’t all our enemies, they definitely weren’t our friends.
So it was that Gibbs turned the tedium and stress of life in the 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment toward murder. His soldiers staged at least three deliberate killings of unarmed civilians in the Maywand District of southern Afghanistan. One was a 15-year-old boy doing farm work for his father, another was an adult man believed to be deaf and/or mentally disabled and the third was a local Islamic mullah. All three were justified through the use of “drop weapons,” meaning guns or grenades the soldiers brought with them specifically to detonate or plant near the bodies. You can read the story of the cold-blooded execution of Gul Mudin, the 15-year-old, in this Rolling Stone article by Mark Boal (also the screenwriter of “Zero Dark Thirty”). Platoon members, including Gibbs and Morlock, stripped Mudin’s corpse naked and posed him for photographs, smiling and holding up his mutilated head by the hair. Gibbs snipped off one of the kid’s pinky fingers with medical shears, although he awarded that trophy to Pvt. 1st Class Andrew Holmes, who may have fired the fatal shots.
“The Kill Team,” which won a Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is not based on Boal’s reporting, and Krauss avoids borrowing any descriptions or accounts from the Rolling Stone article. You and I don’t have to be so careful, and in taking the two together it becomes clear that the real problem exposed here is much larger than one deranged sergeant. One Bravo Company soldier not charged with any crime, Pvt. 1st Class Justin Stoner, tells Krauss that he’d heard about numerous similar incidents in other units: “We were just the ones who got caught.” Boal also interviewed Stoner, and got to read Army internal files on the investigation, and he concludes that the “kill team” murders were hardly a dirty secret but rather “an open topic of conversation” among the 3,800 soldiers of the 5th Stryker Brigade, the larger unit that encompassed Bravo Company and its regiment. If other soldiers didn’t necessarily participate or approve of killing random civilians for fun, they also did nothing to stop it.
Investigations by Der Spiegel and the Army Times have both suggested that Col. Harry Tunnell, the brigade’s commanding officer, may have created an environment in which rogue soldiers like Gibbs felt sure they could literally get away with murder. (I’m not trying to connect the dots here, but it also sounds like half the soldiers in the brigade got baked on potent Afghan hashish every day while the officers looked away.) But no one higher than Gibbs’ rank was ever charged with anything, and as “The Kill Team” demonstrates, the Army spent significant time and resources on prosecuting the one soldier who actively tried to report Gibbs and the other killers. Winfield’s obvious revulsion at what was happening made him the target of Gibbs and other soldiers, who discussed eliminating him by way of an unfortunate accident in the weight room, or a friendly-fire incident while on patrol.
It’s clear that Winfield told his parents back in Florida about the killing of Gul Mudin shortly after it occurred, and also that his father, a ramrod-straight Marine Corps veteran, repeatedly tried to contact military authorities and was repeatedly ignored. Despite all that, Winfield was arrested and charged with murder, along with Gibbs, Holmes, Morlock and Spc. Andrew Wagnon, when the case finally came to light. (That only happened, by the way, as collateral damage from a drug bust.) His story is a heartbreaking one, about a diminutive, idealistic kid from a military family who yearned to be a patriotic hero and encountered only despair and disillusion. Winfield has now served his sentence for involuntary manslaughter, and can move on with his life, damaged as he surely is. The larger story, about the way our pointless and endless wars degrade the human condition, is still being written and never seems to stop.
© 2014 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Support Supershuttle Drivers/60 Years Later: On the Waterfront and Working-Class Studies
We Deserve Better Workers Assembly supports the SuperShuttle Drivers! There is an Urgent Appeal to Join the Airport Caravan on Sat. July 26. You do not need a car to participate.
The SuperShuttle drivers at BWI, Reagan & Dulles Airports are continuing their fight for justice against slave-like work conditions. Despite firings -- the workers have continued to demand their rights including the right to join UFCW Local 1994. Veolia's franchise agreement constitutes modern slavery. Many drivers do not even break even at the end of the week. See the Baltimore Brew article: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2014/01/24/supershuttle-drivers-protest-franchise-terms-they-call-intolerable/
Join the drivers, UFCW Local 1994, the “We Deserve Better” Workers Assembly and many others for a car caravan to Dulles Airport. These mostly West African immigrant drivers have shown tremendous courage. Show your support for the low wage workers movement!
Meet at the Solidarity Center, 2011 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218 at 8 AM. If you plan to drive straight to the airport or from another location, then meet the drivers and their supporters at the Dulles Airport at the cell phone holding area between 10:30 AM and 11 AM. Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/778977292141958/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming. Call 410-218-4835.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
60 Years Later: On the Waterfront and Working-Class Studies
http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/
By Kathy M. Newman
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Working Class Perspectives
For most Americans On the Waterfront is not a politically controversial film—it’s simply one of the best films of all time. [1] Many know that the film’s director Elia Kazan did something shady and some might even know that he testified against his former Communist allies at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). An even smaller group might know that after testifying Kazan took out a full page New York Times ad to justify his decision.
But for the American left, Kazan is one of the worst traitors in American cultural history. When progressive scholars write about On the Waterfront, they draw parallels between Kazan, who betrayed his friends in order to clear his name (and to keep working in film), and Terry Malloy [Marlon Brando], who betrayed the members of his mob crew in order to clear his conscience of the wrong he had done in their name.
Kazan has done much to fuel this interpretation of the film. In his 1988 autobiography, A Life, Kazan explained the parallel between his naming names and Terry Malloy’s testimony before the Waterfront Commission: “When Brando, at the end [of On the Waterfront], yells as Lee Cobb, the mob boss, ’I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!’ that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had [2].”
But if we reduce On the Waterfront to Kazan’s personal story we lose sight of the real working-class social formation out of which this film was born and overlook the genuine progressive political commitments that led both Kazan and Schulberg to make On the Waterfront despite great obstacles.
The social formation of the postwar docks was rooted in the hiring process known as the “shape up.” It was estimated that there were half as many jobs as there were men who lined up for them every morning. Arthur Miller [3], who wrote several plays about the waterfront himself, described the “shape up” as he witnessed it in the late 1940s:
I stood around with longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up in a semicircle to attract his pointing finger and the numbered brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day. After distributing the checks to his favorites, who had quietly paid him off, the boss often found a couple left over and in his generosity tossed them into the air over the little crowd. In a frantic scramble, the men would tear at each other’s hands, sometimes getting into bad fights. Their cattle like acceptance of this humiliating process struck me as an outrage, even more sinister than the procedure itself. It was though they had lost the mere awareness of hope.
On the Waterfront began as a response to these working conditions—not as a vehicle for Kazan’s revenge. The film began in 1951, before the HUAC hearings, with Budd Schulberg, a self-described Hollywood “prince”—a writer who was the son of movie mogul B. P. Schulberg. Schulberg had never met Kazan when he was asked by a small film company, Monticello, to write a screenplay based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalistic series, Crime on the Waterfront, which had been published in the New York Sun.
Schulberg became obsessed with the waterfront after Johnson introduced him to one of Johnson’s main sources: Father “Pete” Corridan [4], whom Schulberg described as “a rangy, fast-talking, chain-smoking West Side [priest] who talked the darndest language I ever heard, combining the gritty vocabulary of the longshoremen with mob talk, the statistical findings of a trained economist and the teachings of Christ.” Schulberg continued to obsess about the docks even after Monticello folded and the project was declared dead.
After the publicity surrounding Kazan’s HUAC testimony, Schulberg wrote Kazan a letter expressing sympathy for the “vilification he was undergoing,” and, later, after they met for lunch, Kazan proposed they work together on a film about the Trenton Six—six African American youth who had been convicted of killing a white shop owner. Schulberg had other ideas: why shouldn’t the two of them work together on his waterfront film? Kazan agreed.
Though Howard Lawson [5], a blacklisted screenwriter, described On the Waterfront as the ultimate Hollywood film, the film was quashed by Hollywood more than once.
In 1952, when Schulberg and Kazan tried to get Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, to produce the film, Zanuck told them, “what you’ve written is exactly what the American public doesn’t want to see.” Finally, in late 1952, when they were depressed and about the to junk the film, a washed-up producer, Sam Spiegel, agreed to bankroll it. Filming was completed in 1953, and On the Waterfront was set to debut in the spring of 1954—just in time, everyone hoped, to help the honest dockworkers win an election against the real life “Johnny Friendly” types who controlled the docks.
Throughout the filmmaking, Kazan was inspired by Schulberg’s commitment to the dockworkers’ cause, and he saw Schulberg’s engagement with the subject matter as “passionate and true.” Kazan acknowledged that “Budd had made himself….a champion of humanity on that strip of shore [6].”
What about Kazan’s engagement? In a much less quoted passage from his autobiography, Kazan explained that his attachment to On the Waterfront came from a desire to show his old lefty enemies that he was the true progressive when it came to representing the working class: “I was…determined to show my old ‘comrades,’ those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives and they were not. I’d come back to fight [7].”
This quote points to another parallel between Kazan and Terry Malloy: they were both fighters. In the final scene of On the Waterfront, Malloy is beaten nearly to a pulp by Johnny Friendly’s goons. He can barely walk.
When his girlfriend Edie (Eva Saint Marie) tries to help him, Father Barry (Karl Malden) waves her off. In 1955, the radical British filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson [8], argued that this scene is “fascist.” Malloy, through violence, has simply become the new de facto “Johnny Friendly,” just another tough guy who is ready to rise up and exploit his brethren.
Anderson’s argument shows how judging Kazan for his political betrayal can lead to a misreading of the film. The closing scene isn’t fascist. It’s a scene that uses the language of fighting— specifically boxing. Malloy, a former boxer, is down for the count. If Edie or the priest helps him get up, then he can’t continue to fight. In this metaphorical boxing round he’ll be disqualified. And so he gets up, on his own, which means that the round is over but the match is not. He will live to fight again. Finally, in this scene, Malloy has become the contender he always knew he could be.
If you get a chance to see On the Waterfront this month, in honor of its 60th anniversary, think about this. As much as Terry Malloy might represent Kazan, ratting on his former friends, it is also true that Kazan and Schulberg were trying to rat on capitalism, to call out American business practices as corrupt, and to argue that something drastic needed to done to reform the docks. What Kazan did was wrong, but what happened to American dockworkers in this period, arguably, was even worse. Though the bitterness against Kazan has lingered lo these many years, we in working-class studies should reclaim On the Waterfront as one of the important texts for understanding what happened to American labor in the postwar period. We do so not to redeem Kazan, but to honor the workers that he and Schulberg were trying to represent.
Kathy M. Newman
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-16/60-years-later-waterfront-and-working-class-studies
Links:
[1] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/on_the_waterfront/
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/02/20/172122533/home-video-review-on-the-waterfront
[3] http://books.google.com/books?id=abiKAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=miller+timebends+google+books&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2ODDU8vEDcyZyASJ6IC4CA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=pointing%20finger%20&f=false
[4] http://hnn.us/article/120328
[5] http://books.google.com/books?id=NofdDixbbBgC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=%22howard+lawson%22+%22on+the+waterfront%22&source=bl&ots=zjxO92S5gV&sig=8jdmQX_jplMG39l2JMBxahmg5s0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XOHDU6KmA4iHyASz84KYBQ&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22howard%20lawson%22%20%22on%20the%20waterfront%22&f=false
[6] http://books.google.com/books?id=hWbVWtZFZlwC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=champion+of+humanity+on+that+strip+of+shore+kazan+a+life&source=bl&ots=JTDOFza56c&sig=RPDBtM5xnTM26_Q6ncm2oSH1bhM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uOHDU9i6DdOOyASZ_oBY&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=champion%20of%20humanity%20on%20that%20strip%20of%20shore%20kazan%20a%20life&f=false
[7] http://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/12/richard-wall/kazan-on-kazan/
[8] http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue2/kazan.html
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
The SuperShuttle drivers at BWI, Reagan & Dulles Airports are continuing their fight for justice against slave-like work conditions. Despite firings -- the workers have continued to demand their rights including the right to join UFCW Local 1994. Veolia's franchise agreement constitutes modern slavery. Many drivers do not even break even at the end of the week. See the Baltimore Brew article: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2014/01/24/supershuttle-drivers-protest-franchise-terms-they-call-intolerable/
Join the drivers, UFCW Local 1994, the “We Deserve Better” Workers Assembly and many others for a car caravan to Dulles Airport. These mostly West African immigrant drivers have shown tremendous courage. Show your support for the low wage workers movement!
Meet at the Solidarity Center, 2011 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218 at 8 AM. If you plan to drive straight to the airport or from another location, then meet the drivers and their supporters at the Dulles Airport at the cell phone holding area between 10:30 AM and 11 AM. Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/778977292141958/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming. Call 410-218-4835.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
60 Years Later: On the Waterfront and Working-Class Studies
http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/
By Kathy M. Newman
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Working Class Perspectives
For most Americans On the Waterfront is not a politically controversial film—it’s simply one of the best films of all time. [1] Many know that the film’s director Elia Kazan did something shady and some might even know that he testified against his former Communist allies at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). An even smaller group might know that after testifying Kazan took out a full page New York Times ad to justify his decision.
But for the American left, Kazan is one of the worst traitors in American cultural history. When progressive scholars write about On the Waterfront, they draw parallels between Kazan, who betrayed his friends in order to clear his name (and to keep working in film), and Terry Malloy [Marlon Brando], who betrayed the members of his mob crew in order to clear his conscience of the wrong he had done in their name.
Kazan has done much to fuel this interpretation of the film. In his 1988 autobiography, A Life, Kazan explained the parallel between his naming names and Terry Malloy’s testimony before the Waterfront Commission: “When Brando, at the end [of On the Waterfront], yells as Lee Cobb, the mob boss, ’I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!’ that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had [2].”
But if we reduce On the Waterfront to Kazan’s personal story we lose sight of the real working-class social formation out of which this film was born and overlook the genuine progressive political commitments that led both Kazan and Schulberg to make On the Waterfront despite great obstacles.
The social formation of the postwar docks was rooted in the hiring process known as the “shape up.” It was estimated that there were half as many jobs as there were men who lined up for them every morning. Arthur Miller [3], who wrote several plays about the waterfront himself, described the “shape up” as he witnessed it in the late 1940s:
I stood around with longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up in a semicircle to attract his pointing finger and the numbered brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day. After distributing the checks to his favorites, who had quietly paid him off, the boss often found a couple left over and in his generosity tossed them into the air over the little crowd. In a frantic scramble, the men would tear at each other’s hands, sometimes getting into bad fights. Their cattle like acceptance of this humiliating process struck me as an outrage, even more sinister than the procedure itself. It was though they had lost the mere awareness of hope.
On the Waterfront began as a response to these working conditions—not as a vehicle for Kazan’s revenge. The film began in 1951, before the HUAC hearings, with Budd Schulberg, a self-described Hollywood “prince”—a writer who was the son of movie mogul B. P. Schulberg. Schulberg had never met Kazan when he was asked by a small film company, Monticello, to write a screenplay based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalistic series, Crime on the Waterfront, which had been published in the New York Sun.
Schulberg became obsessed with the waterfront after Johnson introduced him to one of Johnson’s main sources: Father “Pete” Corridan [4], whom Schulberg described as “a rangy, fast-talking, chain-smoking West Side [priest] who talked the darndest language I ever heard, combining the gritty vocabulary of the longshoremen with mob talk, the statistical findings of a trained economist and the teachings of Christ.” Schulberg continued to obsess about the docks even after Monticello folded and the project was declared dead.
After the publicity surrounding Kazan’s HUAC testimony, Schulberg wrote Kazan a letter expressing sympathy for the “vilification he was undergoing,” and, later, after they met for lunch, Kazan proposed they work together on a film about the Trenton Six—six African American youth who had been convicted of killing a white shop owner. Schulberg had other ideas: why shouldn’t the two of them work together on his waterfront film? Kazan agreed.
Though Howard Lawson [5], a blacklisted screenwriter, described On the Waterfront as the ultimate Hollywood film, the film was quashed by Hollywood more than once.
In 1952, when Schulberg and Kazan tried to get Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, to produce the film, Zanuck told them, “what you’ve written is exactly what the American public doesn’t want to see.” Finally, in late 1952, when they were depressed and about the to junk the film, a washed-up producer, Sam Spiegel, agreed to bankroll it. Filming was completed in 1953, and On the Waterfront was set to debut in the spring of 1954—just in time, everyone hoped, to help the honest dockworkers win an election against the real life “Johnny Friendly” types who controlled the docks.
Throughout the filmmaking, Kazan was inspired by Schulberg’s commitment to the dockworkers’ cause, and he saw Schulberg’s engagement with the subject matter as “passionate and true.” Kazan acknowledged that “Budd had made himself….a champion of humanity on that strip of shore [6].”
What about Kazan’s engagement? In a much less quoted passage from his autobiography, Kazan explained that his attachment to On the Waterfront came from a desire to show his old lefty enemies that he was the true progressive when it came to representing the working class: “I was…determined to show my old ‘comrades,’ those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives and they were not. I’d come back to fight [7].”
This quote points to another parallel between Kazan and Terry Malloy: they were both fighters. In the final scene of On the Waterfront, Malloy is beaten nearly to a pulp by Johnny Friendly’s goons. He can barely walk.
When his girlfriend Edie (Eva Saint Marie) tries to help him, Father Barry (Karl Malden) waves her off. In 1955, the radical British filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson [8], argued that this scene is “fascist.” Malloy, through violence, has simply become the new de facto “Johnny Friendly,” just another tough guy who is ready to rise up and exploit his brethren.
Anderson’s argument shows how judging Kazan for his political betrayal can lead to a misreading of the film. The closing scene isn’t fascist. It’s a scene that uses the language of fighting— specifically boxing. Malloy, a former boxer, is down for the count. If Edie or the priest helps him get up, then he can’t continue to fight. In this metaphorical boxing round he’ll be disqualified. And so he gets up, on his own, which means that the round is over but the match is not. He will live to fight again. Finally, in this scene, Malloy has become the contender he always knew he could be.
If you get a chance to see On the Waterfront this month, in honor of its 60th anniversary, think about this. As much as Terry Malloy might represent Kazan, ratting on his former friends, it is also true that Kazan and Schulberg were trying to rat on capitalism, to call out American business practices as corrupt, and to argue that something drastic needed to done to reform the docks. What Kazan did was wrong, but what happened to American dockworkers in this period, arguably, was even worse. Though the bitterness against Kazan has lingered lo these many years, we in working-class studies should reclaim On the Waterfront as one of the important texts for understanding what happened to American labor in the postwar period. We do so not to redeem Kazan, but to honor the workers that he and Schulberg were trying to represent.
Kathy M. Newman
Source URL: https://portside.org/2014-07-16/60-years-later-waterfront-and-working-class-studies
Links:
[1] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/on_the_waterfront/
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/02/20/172122533/home-video-review-on-the-waterfront
[3] http://books.google.com/books?id=abiKAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=miller+timebends+google+books&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2ODDU8vEDcyZyASJ6IC4CA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=pointing%20finger%20&f=false
[4] http://hnn.us/article/120328
[5] http://books.google.com/books?id=NofdDixbbBgC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=%22howard+lawson%22+%22on+the+waterfront%22&source=bl&ots=zjxO92S5gV&sig=8jdmQX_jplMG39l2JMBxahmg5s0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XOHDU6KmA4iHyASz84KYBQ&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22howard%20lawson%22%20%22on%20the%20waterfront%22&f=false
[6] http://books.google.com/books?id=hWbVWtZFZlwC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=champion+of+humanity+on+that+strip+of+shore+kazan+a+life&source=bl&ots=JTDOFza56c&sig=RPDBtM5xnTM26_Q6ncm2oSH1bhM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uOHDU9i6DdOOyASZ_oBY&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=champion%20of%20humanity%20on%20that%20strip%20of%20shore%20kazan%20a%20life&f=false
[7] http://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/12/richard-wall/kazan-on-kazan/
[8] http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue2/kazan.html
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Friday, July 25, 2014
A Letter From Doctor Mads Gilbert in Gaza
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/25139-a-letter-from-doctor-mads-gilbert-in-gaza
A Letter From Doctor Mads Gilbert in Gaza
Thursday, 24 July 2014 11:11 By Ellen Cantarow, Le Monde Diplomatique | Op-Ed
Mads Gilbert in Gaza, Novemeber 23, 2012. (Photo: Norsk Folkehjelp Norwegian People's Aid / Flickr)
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The email Mads Gilbert, professor of medicine at the University of North Norway (Tromso), sent to a friend on July 19 was a cri de coeur. He had spent two weeks in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead attack in the winter of 2008-09, tending to the wounded and the dying in Al-Shifa hospital, and again for another week during a similar assault (Operation Pillar of Cloud) in 2012.
As then, Gilbert is now once again caring for streams of patients rushed into Al-Shifa (the name means “healing”) from the Gaza killing fields. I reproduce the email in its entirety because it is the first lengthy account by a physician writing directly from a hospital about the region’s injured and dying in the course of Israel’s latest hostilities. Al-Shifa has been under bombardment and shellfire; other health care facilities as well as ambulances and medical personnel have been attacked. Gaza’s only rehabilitation hospital, Al-Wafa, has been destroyed.
“Dearest friends,
“The last night was extreme. The "ground invasion" of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with [the] maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.
“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24hrs shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment [at] all in Shifa for the last four months); they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS! Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world [sic].
“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless; my closeness to the Palestinian sumud [steadfastness] gives me strength, although in [some of the] glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace - but we cannot afford that: nor can they.
“Ashy grey faces - oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out. The cleaners [are] everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas - the leftovers from death - all taken away... [only] to be prepared again, to be repeated all over. More than 100 cases came to Shifa [in the] last 24 hrs, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here [there is] almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors - all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterdays hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormous[ly] resolute.
“And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!
And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again: salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ’Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches. So much made and paid in and by US.
“Mr. Obama - do you have a heart?
“I invite you - spend one night - just one night - with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.
“I am convinced, 100%, it would change history. Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.
“But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another Dahiya onslaught on Gaza. The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of
death.
Please. Do what you can. ...This cannot continue.”
In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on July 14, Gilbert spoke of the Shifa staff’’s “resilience [...], determination and the way they cope with these extremely harsh conditions that they’re in now.” Gaza’s hospitals, he said, “are denied a constant supply of energy, of water, of disposables, medical drugs - all the items you need to run a university-level hospital.
And on top of the total drainage of resources from the siege, they are now exposed to this constant and very large flow of the very severely injured. And they are not crippled. On the contrary . . . they have doubled or tripled their shifts. . . Everyone is extremely tired and exhausted, but they don’t yield.” Half of the 1,232 Gazans injured by July 14 were women and children: 36 children and 24 women had been killed out of a total of 170. “This tells you that these attacks are not targeting the militarists [but] the whole population, in order to intimidate them and to force them to give up their resistance . . . Israel is doing their utmost to kill them and to make their life as miserable as possible through these seven years of siege.”
Born in 1947, Gilbert is a member of the Norwegian Socialist Party, honored by his country for his contributions to emergency medicine. From the 1970s he has worked as a physician in both Palestine and Lebanon.
In Norway, he was central in efforts that, in 2001, twinned Tromso with Gaza City. After 2009, in a report to the medical journal The Lancet, Gilbert wrote that the situation in Gaza was “a nightmarish havoc” and that he and Fosse had “witnessed the most horrific war injuries in men, women and children of all ages, in numbers almost too large to comprehend.”
An Israeli spokesman said Gilbert was “spreading vicious lies”, adding that he was “notorious for his radical far left opinions and his systematic demonization of Israel.” Gilbert rejoined: "This is a part of the propaganda war. We are not surprised and take this very calmly. We tell the truth and do not need to lie. If Israel think[s] we are lying, they can just open the borders and let the world’s press into Gaza. Then one will soon find out who is lying."
Five years ago, with his colleague Eric Fosse, professor of medicine at the University of Oslo, Gilbert wrote Eyes in Gaza, a series of journals about their two-weeks’ work in Al-Shifa in 2008-09. The book got no coverage in the mainstream US press. Not for lack of eloquence:
"Sunday was a terrible day.
"On Sunday, Israeli forces killed two young Palestinian boys who were playing on a roof.
"On Sunday, Israeli aircraft also bombed the vegetable market in the middle of the busiest shopping area of Gaza City.
"On Sunday, we received wave after wave of people frightened to death, some uninjured, some wounded, some dying and some dead - of all ages, with every kind of injury... They had one thing in common: they were all Palestinian civilians... Devastated human bodies were everywhere. On the floor, on stretchers, on tables, in the resuscitation room, behind curtains; and there were walking wounded with bleeding injuries.
"A dying pregnant woman. Children with recent amputations. The noise rose and fell . . . a numbing cascade of voices and cries, commands, outbursts, despairs and moans."
"The little nine month old girl I had been asked to attend to was just an early warning. She was pale and ill-looking after the anaesthetic and was almost unrousable . . . Parts of her tiny little left hand had had to be amputated after the nasty injury she had sustained in the family house. Nobody knew where her mother was, but her father and grandfather must have been killed." (Jumana, the nine-month girl, turned out to be a member of the Samouni family from Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun district. Gilbert and Fosse soon discovered that Israeli soldiers had forced 70 members of her family into a building which was then bombed: at least 26 family members died, among them ten children and seven women.)
Another entry read:
"We could see that the splinter had gone on through the liver and into the duodenum, which had a three centimeter tear on the anterior surface. Dark blood was welling out through the tear in the bowel. It must be coming from a major vein. I freed the duodenum and was able to see a tear in the inferior vena cava, which brings all the blood from the lower part of the body back to the heart. We packed a lot of compresses in against the vein and managed to stop the bleeding for the time being . . ."
Gilbert returned to Gaza in November 2012, working again at Al-Shifa. A power point he compiled with Sobhi Skaik, head of Shifa’s surgery department, has photographs, graphs, and narrative about the hospital’s work during that week of atrocities. One graph charts the daily death toll, showing an increase in mayhem over the course of the week - from nine deaths a day at the start of the assault, on November 14, to 45 by November 21. Then, as in 2009 and now, well over a third of the victims were women and children. The power point includes a reference to Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. This unabashedly propounds a war crime: deliberately targeting civilian infrastructures as a means of inducing suffering in civilians — for “deterrence.” (Israel has not been denounced for carrying out this “doctrine”.)
This June, Gilbert wrote a 17-page report to UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), titled “The Gaza Health Sector as of June, 2014”, which shows that the situation in Gaza was catastrophic even before Israel’s current onslaught. He wrote: “Palestinian childrenin Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage [imposed by Israel in 2007]. Prevalence of anaemia in children of [under] two years in Gaza is at 72.8%, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3%, 31.4%, 31.45% respectively.” This is just one passage in a 17-page document that presents evidence of the excruciating results of Israel’s intent, when it imposed its closure of Gaza eight years ago, to “put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” (The quote in full is by Dov Weisglass, advisor to then prime minister Ehud Olmert who imposed the blockade in 2007.)
From what I have seen from Al-Jazeera stories and Internet reporting, and from reports Gazans have managed to get to the world through social media, I believe the scenes Gilbert and Fosse described in Eyes on Gaza are interchangeable with the ones now unfolding.
There is no doubt that Mads Gilbert will again be attacked for speaking out against Israel, backed unstintingly by the US since 1967, and before. In a world in which the world’s superpower remains willfully blind to Israel’s crimes, while France’s prime minister François Hollande forbids demonstrations on Gaza’s behalf, Mads Gilbert’s voice needs to be heard, as he bears witness to the agony of Gaza’s stricken population.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Ellen Cantarow reported on Israel and the West Bank from 1979 to 2009 for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Inquiry, and Grand Street, among other publications. For the past four years she has been writing about the toll the oil and gas industries are taking on the environment. She views corporate penetrations of American land for fracking as colonization that is turning the US into a petro-state with impacts similar to those in, among other Third World countries, Nigeria.
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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
A Letter From Doctor Mads Gilbert in Gaza
Thursday, 24 July 2014 11:11 By Ellen Cantarow, Le Monde Diplomatique | Op-Ed
Mads Gilbert in Gaza, Novemeber 23, 2012. (Photo: Norsk Folkehjelp Norwegian People's Aid / Flickr)
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The email Mads Gilbert, professor of medicine at the University of North Norway (Tromso), sent to a friend on July 19 was a cri de coeur. He had spent two weeks in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead attack in the winter of 2008-09, tending to the wounded and the dying in Al-Shifa hospital, and again for another week during a similar assault (Operation Pillar of Cloud) in 2012.
As then, Gilbert is now once again caring for streams of patients rushed into Al-Shifa (the name means “healing”) from the Gaza killing fields. I reproduce the email in its entirety because it is the first lengthy account by a physician writing directly from a hospital about the region’s injured and dying in the course of Israel’s latest hostilities. Al-Shifa has been under bombardment and shellfire; other health care facilities as well as ambulances and medical personnel have been attacked. Gaza’s only rehabilitation hospital, Al-Wafa, has been destroyed.
“Dearest friends,
“The last night was extreme. The "ground invasion" of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with [the] maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.
“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24hrs shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment [at] all in Shifa for the last four months); they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS! Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world [sic].
“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless; my closeness to the Palestinian sumud [steadfastness] gives me strength, although in [some of the] glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace - but we cannot afford that: nor can they.
“Ashy grey faces - oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out. The cleaners [are] everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas - the leftovers from death - all taken away... [only] to be prepared again, to be repeated all over. More than 100 cases came to Shifa [in the] last 24 hrs, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here [there is] almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors - all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterdays hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormous[ly] resolute.
“And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!
And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again: salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ’Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches. So much made and paid in and by US.
“Mr. Obama - do you have a heart?
“I invite you - spend one night - just one night - with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.
“I am convinced, 100%, it would change history. Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.
“But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another Dahiya onslaught on Gaza. The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of
death.
Please. Do what you can. ...This cannot continue.”
In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on July 14, Gilbert spoke of the Shifa staff’’s “resilience [...], determination and the way they cope with these extremely harsh conditions that they’re in now.” Gaza’s hospitals, he said, “are denied a constant supply of energy, of water, of disposables, medical drugs - all the items you need to run a university-level hospital.
And on top of the total drainage of resources from the siege, they are now exposed to this constant and very large flow of the very severely injured. And they are not crippled. On the contrary . . . they have doubled or tripled their shifts. . . Everyone is extremely tired and exhausted, but they don’t yield.” Half of the 1,232 Gazans injured by July 14 were women and children: 36 children and 24 women had been killed out of a total of 170. “This tells you that these attacks are not targeting the militarists [but] the whole population, in order to intimidate them and to force them to give up their resistance . . . Israel is doing their utmost to kill them and to make their life as miserable as possible through these seven years of siege.”
Born in 1947, Gilbert is a member of the Norwegian Socialist Party, honored by his country for his contributions to emergency medicine. From the 1970s he has worked as a physician in both Palestine and Lebanon.
In Norway, he was central in efforts that, in 2001, twinned Tromso with Gaza City. After 2009, in a report to the medical journal The Lancet, Gilbert wrote that the situation in Gaza was “a nightmarish havoc” and that he and Fosse had “witnessed the most horrific war injuries in men, women and children of all ages, in numbers almost too large to comprehend.”
An Israeli spokesman said Gilbert was “spreading vicious lies”, adding that he was “notorious for his radical far left opinions and his systematic demonization of Israel.” Gilbert rejoined: "This is a part of the propaganda war. We are not surprised and take this very calmly. We tell the truth and do not need to lie. If Israel think[s] we are lying, they can just open the borders and let the world’s press into Gaza. Then one will soon find out who is lying."
Five years ago, with his colleague Eric Fosse, professor of medicine at the University of Oslo, Gilbert wrote Eyes in Gaza, a series of journals about their two-weeks’ work in Al-Shifa in 2008-09. The book got no coverage in the mainstream US press. Not for lack of eloquence:
"Sunday was a terrible day.
"On Sunday, Israeli forces killed two young Palestinian boys who were playing on a roof.
"On Sunday, Israeli aircraft also bombed the vegetable market in the middle of the busiest shopping area of Gaza City.
"On Sunday, we received wave after wave of people frightened to death, some uninjured, some wounded, some dying and some dead - of all ages, with every kind of injury... They had one thing in common: they were all Palestinian civilians... Devastated human bodies were everywhere. On the floor, on stretchers, on tables, in the resuscitation room, behind curtains; and there were walking wounded with bleeding injuries.
"A dying pregnant woman. Children with recent amputations. The noise rose and fell . . . a numbing cascade of voices and cries, commands, outbursts, despairs and moans."
"The little nine month old girl I had been asked to attend to was just an early warning. She was pale and ill-looking after the anaesthetic and was almost unrousable . . . Parts of her tiny little left hand had had to be amputated after the nasty injury she had sustained in the family house. Nobody knew where her mother was, but her father and grandfather must have been killed." (Jumana, the nine-month girl, turned out to be a member of the Samouni family from Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun district. Gilbert and Fosse soon discovered that Israeli soldiers had forced 70 members of her family into a building which was then bombed: at least 26 family members died, among them ten children and seven women.)
Another entry read:
"We could see that the splinter had gone on through the liver and into the duodenum, which had a three centimeter tear on the anterior surface. Dark blood was welling out through the tear in the bowel. It must be coming from a major vein. I freed the duodenum and was able to see a tear in the inferior vena cava, which brings all the blood from the lower part of the body back to the heart. We packed a lot of compresses in against the vein and managed to stop the bleeding for the time being . . ."
Gilbert returned to Gaza in November 2012, working again at Al-Shifa. A power point he compiled with Sobhi Skaik, head of Shifa’s surgery department, has photographs, graphs, and narrative about the hospital’s work during that week of atrocities. One graph charts the daily death toll, showing an increase in mayhem over the course of the week - from nine deaths a day at the start of the assault, on November 14, to 45 by November 21. Then, as in 2009 and now, well over a third of the victims were women and children. The power point includes a reference to Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. This unabashedly propounds a war crime: deliberately targeting civilian infrastructures as a means of inducing suffering in civilians — for “deterrence.” (Israel has not been denounced for carrying out this “doctrine”.)
This June, Gilbert wrote a 17-page report to UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), titled “The Gaza Health Sector as of June, 2014”, which shows that the situation in Gaza was catastrophic even before Israel’s current onslaught. He wrote: “Palestinian childrenin Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage [imposed by Israel in 2007]. Prevalence of anaemia in children of [under] two years in Gaza is at 72.8%, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3%, 31.4%, 31.45% respectively.” This is just one passage in a 17-page document that presents evidence of the excruciating results of Israel’s intent, when it imposed its closure of Gaza eight years ago, to “put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” (The quote in full is by Dov Weisglass, advisor to then prime minister Ehud Olmert who imposed the blockade in 2007.)
From what I have seen from Al-Jazeera stories and Internet reporting, and from reports Gazans have managed to get to the world through social media, I believe the scenes Gilbert and Fosse described in Eyes on Gaza are interchangeable with the ones now unfolding.
There is no doubt that Mads Gilbert will again be attacked for speaking out against Israel, backed unstintingly by the US since 1967, and before. In a world in which the world’s superpower remains willfully blind to Israel’s crimes, while France’s prime minister François Hollande forbids demonstrations on Gaza’s behalf, Mads Gilbert’s voice needs to be heard, as he bears witness to the agony of Gaza’s stricken population.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Ellen Cantarow reported on Israel and the West Bank from 1979 to 2009 for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Inquiry, and Grand Street, among other publications. For the past four years she has been writing about the toll the oil and gas industries are taking on the environment. She views corporate penetrations of American land for fracking as colonization that is turning the US into a petro-state with impacts similar to those in, among other Third World countries, Nigeria.
Related Stories
Gaza Hospitals Can't Cope
By Mohammed Omer, Truthout | Report
A View From Gaza: "Where Should We Go?"
By Y.A.J., Truthout | Report
US Provides Israel the Weapons Used on Gaza
By Paul Gottinger, Ken Klippenstein, Truthout | News Analysis
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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